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Is it that surprising/arbitrary though?

1. It's very useful for sailing

2. European nations who were good at sailing created the age of empires (yes this was a bad thing)

3. These empires persisted until the end of WW2 (1945) or arguably even the Suez crisis (1956) at which point the American/Soviet world order began

Changing a map is changing everyone's internal worldview, and for obvious reason empires were not about to allow such a massive change unless they had a good reason[0] so It's really only been about 80 years and most of them we were at war with the Soviets, so when we thought about maps, we thought about if they were red or star spangled, not which projection.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just not at all surprised we have the "original" one.

0 - I could easily see an alternate history where e.g. the Spanish and/or Portugese use a different one if it makes them look "better" than the English, or vice versa. Now i'm curious of what projection could be 'anglo/iberi-maximal'



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