Tourism, Proximity and British Perceptions of France and Germany Before the First World War

This collection explores British perceptions of France and Germany before the First World War, and how they were influenced by proximity, both in terms of simple distance and in terms of how easy it was to travel there. There are four elements (one of which isn't a historical map).
The first is a graphical representation of the quickest routes from London to different places in Europe, as advised by Thomas Cook and Son travel agents in 1913, and how long it would take to travel to each destination. These graphs give us a sense of how far places in Europe actually were from London in 1913 (admittedly a limited sense given I haven’t found useful information on the prices of these journeys, or how many times a day they ran). They also show which places routes ran through, thus showing which places travelllers would be familiar with simply by having to frequently pass through.
The second map is a cartoon map of Europe made in 1900. It supposedly shows the different countries responding to Britain’s war in South Africa. It is interesting for how France—at the time far from an ally—is shown as far less threatening than Germany, which in turn is less threatening than Russia. It is interesting to apply information from the previous element to this one (if we assume that travel patterns in Europe had not radically changed between 1900 and 1913). The relative proximity of France, and number of routes through Paris, perhaps meant that more people had been there, and did not find it excessively foreign or sinister, while the distantness of Russia (Moscow is 102 hours from London) arguably result in it being depicted as a terrifying, autocratic octopus (a depiction surely grounded in common British stereotypes and attitudes).
The third element seeks to answer a question posed by the comparison of the first and second. The first element shows that Germany was not very distant, and that many routes passed through it, especially through Cologne. Yet the second shows that Germany seemed to be more foreign and threatening than France. The third element is a map of Europe made in 1880. It labels western Germany—the Rhineland that accounts for so many nodes in the first element—“Germany,” and the rest of the German Empire “Prussia.” While it was probably the result of parsimonious atlas makers reusing pre-unification plates, the existence of such a map (and of other examples, which are hyperlinked), suggests that the British maintained a mental distinction between the Germany they encountered and the threatening, militaristic Prussia they did not. Either that map echoes a distinction that was already salient, or it and others helped to create or maintain such a distinction. It is no accident that Germany is represented in element two by the Kaiser eagerly stockpiling battleships, echoing a pre-unification cartoon map of Prussia, in which that state is embodied by the Kaiser and an armed and dangerous Bismark.
The last element is a fragment of a map of Paris from an English language guidebook published in 1878. It gives us a loose sense of what sort of places would have grounded British perceptions of the French capital. Specifically, government buildings feature prominently, suggesting that visiting Paris in some way entailed visiting the French state, and perhaps coming to understand it as similar to the British state. One might wonder whether visitors to Berlin would have had the same response to the German state, had many people visited Berlin.

John Bull and his friends: a serio-comic map of Europe

This British cartoon map of Europe paints a belligerently nationalistic view of diplomatic relations in 1900. John Bull, Britain personified, is swatting away two cats -- Boer troops resisting British rule in South Africa -- while the rest of Europe…

Map of Europe, Showing its Gt. Political Divisions

This atlas map of Europe is included as it is an excellent example of a persistent problem that cartographers of Europe faced after German unification: how to label the quasi-federal German Empire. Interestingly, the label for Prussia -- the dominant…

Baedeker Map of Western Paris

This is half of a map of Paris included in Baedeker's 1878 English-language guidebook to the Paris region. It gives us a sense of what British visitors to Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have seen -- after all, this guidebook…

This collection of maps and graphs are primarily a visualisation of the information contained in the “Skeleton Through Routes” section of Bradshaw’s 1887 and 1888 railway guides.[1] These tables list over two hundred destinations from London, and…