In his book, Jerry Brotton takes the reader from the first ever recorded map of the world – Babylon of 750 BC – to today’s Google Maps. And he argues that every culture maps selectively, and no map, not even the most technologically advanced, is totally accurate. Excerpts from a conversation.

You have argued that poets and philosophers understand maps in a better than cartographers and geographers do. Why?

If I were a geographer, I couldn't have written this book. And geographers are sceptical about what I'm saying because they want to believe that maps are somehow real. If you're a geographer and you make a map, you have to defend it. Unlike geographers, writers don't have to commit themselves to a map.

Writers and philosophers have been telling us for centuries that maps are made-up things, and to always be suspicious about maps. The Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, "The map is not the territory." The map is claiming representation of territory.

Jorge Luis Borges describes a country where they've become so good at science that they've developed a map on a scale of 1:1, and it covers the entire country. And they realise there's no point to the map, because the country is the map, and the map is the country. So he says that the map just dissolves, and you can find bits of it in the desert land.

So what Borges is interested in maps about, as Lewis Carroll is, as VS Naipaul is, as Rushdie is, is that the map is both real, and imaginary.

You’ve strongly contested that maps actually get better over time.  How does your study of maps counter the notion of the progress of scientific objectivity?

The humanities have, through the work of people like Bruno Latour and Simon Schaffer, told us to be sceptical about the way that scientists make claims to truth. And that's really what all these maps are doing – making claims to truth. Medieval Christian and Islamic maps are telling the truth differently, based on the community, and in the truth of that particular moment.

Think about the current instances of maps launched by Google and Apple. There was the famous instance when Apple launched a new map – they messed everything up! Chicago disappeared, Helsinki lost an airport, Paddington Station in London disappeared. Those were just glitches, but the fact is that that map was as selective, and as inaccurate, as paper maps from two or three hundred years ago.

I feel like I speak across the humanities – in literature, philosophy, history, geography and then also the social sciences – and that's important because you can't compartmentalise the humanities as opposed to the social sciences. And maps are a great example of that.

Is a map an art object or is it a scientific object? And of course, the whole history of the map tells us that it is both at the same time. Ptolemy feels like he's making a scientifically objective map, but the Hereford map is as much an artistic statement as anything else. Even Google says it has to make an aesthetically nice-looking map.

One talks about mapping the genome, Kamila Shamsie talks about maps, Nadeem Aslam writes a book called Maps for Lost Lovers about his identity as an Anglo-Pakistani cross-cultural figure. For him, the map is a vital way of telling that story. Similarly, if you are working in biology or neurology, a map is something you work on. We map the heavens.

The map becomes the object that crosses all those disciplines. It's so ubiquitous - everybody is interested in maps. The metaphor drives literature, and the practice drives science and social science.

Your project seems, in many ways, to be an explicitly political one. You're showing people maps from Korea, the Islamic World, India – to show how different cultures put themselves at the centre of the map. But there's also a literary intention where you're saying all these maps are the same – they are all lies, and they are all the truth.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s people argued that maps are ideological tools, they're conspiratorial. That was an attempt to correct the notion that maps are transparent representations of reality. That was a good move, but I think it went too far.

Just as you're suggesting, my argument now is that each map is a proposal of the world. It accepts that it is selective, but it says that it is a particularly strong proposal about the world that people can sign up to.

The new definition of a map that everybody has now signed up to is that it is a ‘graphical representation of human spatial reality’. My response to that is always: I don't care about that. It's about when communities say they're using a particular map, that's the map we should use, even if we know it's selective.

And I think that's a way to work through the ideological nature of the map and the practical purpose of it. I still have to use online maps! I can use a Google map, and I can see that it's trying to sell me stuff, and I can resist that.

But you have highlighted how the Google map itself acts as a new kind of Empire. 

Yes, although the form of it has changed from being about territory and colonial administration to commerce. But of course, what comes with that, especially to corporations like Google, which breach the boundaries of the nation-state, is political power.

The terms have changed but the argument is still the same, about access to whether you're on the map or not. Google maps do not map townships in South Africa, because they're not commercially useful for Google. Yes, they're claiming that one day they'll map them - but they're not going to do that now, because that's not the commercial imperative.

If you're very poor, you're not on the map. If you're very rich – if you're Tony Blair, or Dick Cheney - you can do what they did – get Google to blur their houses off the map. You literally want to get off the map because in so many other ways, you're firmly on the map, of political and economic power.

And it's not just me saying that as an academic who's on the left wing of politics. I talk to online entrepreneurs, who say that Google and Apple and Microsoft are killing us, because they monopolising access to data. So that is, albeit in a very different way, a form of imperialism.

I can't help but observe that your talk was at a venue sponsored by Google. What is that experience like for you?

To me that was another experience of the ambivalence of it all. I would still say that Google's technology is great and some of what they've done is amazing, but we do have to challenge them.

I've conducted long interviews with them. And now they won't talk to me because of how I've criticised them at the end of my book. My response to that is: I've just put you on the history of cartography - from the Greeks to Google Earth. They can manage that criticism – I'm not going to bring Google down, they'll be all right!

But as readers of literature, we are sceptical of what this text is trying to tell us and what it is trying to make us feel. We should do the same with maps. People tend not to do that. Be as sceptical about maps are you might be about a newspaper article, a poem, a piece of literature, or a political speech.

You are creating your own 3D map of the world. Was this project as product of your book, or was the book a product of your own attempt to map the world?

I’m creating the map project with my friend Adam Lowe, who I've been working with for twenty years. And it was more his idea than mine. He'd read the book and he said – "I have this notion of making the physical world." It came out of the book.

I think it's terribly cartographic – I'm an academic, and he's an artist. I'm more objective, and he dreams – and that's what map-making has always been about, bringing the science and the art together. So this project is a development of that idea. It may never happen – it may be a Utopian dream.

Let's turn to gender and map-making. Each and every map-maker on your list of the twelve maps is a man. Of course, it’s part of the larger reality of patriarchy that made certain professions inaccessible for many different groups of people. But specifically for maps, is that changing somewhat?

Yes, it is to some extent. The great doyenne of the history of cartography is a woman called Catherine Delano-Smith. She leads the field – anything that is produced in the history of cartography has to go through her. I love this fact.

An American woman called Marie Tharp took on the whole mapping establishment. The first half of her career was pretty much destroyed because she couldn't do her mapping. She was supposed to go out on a boat on map the ocean floor with a sonic radar and they said it was no place for a woman. She had to fight for decades, and it was really only at the end of her life that she was acknowledged. It's like the whole history of science - it's deeply patriarchal.

Now you have women working within Google, Microsoft. But even with all this, within the industry, it is still a massive problem.

There's also a tradition of feminist geographical scholarship, not as much on cartography. But that's certainly shifted.

There's another imaginative tradition, though, of women writing about maps. Elizabeth Bishop is one example. There's a poetic tradition where women are tirelessly talking about the whole problem of the map – not being on it, and imagining different Utopias, which becomes a sort of mapping project.