ABSTRACT

This book is different and seeks to fulfil an important gap in knowledge and even thinking. The map of the world which is traditionally learned by youngsters in school is a flat one which has Europe at the centre, Russia to the right and Canada to the left. What is not self-evident is that the distance between North America and Russia is only thirty miles across the Bering Strait. Add to this the fact that until the arrival of the Arno Peters’ projection with digital technology, we had to make a trade-off between the needs of navigation and the physical size represented of the individual countries which might then fuel political claims of territorial ownership. Yet land size is but one major factor, another is population, and this starts to explain the need for this book.