Historic maps in all probability helped trigger World Warfare I

2023-09-19 08:24:02

Check out this map:

Tea vs Cha (short description in comments) : r/interestingasfuck

Variations on it are fashionable on-line. It’s stated to show a degree concerning the globalization of tea: phrases for tea that sound like chai replicate a historic unfold by way of overland routes, the argument goes, whereas phrases like tea are a legacy of maritime commerce. A 2018 viral article by the info journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this concept on the world’s radar. Sonad noticed that the Chinese language character for tea (茶) is pronounced chá in some forms of Chinese language, like Mandarin — however within the Min Nan dialect spoken within the coastal province of Fujian, it’s pronounced te.

Maps like this are an enormous a part of why I grew to become a historian. I in all probability spent extra time trying by means of the volumes of Colin McEvedy’s Penguin Atlas of Historical past collection than another e book after I was a child (scans of the medieval quantity are here). There’s one thing beguiling concerning the thought {that a} easy association of strains may clarify the world — like seeing human historical past as an infinite sport of Civilization 6. However after all, that’s additionally the drawback with utilizing maps as a method of understanding historical past. If you happen to’re not cautious, they go from being useful instruments to deceptive simplifications.

As a result of, like economic charts that go viral, many fashionable maps about historical past occur to be improper.

As a lot as I just like the map above, as an example, it’s price declaring that the protection of Africa is a large number. It places the Democratic Republic of the Congo within the “tea” class, as an example. And it’s true that French (thé) is one of the DRC’s official languages. However one other nationwide language is Lingala, during which the phrase for tea is “chai.” As for Mozambique and Angola, Portuguese is the official language in each international locations, and tea in Portuguese is chá.

Holding that in thoughts, return to the map above and be aware of Portugal and Brazil. The map can now be deployed to show a wholly completely different argument. Possibly this isn’t a map about Min Nan and Mandarin. It’s a map concerning the Portuguese empire. An empire that, not coincidentally, performed a central function in globalizing tea (one thing I wrote about here).

Final month, Anton Howes wrote about historians and our weak point for storytelling. I believe many maps have the same harmful attract. They clean over chronology and ignore the fact of overwhelming complexity that confronts anybody who has tried to reply a query by visiting a historic archive.

After which there are the actually dangerous historic maps. Although my title is debatable, I imagine that there actually are maps — a number of maps, the truth is— which may be pointed to as causal brokers in World Warfare I.

The remainder of this publish is about one particular instance: the map of troop actions on the historical Battle of Cannae (216 BCE) that impressed German navy planners within the years simply earlier than 1914. However earlier than that, I needed to say one other set of candidates. These are the maps of territorial claims drawn up by irredentist and nationalist teams earlier than the warfare, whether or not they have been craving for self-determination or for imperial land-grabs. There may be little doubt that maps deploying skewed historical past to argue for a redrawing of borders performed a job in each Balkan nationalism and within the naval arms race between the German and British empires.

German claims in Africa (1917) — Putative German claims in Africa amounted to just about half the continent (source).

For the remainder of this publish, nonetheless, I’ll be speaking a few a lot smaller-scale map: the map of Hannibal’s double envelopment of Roman troops on the Battle of Cannae.

In her e book The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman argues that the reminiscence of Cannae, which was handed down by means of a succession of navy histories till it grew to become a digital obsession of strategists within the nineteenth century, helped push the world into an unimaginable disaster.

It did so by providing up a mannequin of a “battle of annihilation” that Germany’s warfare planners believed they may unleash on France. On the head of those planers was Basic von Schlieffen, the Chief of the German Basic Employees. The map of Cannae haunted Schlieffen’s desires.

As Tuchman writes:

To attain decisive victory, Schlieffen mounted upon a technique derived from Hannibal and the Battle of Cannae. The lifeless basic who mesmerized Schlieffen had been lifeless a really very long time. Two thousand years had handed since Hannibal’s basic double envelopment of the Romans at Cannae. Discipline gun and machine gun had changed bow and arrow and slingshot, Schlieffen wrote, “however the rules of technique stay unchanged. The enemy’s entrance shouldn’t be the target. The important factor is to crush the enemy’s flanks… and full the extermination by assault upon his rear.” Underneath Schlieffen, envelopment grew to become the fetish and frontal assault the anathema of the German Basic Employees.

I extremely advocate Tuchman’s e book, which, whereas imperfect as scholarship, is sensible as historic writing. However should you’re in a rush, Wikipedia has a decent summary of the implications of the assorted maps of the supposed Cannae “pincer” assault for twentieth century historical past.

And if, against this, you have got an infinite period of time to spend on this matter, you’ll be able to learn the e book Schlieffen wrote himself. It’s known as merely Cannae. You’ll find an English translation of it here as a free PDF.

Right here is the map of Hannibal’s encirclement maneuver from that translated version:

Cannae was no obscure inspiration. It was a direct mannequin for Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France. Schlieffen grandly proclaimed:

A battle of annihilation may be carried out right this moment based on the identical plan devised by Hannibal in lengthy forgotten occasions.

Because the geographer J.B. Harley as soon as warned, “[a] map says to you, ‘Learn me fastidiously, observe me intently, doubt me not.’” Doubt by no means appeared to enter the minds of those navy strategists of pre-war Germany. It didn’t appear to bother them, as an example, that they have been drawing world-changing classes from a map of a battle of two thousand years earlier about which surprisingly little is thought.

Because the historian Martin Samuels pointed out in his article “the Actuality of Cannae,” there isn’t any archaeological proof for the battle. Nor are there first-hand sources of any form. All the things we all know derives from accounts written sixty years or extra after Cannae itself. Suffice to say, when Samuels dug into these sources, he discovered as many questions as solutions. The detailed maps of actions at Cannae that embellished navy technique manuals for a whole bunch of years, in different phrases, have been largely fanciful. Samuels calls Cannae “probably the most quoted and least understood battle” in historical past.

The simplicity of a historic map — the clear labels, the sharp edges, and above all of the discount of hundreds or tens of millions of individuals into summary symbols — is an enormous a part of why they’re so beguiling. However it’s additionally why they lead us astray.

In the long run, the illusory lure of reaching a “second Cannae” helped set off the cascading tragedies of the primary few months of World Warfare I.

All this has been on my thoughts as I gear as much as educate this fall. Maps make wonderful educating instruments. I usually depend on the extra visually placing ones — like Minard’s flow map of Napeoleon’s invasion of Russia, or Fernand Braudel’s maps of how lengthy it took a Venetian letter to journey — so as to add curiosity to my lessons.

Res Obscura: Seven Weeks to Venice: History Through ... — An animated gif of Braudel’s maps displaying the journey occasions of a letter despatched from Venice. Every line represents every week (source).

I additionally discover GPT-4’s primitive map-making capabilities to be among the many most oddly compelling (and funniest) parts of the makes an attempt at creating historic simulations utilizing ChatGPT that I wrote about last week:

As you may have the ability to guess by now, I get pleasure from making maps myself — as an example, I spent lots of time creating 4 of them for my forthcoming e book.

And it’s within the course of of constructing historic maps that you simply really notice how a lot they miss. What exact date does a map of, say, “the world circa 1200” really present? How actual are these borders between completely different polities and tribes? Or, within the case of maps of battles like Cannae, how can we all know precisely how a detachment of troops moved through the fog of warfare, a whole bunch or hundreds of years in the past?

I nonetheless love utilizing maps in educating historical past. However I get suspicious each time cartography begins turning into a type of historic argument in itself — whether or not it’s on social media or in recent Russian propaganda.

It’s generally stated that the map is not the territory. The map shouldn’t be the historic argument, both.

As an alternative, maps are an effective way to pose questions about historical past. They’re greatest approached as a method in: an entry-point quite than an ending. They provide one path towards confronting the big complexity of “actual” historical past — the sort made by particular person individuals, on the decidedly imperfect and unmap-like terrain of the world.

“Tis very onerous to catch it within the Woods, however easie in open Locations, as a result of we run sooner than they, and generally we method them with out a lot Hassle. From March to September they’re extraordinarily fats, and style admirably properly.”

— François Leguat’s description of the Rodrigues solitaire, circa 1708: the dodo’s closest residing relative, which, prefer it, went extinct.

Two present historic mapping initiatives I’ve discovered attention-grabbing: These maps of the historic unfold of the “eleven nations” of america, developed by Colin Woodward; and the long-running Orbis project at Stanford, a exceptional visualization of Roman transportation networks.
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Wikipedia has wonderful lists, and this has bought to be among the best: List of inventors killed by their own invention. See additionally the list of lists of lists.
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