National Atlases: Their History, Analysis, and Ways to Improvement and Standardization

Summary

Prepared under the auspices of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on National Atlases and coordinated by Soviet geographers and cartographers, this volume examines the history, existing practice, and methodological foundations of national atlas production while proposing measures for improvement and international unification. It defines a national atlas as a fundamental, comprehensive cartographic work that synthesizes contemporary knowledge of a country’s physical, economic, social, cultural, and political geography. Its practical purpose is to present the greatest possible amount of reliable information in a compact, expressive, and accessible form, thereby supporting research, education, planning, administration, and broader public understanding. The historical survey traces the idea of integrated country atlases from early projects associated with Vauban and the Russian cartographer I. K. Kirilov to the emergence of modern national atlases. It argues that such works became feasible only after the expansion of topographic surveying, the development and differentiation of the natural and geographical sciences, and the growth of statistical observation following the Industrial and French Revolutions. Nineteenth-century thematic atlases devoted to meteorology, agriculture, industry, and other fields supplied important precedents, but varied greatly in scope, organization, and cartographic technique. The study therefore compares completed and planned national atlases, identifying differences in subject coverage, scale, projection, representation methods, mathematical basis, and institutional organization. A central argument is that international unification should not suppress the distinctive natural conditions, historical development, or socioeconomic systems of individual countries. Rather, coordination of essential themes, classifications, symbols, scales, projections, coordinate grids, and topographic bases should make analogous maps more readily comparable and eventually permit national atlases to serve as source material for international maps of the world. The volume accordingly discusses the general requirements and component parts of an atlas, the selection of cartographic methods, page format and scale systems, map projections, and coordinate networks. Its proposed thematic program encompasses introductory maps and extensive series on the physical environment, population, economy, culture, and political administration. Physical-geographical coverage includes geology, geophysics, relief, climate, hydrology and oceanography, soils, vegetation, forests, fauna, and natural regionalization. Population maps address distribution, density, natural change, age and sex composition, employment, social structure, ethnicity, language, belief, and settlement. Economic sections cover industry, agriculture and agrarian relations, transport and telecommunications, domestic and foreign trade, finance, national income, investment, and economic regionalization. Cultural and administrative series include education, science, public culture, health, sport, tourism, monuments, protected areas, territorial government, and political parties where relevant. By distinguishing recommended from supplementary maps and adapting certain topics to capitalist, socialist, arid, maritime, or territorially extensive countries, the work combines standardization with flexibility. Overall, it functions both as a comparative assessment of national atlas practice and as a normative guide for future international cooperation, emphasizing scientific synthesis, internal consistency, legibility, practical utility, and cross-national comparability.