Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The Roman Empire (27 BCE – 476 CE in the West, 1453 CE in the East) was one of the most influential civilizations in history.
It originated from the Roman Republic and transitioned into an imperial system under Augustus. Over centuries, the empire expanded across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
The empire eventually split into two:
The map above and the one below are both the work of Dāvis Viļums a Latvian born Londoner who over a period of 5 years cycled all the streets of central London.
In total he cycled over 10,000 miles over the course of 1,200+ individual cycle journeys.
As someone, who walked the Tube back in 2015, I love these sorts of London challenges.
You can leant more about the why below:
The data comes from the Prison Policy Institutes’ report: State of Phone Justice: Local jails, state prisons and private phone providers.
Here is the data per state, followed by the facilities in each state with the highest rates:
The map above is Francis Galton’s earliest known isochronic map, published in 1881 for the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, illustrates travel times from London, United Kingdom, to various parts of the world, measured in days.
The map assumes favorable travel conditions, prearranged land transport, and the use of contemporary travel methods within a reasonable cost.
From the map itself:
The map above shows the location of Lufthansa Group’s Airlines.
And surprisingly they’ve more or less accidentally recreated a map of the Holy Roman Empire (see below):
The map above shows which countries the US has a trade surplus in goods (both manufactured and non-manufactured commodities) with and which ones it has a trade deficit.
The data is for the 11 months up to Nov 2024 and comes from the US census FT900 report.
However, it should be noted that the data is for good only. The US actually has a slight trade surplus in services, but a very large trade deficit in goods.
Here is the full data by country:
The map above shows each US state’s international trade surplus or deficit (or balance of trade) in goods per capita for the 11 months ending November 2024.
This includes both Manufactured Commodities and Non-Manufactured Commodities.
States in blue have a trade surplus in goods while those in red have a trade deficit.
The map above shows the most important country of origin for each state’s imports.
As you can see Canada, China and Mexico are the big 3, all of which have been threatened with Tariffs by the Trump government.
Top 3 Import Partners By Number of States:
The underlying data comes from Slave Voyages, which has more detailed maps, from the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade a couple of which you can see below:
Here’s a detailed summary of each slave trade mentioned: