Exhibition series "KARTEN WISSEN MEER. Globalisierung vom Wasser aus"

On the oceans, the world became one. As media of globalisation, maps created the conditions for the intensification of shipping traffic. They showed travellers, merchants and migrants routes in a world that increasingly appeared to be a spatial continuum. As nautical charts, they enabled increasingly precise navigation; as maps of the world, or rather the world's oceans, they helped to raise awareness of global connections and their distortions. Above all, however, maps made it possible to view and understand the world as a whole – a whole whose parts are connected rather than separated by the seas.

The exhibition series "KARTEN WISSEN MEER. Globalisierung vom Wasser aus" shows maps and other objects from the Gotha Perthes Collection and the map collection of the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Leibniz-Aktionsplan „Eine Welt in Bewegung“and is based on research conducted by a consortium of academics from the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection at the University of Erfurt, the University of Bremen and the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven with the title "Karten-Meere. Für eine Geschichte der Globalisierung vom Wasser aus".