If you could travel back and look at a map of the world in 1750, you’d probably get lost. Or at least, you'd be very confused about where the coastlines went. It was a weird time. The Enlightenment was in full swing, and everyone was obsessed with measuring things, yet huge chunks of the planet were basically just giant "Here be Dragons" zones—even if they didn't draw the actual dragons anymore.
By 1750, the "Age of Discovery" wasn't exactly new. It had been a couple of centuries since Columbus bumped into the Caribbean, but the interior of most continents remained a total mystery to European cartographers. Think about it. We had the technology to sail across the Atlantic with decent reliability, but we hadn't the slightest clue what the middle of Africa or North America looked like.
Looking at a map of the world in 1750, you see a planet in transition. It’s a snapshot of a world caught between the old medieval myths and the cold, hard data of modern science.
The Empty Spaces and the Great Southern Continent
One of the first things that jumps out at you is the "Terra Australis Incognita." For centuries, geographers thought there had to be a massive continent in the south to "balance" the weight of the lands in the north. If there wasn't, wouldn't the Earth just tip over? It sounds silly now, but that was legitimate scientific theory.
In 1750, Australia—or New Holland as the Dutch called it—was barely a squiggle on the map. James Cook wouldn't "discover" the east coast for another twenty years. So, on your average mid-18th-century map, the western half of Australia is there, looking lonely, and then the rest just... fades into a blurry mess or connects to Antarctica.
Then there’s the North Pacific. Honestly, it was a disaster.
Cartographers like Guillaume Delisle were trying their best, but they were working with scraps of info. Is there a Northwest Passage? Maybe. Does California attach to the mainland? Some maps from 1750 still showed California as an island, even though explorers had proven it wasn't decades earlier. Mapmakers were stubborn. They liked their old copper plates and didn't want to engrave new ones just because some Spanish monk walked across a desert and said there was no sea there.
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Why the Map of the World in 1750 Was a Political Weapon
Maps aren't just about geography. They're about bragging rights. In 1750, if you were the King of France or the Queen of Spain, your map was a legal claim.
Take South America. The Treaty of Tordesillas was supposed to have split the world between Spain and Portugal, but by 1750, the Portuguese had pushed way past that line into the Amazon. When you look at a map of the world in 1750, you're seeing the "Pink Map" or various territorial claims that didn't actually exist on the ground. The borders were aspirational.
- The Mughal Empire was starting to fracture in India, but maps still showed it as a massive, monolithic block.
- The Qing Dynasty in China was at its absolute peak of power under the Qianlong Emperor, controlling Tibet and huge swaths of Central Asia that aren't always part of China today.
- The Ottoman Empire still looked terrifyingly large on paper, stretching from the gates of Vienna down to the Persian Gulf, though the edges were starting to fray.
It’s easy to forget that "countries" back then didn't have hard borders with fences and passports. They had "frontiers." A mapmaker in London would draw a line across the American Midwest and say "This is British," while a mapmaker in Paris would draw a line over the exact same spot and say "This is French." Neither of them bothered to ask the people actually living there.
The Longitude Problem
Science was the biggest bottleneck. By 1750, we were getting really good at calculating latitude—how far north or south you are—by looking at the sun. But longitude? Knowing how far east or west you'd sailed was basically guesswork.
This is why 1750 maps are often remarkably accurate in their "tallness" but weirdly stretched or squished in their "width." John Harrison was working on his marine chronometer around this time, but it wasn't standard equipment yet. If you were a sailor in 1750, you were "dead reckoning," which is a fancy way of saying you were measuring your speed with a log on a string and hoping for the best.
North America: The Great Unknown
If you zoom in on North America on a map of the world in 1750, the East Coast looks great. New York, Boston, Charleston—they're all there. But once you head west of the Appalachians, things get wild.
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The French had this vast, thin empire called Louisiana. It wasn't the state of Louisiana; it was the entire Mississippi River basin. On a 1750 map, this looks like a giant blue and green smudge in the middle of the continent. There are no Rocky Mountains on these maps. Instead, you might see the "Sea of the West," a fictional body of water that people desperately hoped would lead to China.
It’s kind of funny to think that in 1750, people in Philadelphia knew more about the moon than they did about what was happening in what is now Colorado.
The Printing Press and the Business of Geography
Maps were expensive. They were high-tech luxury goods.
When you look at the work of the Homann Heirs in Germany or the Seutter family, you see these incredibly ornate cartouches—those little decorative boxes in the corner. They’re filled with drawings of "natives," exotic animals, and gold bars. This was marketing. If you were a wealthy merchant in Amsterdam, you bought a map to show off your global reach.
- Copperplate Engraving: This was the gold standard. A craftsman would scratch the map into a copper sheet in reverse. It took months.
- Hand-Coloring: Maps didn't come out of the press in color. Usually, a room full of underpaid workers (often women and children) would watercolor the outlines by hand.
- Paper Quality: 1750 maps were printed on thick, rag-based paper. That’s why so many have survived; they aren't made of wood pulp that turns acidic and crumbles.
What Most People Get Wrong About 18th-Century Cartography
We tend to think people back then were "dumb" because their maps were wrong. They weren't. They were actually incredibly sophisticated.
The Jesuits in China were doing some of the most advanced surveying in history. Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, a French cartographer, started a revolution in the 1700s by doing something radical: he left blank spaces. Before him, mapmakers hated empty spots, so they filled them with fake mountains or forests. D'Anville basically said, "If we don't know what's there, don't draw anything."
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That was a huge shift in human thought. It was the moment we admitted we didn't own the whole world yet.
Mapping the Oceans
The sea was the highway of 1750. But it was a highway with no signs.
The map of the world in 1750 shows the beginning of "thematic" mapping. Sailors were starting to map trade winds and currents. You’ll see arrows indicating the "Trade Winds" that carried ships from Africa to the Americas. This was the dark side of 1750 cartography. These maps were the infrastructure for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The precision of the coastlines of West Africa in 1750 exists specifically because that’s where the money—and the human tragedy—was centered.
Actionable Insights: How to Read a 1750 Map Today
If you’re looking at an old map in a museum or online at the Library of Congress, don't just look at the shapes. Look at the "lies."
- Check the "Hinterlands": Look at the centers of Africa and South America. If they are filled with mountains and lakes, the mapmaker was probably lying to make the map look prettier.
- Follow the Names: Look for "New" names. New Granada, New Spain, New France, New Holland. It tells you exactly who was winning the imperial game at that specific moment.
- Identify the "Unknown": Look for the words "Terra Incognita." It’s a reminder that only 275 years ago, we were still living on a planet of secrets.
To really understand the map of the world in 1750, you have to stop thinking of it as a failed version of Google Maps. It’s actually a high-speed photograph of a world that was about to be turned upside down by the Industrial Revolution and the American and French Revolutions. It's the last time the world felt truly, impossibly big.
If you want to dive deeper, check out the David Rumsey Map Collection online. You can overlay these 1750 maps directly onto modern satellite imagery. Seeing a hand-drawn 1750 map of "New York" struggle to align with the actual GPS coordinates of Manhattan is the best way to appreciate how far we've come—and how much those early explorers got right despite having nothing but a compass and a lot of nerve.