The might of the US is vividly illustrated by a new cartogram showing how the world would look if each country took on the size of its military spending.

The modified map is one of many produced by Sheffield University’s Social and Spatial Inequalities research group and the University of Michigan, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of countries and continents.

On military spending, for example, the US occupies just under half the global landmass and Britain is the third biggest country in the world.

When it comes to war, Africa’s bloody 20th century puts it centre stage, so that it takes nearly a third of the world on the cartogram depicting military deaths from the end of the Second World War until 2000.

Civil wars also inflate the size of the Balkans, Bolivia and Colombia, while North America and Western Europe are reduced to pinpricks.

Another map in the series shows a marked difference between East and West in the number of people who kill themselves. It is not just the sheer size of populations that results in half of the world’s annual 900,000 suicides occurring in India and China. Suicide experts cite poor mental health support and the effects of stress on students.

Eastern Europe is also overrepresented on this map, with Ukraine eight times the size of Australia. Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at Sheffield, said: “In these areas the rates are very high. It is often people drinking themselves to death.”

Britain’s bulging prison population is represented by its redrawing as the largest country in Western Europe on the cartogram showing how prisoners are distributed across the world.

Professor Dorling said: “Violence is rising worldwide. In a sense the new violence maps are figures that have been known for a long time, but we get so used to them that we don’t have an overall image of what they show. The project is about bringing to life what are normally boring figures.”

The Worldmapper cartograms draw particular attention to the miserable plight of Africa. More than 90 per cent of global landmass is occupied by the continent when country size is measured by cases of malaria and, when Aids is the measured variable, Africa bulges across two thirds of the world.

But the story is quite different when the map is concerned with fuel usage. The world’s highest per capita fuel users are the inhabitants of Luxembourg, who use nearly a hundred times more fuel per head than the Bangladeshis, the lowest fuel users.

The world’s three most populous nations, China, India and the US are also the countries who use the most water. But for the US to maintain a large presence on the map its citizens need to use three times more water than the average Indian and Chinese, because of their vast populations.

There is a marked contrast with the global distribution of water resources. On that cartogram South America bulges, as its rainforests contain some 30 per cent of the world’s fresh water. Uniquely, Kuwait does not feature on this cartogram. The country uses desalinated sea water and, as such, has no freshwater resources.

To view more maps visit: www.worldmapper.org

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?