Stories behind the maps that shaped the modern world

He wanted to take a map and explore, finding new associations beyond the familiarity of his home town and a failing comprehensive school. "I went to Sussex University, and found there were certain people who said, 'You're from up North? But you're clever!' They really did expect that I'd have a ferret down my trousers."

After postgraduate studies at Essex University, and a period spent in Berlin, he became a full-time academic and although he and his family live in Oxford, he is currently professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London. He may be anchored in the south of England, but his work has taken him all over the world.

Travel and the history of early modern cartography – or map-making – have been an important strand of Prof Brotton's research. His love of maps, not just as reflection of the physical world but also as a tool used to shape that world, has now fed into a magical three-part series television series for the BBC in which he uncovers the hidden stories of maps.

"Map making is a basic human instinct, and they provide a window into different times, offering a specific view of the political and social forces that drove society," says Prof Brotton.

Eighty years ago, archaeologists discovered a 3,000-year-old map etched into a huge rock at Bedolina in the Italian Alps. It clearly showed rectangular fields, dots for trees, timber houses, deer and stick-legged human beings. It's thought that the tribe that created it were pioneering a new way of life, moving away from hunting/gathering towards agriculture.

A thousand years after that oldest known map, the Romans used maps of their towns, regions and colonies. They were not that geographically accurate (Italy was naturally the largest country represented), but Roman roads and some distances are correct.

In 1539, Henry VIII ordered local artists to paint the entire English coastline and a map was made detailing the coast from Exeter across to Kent, including the state of coastal defences. The King had divorced Katharine of Aragon and feared invasion by the Spanish Armada. A few years later, Henry invaded and occupied Boulogne and had a map made to define the limits of his French lands. Distances were walked, ropes and compasses used, and the political frontier marked out.

In 1663, King Louis XIV of France commissioned a map of the whole of France to consolidate his power. Astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, based at the Paris Observatory, used astronomy to make maps and to understand latitude by measuring it using the height of the Sun. Longitude was still a mystery, but later advances in lenses allowed scientists to measure it by by observing the moons of Jupiter.

By 1862, cartographers were able to present the King with a true outline of the country, and it was shown to be 20 per cent smaller than previously thought. The language and other details on the map were standardised and the map was a vital tool in the unifying of the country – one language, one nation, one map.

Meanwhile, British explorers, including James Cook, were busy charting the oceans. in 1768, Cook, who had great mastery of science and maps of the time, sailed in the Endeavour to the Pacific. There he met his match in a local navigator who had accurately mapped the many islands of Polynesia without any of the scientific tools used in Europe. His methods included knowledge of fish life and wave patterns passed down from his ancestors.

Developments in map making have often been driven by military necessity (the Ordnance Survey map, for example) or political ambition. In 1922, when the British representative in what is now Iraq was negotiating with the Saudi Arabian king Ibn Saud about the positioning of a line across the desert to mark the extent of the British Empire's land in desert occupied by nomadic tribes, Britain's insistence on the drawing of a border to its dominion also imposed a severe limit on the nomadic culture and economy. A similar scenario applies now to the North Pole, where contesting powers (principally Russia, Canada, the US and Denmark) are involved in a carve-up of territory and the oil and

mineral resources to be exploited there.

Today the map, the picture that replaces millions of words, appears to be under threat from the piped voice of satnav or the technological glory of Google Earth.

"When maps went from manuscripts to paper the same arguments came up," says Prof Brotton.

"Some people felt access to maps would give people too much power. Today satnav and Google Earth are just new kinds of map. Any anxiety is about the technology, not the map. Maps are as unreliable and selective as ever, but the way Google Earth includes local knowledge from local people in different places in the world means it is constantly added to.

"As a format it is so dynamic and democratic. The changes that have happened recently are as revolutionary as the change from parchment to paper. Maps as we knew them will become historical items, but there will always be an artistic, philosophical and scientific interest in them."

n Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession begins on BBC Four on Sunday, April 18 at 9pm.