GreenCard78 posted:

When the European powers divided up Africa, some of the boundaries were rivers. The problem was people didn't view rivers as boundaries but as major transportation networks, the boundaries were elsewhere. You can imagine where the problems started.

7thBatallion posted:

Why does everyone hate Seattle?

7thBatallion posted:

esquilax posted:

How so? Most conflict in Africa is local and intra-state, and is between ethnic groups rather than between states. I have a really hard time believing that that Nigeria, for example, would have been worse off if it had been divided into Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa states via the Niger instead of just throwing them all together.

GreenCard78 posted:

That's pretty much the point. Europeans didn't think about African ethnic and tribal considerations and drew things rather arbitrarily, thus dividing people by things they hadn't normally been divided by before (rivers) or grouping peoples together into a country who would not normally be grouped together.





The ethnolinguistic map isn't exactly the best ethnic map but it helps illustrate the idea. There is an estimated 2,000+ languages, not just dialects, in Africa. The languages are likely as diverse as the cultures and people.

E: The map doesn't say 2,000 itself, that figure is from a class.

esquilax posted:

Well then the issue is not that rivers make bad borders, it was that there were simply not enough borders drawn to create a state for every nation. Rivers actually make very good borders, since they're an obvious geographical feature which helps to minimize border disputes between states (though can never really be eliminated). There will always be ethnic overlap in geographic areas, which will generally create competing claims on a given geographic area. Having clear geographic borders helps to avoid inter-state conflict.

DarkCrawler posted:

Or you know, just look at a ship when it comes from the horizon.

It takes extra retardness to think that the world is flat when even in old times every lice-ridden clap-having scurvy-addled sailor could tell you that it's round.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Other outdated models of our universe, stuck between some good data and Biblical assumptions/reverence for Greek thinkers:



Geocentric model of the solar system, with the orbits of the Sun, Venus, and Mercury shown. Accounts for the apparent retrograde motion of those planets. Wikipedia says this is a copy of a Cassini drawing, and that it appeared in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1777, when it would have been known to be false. Interesting, because Cassini himself would have known it was a false model too, at least later in his life.

appropriatemetaphor posted:

Bigger version of that map thing for people who want to read the text:

a pipe smoking dog posted:

It's worth reading the bible quotes because (as always with these things) they don't seem to say that the world is flat at all.

A crazy person posted:

The sea is calm to the observer at the shore, but after miles and miles at sea, statistics dictate that you will encounter a swell that will block the ship. The sea is never, never ever, calm for miles and miles, it's a constantly moving thing that never calms to the point of perfect flatness. Personally, I wish it did calm like you seem to think it does. It would be one of the most undisputed proofs of a flat-earth available. Sadly, it does not.

GreenCard78 posted:

That's pretty much the point. Europeans didn't think about African ethnic and tribal considerations and drew things rather arbitrarily, thus dividing people by things they hadn't normally been divided by before (rivers) or grouping peoples together into a country who would not normally be grouped together.





The ethnolinguistic map isn't exactly the best ethnic map but it helps illustrate the idea. There is an estimated 2,000+ languages, not just dialects, in Africa. The languages are likely as diverse as the cultures and people.

E: The map doesn't say 2,000 itself, that figure is from a class.

esquilax posted:

Well then the issue is not that rivers make bad borders, it was that there were simply not enough borders drawn to create a state for every nation. Rivers actually make very good borders, since they're an obvious geographical feature which helps to minimize border disputes between states (though can never really be eliminated). There will always be ethnic overlap in geographic areas, which will generally create competing claims on a given geographic area. Having clear geographic borders helps to avoid inter-state conflict.

As another example, Ethiopia and Eritrea have had some border conflicts. A big chunk of the border is defined along two rivers, and the border disputes happen primarily because of the one spot where borders weren't defined by a river.



Plus, this even ignores the fact that ethnic borders often correspond to geographic features. In your first map a lot of the tribal/ethnic borders coincide with the rivers. If you were to draw your ideal map of the Congo's I bet a lot of the countries would be bordered by a river instead of having a river run through them.

GreenCard78 posted:

You're missing the point. It's a very grey thing. Some rivers make very good borders while some rivers make very bad borders. You shouldn't need to know 43.21% of rivers make 54.32% of borders bad to understand this. Rivers aren't the only form of border creation. It is an example of how what seems like a good border can turn out to be a bad border when local context is not thought about. The point was, European colonial powers made poor choices when dividing up Africa because odds are, it would not have divided itself up like that. Many of the ethnic and tribal conflicts in Africa today are the result of groups fighting for power in a nation state they might not have been in together had it not been for Europeans drawing their borders.

It's interesting you bring up Eritrea and Ethiopia because Eritrea only separated from Ethiopia about twenty years ago and Ethiopia remained pretty much free during he scramble for Africa. Yes, the Italians tried but they failed. When talking about Europeans in Africa,
Ethiopia is pretty unique.

E: Mu cow's post about which rivers make good and bad borders is pretty much spot on.

esquilax posted:

If you think I missed your point then you missed mine. When confronted with the fact that the vast majority of violence is between ethnicities inside a state rather than between states, the conclusion should not be that the current lines are in the wrong spots, it should be that there are not enough lines.

Raenir Salazar posted:

How? More nations mean more votes in the General Assembly, meaning more representation. Their collective interests are already better handled by regional organizations not nation-state governance. I.E: The USSR have 3 Votes from having Belarus and Ukraine as members of the United Nations giving it 2 extra votes.

As having a more 'powerful' nation under any neorealist metric doesn't directly translate to a correlation to greater representation because the only nations whose individual votes matter is the top Five of the UNSC by virtue of their singular nation hood.

Hence the USSR only really have real politcal clout is by virtue of the Warsaw Pact/Comintern and the the Veto at the UNSC. Having *enough votes* in the General Assembly only mattered with decolonialization which shifted the Third World into the USSR's camp.

System Metternich posted:

Concerning maps, I present to you the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a fifth-century Roman road map (which in turn probably was an adaptation of a map drawn under Augustus), depicting all imperial roads, harbours and important cities; its depiction stretches up to the western reaches of China. The map depicts 555 cities and villages along with 3,500 other objects (e.g. light towers or shrines), as well as seas, rivers, forests, mountain ranges and more than 200,000 kilometres of road. The road segments are marked with the estimated time you'd need to travel the distance


This is roughly how the map segments correspond to the actual geography (the first segment with the British Isles and Spain was left out for some reason)

Kegluneq posted:

The Tabula Peutingeriana is a visual version of a more common Roman system of terrestrial navigation, which was to use itineraries - lists of names and their distances from specific points. Where places were in physical space/geography was of much less importance to Roman travellers than how long it would take them to get to particular locations (think of us using pre-satnav route planners, basically the same thing). Unfortunately this meant that the Romans were constrained by the need to build clear road networks wherever they went, and often had precious little knowledge of geography away from these. Julius Caesar famously had to rely on guides to get through northern Italy, his own back yard essentially.

The political significance of that approach to maps ties into Roman attitudes towards foreign lands. Rather than think in terms of areas of land as we do, the Romans focused on specific peoples, based in specific towns connected by specific roads; non-urban western/northern Europe was a total mindfuck for them, even if the prehistoric road system was more developed than is usually realised. When it came to conquests of new lands without towns, the priority was to establish these, so that they could be incorporated into the Roman political system.

esquilax posted:

If you think I missed your point then you missed mine. When confronted with the fact that the vast majority of violence is between ethnicities inside a state rather than between states, the conclusion should not be that the current lines are in the wrong spots, it should be that there are not enough lines. Compared to all the poo poo that has happened in Zaire/DRC in the past, any problems caused by having a border on the Kongo river are essentially a non issue. The only major conflict that I could find along the Kongo was entirely on the left bank, between two DRC tribes (in Dongo).

In addition, I think my earlier example of a border on the Niger fits your definition of a bad border river, but in reality would have been a good thing.

Obviously you shouldn't just put a border wherever there's a river, and there won't be enough rivers for all the borders you need. But putting a border where ethnic groups tend to line up with geographic features tends to lead to a more stable region. This isn't just a historical issue either, you would want to look at geography if you wanted to create a stable Kurdistan for example.

I used Ethiopia and Eritrea as an example because they have both river borders and non river borders, and the conflict happens because of one and not the other, which directly supports my point.

Koramei posted:

Or that the lines are in the wrong spots, since if there isn't inter-state violence then the ethnic groups in different states are friendlier than those in the same state, at least in theory. The problem with dividing Africa into even smaller chunks is that each of the nations will be even more under represented in the world stage.

DarkCrawler posted:

Looking at that it seems to me that dividing things into states wouldn't have worked no matter what borders you made.

Koramei posted:

Huh. Was that just a Roman thing? This is (or at least I was told it is) a Ptolemaic map, and it's surprisingly accurate geographically given that it's more than two thousand years old.

GreenCard78 posted:

It's interesting you bring up Eritrea and Ethiopia because Eritrea only separated from Ethiopia about twenty years ago and Ethiopia remained pretty much free during he scramble for Africa. Yes, the Italians tried but they failed. When talking about Europeans in Africa, Ethiopia is pretty unique.

GreenCard78 posted:

When I get home, I'll try to look through an old book for river disputes. The point wasn't just rivers, it's bad borders in general with a focus on Europeans drawing them to their desire without consideration to the locals.

GreenCard78 posted:

Maybe within the next century Africans will experience nationalism or another ism in which tribal and ethnic conflicts stop or decrease because people now see each other as from whatever country instead of whatever smaller group. The idea of who fits what groups will change (see ethnic Hans) and we'll have a new context to operate in.

PittTheElder posted:

This indeed. At the end of the day, ethnicity is a pretty fluid concept (especially when skin color is largely removed from the equation), and given that these countries have really only existed for one or two generations, I think it's entirely plausible that people will start to define themselves by country rather than tribal ethnicity. Especially in places that can escape large scale civil violence, and establish good stable governments.

Smirr posted:

I realized just now that I've got a politically-loaded map right here on my wall. It's a map of Leipzig. Here it is in its entirety:

twoday posted:

Ok, here is a scraping of maps from my hard drive:

Fojar38 posted:

It's also cute that apparently the midwest joins Canada yet for some reason it's a republic. (Republicanism has never been popular in Canada.)

Fojar38 posted:

I used to find the whole "X invades America" subgenre of historical fiction to be fascinating until I learned more about strategy and realized how unless the defenders have basically no army at all it's virtually impossible to invade the North American continent. I would much rather get involved in a land war in Asia than a land war in North America.

Amarkov posted:

I love how the obliteration of the Middle East has affected almost zero national borders, except that Turkey now controls the only land route to Africa.

Fojar38 posted:

I used to find the whole "X invades America" subgenre of historical fiction to be fascinating until I learned more about strategy and realized how unless the defenders have basically no army at all it's virtually impossible to invade the North American continent. I would much rather get involved in a land war in Asia than a land war in North America.

It's also cute that apparently the midwest joins Canada yet for some reason it's a republic. (Republicanism has never been popular in Canada.)

Also, Halifax was probably a more important strategic target for the Nazis than most American cities aside from maybe New York and Washington on account of it being the primary port for the supply line keeping Britain fed.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Also how it misses probably the majority of the world's Muslim population.

DarkCrawler posted:

Probably? Indonesia alone has more Muslims then the Middle East.

DarkCrawler posted:

Eh, it's virtually impossible to invade any continental sized entity over the Atlantic or the Pacific. Normandy being exception due to ever-handy Airstrip One (and the fact that thanks to Soviet Union most of the army was occupied elsewhere).