Charting Culture

Here is a data visualization that shows the propagation of European culture to the far corners of the globe.

The visualization looks like a chart for a nuclear war, with Europe launching warheads of cultural practices to its erstwhile colonies. There's no shooting back, either. Cultural practices aren't delivered back to the imperial centers.

Oversimplification is a hazard of data visualizations. It's main pedagogical point is made in the sudden explosion of cultural practices in the nineteenth century. As transformative as the Internet has been, in the context of European history it can't match the period between the birth of David Hume and the death of Sigmund Freud.