Jared Diamond: How Geography Creates History
14m
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Pop-Up Ideas
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The geographer and polymath Jared Diamond argues that apparently slight differences in geography can have profound consequences for the culture and history of nations.
The episode Jared Diamond: How Geography Creates History from the podcast Pop-Up Ideas has a duration of
14:11. It was first published
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"How boring would the world be," asks Simon Garfield, "if we knew precisely where everything was?" Simon reflects on the many mistakes and deceptions in some of our best-loved maps. He begins with the map of the London Underground where lines on the map bears little resemblance to reality but is "informationally brilliant". He talks about California, the subject of a "sustained cartographic foul-up": for 200 years it appeared on maps as an island, and it continued to do so even after navigators had tried to sail all the way round it - and failed. And then there's "one of the great phantoms in the history of cartography" - the Mountains of Kong. They were apparently a wide central mountain belt that in the eighteenth-century appeared to stretch across thousands of miles of West Africa. Despite being repeated on map after map for almost a century, however, they were a pure figment of imagination. Simon celebrates these mistakes, describing them as the "accidental discovery...of searching souls". In these days of digital maps, he hopes that we can still find "strange and charming and wonderful things - mountains that don't exist and islands of the imagination". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Jared Diamond: How Geography Creates History
The geographer and polymath Jared Diamond argues that apparently slight differences in geography can have profound consequences for the culture and history of nations.
Jerry Brotton: Mapping History
Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, argues that how we see the world depends on where we stand on it. He takes us back to the Hereford mappamundi - with its unicorns, griffins, cannibals and fabled cities - a world picture completely consistent, logical, and comprehensible to the England of 1300. Google Hereford today, Professor Brotton says, and you find "a very different set of digital preoccupations"; not Babel or Jerusalem but how far we are from Hereford's Cider Museum or the nearest bike shop. He concludes that "each period in history gets the map it deserves, whatever version of salvation it offers". Producer: Adele Armstrong.
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