E. Livieratos, Ziti Publications, 2007, ISBN 978-960-456-050-9
Presentation: Intrernational Book Fair,
Thessaloniki, Sunday 20 May 2007
A journey into the dominance of maps. Stories about the representation of the expansion of the World.
The book by professor Evangelos Livieratos is the first in the series ‘Journeys with maps in places and utopias’ an editorial project by Ziti Publications in cooperation with the author. A book series for the general public (but not only), journeys of acquaintance with the imaginary, the oneiric, the unreal and the real worlds of maps, the eternal and ephemerous, from Greece to the World and from the World to Greece, from the civilization of maps in clay to the civilization of maps in digits through people, lands and seas, cities, relieves, deserts and islands!
...What should be however one of the most imposing conclusions about the role of maps (this powerful tool of geospatial sensing) in the global partition of power implied by those societies which ruled the historic evolution of cartography? It is the decisive combination of mapping and maps with two other characteristic elements of societies which asserted domination, as global powers outside their own territorial limits, namely their performances in world trade and their ability in mobility. Those societies which combined the control on markets and their continuous mobility with mapping and the development of cartographic technology, imposed at the end a large scale long lasting geopolitical power all over the each time known world. The fulfillment of this condition, even unstable in the antiquity and most of the medieval era, is undoubtedly the case of the ruling powers of the period of Latin nautical flourish in the Mediterranean in the late meddle ages extended to 15th and 16th century during the Iberian exit to the Atlantic. And further, this condition is apparent in the next centuries, during the West European and especially the Anglo-Saxon domination on the new lands and seas, the inter-European antagonisms of the 18th and 19th centuries until the final North American domination during the last century. A rule which strengthened much more due to the advancement and apex of Colonialism which stressed the connecting tissue of the triptych of power mentioned above (market – mobility – geospatial sensing). The actual North American example is the final confirmation of the sufficiency and necessity of the triptych of power totally transformed into digital in our days. The power which controls the markets, which is distinguished as a society of intense and continuous mobility and produces self-dependent know-how in mapping and geospatial sensing, this power is a ruling global power...
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