>Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order