How the world map was in 1922

This latest edition of National Geographic brings two very interesting topics:

On the one hand, an extensive report on the heritage modeling process using laser capture systems.

This is a collector's item, which explains the complexity that took the works on the faces of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and the frieze of Hindu gods with their female companions in Rani Ki Vav, the stepped well of the 11th century in the west of India

The other collection object of this edition is the anniversary map of the 125 years, which consists of a copy of 50 x 75 centimeters of the First General Reference Map of the National Geographic Society, published in December of 1922 and reflecting the dramatic changes of the early twentieth century after the First World War.

It is interesting and educational in subjects that we barely saw above in the Social Studies Class of that Ninth Grade at the Alfonso Guillén Zelaya Institute. This map redraws the political borders of Europe and the Middle East after the 1919 Treaty. It was at this time that the losing Germany was the object of derision, and its territories in Africa and the Pacific passed into the hands of the victors. The explorers had reached the south and north poles, although vast ice-covered expanses of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans remained unexplored.

It is certain that there was more cartography, but for National Geographic it was a tremendous achievement to publish an “official” map of what the result of a first world war had been, in which for four years a daily average of 6,046 people died per day. On the map you can see curiosities that can only be seen in this way, such as:

• Iran was still called Persia. Already here is what would later be called the Soviet Union after the transformation of the Tsar Empire. Turkey also appears after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. And from the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire appear the State of Austria and the Republics of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. 
• You can see the Japanese mandate over much of the Pacific Islands; that position that gave him the air of liberator and made him a tyrant for the Second World War. I can still remember the leftist version of my teacher, when he explained to us that Japan invaded in an air of liberating the territories colonized by the great British and French empires, then he forgot it and ended up being another colonizer who made a tremendous mess with the great ones.
• The map shows the tentative air routes, which by then was novel to appear on the map. The air routes in operation appear in a continuous line, which are only short sections within the continents. In a dotted line the routes authorized but not in operation, appear here Buenos Aires - Rio de Janeiro, and a section from the end of Brazil to Senegal in Africa. Other intercontinental routes only appear as flown but not commercially adopted.
• The map has small inlays of ocean currents, winds, and population density. The highest are over 400 people per square mile, in which only eastern China, southern Japan, central India and northern France figure. Between 100 and 400 inhabitants per square mile is Central Europe, India, China, the United States, just a speck in New York. By then the United States was nobody, except the only industrialized country in America, but its participation paved the way for it to position itself in the world as a creditor and a new colonizer.