Maps with Blank Spaces Symbol Analysis

Harari uses the symbol of maps with blank spaces to represent a shift in humanity’s outlook around the year 1500 towards a desire to learn, explore, and discover unknown facts about the world. The blank spaces on maps represent knowledge about the world that’s yet to be discovered. Before the Scientific Revolution, humans generally assumed that information and knowledge about the world was already known and recorded, and they could find it by reading religious scriptures. For Harari, maps that are completely filled in represent this religious mindset—that all the knowledge about the world is already known and written down in scripture, waiting to be memorized. During the Scientific Revolution, however, humans shifted in their mindset and began thinking they were ignorant about the world, but they could learn about the world by observing it. After Christopher Columbus attempted to sail west from Europe to India in the 1400s, and his fleet accidentally bumped into the Americas along the way, Europeans started drawing maps with blank spaces in them—representing territories, information, and knowledge waiting to be discovered. Harari thinks this new way of thinking about the world fueled European imperialism—because after Columbus landed in the Americas, European imperialists became obsessed with exploring, discovering, and learning about the world, and in doing so, they ended up colonizing many parts of it.