From the Periphery

map of ScotlandAs Flannery O’Connor wrote: “Somewhere is better than anywhere.”  Unless of course, you are HERE.

Ian Smart’s column arguing that the problem with Scotland is that it’s just in the wrong damned place has stuck in our heads like a ******* Cheeky Girls single.

From Geddes exhortation to ‘think globally and act locally’ to Bartholomew’s mapping to John Muir’s idea that ‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’, we find that the place of place in Scottish thinking has been significant for some time.

But it’s not just that. As we’re thinking about our place in the world it seems kind of important to think of place in the world:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

utopia-map

Anyway in honour of peripheralism and cartography in general we publish the following for our readers geographical education. They should embiggen when clicked upon…

propaganda maps
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the-road-to-success

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20c
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World According to Israel

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lovemap1

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sideb

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    1. bellacaledonia says:

      Thanks. We may be alone here. Email response coming.

  1. falski says:

    Where does “The Road To Success” originate from?

    1. bellacaledonia says:

      Originally from http://bigthink.com/ but neither they nor I know it’s original origins…

      1. falski says:

        Thanks. Would love to see a higher res version, it’s great.

  2. JBS says:

    Loving the Equal Area Projection. The world looks like an eviscerated dog lying in a puddle.

  3. Dave Coull says:

    That “serio-comic war map for 1877” is interesting. It shows Norway and Sweden as a single country (they were in fact a United Kingdom) yet it shows England, Scotland, and Ireland with their own distinct identities. Russia is portrayed as an octopus grabbing bits of Turkey etc. After a bit of checking, it turns out this is about the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. Orthodox Christians in the Balkans were trying to break away from the Ottoman Empire and Orthodox Christian Russia sided with them. British prime minister Disraeli got heavily criticised by Gladstone for condoning Ottoman Turkish authoritarianism. The odd thing is, this cartoon map is from the San Francisco Newsletter and California Advertiser. But the proprietor of that was British, and he clearly followed the British government line.

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