This thought-provoking history of cartography focuses on 100 key maps that changed human understanding of the world around us, changed the course of map-making itself, or directly influenced the path of history.

It reveals how different peoples have observed and represented their world through the ages, and explores the human fascination with maps.

It addresses how maps have been used for navigation, exploration, wartime propaganda and planning, and to project national goals.

A team of academic experts in the history of cartography provides a scholarly and revealing text that addresses the key questions of how, why—and, crucially, if—these maps have changed the world.

One hundred of the world’s most beautiful and fascinating maps provide the illustrations. The result is a definitive, fact-packed, fresh and lively study that readers, no matter how much or how little they may know about the subject already, will find informative, insightful, and absorbing.