Changing Global Geographies: Cartographic Representations of the East-West and North-South Conflicts, 1860s-1970s

• Applicant: Dr. Jasper Trautsch
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422478530

This research project analyzes how world maps that appeared in mass media such as school atlases, stamps, election posters, and TV news programmes divided the world and shaped how historical contemporaries imagined the globe between the 1860s and 1970s – a period that witnessed the emergence of a globe-spanning inter-imperial order and its subsequent transition to an inter-national order.It suggests that the concept of the world – like “the nation” – is no self-evident and natural category, but that images of the earth are shaped by how specific cultures conceive of and interpret their world, are influenced by political interests and therefore contested and historically contingent. Put differently, the globalization processes taking place in the period of investigation and triggering mass media discussions about global connections, interdependencies, and entanglements since the 1860s have not led to consent on what the earth looks like but, to the contrary, produced global demarcation processes and caused interpretative battles about world images.Reconstructing how these world images changed over the course of time and became subject of political disputes, this research project focuses on Germany, Great Britain, France, and the U.S. As imperial powers with global interests and leading producers of maps, these countries have had a preponderant influence on world images in the age of imperialism. The case of the U.S. is then used to examine how a new Atlantic world image emerged in the early 20th century, which challenged the dominance of the centuries-old juxtaposition of Western and Eastern Hemisphere and helped bring about the change from an isolationist to an interventionist foreign policy. The German case demonstrates how, starting from the same national cartographic traditions, after 1945 new and different “world images” developed in both parts of the country, which were paradigmatic for the global imaginaries of the blocs on both sides of the Iron Curtain and contributed to the naturalization and therefore longevity of the East-West conflict. Finally, the cases of Great Britain and France make it possible to analyze how the conflicting requirements of the Cold War and the decolonization process led to competing spatial orientations and therefore made cartography the subject of political battles over how to interpret these global conflicts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants