General Studies on National Atlases

Ena L. Yonge’s National Atlases: A Summary appeared in the October 1957 issue of Geographical Review. Only a year earlier, the International Geographical Union had established its Commission on National Atlases and begun to promote international exchange and coordination in the field. Yonge’s article was not an official product of the commission, but its near-simultaneous appearance reflects the growing demand for a systematic overview. It recorded twenty-six national atlases already published and three more in preparation, and it was cited again and again in the studies that followed.

Yonge extended the same approach to other kinds of atlases. In 1962, Geographical Review carried her Regional Atlases: A Summary Survey and World and Thematic Atlases: A Summary Survey; a decade later the same journal continued the line with Richard W. Stephenson’s Atlases of the Western Hemisphere: A Summary Survey (1972) and Mary Murphy’s Atlases of the Eastern Hemisphere: A Summary Survey (1974). The method stays the same throughout: atlases are arranged by scope or type, reviewed for size, content, and purpose, and taken together as a record of what had been published at a given moment.

This volume was the first major methodological statement to emerge from the IGU Commission on National Atlases. It grew out of the commission’s 1958 plenary meeting in Moscow and Leningrad, which called for a systematic analysis of national atlases already published or in preparation, together with practical recommendations for future projects. Although issued under K. A. Salishchev’s direction, it was a collective undertaking: much of the work was carried out in the Department of Cartography at Moscow State University, with specialists contributing to the treatment of geology, climate, population, industry, agriculture, transport, and other subjects.

A Russian edition and a French edition appeared simultaneously in 1960, in time for the nineteenth International Geographical Congress. Two years later, a Chinese translation was issued for internal circulation. An English edition did not appear until 1972. Originally translated for work on the fourth edition of the National Atlas of Canada, it was subsequently revised and published as a Cartographica monograph.

It begins by comparing national atlases from turn-of-the-century Finland to the projects of the 1950s, in scope, structure, format, and cartographic strengths and weaknesses. It then sets out principles for the organisation and mathematical basis of a national atlas, and proceeds subject by subject through maps of the physical environment, population, economy, culture, and administration. Its concluding lists of essential and supplementary map subjects gave atlas makers something close to a working programme. What the volume called standardisation was not uniformity for its own sake, but comparability: corresponding maps in different atlases should be directly comparable, and national atlases should provide source material for future international maps of the world.

Contemporary reviews recognised both the book’s importance and its limits. A 1960 review called it timely and useful for the many countries then preparing national atlases. Carleton P. Barnes emphasised its value to atlas makers and planners, while questioning some of the boundaries by which it defined the genre. Reviewing the delayed English edition, J. B. Post described the study as exhaustive and likely to remain a basic reference, but also noted that parts of it had dated and that its account sometimes gave disproportionate weight to Soviet achievements. Read today, it is still a working handbook, and a primary source for the history of national-atlas methodology, international cooperation, and cartographic standardisation in the mid-twentieth century.

Complex Regional Atlases, edited by K. A. Salishchev and published by Moscow University Press in 1976, closes a series of studies prepared under his direction for the IGU Commission on National Atlases in the years of successive international geographical congresses. The series opened with National Atlases: History, Analysis, Ways of Improvement and Unification (Stockholm, 1960) and continued with Regional Atlases: Tendencies of Development, Subject Matters of the Maps on Natural Conditions and Resources (London, 1964), Socio-Economic Maps in Complex Regional Atlases (New Delhi, 1968), and Methods of Creating Complex Regional Atlases of the USSR: Nature Maps (Montréal, 1972). When the twenty-third congress met in Moscow in 1976, Salishchev, by then retired from the chairmanship of the commission, brought this work together in a volume of 638 pages, with 98 figures, 44 tables, and a bibliography of 726 titles, framed by his own foreword, introduction, and afterword.

The book draws the preceding reports into a single methodological framework. Its first part, Methods of Atlas Compilation, covers projection and the organisation of work, preparatory operations, the compilation and editing of author’s manuscripts, technical preparation, general design, and the specific treatment of nature and socio-economic maps. The second part sets out the full programme of an atlas section by section: geology, geophysics, relief, climate, glaciation and avalanches, permafrost, surface waters, soils, vegetation, wildlife, medico-geographic and phenological maps, landscapes and physical-geographical regionalisation, and the evaluation of natural conditions; then population, industry, construction, agriculture, forestry, transport, and general economic maps. Several of these groups, including the glaciological and permafrost, zoogeographic, medico-geographic, landscape, and natural-condition evaluation maps, were developed for atlases here for the first time. The book closes by looking ahead: one chapter examines the potentialities of automating atlas production, from data banking and the computer processing of cartographic information to the automated output of map images, and another the use of space imagery, anticipating the digital cartography that was to follow.

Christian Witschel’s Nationalatlanten: Entwicklung, Konzeption, Gestaltung und Funktion originated as a doctoral dissertation defended at Leipzig University in 1997 and was published as a book in Cologne in 1998, against the background of renewed plans for a German national atlas after reunification. The book surveys the history of national atlases from the Atlas de Finlande of 1899 to the 1990s, arranged in six phases: early beginnings (1899–1918), the interwar years (1919–1945), postwar reconstruction (1946–1960), the boom of the 1960s, maturation in the 1970s, and new departures after 1980.

For each phase Witschel examines the political context, editorial conception, cartographic design, and typological features of the atlases, and traces the influence of the recommendations issued by the IGU Commission on National Atlases. Over the period he surveys, national atlases moved from presenting the nation and synthesising scientific knowledge about it to serving planning, education, propaganda, and international comparison, while their technology advanced from manual drafting to computer assistance and electronic media. Towards the end, Witschel proposes a framework for future national atlases, tested against the atlas then planned for reunified Germany, and presents Finland’s model of successive revised editions as the one most worth following. In the final chapter, he turns to the electronic age, expecting digitisation and networking to set the next direction for national atlases.

We have found no later full-length survey that traverses the whole field of national atlases. Two years later Witschel distilled its periodisation and outlook into a short paper, Nationalatlanten: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Ausblick, published in Kartographische Nachrichten.

This article was a paper Ormeling presented at Atlases in Time, a joint meeting of ICA commissions held in Madrid in 2022. The meeting had been postponed twice because of the pandemic. Ormeling died three years later.

The term national atlas has a surprisingly long history, which Ormeling traces back to the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Its modern meaning was not clearly defined until 1960, when Salishchev codified the concept in his well-known report on national atlases. The commission he chaired then retrospectively designated the 1899 Atlas de Finlande as the first national atlas. That claim has been disputed, with German and American scholars pointing to earlier candidates. Ormeling further suggests that historical circumstances may have influenced this retrospective choice: it was made at the height of the Cold War, when earlier German contributions to cartography had yet to regain full acceptance after the Second World War.

The idea of the national atlas continued to evolve. The commission’s remit expanded to include regional and environmental atlases, while national atlases themselves changed in both purpose and audience. By the late twentieth century, they were no longer simply showcases for a country’s territory, resources, and achievements. They increasingly addressed social and environmental issues and reached well beyond the scientific community. From the 1980s onward, the rapid growth of geospatial data gave rise to national atlas information systems. In these systems, the atlas itself, whether printed or on screen, was essentially a gateway to the underlying database.

John Rennie Short’s The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century is a political history of the genre. By Short’s count, more than seventy countries produced national atlases between 1900 and 2000—official or quasi-official renderings of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. Working from a critical-theory standpoint, he treats this state-sponsored cartographic explosion as an instrument of statecraft: atlases helped to define national boundaries, reinforce territorial governance, and legitimise territorial claims, and they addressed the “cartographic anxiety” that attended the birth of new states.

The book moves from the formation of the modern national atlas, through its depictions of the natural and social worlds, to its transformation in the digital age. Drawing on specific plates from Finland, Poland, Canada, Brazil, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan, among others, Short shows how maps expressed state knowledge, power, and policy, and relates them to themes that run throughout the century: the rise of state-sponsored science, colonialism and postcolonialism, and the geography of biopolitics. The high point of the national atlas, he argues, came between the 1960s and the 1980s; data overload, technological change, and rising costs, together with the rise of thematic atlases and digital cartography, brought the traditional national atlas low. But he does not pronounce it dead: networked, interactive atlases may yet be its next form.

This is the first comprehensive study of the national atlas from the perspective of political geography. Dahmann’s review credits the book with opening a neglected subject to critical inquiry and expects it to stimulate new research; Nicholson praises a well-illustrated volume suited to academic collections in both cartography and political history; Sui, while finding the treatment of the major Western European mapmaking countries and of twentieth-century technological change rather thin, welcomes the book’s interdisciplinary perspective for cartographers, geographers, and historians.