Our superpower status may have waned, but when it comes to alcohol consumption the British still punch above their weight.

In a series of unique world portraits, researchers have represented countries not by size but by their rating on a range of topics. As the world’s tenth-highest alcohol drinkers, the result on this map is a bloated Britain the size of India.

The modified maps — known as cartograms — are a product of Sheffield University’s Social and Spatial Inequalities research group and the University of Michigan. Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield, said: “It’s like looking at a global pie chart. Each country is sized according to the proportions of the variable we’re charting, but the sea remains the same size.

“The main purpose of the project is to make real, numbers that have been available for some time. The numbers don’t have an effect on people but when you see a picture the effect really brings the numbers to life.”

When it comes to alcohol, the Middle East is a speck on the map compared to Western Europe, where the average person drinks more than one third more than people in any other region.

Professor Dorling’s group is releasing today a new series of 16 maps showing the world according to various factors of conflict: nuclear weapons, land-mine casualties and war deaths over various periods. Entitled Violence, the cartograms reveal staggering differences between the effects of war and the amount of money spent on it.

The maps are also used to examine change — for example, in global wealth. In 1500 the regions with the largest figures for gross domestic product (GDP) were eastern and southern Asia. Those with the lowest GDP were central and southeastern Africa. In 2002 they had an even smaller proportion of the world’s total GDP.

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