What seems to be one of the greatest conclusions regarding the role of maps (this powerful tool of geo-supervision) in the global distribution of power? It is the determining combination of mapmaking with the two other characteristic elements of societies that ultimately imposed themselves as global dominant forces outside their narrow boundaries: Their performance in markets and their ability for broad mobility.

Societies that combined their control over markets and their continuous mobility with mapping and the development of their cartographic technology ultimately imposed their long-term geopolitical power on a broad scale. This condition, although with unstable examples from antiquity and the medieval period, constitutes the unwavering rule of supremacy from the period of Latin maritime flourishing in the Mediterranean during the late Middle Ages and in the 15th and 16th centuries of the Iberian expansion into the Atlantic.

Up until the West European and mainly Anglo-Saxon dominance in new continents and oceans in the following centuries, the intra-European rivalries of the 18th and 19th centuries, and finally, the North American predominance of the last century. A rule that was further reinforced by the development and peak of colonialism, which emphasized the connective tissues of the triptych of dominion.

The current North American example is the ultimate confirmation of the rule, in its digital version. The power that controls the markets, distinguished as a society by its intense and continuous mobility, and produces self-sufficient geo-supervisory technology, is a dominant power.

Professor Evangelos Livieratos's book is the first in the series "Journeys with Maps to Places and Utopias," published by Zitis Editions in collaboration with the author. A series of books for the general public (and not only), journeys of acquaintance with the dreamlike but also the real world of maps, the eternal and the ephemeral, from Greece to the World and from the World to Greece, from the cultures of maps in clay to the cultures of maps in digits, through dry lands and seas, cities, reliefs, deserts, and islands!