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Large, richly colored French world map depicting the extent of global empires, overland railways, telegraph cables, and transoceanic shipping routes in the final phase before the collapse of European overseas empires. Issued by the Paris publisher A. Taride, the map uses color to delineate colonial control by France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, the United States, Japan, and others, with maritime routes and cable lines carefully overlaid in red and blue.

Inset maps across the bottom provide detailed views of strategic and commercial hubs, including Singapore, Aden, Hong Kong and Canton, New York, San Francisco, the Canal de Suez, Cape of Good Hope, the Panama Isthmus, and the Antilles.

Two polar projections anchor the lower left corner, with the Arctic map bearing the label "Cook et Peary 1908 1909", referencing the rival claims to the North Pole and confirming the map’s compilation no earlier than late 1909.

Geopolitical features fix this edition to a narrow historical window. The Lado Enclave is marked in eastern Africa as a distinct region around the Nile labeled Bari, reflecting Leopold II’s personal possession of the territory under British lease. As the enclave was reintegrated into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan following Leopold’s death in December 1909, its appearance here confirms the map's production just before or shortly after that transition. Likewise, Sakhalin Island is shown divided between Russia and Japan, as it was from 1905 to 1945, and Korea appears under Japanese rule.

A remarkable feature is the extensive Arctic cartography, where symbolic colonial presence is asserted in remote polar regions. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago is rendered in detail with British and Canadian claims labeled by explorer name. Greenland is under Danish control, while the islands around Spitsbergen remain loosely charted but actively named. Of particular note is the label "Terre du Roi Guillaume (All.)" (King William Land, German), signaling Germany’s maximal imperial expression—not through administrative possession, but through the scientific prestige of cartographic naming and Arctic exploration. For a French map, this inclusion reflects both the international recognition of German expeditions and a moment when German colonial reach—real and symbolic—was at its height.

A vivid visual document of imperial infrastructure and reach on the eve of a global reckoning, capturing the European world order just before the First World War redrew its borders.