When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

London has been described as a city built on the spoils of empire, prompting visitors, at least over a damp weekend in March, to wonder why more of these spoils weren’t spent on proper indoor heating. And with ethical debates raging over the looted holdings of the British Museum, these same visitors might decide they don’t want to walk that far in the rain, and instead visit the more modest collection at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Unlike the British Museum, the Petrie has been spared any prominent repatriation requests. Perhaps no one has heard of it, or perhaps no one really wants another millennia-old miniature carving of a baboon drinking beer. A small display of Tutankhamen’s childhood toys is certainly less striking than the boy-king’s solid-gold death mask, and impeccably preserved palm-fiber sandals make for less inspiring cultural heritage campaigns than the Elgin Marbles. Ironically, though, the compact density of random objects on display at the Petrie — rows of beaded necklaces, drawers of tiny figurines, and walls covered in fragmentary friezes — conveys both the scale of Egyptian civilization and of the British imperial endeavor more effectively than the grand statues found elsewhere. So if you are wandering through the collection trying to pick a topic for your biweekly cartography newsletter, it’s hard not to be reminded of a map that’s all about conveying the scale of the British imperial endeavor: John Charles Ready Colomb, Extent of the British Empire in 1886, The Graphic, 1886.Colomb’s Victorian-era work seems almost designed to be cover art for present-day academic monographs critiquing empire. Not surprisingly, it has played this role repeatedly. The map features, and indeed helped to cement, all the visual cliches that we have come to expect and that these monographs spend pages lambasting. Colonies are colored in imperial pink and