This document is a world map made by British people to show and glorify the British empire in 1886. The projection used is centred on Europe but more precisely on the Greenwich Prime Meridian, placing Great Britain just above the map's central focal point. On the map itself, in the middle, we can see all the continents and the British maritime roads that are represented by blue lines on the oceans. The places enlisted in red are all British, they are islands or colonies. The squares or rectangles that we can see next to those places contained diverse information like statistics about geographical this area or statistics about the population. The little rectangle at the right of the map shows the British empire in 1786. The objective is to show the great extension of the empire.
[...] Him being there gives her an even greater importance. Just next to her there is to black women with traditional African's clothes that have fans in their hands and who seems to be refreshing her. It symbolises that she is superior because she is on top of them and she is some kind of princess with servants to make her happy and serve her. Those women symbolise the colonised nations. They are sitting on two big blue fishes but I couldn't find what it means. [...]
[...] Then, on the sides of the map we can see various characters. If we start on the right side from the top to the bottom, there is a naked white woman with blond hair and a sickle in her hand and she is surrounded by ears of corn. I assume that she is Ceres the goddess of agriculture, she would symbolise the fact that the British empire was prosperous on the market for agriculture. But she holds in her other arm an amphora with the inscription Cyprus like the country. [...]
[...] She is also wearing a helmet. All of those clues make us understand that she is Britannia, the physical representation of Britain. We can see the face of her lion always accompanying her right below her. She is sitting on top of a globe, of the “world” and seems to be rolling over her subjects that are all looking at her in admiration. The globe is supported by a man, Atlas, who is a god who according to Grecque mythology is condemned to carry for eternity the world on his shoulder. [...]
[...] British Empire map in 1886 https://images.app.goo.gl/BSSVLqM8LvktAjdN6 I. What is this image? This document is a world map made by British people to show and glorify the British empire in 1886. The projection used is centred on Europe but more precisely on the Greenwich Prime Meridian, placing Great Britain just above the map's central focal point. On the map itself, in the middle, we can see all the continents and the British maritime roads that are represented by blue lines on the oceans. [...]
[...] They could represent the British population. In the left bottom corner, there is what looks like a surfboard coloured like the English flag. It could represent Australia. There are two men, one is a soldier of the empire as we can understand it with his outfit and by the gun that he is leaning on and the other one probably is a sailor as we can see with his hat and also his outfit. They could represent the force of the empire, the fact that they have a great army. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
