Interesting - Countries real sizes

[packman]

[genxlib]

1. It was always a misleading tool for Western Colonialism

To over-inflate the importance of Northern Europe relative to the Countries they were dominating in Africa, Asia and South America.

It's remarkable the power that a small Country like England had for Centuries.

[highplainsdem]

11. You don't need a huge country geographically if you can dominate

through trade, as the British and the Dutch did.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie;[f] VOC), was a multinational corporation founded by a government-directed consolidation of several rival Dutch trading companies (voorcompagnieën) in the early 17th century. It is believed to be the largest company to ever have existed in recorded history.[9][10] It was established on March 20, 1602, as a chartered company to trade with Mughal India[11][disputed – discuss] in the early modern period, from which 50% of textiles and 80% of silks were imported,[where?] chiefly from its most developed region known as Bengal Subah.[12][13][14][15][16] In addition, the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade.

The company has been often labelled a trading company (i.e. a company of merchants who buy and sell goods produced by other people) or sometimes a shipping company. However, the VOC was in fact an early-modern corporate model of vertically integrated global supply chain[2][5] and a proto-conglomerate, diversifying into multiple commercial and industrial activities such as international trade (especially intra-Asian trade),[1][17][18][19][20][21] shipbuilding, and both production and trade of East Indian spices,[2] Indonesian coffee, Formosan sugarcane,[3][4] and South African wine.[5][6][7] The company was a transcontinental employer and a corporate pioneer of outward foreign direct investment in the early modern world. At the dawn of modern capitalism, wherever Dutch capital went, urban features were developed, economic activities expanded, new industries established, new jobs created, trading companies operated, swamps drained, mines opened, forests exploited, canals constructed, mills turned, and ships were built.[22][23][24][25][26] In the early modern period, the Dutch were pioneering investors and capitalists who raised the commercial and industrial potential of underdeveloped or undeveloped lands whose resources they exploited, whether for better or worse. For example, the native economies of pre-VOC-era Taiwan and South Africa were largely rural. It was VOC employees who established and developed the first modern urban areas in the history of Taiwan (Tainan) and South Africa (Cape Town and Stellenbosch).

In the early 1600s, by widely issuing bonds and shares to the general public,[g] VOC became the world's first formally listed public company.[h][32][33][34][35][full citation needed][36][37][38] With its pioneering institutional innovations and powerful roles in global business history, the company is often considered by many to be the forerunner of modern corporations. In many respects, modern-day corporations are all the 'direct descendants' of the VOC model.[28][full citation needed][39][40][41][42][full citation needed] Its 17th-century institutional innovations and business practices laid the foundations for the rise of giant global corporations in subsequent centuries[27][28][29][43] – as a highly significant and formidable socio-politico-economic force of the modern-day world[44][45][46][47][48] – to become the dominant factor in almost all economic systems today. It also served as the direct model for the organisational reconstruction of the English/British East India Company in 1657.[49][50][51][52][38][53] The company, for nearly 200 years of its existence (1602–1800), had effectively transformed itself from a corporate entity into a state or an empire in its own right.[j] One of the most influential and extensively researched business enterprises in history, the VOC's world has been the subject of a vast amount of literature that includes both fiction and nonfiction works.

The company was historically an exemplary company-state[k] rather than a pure for-profit corporation. Originally a government-backed military-commercial enterprise, the VOC was the wartime brainchild of leading Dutch republican statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States-General. From its inception in 1602, the company was not only a commercial enterprise but also effectively an instrument of war in the young Dutch Republic's revolutionary global war against the powerful Spanish Empire and Iberian Union (1579–1648). In 1619, the company forcibly established a central position in the Javanese city of Jayakarta, changing the name to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). Over the next two centuries the company acquired additional ports as trading bases and safeguarded their interests by taking over surrounding territory.[57] To guarantee its supply, the company established positions in many countries and became an early pioneer of outward foreign direct investment.[l] In its foreign colonies, the VOC possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts,[61] negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies.[62] With the increasing importance of foreign posts, the company is often considered the world's first true transnational corporation.[m][63] Along with the Dutch West India Company (WIC/GWC), the VOC was seen as the international arm of the Dutch Republic and the symbolic power of the Dutch Empire. To further its trade routes, the VOC-funded exploratory voyages, such as those led by Willem Janszoon (Duyfken), Henry Hudson (Halve Maen), and Abel Tasman, revealed largely unknown landmasses to the western world. In the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography (c. 1570s–1670s), VOC navigators and cartographers helped shape geographical knowledge of the world as we know it today.

-snip-

[Tadpole Raisin]

2. Thanks! Never learned this in school - I had to watch The West Wing.

I have to say it does offend my eyes but that’s because I was lied to for decades (those imperialists!).

But how did Mercator do that map in 1569? Did he have an alien best bud who gave him the inside scoop?

[Fla Dem]

3. Yes very interesting.

The Dark blue land masses are the true size, light blue is Mecator projection.

The Mercator projection exaggerates areas far from the equator.

Examples of size distortion

-Antarctica appears to be extremely large. If the entire globe were mapped, Antarctica would inflate infinitely. In reality, it is the third smallest continent.

-Ellesmere Island on the north of Canada's Arctic archipelago looks about the same size as Australia, although Australia is over 39 times as large.

-All islands in Canada's Arctic archipelago look at least 4 times too large, and the more northern islands look even larger.

-Greenland appears the same size as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times as large.

-Greenland's real area is comparable to the Democratic Republic of the Congo's alone.

-Africa appears to be roughly the same size as South America, when in reality Africa is over one and a half times as large.

-Svalbard appears to be larger than Borneo, when, in reality, Borneo is about 12 times as large as Svalbard.

-Alaska appears to be the same size as Australia, although Australia is actually 4 ½ times as large.

-Alaska also takes as much area on the map as Brazil, whereas Brazil's area is nearly 5 times that of Alaska.

--Madagascar and Great Britain look about the same size, while Madagascar is actually more than twice as large as the largest of the British Isles.

-Sweden appears much larger than Madagascar. In reality Madagascar is a little larger.

-Russia appears bigger than the whole of Africa, or North America (without the latter's islands). It also appears twice the size of China and the contiguous United States combined, when, in reality, the sum is comparable in size.

-The northern inflation acutely distorts Russia's shape as well, making it appear much taller north-to-south and greatly stretching its arctic regions compared to its mid latitudes.

-The northern inflation acutely distorts Russia's shape as well, making it appear much taller north-to-south and greatly stretching its arctic regions compared to its mid latitudes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

[lastlib]

8. The perils of trying to project a 3-D curved surface onto a 2-D flat surface.

[Biophilic]

4. Well, that's an eye opener. How interesting. I didn't have a clue. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

5. There are several less-distorted alternatives to Mercator.

Mercator is used mostly because of the simplicity of the idea, and the fact that it's been around longest.



Numbers indicate rank in size, 1=largest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

[Sneederbunk]

6. Where is Antarctica?

[Ferrets are Cool]

7. The Gall-Peters projection of the world map as comparison.

[Wounded Bear]

9. Mercator dates back to the days before longitude...

Well, they knew about and "had" longitude, but there were no great ways to measure it out at sea. Sailors tended to sail north-south to the proper latitude (which is relatively easy to measure) and then go east-west. Until there was a reliable way to measure longitude at sea, Mercator worked well enough.

[kairos12]

10. Maps have always been either tools for enlightenment or

mechanisms of misinformation.