I first sided with the Mercator against its critics when, on one of the rare occasions I thought about Greenland, I realized just how rarely I thought about Greenland. Despite seeing it hanging there like a giant icy sword of Damocles atop every wall map, we just don’t seem to care about it.

Antarctica, too, is massively inflated on the Mercator, to the point that it’s as big around as the entire earth. But few would argue that mapmakers intended to depict it as a superpower. Meanwhile, if maps lead us to ignore Africa, they should also lead us to treat cartographically bloated Canada as one of the most important countries in the world. We don’t.

Or consider illustrator Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover, “View of the World From 9th Avenue” which imagines a map in which size has been altered to conform perfectly to perceived significance. In a counterintuitive way, his cartoon serves as a reminder that no matter how hard every Mercator map of the United States might insist on the importance of Kansas, Manhattan residents remain unconvinced.

Of all the problems with criticizing the way our maps depict Africa, the most ironic is that it ignores the continent’s history of colonialism. Consider the motives of a colonial-era British cartographer — perhaps the kind of guy who made this bold, colorful propaganda map (right) showing off the queen’s dominions.

His incentive, if anything, would have been to make Africa appear as large as possible, since Britain then ruled a large share of it. With India along the same latitude, expanding the size of the earth’s equatorial region would have been a perfect way to color more of the map imperial pink.

Or what about this remarkable Portuguese map (below), which superimposes Portugal’s African colonies on a map of Europe to argue that Portugal doesn’t look so small anymore?

Prioritizing the map’s center goes back much earlier. Before Galileo Galilei or Charles Darwin, tension arose between the pious and the scientifically minded when Renaissance mapmakers, realizing just how big East Asia was, concluded that Jerusalem was not the geographic center of the Old World. Compare these two 13th century maps — a stylized image of three continents meeting in Jerusalem (right) and a sprawling world centered on Christ enthroned in the holy city (below left) — and this more accurate 15th century depiction of Eurasia (below right), with Jerusalem a little off center.

Eventually, particularly after the discovery of the New World, even the most pious appear to have moved on.

It’s good to realize that every map contains distortions and to correct for this by looking at alternative projections or a globe every so often. It’s even fun to discover, as anyone with a see-through map as a shower curtain probably has, that the world would look different to a band of subterranean mole men looking out, just as it does from inside the shower.  

But we shouldn’t worry so much that subliminal cartographic signals will distort our thinking. More dangerous, perhaps, are the political positions mapmakers don’t feel the need to hide. When her Britannic majesty is sitting firmly atop the globe (as in the famous map below) or the armored fist of American nuclear power is shaking lightning bolts above it (as in the underappreciated logo for the U.S. Strategic Command), does the size of the continents really matter?