A Map of Cosmographia
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The deep roots of a turbulent world.
We are living through a period of extraordinary upheaval: the international order is fracturing, new conflicts are erupting, and the forces reshaping the world are moving faster than our ability to understand them. Meanwhile, the information environment that ought to help us make sense of things has become increasingly fragmented, nakedly partisan, and overrun by noise and bad faith.
The world is only becoming more complex. To make sense of it all, perhaps it is time to revive an old approach to understanding the world: cosmography.
Cosmography as a word and a discipline is no longer in vogue, but it once denoted attempts to map the entire cosmos. In 1569 the great cartographer Gerardus Mercator began his own Cosmographia — a description of the whole universe in five volumes, uniting history, geography, astronomy, and theology all in one. He died before he could finish his magnum opus, because of course he did: who could ever hope to map the entire universe in a single lifetime? And yet the attempt — a preposterously vast, yet dazzling endeavour — seems to me the noblest pursuit there is.
Cosmographia is a newsletter about geography, history, culture, and power, and the threads that connect them. I write long-form essays exploring the landscapes and civilisations that shaped history, and that continue to shape the geopolitics of today. Why is the Middle East the way it is? What made the first humans build cities? How does inequality emerge and entrench itself? What can the fall of Athens tell us about the fracturing of NATO? These are the kinds of questions I try to answer, tracing the deep roots of a tumultuous world through the geography, history, and ideas that made it so.
“A cracking read.”
— Oxford Professor of World History, Peter Frankopan
Who am I?
I’m M. E. Rothwell.
Ever since I was given a globe as a small child, I have been obsessed with faraway places, old maps, and stories of adventurous explorers. As a teenager I spent hours staring at distant place names on the six-foot map of the world I had pinned to my bedroom wall. I always used to wonder: Who lived there? What were they like? What did they do?
These questions led me first into dusty books, then to travel, and now to Cosmographia. I see this newsletter as an attempt to make a map of the world, not with rhumb lines and compass roses, but with hundreds of essays, each one an attempt to understand a small part of the world, whether that be a chapter of its history, a corner of its geography, or one of its many and enduring ideas. Layer by layer, all of those small parts add up to something greater than the sum of their parts: a map of the world and our place in it.
I can’t pretend to be an expert in all of the topics I write about; neither can I make claim to entirely original scholarship. But I hope, if nothing else, to inspire a sense of curiosity for the world, which, contrary to popular sentiment, remains a beautiful and fascinating place.
Subscriber Testimonials:
Popular Free Reads:
Understanding Iran — the opening essay of a series on the history and mind of one of the world’s great civilisational centres.
A Theory of Inequality — one model, from the Pacific Northwest to Silicon Valley, that explains how social hierarchies emerge and entrench themselves.
Why did humans first build cities? — it wasn’t just agriculture; the geography had to be right too.
Photographs of Old Russia — extraordinary colour photographs from the dying days of the Russian Empire.
Full Index:
By Continent:
By Discipline:
By Series:
Exploring the role of networks in human history.
The origins of urbanisation.
How Iran’s culture and history informs the modern nation.
The story of the world’s first metropolis.
Journeys through the strange landscapes of our planet’s deep past.
The history of humanity’s most enduring symbols.
400,000 years of European prehistory condensed into four blogposts.
All original maps on Cosmographia are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)