‘I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe,’ wrote Robert Louis Stephenson, recalling the moment he began to conjure his most famous story. ‘As I pored upon my map of Treasure Island,’ he continues, ‘the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeked out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of flat projection.’

Konrad Faber’s bird’s eye view of the siege of Frankfurt from 1552, at the British Library’s exhibition of treasures from its cartographic collection, gives just this impression. It is teeming with life: horses gallop, soldiers charge and cannons blaze, their shot suspended in mid-air; townsfolk frozen in place, unaware, as they go about their business within the city’s fortified walls. At the other extreme, a map of London produced after the great fire of 1666 deliberately effaces all signs of humanity, sanitising the city and suppressing the numerous workhouses, jails and open sewers from the idealised plan of ordered reconstruction. Just two examples on display of how different map-makers have chosen to represent and schematise the world.

Seeing so many maps side by side, the earliest made in 2,000 BC, brings these embedded assumptions and prejudices into sharp relief. ‘Projection’ is the right word: even the least fanciful, most scientific map involves a leap of imagination and a falsification of perspective, an effort to rise above the individual perspective to a more god-like – or at least bird’s eye – view. Maps are rarely simply ‘about’ geography. One of the earliest on display, a facsimile of Hereford’s medieval mappa mundi, is a sort of graphic encyclopaedia of all creation, including all kinds of information we wouldn’t think proper to put on a map. Oriented with the east uppermost, it features the Garden of Eden and is, even when tilting your head 90 degrees, scarcely recognisable, yet if it does get its coastlines wrong, it’s not the makers’ craft that’s at fault: it is mapping gaps in the contemporary knowledge of the earth. Looking at the Hereford map is to stare at the murky limits of the world, limits illuminated by a dark, visionary imagination. Fantastic creatures – sea monsters, centaurs and weird humanoids using their single giant foot as a sunshade – inhabit the peripheries; Hieronymous Bosch suddenly seems less of a fantasist.  It maps the medieval psyche, a process echoed and honoured by Grayson Perry in his Map of Nowhere (2008), also on display.

After the Renaissance, and as European colonialism spread across the globe, the maps became more recognisable, and more concerned with controlling and partitioning the world than illustrating its chaos. For the seafaring Dutch, who emerged as the period’s finest cartographers, maps of overseas holdings were a way of visualising value. Most merchants and aristocrats never made the treacherous journey to see their lands, so maps were proof that the goose laying the golden eggs really existed, empirical evidence of the provenance of their empire’s goods and wealth. A sense of ownership and entitlement is palpable. ‘This is my playground’ is the implicit message of a beautifully drawn plan of King George III’s hunting grounds in Germany, and it’s easy to draw the same conclusion about the huge world maps that hung in European palaces: they are they site of a giant game of Risk played out in real time and space for the nobility’s entertainment.

Unsurprisingly, there was a certain amount of willy-waving inherent in producing a map or atlas. My colony is bigger than yours, my ships faster, and my craftsmen more skilled. The atlases in particular are sumptuously bound and gilded with gold leaf, evidence of the wealth and the might of those that commissioned them. As such, the exhibition holds some salutary lessons about favour and patronage – in modern parlance, how to win business and keep clients onside. Are you dealing with a monstrous ego and an impossible brief? Then why not portray your client as the god Neptune, and place him astride a sea serpent coursing through the southern ocean? It kept King Philip II of Spain happy and there’s no reason to think it won’t work today.

While the Dutch maps show capitalism’s conquest of the earth, the fascinating political propagandist maps from the 19^th and 20^th centuries dramatise its ideological wars with communism and, later, Nazism. In one, the Tsarist Russian octopus is crushing Bulgaria, Finland and Turkey in its grasp, while Hungary, depicted as a volatile Magyar warrior is restrained from attacking and Italy – a young maiden – looks on in horror. In another, a French collaborationist poster from World War II, a psychotic, cigar-chomping Churchill (again an octopus) seizes hold of Africa. These later maps employ the advantages of mass mechanical reproduction explicitly to sway mass opinion, and, throughout the exhibition, the command of materials and processes – vellum, silk, tapestry; illustration, woodcut, lithography – is incredible, the painstaking care well balanced against both the commercial and creative imperatives of the work. The imagination poured in to each and every one is striking.

Above all, these maps pay testament to the human inability to leave a blank space, an inability that can be seen both in the colonial impulse and the cartographer’s craft. If a continent is unknown, then go forth and tame it: fill in the blanks. And if, once that map is drawn, gaps remain, in the deepest oceans or in darkest Peru, then a sea monster, or a cannibal perhaps, might fit just right.  

[this article was to appear in grafik magazine which, sadly, has folded]