I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map. Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world? Europe is tiny, yet the kind of people to complain about it will also complain about the outsized importance of it. Africa, which is apparently a victim of such projectionism, is also placed in the middle because of where the arbitrary Greenwich meridian goes.
Also notable that in the centuries following Mercator projection, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the northern parts of South America actually shrunk by the map were regarded as vast, unexplored wildernesses full of resources to plunder (and the northern realms expanded by the projection as inaccessible icy wasteland). Difficult to imagine the Gall-Peters projection making conquistadors and colonists from little European countries more respectful of the inhabitants of the equatorial realms, though I guess they might have got lost more using it...