England on the Same Scale

There's a fascinating slideshow showing maps of Africa here on the BBC website. My friends who want an independent Catalunya will be pleased with the first, a remarkable map produced by the Catalan State in the 14th century.

But this is the last slide, which shows how much the current borders in southern Africa reflect European colonialism. Click the image to open a larger version.

     

If we look at the bottom corner of the map from 1889 we can see another example of the same colonialism.

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10 comments:

Anonymous said...

We'd got Wales but the Scotland should say we had Scotland as well , they reckon old maps are more accurated I dont reccon

Anonymous said...

thank for following me on Twitter, MH ;-)

@marchglas

Anonymous said...

Actually, I don't think the Victorian map of 'England' is in proportion to the map of southern Africa. There was a tendency to over estimate the British Isles.

England (the real England not the one of the England cricket team or True Wales): is 130,000km sq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England

Western Cape is the same size at 129,000km sq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Cape


M

BoiCymraeg said...

Hey, at least they're not saying that thing's are "X times the Size of Wales!"

Anonymous said...

... quite like the 'x times the size of Wales' evaluation. At least it gets us on the map!

Albert said...

Hi Michael, it is indeed a very interesting slideshow and the BBC correctly mentions the "Catalan State". Thanks for mentioning that!

And yeah it is sad how colonialism still affects borders all over the world.

MH said...

Anon, having a few spare moments, I've just measured the distances on Google Earth. The north-south distance (ignoring the east-west component) between the Lizard (which is of course in Cornwall, not England) and Berwick (which probably should be in Scotland) is about 645km, almost exactly the same as from Cape Agulhas to the Orange River border with Namibia. So the old map is in fact right about the distances ... just not about the number of countries involved.

-

I must admit that I like "the size of Wales" and think it should become the internationally recognized unit of measurement.

-

Thanks Albert. Good luck with the Barcelona Referendum on 10 April.

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