“Commonwealth historian Linda Colley, commenting on an Imperial Federation map depicting the extent of the British Empire in 1886, noted that the globe is depicted using the Mercator projection, centered on the Greenwich meridian. The effect of the image, she argued, is to conceal the territorial fragility of British imperialism by underlining its global reach. Thus, the viewer neglects the small territory of islands that the world-dominating United Kingdom consists of. … The vast stretches of pink are presented as connected and homogeneous, though different parts of the empire were dealt with separately and held with different levels of power.”

From Painting the World Pink, an article by Charlotte Johnson, posted in the Manchester Historian on 14 May 2013