Historical data visualization · 1786
William Playfair: The Commercial and Political Atlas
Excerpt · London · 1786 and 1787
Two 1786 charts by William Playfair: trade with Denmark and Norway over time, and Scotland’s trade as bars.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
Part of the series The first data visualizations.
- Print from
- A3
- License
- Public domain
- Source
- archive.org
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- William Playfair, 1786-1787
Theme
Download
- A seriesPrints at A0, A1, A2 or A3
- 50 × 70 cm
- 60 × 80 cm
US formats
Each one laid out on its own. At Letter and Tabloid the body of a long text prints under 8 pt: they suit short texts, or a copy to read up close.
- Letter8.5 × 11 in
- Tabloid11 × 17 in
- 18 × 24 in
- 24 × 36 in
Print it Which size, paper or aluminium, which file to send
Every Historical data visualization poster, in the A, 50 × 70 and 60 × 80 cm formats and every theme, as one zip from the latest release, and in the US formats as another.
Print from A3: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
Wallpaper
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Edition
William Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas, “a new edition, improved” (London, John Stockdale, 1787), the second edition of the atlas first published in 1786, in the scan on the Internet Archive of the copy stamped by the British Museum (black and white, 9036 px wide). Images: plate 18, “Exports and Imports to and from Denmark & Norway from 1700 to 1780” (imprint dated 1 May 1786, scan n111), and plate 25, “Exports and Imports of Scotland ... Christmas 1780 to Christmas 1781” (imprint dated 7 June 1786, scan n153), cropped to the plates, reduced to 4000 px and with their levels stretched (40 to 215) to whiten the paper. The plates of this edition are engraved with hatching and stippling where the copies on Wikimedia Commons show colour washes. Text: the title, the legend and the imprints engraved on each plate, read on the scan (the words inside the charts, the scales and the names of places are not transcribed; the plate numbers are in the captions), with “Wm”, “1st”, “7th” and “sculpt” with their last letters in superscript as engraved; and the first two paragraphs of the “Observations on the Trade of Scotland” (p. 101), from the OCR of the scan corrected against the page image (“THE limits”, the drop capital, set as “The limits”; “much inferior in utility to those that do”; “same”; “itself at”; “consists:” with the colon of the print; “shape given”). The long s is set as s and the space printed before semicolons and colons is dropped. No transcription of the plates was found to compare with: they were read on the scan word by word.
Rights
William Playfair died in 1823 and the atlas was published in 1786 and 1787: it is in the public domain in France and in the United States.
The Internet Archive item carries no license statement; the scan is a faithful photographic reproduction of a public domain book, which creates no new right (in the United States, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 1999; in the European Union, article 14 of Directive (EU) 2019/790). Wikimedia Commons marks its copies of the same plates PD-old-100-1923 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Commercial_and_Political_Atlas,_1786).
