Guardian Reader Defends Mercator Projection Against Bias Criticism

A letter published in the Guardian has pushed back against the suggestion that the transverse Mercator map projection is biased, arguing instead that it was designed for a specific navigational purpose and served that purpose well.

The letter, from reader Paul Harwood, was written in response to an earlier Guardian feature about cartographers challenging what that article described as centuries of Western bias in mapmaking. Harwood wrote that the transverse Mercator projection was created for European sailors and functioned effectively for their navigational needs at the time.

A defense of the projection's intent

According to the letter, describing the projection itself as inherently biased is unfair both to the mathematics behind it and to the cartographers who developed it, given that map projections are, in the letter's own words, an incredibly complex subject. The letter credits the original Guardian article with navigating that complexity well, even while disputing its framing of Mercator-style projections as biased.

The letter does not dispute that historical mapmaking choices can carry cultural assumptions, but distinguishes between the mathematical design of a projection, created to solve a specific technical problem, and broader critiques of how maps have been used to represent the world.

The original feature referenced by the letter examined the work of cartographers revisiting map projections with an eye toward addressing historical biases in how the world has been visually represented.