From the Introduction...

The book takes twelve world maps from cultures and moments in world history, and examines the creative processes though which they tried to resolve the problems faced by their makers, from perception and abstraction to scale, perspective, orientation and projection. The problems are constant, but the responses are specific to the mapmaker’s particular culture, and we discover that what drove them was as much personal, emotional, religious, political and financial as geographical, technical and mathematical. Each map either shaped people’s attitudes to the worlds in which they lived, or crystallized a particular world view at specific moments in global history – often both. These twelve maps were created at particularly crucial moments, when their makers took bold decisions about how and what to represent. In the process they created new visions of the world that aimed not only to explain to their audiences that this was what the world looked like, but to convince them of why it existed, and to show them their own place within it.