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Jonn Elledge, "A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps" (Experiment, 2024)
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Hello everyone and welcome to academic life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler and today I'm so pleased to be joined by John Elledge, who is the Author of A Brief History of The World in 47 Surprising Stories behind the Lines on Our Maps. Welcome to the show, John.
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B
Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
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C
I am so glad that you're here and that we get to talk about your book. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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B
Oh, I'm very, I'm very boring indeed. I, I was a journalist for 20 years. Well, still am, I suppose, sort of freelance. But I sort of gradually drifted away from writing about news and politics and all that jazz and increasingly just have, have, have earned my money by like finding out interesting things and writing about them on the Internet. And somehow based, based on that, I've managed to kind of segue that into an actual literary career. So History of the world in 47 borders as it it is in the UK. The brief was added for the American edition, which I don't really understand is my, my third book, but there I do just kind of write about things I find interesting, really.
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C
And so what drew you to this topic? There's a little bit more in your background that might indicate that this is a natural fit. But can you explain for listeners what drew you to this topic?
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B
So there's a few different origin stories of the book, depending on how pretentious or how silly I want to be. One of which is just I've always been interested in maps and I've always been interested in stories about borders ever since a documentary from the BBC that my grandfather recorded for me in the early 90s called Tales from the Map Room, which had some stories in it that actually ended up in this book. Another is that I, for a number of years I edited the urbanism website CityMetric, which is a part of the New Statesman, which is kind of equivalent to the New Republic, the Atlantic, that kind of thing. It's a left wing political magazine that was in the past associated with like George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw and Christopher Hitchens and all those guys. I worked there for a number of years and the website I was editing for them looked at kind of cities and transport systems and all those kind of things. But I used to run a little series there called Boundary Issues where I kind of find stupid lines on maps and basically go, hey, what the hell's happened here? And Also just in 2016, the Brexit referendum happened and two years before that Scotland had voted to actually remain part of the United Kingdom. But you know, with those events here and with kind of the sort of resurgence of nationalism as a global Political force. I just found myself getting more and more interested in kind of where these identities come from and why people give up so much of themselves to it, when actually, you know, the nation state is a relatively modern invention. So it kind of seems strange how much of our politics it can drive.
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C
The book is called A Brief History of the world in 47 borders. But pretty quickly into the book you say, well, it's 47 chapters, and some of the chapters are necessarily going to be dealing with multiple borders. How did you arrive on the 47 borders that you chose?
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B
Yeah, the title is a total lie. Actually, the UK paperback, which came out earlier this year, my publishers asked for a bonus chapter. So even it's not even 47 chapters anymore, it's 48 chapters over here. To an extent, it was literally, I could come up with some story about how these are. These are the most important lines on the map. But to an extent, I just. I did the ones I found interesting. I did the ones I thought were kind of like, you know, important to the story of borders and national identities generally. And I did the things I kind of thought would make. Would make good content. And they just kept going until I ran out of space in the book and my deadline was appropriate approaching. At one point they were going to be 51, I think, but we took a few out for space reasons. So there's no magic reason why it's 47. To some extent, I think it's probably because Buzzfeed broke everyone's brain and made everyone think that it needed to be a prime number in your headline. So it's probably just that.
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C
And you tell us in the book that there's going to necessarily be gaps. The world is enormous. You can't cover everything, even a brief history. Can't just jump from thing to thing and try to cover all sorts of factoids. And so if people are upset with that, you invite them to tell your publisher. Because then you get to give us Volume two.
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B
Yes, exactly. No, I mean, I had so much fun writing it. It is. I mean, the other. The other sort of origin story for the book is I was looking for something that would feel like, you know, a big book, you know, kind of like, you know, a statement book. But that wouldn't require me to do sort of 80,000 words argument, because I think consider short, I think, in paragraphs rather than. Rather than chapters, if you know what I mean. And also I was looking for a topic that would enable me to do lots of different things I was interested in. So this is kind of bits of, you know, there's a lot of history in there. There's also some stuff about geography and sort of modern geopolitics. But it's also just a lot of stories about people being idiots. And those are my favorite things in some ways. And so I came nowhere close to running out of ideas. I have a whole spreadsheet of. Of possible topics that I just. I might have written at some point. So if it does well enough, I would love to write a sequel. I'm writing a book about something completely different now, and I'm finding myself thinking how much nicer it would be to be doing another book about borders. So we shall see where the world takes me. But I could definitely do another 47. The only question is whether I could kind of make it feel like coherent as opposed to just like, here's 47 more chapters about the exact same thing you've already read.
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C
Early on, you defined for us what a border is and what a boundary. Can you share with listeners what are the definitions of border and boundary that you're working from?
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B
So, yes, when I was doing my research for the book, I had a very nice call with a chap called Philip Steinberg, who is. I think he's one of your countrymen. I think he's an American, but he's director of the center for Borders Research at the University of Durham in the north of England. And he explained to me that there is a subtle difference between borders and boundaries in that boundaries are a line of no thickness where the territory of two states meets, while a border is the line you pass through to cross from one to another. So it sounds like that's the same thing, but actually there is a difference in that, you know, you can cross the border at, you know, in an airport or an international rail station. You know, you will cross a border at the point you kind of pass customs checks and someone checks your passport and so on. But, you know, that is clearly not the boundary of a country. So to an extent, borders are political, whereas boundaries are kind of physical. Yeah. And also boundaries are about division, borders about connection. I felt it was important to explain that, partly because, as with so much of the stuff in the book, it's in there because I find it interesting more than anything else, but also because it seems like an important distinction that in the rest of the book, I was going to completely ignore and use the two words interchangeably. So I thought I should at least glance at. At the difference there before diving in.
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C
Early on in the book, you start moving us into our own unconscious biases. One is that in the modern world, most people assume that a border is natural, that having borders is normal, and that if we need to look up a map or, or use a wall map, that those lines that delineate one space from another are the way that the world should be described, rather than where the natural resources or a map of population density. That of course, when we say we need a map of the world, what we're talking about is a bunch of borders drawn on a piece of paper. Can you take us into this bias that this is a natural thing?
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B
Sure. So it was something that kind of occurred to me when I was first thinking about the book. If you kind of stick the words map of the world into a search engine, it will almost certainly provide you with a particular kind of map of the world. It'll be a political map of the world. It will show the 194ish nation states of the world. It will divide North America into Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, for example. Takes a while to kind of realize that is an assumption. Actually, a map of the world doesn't have to be that kind of political map of the world. It could be a physical map of the world. It could be showing major rivers and seas and mountains. It could be a map of the world's cities rather than nation states. But it shows you a particular type of map of the world. Because the odds are that's what you're looking for. Because that's how most of us envision the world, if we think about it at all. And this is one of those assumptions that's so embedded in us that it kind of takes a moment to realize it is an assumption and that there are other ways of mapping the world. And once you kind of realize that, it does kind of open up a whole bunch of other things, like the nation states. As I think I've already alluded to, the nation state is a relatively recent invention. Like the idea the entire world is going to be divided on that basis is a product of the last 80 years, really, and the fall of the European empires. Whereas for most of history, you had empires and you had cities, but there are only a few things that were kind of nations in the sense we'd understand them now. And yet we kind of imagine that the idea of the nation is something eternal and unchanging, and, you know, in many cases, worth dying for. And once you realize that actually these things are human creations and often surprisingly recent human creations, I think that does kind of reframe both a Lot of human history and the state of the world today.
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C
And you tell us that borders and boundaries kind of have had three key functions. While while borders and boundaries move around, there's. There's three key things that we, we need to know as we get started here. One is that borders and boundaries have been with us for all of human history. That is not to say that the current borders and boundaries have been there since the start of history, but that the concept, the need for them has been with us for all of human history. You also tell us that while they sometimes have their roots in physical geography, it's not always clear whether the border was shaped by political identities or whether the political identities were shaped by the borders. And the third key thing is borders can retain resonance long after they are erased. Can you talk about these foundational concepts for us, please?
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B
Yeah. So the idea that it's not clear whether borders are shaped by political identities or political identities are shaped by borders, that is to an extent, this is the question I'm trying to answer in the book. And the conclusion I came to slightly is that there isn't one. You know, they, it, it is two way traffic. It does happen in different directions. So like, you know, why, why would someone consider themselves, I don't know, Polish as opposed to Czech? And you kind of imagine that, you know, that's because, well, they will speak a certain language, they will have a particular culture, and you sort of assume that it's, it's natural. Whereas actually like those things are constructed, you know, historically a lot of what we now think of as border territories, they would have had a more sort of mixed language. They would have languages kind of blended into each other a little bit. And those political identities kind of harden with the emergence of the modern nation state system. And I thought this was sort of an interesting thing to explore because as listeners will be able to tell from my accent, I'm English, you know, I grew up on an island. So it is sort of natural to sort of assume there is, there is something natural and inevitable about borders because, you know, it is clear what is England and what is France, because there is a big, there's a body of water in the way. So you sort of assume that like nation states are kind of geographically and physically inevitable. But actually in most of the world that's not true. And even here, you know, there is, there are many centuries of European history in which a French power is conquering parts of England or an English power is trying to conquer parts of France. You know, these things are a Lot blurrier than. Than we imagine them to be. The point about boundaries and borders, so the retaining resonance long after they're erased is like they don't always. You know, sometimes you kind of like erase the thing contained by the borders and it goes away. You know, the identity that was kind of created by those borders can sometimes die with the political unit, but not always. So, you know, the nation of Poland, I think, is the only nation in the world that's been abolished twice, but it's still very much there, going strong. It was completely wiped off the map once in the 1790s and then again in the 1940s. And yet, you know, throughout both those periods, there were very much people who felt they were polished. But there are other. There are other sort of nations or things that we might compare to nations that are long gone. The things that gave rise to them have been completely destroyed. Like there are a group called the Ruffinians that was a very strong European identity in sort of Eastern Europe for a long time. It's sort of in now, in roughly in what's Ukraine. You're not going to find anyone going around calling themselves a Rufinian these days. That's just completely gone. So, yeah, to an extent, it was just kind of a way of, kind of setting the scene for a lot of the stories that follow. Especially the very first story in the book is the oldest sort of political boundary I could find, which is the boundary between what we now call Upper and Lower Egypt, which was abolished in the unification of Ancient Egypt at around 3000 BC. You know, it's one of the first political events we know of in the whole of human history. And it's not merely a story about a boundary, it's a story about the abolition of that boundary. And even though that boundary went 5,000 years ago, that's a long old time. Even so, it retained resonance for a very long time because the identity of the pharaoh was kind of bound up in the concept of being the lord of the two lands, he of the sedge and the bee, which kind of symbols of those two halves of Egypt, the sort of power of pharaoh, which sort of lay to some extent in being able to say, look, I am the one who can hold this disparate country together. So even though the boundary. The boundary had long gone, it did kind of retain resonance for not just centuries, but millennia. So I just thought that was kind of a good way of setting up a lot of what was to come in the book. To some extent, it's just setting up questions that I'm never actually going to answer, but have a lot of fun asking.
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C
And that example of Egypt, you point out again and again in the book that we assume things were done more logically or more naturally than they were. When a lot comes down to ego and political power.
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Yeah. Or often some tired Europeans with a map on a big table, basically. So I wrote a column earlier this year that I wondered if it would get me in trouble, and it didn't, actually, but I think that might because not that many people read it, but it was. It was about Donald Trump's comments about the U.S. canada border being this kind of weird, artificial, unnatural creation. And the headline was something like, he's not actually entirely wrong, because he isn't, you know, it's the 49th parallel, isn't it? It goes for like nearly 2,000 miles or something. Just this long, straight line that some representatives of the U.S. and British North America, which became Canada on the other side of this table, just agreed that beyond a certain point, the border would just run along this long, straight line through territory that no one had really properly explored. Never mind that there were people who'd been living on that territory for millennia. This is where we were going to put the line. And that is weird, that is unnatural, that is artificial. Donald Trump was right about all those things. Where he was, however, completely wrong is that that is unusual because actually, if you look around the world, there are a lot of borders that were drawn like that. There are a lot of suspiciously long, straight lines. They don't think they're any quite that long, but nonetheless, there are a lot of straight line borders that some Europeans drew on a map at one point and said, okay, we're going to ignore the rivers and the mountains and the seas. We're just going to put the border there. That was for the 200 years of world history. And it doesn't, it doesn't matter that it was come up in that false, that kind of fake way. The thing that matters is that the people on the northern side of that border do not want to be American. They do not want Donald Trump as their president. So, you know, the fact that the border is a bit silly doesn't mean it's not real or important, you know, so, again, it's just sort of setting up a lot of these stories that I kind of want to want to tell in the rest of the book, really.
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B
Yeah, I mean, well, I slightly push back on politically it seldom does because actually for much of the last 80 years it hasn't always. But more often than not I think self determination has been a very important part of world politics. The assumption is that a good country will give people the right to decide whether or not they want their territory to be a part of it. That hasn't always worked in practice, but that is kind of we've had a sense of the rules of geopolitics and this is what you do and self determination matters. But that's kind of unusual. That's not how it's worked for most of human history. For a lot of human history. Who who your territory, which nation, which which empire rather in many cases your your your territory belongs to will not be a matter of what you what the local people want. It will be a matter of who has the biggest economy or the biggest army. It will be about the ability to kind of enforce your will on the part of the great powers. For Most of human history. That's how it works. And one of the terrifying things about the sort of geopolitical moment we're in now is it does kind of feel that there are a lot of big states that kind of want to roll back that sense of, like, you do not move borders by force, that borders are kind of negotiated rather than sort of affirmed by military action. And it does kind of feel like we're kind of shifting back into that old world because we do have a bunch of these kind of strongman leaders like, like President Xi in China or President Putin in Russia, or dare I say, President TRUMP in the U.S. you have these presidents who, who think that actually self determination matters a lot less than who has the. The most money or the biggest military. So. So I do kind of worry that we are. We are going backwards in some ways, and we are. I mean, it does feel very unlikely that there will be peace in Ukraine that does not involve at least some of what are being euphemistically referred to as land swaps. And I don't really understand why we're calling them land swaps, because so far as I can tell, Russia is swapping nothing. It is literally just the bits that Russia will have succeeded in taking by force. That is very unusual in the world of the last 80 years. However, for most of the time before, you know, 1945, that would have been an entirely normal way for a great power to conduct its affairs.
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C
You take us back before we go forward, and on page four, you get us into what the world was prior to the 1500s. And in that section, you're talking about how a nation was a distinctly fuzzy concept. People could move freely, provided they weren't inserted or enslaved. But towns and territories were constantly traded between noble families by conquest, peace treaty, or marriage alliance. It seems to relate a bit to what we're talking about here. And then you say, in the 1500s, a couple of really fundamental things changed in how people conceive of the world. One was maps. There were differences to tools and printing, and so maps now became this more tangible thing, and they seem to matter more to people. And you talk about. Then the maps became a way of saying, you know, you'll control this piece of land over there, I'll control this piece of land over here. And it started to give political leaders a more spatial sense of their power. Can we talk about this shift in around 1500?
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B
Yeah. So the process I've already sort of referred to of like, you know, Europeans carving up maps around big conference tables, which you know, that is a thing that happens a lot. You know, we see it at the Berlin Conference in 1885, when which is the starting gun and the scramble for Africa. We see it in the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which is kind of the post Napoleonic war settlement. And we see it in the early United States actually, where, you know, like how the Louisiana Purchase is kind of first divided up in states and then kind of like parcels up into to as land for individual veterans of the War of Independence. You know, there are a lot of these processes where it's literally some official somewhere sitting with a map and saying, okay, you have this bit, I'll have this bit. So that's kind of how sort of the sort of the imperial age works, let's call it that. But that was not possible 300 years before, because to do that, you do need a map of a certain quality. You know, you can't divide up a territory using nothing but a map and a PEB without a decent map. And that's really only in sort of the 16th, 17th centuries that the maps of that quality, the surveying technology of that quality, start to come on stream. So I do have a chapter in the book where I look at a thing called the Down Survey of Ireland, which is in the. The 1640s when there's a. There's a rebellion in Ireland which had been sort of held by the English Crown for. For a couple of centuries by then, not always very strongly, but nonetheless it was basically colony. And then there's an uprising in the 1640s and, and the. The English and to an extent Scottish militaries kind of go in, subdue the uprising. This is all of Oliver Cromwell, those guys. And this has all been done like the money to do this has been raised from, you know, through loans back in London that have been issued on the basis that, you know, land will be available in Ireland to kind of repay the loans afterwards. So to kind of get to the. To sort of access the land so you can parcel it up and access that money to pay your soldiers. You kind of need to be able to parcel the land up. So like, there is a huge advance in surveying technology that comes entirely out of that process of just needing to divide up a conquered territory. And that is one of the first examples of a proper sort of, you know, detailed national survey of a territory on that kind of level of detail and is conducted entirely so that, you know, an imperial power can divide up the land between settlers. So there is this sort of very tight connection between mapping technology on the one hand and imperialism on the other. If you think about the world before, we kind of have maps of that quality, the nation states sort of worked very differently. So partly that's because, you know, as I've already kind of alluded to, there were nation states dating back before then, and two of them were England and France, which obviously kind of went on to conquer the world. Which is, I think, one of the reasons we, we sort of project the idea of the nation state much further back than it really goes. But also like, there are a lot of empires where, where the sort of power worked differently. Like it was different. It was harder to kind of project power in the pre imperial age. So in a lot of areas and for a lot of history, it's probably more accurate to kind of think of instead of like, you know, countries with hard borders in the way we have now, it's more and more true to sort of imagine that you kind of have centers and peripheries and the peripheral zones can sort of switch between empires or between countries, or they can be kind of traded as part of peace treaties. And it wouldn't necessarily make that much difference to, to, to the life of the people who lived there. Like, you know, who, who was, you know, theoretically the crown to which your local lord answered probably didn't matter as much as who the local lord was. You know, just because it took days for news to come from the capital, you didn't have much connection to what was going on in, you know, Paris or, or, or. Well, I'm trying to think that I've got imperial capital at that point. There aren't many really, but, but, you know, if you look at a lot of what we think of as if you go even further back in history, if you look at a lot of the things we kind of imagine to be kind of like the edge of, you know, lines marking the edge of imperial territories, like Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, which kind of marked the edge of Roman power in the north before you got to what was then Caledonia and we now call Scotland. Or if you think of the Great Wall of China, I'd grown up imagining that both these, these structures were kind of there to mark the limits of an imperial power. And that's not really true. It's more so the communications artery and so the tripwire. So like, if there's a bunch of angry Picts heading towards Londinium, you've got fair warning they're coming. But it wasn't really sort of a hard line on Roman Power, because the north of England was not that sort of tightly held in the way the south was. It probably wasn't that much more in the Empire than Caledonia was. So just like the concept of borders in the ancient world work completely differently because it. Because there were these sort of weaker identities and also because it was harder to project power. Sorry, I've just done the whole of the history of borders backwards there, which is probably not the most rational way of doing it, but I kind of got caught in my argument.
- [30:30]
C
It's very helpful because we are going back and forward in time, as does the book, because the question of borders isn't static. And when we come across one border, it necessarily opens up a number of questions about why this border, why this attitude, why now? Which takes us back into time. And to that point, you take us to something in 1648 called the Peace of Westphalia. And it's really interesting how it's used versus what's actually delineated in the treaty. Often we think our key government documents really clearly spell out the entire letter and spirit of the law. And then sometimes we're really surprised when a group of people say, well, we're not going to do that anymore. And we try to use the piece of paper and lo and behold, it doesn't say as much as we thought it did. And so the piece of Westphalia is an interesting one because it basically says no state should be able to interfere in another's domestic affairs. But you point out the treaty isn't really as detailed as that.
- [31:28]
B
So there's a number of examples of this in the book, where a phrase that I sort of assumed I understood turns out not to mean exactly what people suggest it does. So the Westphalian state system is meant to be kind of this foundational moment in the development of the nation state and international diplomacy. It's the series of peace treaties that end the 30 years war, which is this kind of huge European conflagration which goes on from 1618 to 1648. It starts with the defenestration of Prague, which is when. When a couple of emissaries are thrown out of a window in Prague Castle, which is one of my favorite events in the whole of European history, because it's not actually the only time that happens. It is, at the very least, the third defenestration of Prague. But let's. Let's not get into that. People do keep getting chucked out of windows in Prague, but yeah, so you've got this major European war. Almost everybody is involved, actually. You know, England And Scotland largely sit out of it. But, you know, most of the continental powers are involved. And every time it looks like the war's winding down, someone else appears on the horizon. It goes on for decades. It's part of the wars of religion. And it ends with these series of peace treaties in 1648, which, known as the Peace of Westphalia. And part of what comes out of that is the line you just read out, which is basically the rules of national sovereignty. And it's saying that, you know, you can't interfere if you're a state. You're not meant to interfere in the internal affairs of another state. Now, that's always been sort of more of a hope than an actual reality, let's be honest. You know, actually power states intervene in each other's affairs all the time. But it's nonetheless, it's kind of, you know, it is officially the rule. And I've just always assumed that that is, you know, this idea of like, you know, territorial sovereignty that no, what. What goes on in Poland really is no business of the government of Germany, for example. I'd always assumed that that would be written down in the Peace of Westphalia. And it turns out it isn't. There are lines kind of a bit to that effect, but they are almost entirely about the specific rules inside the Holy Roman Empire, which, if listeners are not familiar, it's kind of sort of medieval Germany, but not quite. There's bits of other bits of Europe are in there. Like a lot of the Netherlands is in there, Switzerland's in there, Czech Republic is in there. It doesn't quite map onto Germany, and it's an empire rather than a nation state, really. And. And, you know, it's in. In, you know, up until the 16th century, it is probably the most powerful European state, actually. It is kind of bordering on a superpower. But then largely because of the Reformation and the wars of religion, the emperor's power sort of attenuates a lot, and the sovereigns of the individual territories within it, princes, become increasingly powerful until by the end of the 18th century, there's a lovely line from Voltaire which everyone quotes about how the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire, which, you know, is not quite true for most of human history, but by the 18th century, it's completely correct. It's sort of a bit notional. And realistically, really, you kind of have these places like Bavaria and Saxony and also a bunch of teeny tiny sort of nightly or princely states. They're barely individual counties. They are kind of Acting as states in their own right and drawing up international treaties and so on. Anyway, the piece of Westphalia basically just refers to how that works. It's not talking at all about how states, the rest of the world should work. But nonetheless, you know, the idea of the Westphalian state system has kind of gone down in the theory of international relations as being this sort of, you know, the doctrine of territorial independence and sovereignty and non interference. And I just thought that was interesting to draw it a little bit because it is, as I say, it's a pattern. You see, you see it a lot. There's a few of these in the book where the phrase turned out not to mean what I thought it did. So Sykes, Picot, the agreement between Britain and France about how they're going to carve up the Middle east when the Ottoman Empire falls after World War I. There is a treaty between some chaps called Sykes and Pico. However, it's not the lines. However, it's not the line in the sand. We actually get. We get a variant on that, but it's just kind of the most memorable name. So that's the one that kind of attaches to the process and also close to home for you guys. The Mason Dixon line, turns out is not. Was never the sort of line between the Union and the Confederacy as I'd always assumed it was. It was actually a very specific border between. Let me see if I can get this right. It's Pennsylvania on one side and Maryland, Delaware and possibly also West Virginia on the other. And it's a specific stretch of boulder. It's about 400 miles drawn up by two English guys called Mason and Dixon in the 18th century. And somehow through just kind of the meaning shifting for a number of congressional debates around things like the Missouri Compromise, that becomes a sort of portmanteau for the entire division of the United States into North and South. So I just kind of thought it was interesting to kind of unpack a few of these terms and say these phrases. You might think, you know, they don't actually mean what you imagine they do. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.
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You've mentioned several times about, you know, people standing around carving up a map, and there's a wonderful quote on page five from the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, where he is talking about the terrible thing while also making clear he had no intention of stopping it. And you say he sums up the results best. We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's feet have ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.
- [38:57]
B
Yeah, no, I love that quote. I mean, that quote is one from that documentary I mentioned earlier that inspired me to get into the subject all the way back when I was about 12 or something. But also, you can tell I love it because I'm fairly sure it's in the book twice, which I do try and avoid, but it's in the introduction and later in the Scramble for Africa chapter as well. And you know, I, I feel it's, you know, nobody has ever been sort of like so scathingly honest about what, what European imperialism in Africa especially meant. It was a bunch of European diplomats sat around the table in Berlin just like handing out treaties between, you know, handing out territory among themselves without really knowing what they were handing out. Nobody had been to these places. It was relatively recent at 1885 that Europeans could get into the interior of Africa without dying of malaria because somebody had invented Queen. So, you know, European power in Africa was a relatively new thing. Before that, it was just trading posts on the coast and basically an entire continent, many Times the size of Europe is carved up between the European powers for sort of, you know, internal balance of power dynamic reasons. And there are no Africans in the room when this happens. Like, the Sultan of Zanzibar had tried to request an invite and had basically been laughed at. So it's just white people sat around the table dividing up an entire continent between themselves. And there's this great quote by Lord Salisbury in which he kind of admits that's what's happening. And I like the quote partly because it is so honest about it, but also because, you know, the British Empire was a very enthusiastic participant in that. In that process. You know, the fact that Salisbury could see what they were doing did not mean that his government was not going to get involved. It was very, very keen to get invol involved. Nonetheless, he could sort of see clearly what they were doing.
- [40:50]
C
The book has a number of maps and an introduction, but the meat of the book is divided into three parts. Part one is history, Part two is legacies, and part three is externalities. And in the externalities section, it looks at borders in the sea, in air, in space. But if we. If we dive into an example from part one, the histories, on page 22 is the chapter called why is Europe not a peninsula in Asia? And I admit in many college classes that I have been in, that question has been asked. So since you were curious about it too, can you tell us, why is Europe not a peninsula in Asia?
- [41:28]
B
So it depends how far back you want to go. So, I mean, I find this. I thought this would be an interesting one to explore because it is one of the most sort of established boundaries. Like when we were talking about. When we're talking at the very start of the show about, you know, this. The idea if you. If you do a. A web search for a map of the world, you'll get a political map of the world. It's another of those embedded assumptions that there is a difference between Europe and Asia and that they are different things called continents. But actually, if you kind of like stop and really look at the map, you'll realize that's nonsense. Like, you know, Africa is clearly a landmass in its own right. It is connected to the rest of Eurasia via the Sinai Peninsula. But there is clearly a point where, you know, the. The land narrows significantly and you can see, like, okay, this. This thing on one side is different to this thing on the other. Even if you can debate exactly where the line should go. And the same applies to the boundary between north and South America. There are clearly two things there, and there is a thin stretch of land between them. And you can debate where in Central America the line is, but nonetheless, you can see there are sort of northern and southern continents there. You can't do that with Europe and Asia. They are clearly the same landmass. So, you know, something different is going on there. And it's sort of socially constructed. So if you go back far enough. The idea of the continents comes from ancient Greek geographers, when there's a work by a guy called Hekataeus, so Hecateus Meletus, whose name I've no doubt massively mispronounced, which is a sort of travel log which begins with Europe in book one. It goes all the way around the Mediterranean. It does Europe in book one, and then Asia in book two, which is everything beyond the Adriatic, basically. And then Asia later gets split into Asia and Libya, which becomes Africa. So, you know, and if you think about the world from the point of view of an ancient Greek mariner, that sort of makes sense, because if you're on an island in the Aegean. Sorry, it's the Aegean, not the Adriatic, I should say, if you're on an island in the Aegean, you are probably aware that there are sort of three landmasses around you. There's the one to your northwest, which you call Europe. There's one to sort of your east, which is divided from Europe by a series of channels, ultimately the Black Sea, and then who knows what lies beyond that. And then there's one to the south which is divided from. From Asia by. By the Nile. You can kind of see the logic there. But of course, the ancient Greeks did not know what the rest of the world looked like. They kind of had quite limited knowledge compared to. Compared to what we have today. And it turns out if you keep going beyond the Black Sea, there isn't really a body of water dividing Europe and Asia. They are just the same landmass. And that distinction probably wouldn't have persisted if it were not for a couple of things that happened later. One which is the division of the Roman Empire into East and west, followed by the fall of the Western Empire in the late 5th century. And the other is the rise of Islam. So firstly, you end up with Western Europe kind of becoming a completely different world, and then it's sort of having a different God from the old world. So it's sort of become basically the existence of Europe as a separate thing from Asia is very bound up in kind of the rise of a medieval Christendom and things like The Crusades, and the idea that there is something fundamentally different from the people at the western end of this land mass than there is from the people at the other end with their strange gods. But because it was Europe that went on to create the modern empires and conquer much of the world, that division persists. We sort of people far beyond Western Europe now understand there to be a difference between Europe and Asia. And you can say there is culturally, although I think even that's pushing it. It's kind of, if anything, sort of spectrum. But, you know, geographically, they are definitely the same landmass. They should really be the same continent. But for all sort of political reasons, we imagine it to be two things rather than one. I do sometimes wonder about an alternate history where, if you look at kind of the way the Indian subcontinent functioned before Europeans started arriving, that too was like Europe as a patchwork of different religions and languages and cultures and basically nations. And it starts getting unified with the arrival of the Mughal Empire from the north in, I think, the 16th century, and then obviously by European powers and particularly the British later on. But I do kind of wonder, if it had been the other way around, if it had been powers from the Indian subcontinent that had somehow conquered Europe, would we now be living in a world in which we had a sense of a nation called Europe, while India will be lots of different countries? I don't know. But it's interesting to think about and to realize how contingent these. These results are.
- [46:44]
C
And that section of the book takes us all around the world. It has quite a bit of different parts of Europe, but it also takes us to the Sudan, Uganda Border Commission. It takes us to the American invasion of Mexico. All, all divided into short, easy to read chapters that take you deep into these questions. Part two is called Legacies, and it again begins taking us around the world. And it also takes us into some things that really need defining and for us to sit with as we consider what we mean by borders and boundaries. So there's a chapter called Some Notes on Microstates. There's one called City Limits. But importantly for the discussion we're having is a section there that starts on page 261 called the Map Makers Dilemma. As we've moved past the history from pre1500 into the. As we go forward, maps have become more and more important. And as we get to world now, maps have a kind of flexibility that I don't think early cartographers could have imagined, where online map makers and online search engines can update things at a dizzying Speed, can you take us into the map makers dilemma, please?
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B
Sure. So this came out of a 2014 report by a Guardian writer named Alex Hearn, who's actually a friend of mine, who noticed that Google had begun presenting a very different view of the Crimea and its boundaries to people who looked at the map in different territories. So this was after Russia had first invaded the Crimean Peninsula. In Russia, Google started showing the Crimea as a part of Mother Russia, whereas in Ukraine, in Ukraine, rather, I should apologize for the use of the definite article there. In Ukraine, it was still shown as part of Ukraine. Now, obviously it's contested territory and it does kind of look a little bit like Google was being a bit cowardly there by kind of like showing, sort of bowing to Russian military pressure. But the reason for that is that a lot of countries have rules about what you're allowed to show on a map. And they will literally lock people up if they find people, or throw them in jail if they're showing the wrong map. And Russia is one of those countries. So because Google at the time did have staff in Russia, it made sense to kind of just sort of accept the Russian view of the world on maps that were going to be visible from inside Russia. And this happens in a few places. So like you will now see, I think, well, one of the most recent examples, I believe if you look at the great sort of sea to the south of the United States, if you look at that from within the United States, I'm fairly sure at this point it will now be labeled the Gulf of America. It's not doing that in the rest of the world. The rest of us do we see the Gulf of Mexico? But again, if you have a lot of staff and a lot of money tied up in the United States, in the current climate, it does kind of make sense to play the game slightly and not offend a powerful and revenge hungry government. So this is the map maker's dilemma. It's how you deal with the fact that the world is changing. Well, I was going to say the world is changing faster than ever before. I don't know if that's true. But maps are expected to keep up in a way that they never used to once upon a time. Like, if you were looking at a map, it would be a little bit dusty and you'd know you were looking at something from the past. You would know you were looking at a map that was printed a year, five years, ten years ago. Whereas now, if you look at a map on your phone, if you look at Google maps, or Apple Maps or whatever it may be, because they can be updated constantly, you sort of expect that they will be. And that raises a real problem is what you do about these contested territories. Because often there is no right answer about where a boundary is if it's contested. And often a company providing maps will get in trouble for showing the quote, unquote, wrong version of a map in. In some particularly techy territories. So. So companies like Google have found themselves just trying to sort of please everybody by showing different maps to different people. And that is not a problem that cartographers of the past would have faced.
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C
Part three is called externalities, and it takes us into things like the Prime Meridian, time zones, the International Date Line, maritime boundaries. It takes us into boundaries in the air. But I know we're starting to come to the close of our time together, and I want to at least quickly ask you about something from that third section, which is some notes on time zones. You open by saying that there are so many ways to rebel against a repressive state. You can criticize the government, you can break its laws, you can attack its property. And then they came up with a secret fourth thing, which is defy the time zone. So can you take us into this section, some notes on time zones and on crossing the timeline?
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B
I'm very big fan of your use of the phrase secret for thing there. It's always nice to kind of encounter a meme in real life. Yeah. So China, as listeners have no doubt noticed, is massive. It's nearly 2,000 miles from east to west. And that bigger country, you'd expect rationally that it would have multiple time zones. The United States is also pretty big. That has. The continental United States at least has four time zones, obviously. And you would expect China to have four or five, too, but it doesn't. Since 1949, in an attempt to kind of create national unity, Chairman Mao decreed that everyone in the country should use Beijing time. The problem there is that Beijing is right at the eastern end of the country. The west of China is as much as 2,000 miles away. The west of China is also essentially imperial territories that never really fell. You know, China is basically a land empire that now poses as a nation state. And there are a lot of people in the west of China that would probably rather not be Chinese. There's the Tibetans, obviously, but there's also the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The Uyghurs, who are a largely Muslim population, I believe, who are being rounded up and put in re education camps. Literally a million People, I think, is the last figure I saw. It's a fairly horrifying story that we don't hear much about in the west, but one of the ways that Uyghurs like to protest against repression coming from Beijing is to set the watch to Xinjiang time, which is only six hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, rather than Beijing's eight. And there are stories that human rights organizations have identified of people of Uyghurs literally being arrested and locked up for having watches set to the wrong time. So it is just kind of a novel form of protest. But, yeah, so time zones are another one of those things that you kind of, as with all the borders in the book, really, they're kind of this sort of mix of the result of kind of geography and natural forces and the result of political forces. So they only really emerge in a big way with the invention of the railway, because until then, you can't really move fast enough for it to matter. You know, by the time you've gone far enough to have gone an hour back in time, it will take you so long to do that. The slight change in the clock when you arrive at a new location doesn't really matter. So in much of Europe, certainly, and I think in North America, too, every town would have its own individual time based on the movement of the sun, which would basically set noon to when the sun was highest in the sky. And it's only with the creation of the railways, you start getting standardized time zones. And in North America, that does come out of the railways, too. Like, I think the guy was called Stanford Fleming. I can get the mix. Sandford Fleming. Sorry, Stanford Fleming is an incorrect name that you can find on the Internet. It's actually called Sanford Fleming, but he was actually a Scot he built. He was Canada's foremost railway engineer. And he also came up with the system of the time zones we use today, which divides the earth into roughly 24 time zones. In practice, it doesn't work like that because a lot of countries go in with a half hour or quarter hour, and there's things like, you know, summertime, you know, moving the clock in summer as well. But nonetheless, There are roughly 24 zones to global time. That only happens through the arrival of the railways in the 1870s.
- [55:41]
C
We're starting to come to the close of our time together. And while I have at least a dozen more questions here, we need to wrap up and let you go on with your day. So I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [55:54]
B
Oh, God. Interest I suppose. I mean, I feel like I'm going to own up to something at this point. I do feel like I often feel like a bit of a fraud when I'm talking about the book at events. I've sometimes been introduced as the historian John Elledge. And I feel the need to point out I'm really not a historian. My degree was in English literature and I stopped doing history at school at the age of 16. I'm just someone who's interested in this stuff and reads a lot and enjoys researching and writing about things. But I suppose the thing I hope people will come away with is just kind of like an urge to rethink some of their assumptions about what nationalism means, about what nations mean. And we're seeing nationalism as a rising force again, a way it's perhaps been in decline for a few decades and it seems we're already seeing conflicts, territorial conflicts based on clashing national identities. I think it is entirely possible we're going to see more of those in the near future. And I suppose I would like people to kind of consider whether a flag or a nation is always worth, worth one's loyalty or whether they're actually sort of bigger things or indeed smaller, smaller groups we are part of that may be more deserving of that respect. Yeah, just, just, just think about these things a little bit, I guess, but also idle. The thing I hope the listeners will take away from it is that, is that this book sounds really interesting and they should read it. So, you know, always be closing.
- [57:30]
C
Thank you so much for being here today, John Elledge, and taking us inside your book, A Brief History of The World in 47 Surprising Stories behind the Lines on Our Maps. I'm Christina Gessler. This is the Academic Life. Please join us again.