... extraction of taxes. The maps invisibly affected the daily lives of people just as the clock brought in 'time discipline', maps brought and new dimension to 'space discipline'. Maps are embedded in the history they help construct. While the 'western way' of viewing maps has become the 'norm', with Europe in the located in the centre, there have been many other approaches in viewing the world. For example Australian cartographers have a different perspective, they had Australia centred and at the top of the map. Even Arab cartographers of the twelfth century viewed the world differently, and their maps today would appear upside down to us. The main problem in drawing maps is transforming a 3-dimensional world into a 2-dimensional representation as the result is distortion. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the Mercator projection. The main use to which Mercator's maps were put was in navigation, so coastlines are the ...

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