Globalizing Cartography? The International Map of the World, the International Geographical Union, and the United Nations

Few maps mirror the history of the twentieth century as closely as the International Map of the World (IMW). A proposal for a map of the entire globe on a scale of 1:1 million, using standard conventional signs, was presented at the Fifth International Geographical Congress in Berne in 1891 by the German geographer Albrecht Penck. More than two decades later, the final specification was finally published shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, a crisis that brought a halt to the international collaboration on which the project depended. The IMW's fortunes waxed and waned over the next three decades, necessitating a major review of its continuing value after the Second World War. A new IMW Executive Commission under the chairmanship of John Kirtland Wright, Director of the American Geographical Society, was established at the 1949 Lisbon conference of the International Geographical Union. Drawing on Wright's correspondence in the AGS archives, this paper examines the debates between the national cartographic agencies and related societies involved in the future of the IMW, with particular reference to the transfer of the project's Central Bureau from the British Ordnance Survey in Southampton to the United Nations in New York in the early 1950s. This discussion, which focused mainly on the need to combine the IMW with an internationalized version of the US-dominated 1:1 million World Aeronautical Chart, reveals the on-going tensions between the ideals of scientific internationalism embodied in the IMW's original proposal and the harsh realities of national self-interest in the early years of the Cold War.