Copyright © 2024 Jonn Elledge

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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

WILDFIRE

an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

First published as an Ebook in Great Britain by

WILDFIRE

an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2024

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eISBN: 9781472298522

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

About Jonn Elledge

Praise

Also by Jonn Elledge

About the Book

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Introduction

PART ONE: HISTORIES

The Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt

The Great Wall of China and the Border as Unifier

Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia?

The Roman Limes and the Power of the Periphery

The Legacies of Charlemagne

The Borders of Great Britain

Of Feudalism, Marquises, Margraves and Marcher Lords

The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan

Spain and Portugal Carve up the World

Holy, Roman and an Empire

Britain, Ireland and the Invention of Cartographic Colonialism

The Much Misunderstood Mason–Dixon Line

The Local Government Reforms of Emperor Napoleon I

The American Invasion of Mexico

The Schleswig-Holstein Business

‘. . . Where No White Man Ever Trod’

The Sudan–Uganda Border Commission

European Nationalism and the United States of Greater Austria

Britain and France Carve up the Middle East

The Partition of Ulster

The Partition of India

The Iron Curtain and the Division of Berlin

PART TWO: LEGACIES

Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Eastern Germany/Western Russia

The Strange Case of Bir Tawil

The Dangers of Gardening in the Korean DMZ

China’s Nine-dash Line and Its Discontents

The Uncertain Borders Between Israel and Palestine

The Siamese Twin Towns of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau

The US–Canada Border, and the Trouble with Straight Lines

Some Places Which Aren’t Switzerland

Some Notes on Microstates

City Limits

The Curse of Suburbia and the Borders of Detroit

Washington, DC and the Square Between the States

Borders from a Land Down Under

Some Accidental Invasions

Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the ‘Google Maps War’

The Mapmaker’s Dilemma

PART THREE: EXTERNALITIES

A Brief History of the Prime Meridian

Some Notes on Time Zones

A Brief History of the International Date Line

Of Maritime Boundaries and the Law of the Sea

Some Notes on Landlocked Countries

How the World Froze Territorial Claims in Antarctica

The Other, Bigger, More Musical Europe

Boundaries in the Air

The Final Frontier

Conclusion: The End of the Line

Sources and Further Reading

Index

About the Author

© Jamie Drew

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist, and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He lives in London.

Praise for
A History of the World in 47 Borders:

‘Totally fascinating and hugely entertaining. This book is a nerd’s paradise without borders – but with jokes. Jonn Elledge has such a gift for looking at complicated bits of the world, then telling you all about them in a way that feels not like a textbook, but like an incredibly fun and interesting conversation in the pub.’

Marina Hyde, author of What Just Happened?

‘A fascinating and often very funny history of one of our great current preoccupations: borders.’

Tom Holland, author and host of The Rest Is History podcast

‘By turns surprising, funny, bleak, ridiculous, or all four of those at once, A History of the World in 47 Borders unknots some of the weird historical and geographical tangles we’ve managed to get ourselves into. And it’s timely too, if only because our preoccupation with drawing lines never seems to abate.’

Gideon Defoe, author of An Atlas of Extinct Countries

‘Somehow, Jonn Elledge turns geo-political history into a funny, fascinating and revealing insight not only into the world today but into the frailty and determination of the human spirit. Packed with “I never knew that” information (the sort that you read out to anyone in the room with you), A History of the World in 47 Borders shows us that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it plays out in weird ways right under our noses. He’s such a lovely writer. A delight from start to finish.’

Miranda Sawyer, author of Out of Time

‘Full of stories you thought you understood and those even the nerds in your life will never have known, this clever, confounding history will help you see the world from a new angle – if you can ever put it down.’

Patrick Maguire, author of Left Out

‘A brilliant account of how these lines on a map shape lives, destinies and economies. You’ll never look at a map in the same way again.’

Stephen Bush, Financial Times columnist

‘Jonn Elledge provides a witty grand tour of the fascinating, disturbing and downright bizarre decisions that made the world what it is today.’

Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth

‘This is brilliant fun, explaining the modern world in enjoyably bite-sized chapters. It’s exactly the book you hope it will be.’

Rob Hutton, author of The Illusionist

‘Delightful. You’ll learn more in one book than you did in years of school.’

Charlotte Ivers, Sunday Times columnist

‘Jonn Elledge is a wonderfully lively writer – warm, funny and sharply political, all at once. This makes him the perfect guide for a survey of the world’s borders, which are revealed, under his quizzical gaze, to be deadly serious and utterly absurd.’

Phil Tinline, author of The Death of Consensus

‘With the wit – and often the tone – of Douglas Adams telling us about the tragic absurdities of the galaxy, Jonn Elledge is our guide to the lines that have divided us since we decided to stop following the caribou to plant crops and pay tax. Why are some borders straight and some crinkly? Why is Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest? Why does Northern Ireland exist? The answers are here.’

Matthew Sweet, author of Operation Chaos

‘Full of fascinating stories.’

Greg Jenner, author and host of You’re Dead to Me podcast

Also by Jonn Elledge

By Jonn Elledge and available from Wildfire

The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything

Conspiracy [with Tom Phillips]

About the Book

A fascinating and surprising history of the world told through the lines people have drawn on maps, by the ‘charming and outstandingly nerdish’ author of The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about the nature of human folly.

From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British–French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.

For Agnes – God, I wish you were here to see this

Acknowledgements

There are two people in particular without whom I would never have written this book: my grandfather, Wally Horsey, who encouraged my interests in history, geography and absurdity alike; and my beloved fiancée, Agnes Frimston, who pointed out that there was a book in these interests, and who helped shaped the results. Neither, sadly, are with us any longer – Agnes died, with shocking suddenness and timing that would feel a bit too on the nose in a novel, just hours after I finished the first draft in June 2023. I miss her more than I can say. I suspect I always will.

The team who actually turned the bizarre and random contents of my brain into a coherent book include my wonderful and patient editor, Lindsay Davies; Tim Peters who provided the maps; Liz Marvin for the copy editing; Matthew Burne for the cover art; the team at Wildfire, especially Alex Clarke and Federica Trogu; and my agent, Antony Topping of Greene and Heaton.

A number of historians were kind enough to read chunks of the manuscript, to help me avoid howlers: Kevin Feeney, Rhiannon Garth Jones and my dear friend Matt Symonds. Others who offered insight and advice at various crucial points in the process include Alex Von Tunzelmann; Duncan Weldon; Dr Megan Barford of the Royal Museums Greenwich; Professor Philip Steinberg, Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit at the University of Durham; Jim Caruth, formerly the lead curator of maps at the British Library; and Lewis Baston, whose own very different book about borders is published shortly after this one, and which you should all purchase immediately.

I should also thank a number of others without whom I am not sure I would still be standing, let alone finishing books: my mother and stepfather, Kim and Alan; my aunts Jennifer and Leila, and uncle David; and the team at Podmasters’ Paper Cuts podcast, including Andrew Harrison, Miranda Sawyer, Jason Hazeley, Gráinne Maguire, Liam Tait, Jess Harpin, Jacob Jarvis and Adam Wright (God, I’ve missed having colleagues). I should thank, too, the bafflingly sizable number of people who subscribe to my Substack, The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, whose interest and support has enabled me to write full-time.

Last, but very far from least, there are so many friends to whom I owe a great deal these last few months that I’m terrified I might miss one out. Their names include but are not limited to Scot Fisher, Manu Ekanayake, Brad Curtis, Rachel Nekanda-Trepka, Larissa Fischer, Jasper Jackson, James Ball, Frankie Goodway, Marie Le Conte, Tom Phillips, Luke McGee, Holly Thomas, Ava Evans, Sarah Duggers, Andrew Swan, Harriet Tyce, Kate Arkless Gray, Matt Drinkwater, Anne-Marie Conneally, Aaron Lovell, Rachel Cunliffe, Pete Mitchell, Jim Cooray-Smith, Neil Atkinson and Henry Scampi, who remains, reassuringly, the best dog in the world. My heart is filled with love for every one of you.

List of Maps

The Great Wall of China

The boundary between Europe and Asia

The division of Charlemagne’s empire at the Treaty of Verdun

The Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century

The lines dividing the planet agreed by the Catholic powers of the 1490s and 1500s

The overlapping claims of Pennsylvania and Maryland

The state borders around the Delmarva Peninsula

Napoleon’s empire in 1812

Territorial change in the US–Mexico War of 1846–8

Schleswig-Holstein on the Jutland Peninsula

The results of the Scramble for Africa

The region surveyed by the Sudan–Uganda Border Commission

The proposed ‘United States of Greater Austria’

The spheres of influence laid out by the Sykes–Picot agreement

The lands around the Baltic today

The lands around the Baltic between the wars

Bir Tawil and the Egyptian and Sudanese definitions of their border

China’s ‘nine-dash line’

The District of Columbia, then and now

The International Date Line

The different categories of territorial waters

The territorial claims on Antarctica

The European Broadcasting Area

Introduction

An even briefer history

The main reason we know of the first recorded instance of a man-made international border is because of its abolition.

It won’t have been the first to have existed, of course; people have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on, and even before that, our ancestors will have been keenly aware that this side of the stream is our tribe’s land, while over there, in the distance, dwell the others. But the first example of an international border we can place with any degree of certainty is that which divided the lands of the Nile during the fourth millennium BCE. To the north of this limit was Lower Egypt, which lay in the low-lying river delta. To its south was Upper Egypt, which occupied the narrower band of higher ground towards Lake Nasser. The dividing line was somewhere around the thirtieth parallel, just south of modern-day Cairo.

But then, sometime around 3100 BCE, that border ceased to exist. Menes, who may actually have been called Narmer, became the first pharaoh by uniting the two kingdoms, in the process creating the world’s first and most enduring national identity. For centuries to come, Egypt’s rulers employed regalia combining symbols representing both halves of their kingdoms, and styled themselves as ‘lord of the two lands’.

Several things are worth noting about this story. One is that borders and boundaries, the division between people like us and people like them, have been with us for the entirety of human history. Another is that, while both may sometimes have their roots in real physical geography, it’s not always clear whether the border was shaped by political identities or whether the political identities were shaped by the border. A third is that boundaries can retain resonance long after they are effectively erased.

But probably the most important thing to take from this story is that, given a distant enough perspective by time or geography, almost any boundary can become baffling to the point of meaninglessness.

*

So, here’s a game you can play at home. Stick the words ‘map of the world’ into a search engine’s image search function and see what pops up. You will almost certainly get a couple of different map projections – and possibly an upsetting array of colour schemes too. But it’s likely that all the maps on offer will otherwise be exactly the same, as the search engine assumes that, when you ask for a map of the world, what you really want is a political map of the world, which shows national boundaries and marks different countries in different colours.

This assumption is so embedded in the culture we’ve all grown up in that it might take a second to grasp it’s an assumption at all – but it is. One could, in theory, be interested in natural geographical features, like rivers and mountains, rather than national boundaries. Even if we stayed in the realm of the human, one might be more interested in the question of where people actually live – maps of cities and population density – rather than the sometimes notional political control over places where they don’t. Yet the search engine assumes that the thing we’re most keen to learn about is the manufactured entities we call nation states. And it does so because, odds are, your brain does so too.

This is not necessarily how our ancestors would have conceived of the world. For much of history, had decent cartography or internet search engines been available, a ‘map of the world’ would have looked very different. So before we dive into talking about specific boundaries and what they mean, here’s a map, as it were, of the territory ahead.

The earliest political entities recognisable to us as states – or at least, the earliest we have records of, which of course is not the same thing – emerged sometime in the fourth millennium BCE, in what is sometimes known as the ‘Fertile Crescent’, a region stretching from the Nile valley round to where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf. Later on, other civilisations emerged in other river valleys: the Harappan civilisation centred in Pakistan’s Indus Valley; the earliest Chinese dynasties, beside the Yellow River.

The rulers of these places almost certainly had some sense of what land was definitely theirs and what was not, but the peripheries were more likely to be fuzzy areas where their influence was limited rather than hard lines marking out the point where it suddenly stopped. What’s more, what lay beyond was less frequently a rival state than a sort of no man’s land, free of political control and home to nomads, plus, probably, an exciting array of things that might kill you. There simply weren’t enough humans in the world for all land to be claimed. It’s probably not a coincidence that the first boundary we know of is the aforementioned one between Upper and Lower Egypt, as the Nile valley was one of the few areas fertile and prosperous enough to support rival states that could bang into each other.

This situation – islands of statehood in a great ocean of land – seems to have persisted for, well, almost all human history. The great empires of the classical era preferred to rely on natural features – mountains, rivers – for boundaries where possible. Where they did create their own, man-made boundaries, like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China, it was less about marking the boundary between states than between order and chaos, a way of giving them some form of control, even just highlighting their domination over man and nature alike. China’s Han Empire, the American historian John Mears wrote in 2001, regarded its wall ‘less as a clear, continuous line and more as a cordon sanitaire, a barrier restricting the movement of people and goods over what they regarded as the approximate boundary of their state’. Half a millennium later, on the other side of Eurasia, entire ‘nations’ could and did enter the Roman Empire, establishing themselves as foederati – client kingdoms – within its boundaries. For all the might of those empires, this is a much weaker conception of national boundaries than the one we’re all used to.

The nation state – a way of organising the world so that political and ethnic/linguistic boundaries align – arrived later than we sometimes imagine, too. We live in a world still shaped by two western European countries, England and France, which coalesced early (both are over a thousand years old). This, along with misleadingly modern-looking maps with titles like ‘Europe in 1000CE’, has sometimes led us to imagine a medieval Europe composed of a system of rival states not dissimilar to the one we have now. Until the early modern era, though, ‘nation’ was a distinctly fuzzy concept: people could move freely, provided they weren’t enserfed or enslaved, but towns and territory were constantly traded between noble families by conquest, peace treaty or marriage alliance. Even in England and France, the edges remained fuzzier a lot longer than we sometimes assume – consider the fact that Lancashire, which later produced the major English cities of Manchester and Liverpool, doesn’t feature in the Domesday Book, or that Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the most famous Italians of all time, was born in Nizza, better known today as Nice.

But then, in a few busy centuries around 1500, a couple of related things happened that fundamentally changed how people conceived of the world. One was that, thanks to improved tools and printing, maps got a lot better. That was useful as a way to, say, announce your control of that piece of land over there that you believed your family owned; it also gave political leaders a more spatial sense of their power.

Another change was in how Europeans, at least, thought of states. It may partly have been the shift to a form of government more based on centralised administration than feudal relationships that did it; a lot of it was also the Reformation. But at some point, the notion that much of their continent was under the sway of a vague and possibly non-existent thing called ‘Christendom’ was replaced by a sense of a world made up of independent sovereign states. This shift is sometimes credited to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (see page 78) but this turns out to be one of those things about history that everyone ‘knows’ which might be entirely untrue: the relevant treaties have almost nothing to say about sovereignty.

At any rate, by around the year 1700, maps were starting to show national borders in heavier lines than other forms of boundary: for the first time, the most important thing to know about a piece of land was which state it belonged to. At the same time, the bigger European powers were gobbling up unincorporated borderlands. Now, states mattered most, everywhere was part of one, and they were not just political units but sources of cultural identity, too.

This, via European expansion and imperialism, soon came – in relative terms, at least – to define the entire world. By the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson’s USA was setting state boundaries and parcelling out land to settlers based on little more than cartography. By the end of the century, the European powers were dividing up Africa – an entire continent – in much the same way. The words of British prime minister Lord Salisbury – which, in best British tradition, manage to be amusingly ironic about the terrible thing while also making clear he had no intention of stopping it – sum 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.’ Not that long before, this sentiment would have been meaningless – how can you divide the world using nothing but a map?

Eventually, of course, the empires fell (well, most of them; China, Russia and the United States are, I believe, still standing). But many of the lines they drew on the maps survived. And so today’s maps divide the landmasses of planet Earth into roughly 193 discrete bits, most of which are fewer than two centuries old. What’s more, they strongly suggest that the boundaries between them are not only clear but the only real way of dividing up the planet.

*

It’s impossible to come up with an exact and unarguable measure for the length of a coastline; you can always zoom in further, get a more accurate measurement, include details invisible in a more distant view. By the same token, even with an infinite word count, it’d be impossible to come up with a history of a boundary that included every quirk of its past and geography. Things need to be compressed and summarised. So what you have here is not a definitive account, merely my interpretation of which parts are the most interesting, on the assumption that if I find them so, then you might, too. In the same way, I’ve had to be picky about which stories to include. This is not, despite its title, a definitive history of the world: there are entire centuries, entire civilisations I’ve been forced to leave out.

These gaps partly reflect the limitations on both time and space inherent in producing any book, and partly an urge to avoid repetition – but also, if I’m honest, my own limitations as a human being, and the fact I am, variously, English, British, European, a Westerner and white. I’ve tried to push outside my comfort zone, to acknowledge how many of the world’s problems are the work of people who look more or less like me – but this is nonetheless my history with my biases. If I’ve missed your favourite border, or your favourite civilisation, I can only apologise – and invite you to buy copies of this book for all your friends and family to increase the likelihood I can correct that error in a sequel.

I should also make clear up front that what follows isn’t a simple, linear history, stretching from past to present. It couldn’t be, without jumping from border to border in an infuriating and confusing fashion, because many of these stories play out over so long. Indeed, most of the essays in this book include both chunks of history and commentary about the world as it stands today.

All that said, part one of the book, Histories, is roughly chronological. There I run through some of the most interesting lines drawn in the past, from the ancient world to the twentieth century – some because they feel particularly key to telling the story of borders as a concept and some because of the role they played in creating the world we live in now.

In part two, Legacies, I move on to the story of those borders whose most interesting feature is how they are still affecting the world today – by providing potential military flashpoints or less frightening foreign policy dilemmas, or simply because they make for strange or confusing lines on the map.

Finally, in part three, Externalities, I look at other types of border, less concerned with carving up control of the ground beneath our feet – temporal borders, between dates and time zones; borders at sea or in the air; and, finally, borders in space. Just as the book begins in the distant past, it ends by looking to the future.

While I’m explaining what lies ahead, some quick notes about language. Firstly, there is, technically, a subtle difference between boundaries and borders. A boundary is, in the words of Philip Steinberg, director of the IBRU Centre for Borders Research at the University of Durham, a ‘line of no thickness where the territories of two states meet’, while a border is the line you pass through to cross from one state to another. The former is about division, the latter about connection. This is why you can find signs alerting you to the fact you are about to cross a border inside an airport, hundreds of miles away from any physical boundaries. This is a distinction it feels worth noting, even though in the pages to come, I’m going to largely ignore it and use the two words interchangeably.

Likewise, the phrase ‘Middle East’ is obviously a problematic one, presuming as it does a European perspective on the world, rooted in a particular time, place and attitude. It is, if you think about it for half a second, just as absurd as the fact a large chunk of the eastern half of the United States is still commonly referred to as the ‘Midwest’. There’s an added complication, too, in that much of what we now call the Middle East – the stretch of the eastern Mediterranean once occupied by the Ottomans – would once have been termed the ‘Near East’. I did consider using less loaded terms like ‘Western Asia’, ‘Southwest Asia’ or ‘SWANA’. But despite the fact that ‘Asia’ was originally the term for what is now Turkey, referring to that region as such today is likely to baffle a mainstream readership, and clarity is all. So as with the border/boundary distinction, I’m going to ignore it in favour of colloquial usage. This note is my way of saying, look, I’m not happy about it, okay?

Lastly, I should admit up front that the very title of this book is misleading. It contains 47 chapters but some are concerned with multiple borders. The lines humanity has drawn upon maps are innumerable. Apt, then, that the number of borders covered in these pages should be the same.

*

We are all familiar with the map of the world, or of our own corner of it. We are all so aware of where our bit stops and something else begins that it can be easy to imagine that the lines which carve it up are as natural a feature of geography as mountains, rivers or coasts. But they aren’t. These divisions are ideas, more than physical facts, and to an animal or an alien they’d be invisible. What’s more, what was made can be unmade. There was a time before those lines existed; there will be a time when they exist no more.

No border is inevitable or eternal. They are arbitrary and contingent and, in many cases, could have looked very different if a war or a treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. Sometimes they are fleeting; sometimes they persist for centuries. Some are funny; some absurd; some brought forth a death toll that ran into the millions.

By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about human vanity and human folly, and see how what seems obvious and permanent in one century will come to seem random or ridiculous in another. These histories show us how decisions taken for reasons of short-term power politics or ego can have long-term, real-world effects for decades or centuries to come. And where better to begin than just south of Cairo 5,000 years ago, to consider what the first border in human history really meant.