Cartography's Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974–1990

Abstract

This paper documents a famous cartographic controversy played out in the cartographic literature for more than fifteen years. In 1974, a German historian, Arno Peters, introduced what he called The Peters Projection to the cartographic community. It was immediately and roundly condemned as being a copy of one by James Gall, a nineteenth-century evangelist. Both men are discussed in their own contexts. The controversy that then arose is used to illustrate several matters: first, that intellectual traditions proceed through debate and contest, rather than by increasingly accurately describing the world; second, that ideology is an instrumental aspect of cartography. Both these points inform my sense of defining moment, which is used in two ways: on the one hand, the fact that many academic cartographers participated in a controversy about the worth of the Peters projection 'defines' something of the nature of the dominant perspective in cartography; on the other hand, the period over which the controversy occurred marks a transitional 'moment' about which contemporary cartography balances. It is argued that post-Peters cartography should engage ideology for a fully informed theory of cartography.