The Lie of the Land: Map Borders, Lines in the Sand, and Why They Matter

By Ross Hunter

Maps are great, if shy, historians; their borders tell stories. Tales about the land, tales about people who drew them. They have lasting consequences. This book explores some of those borders with the most to tell us. History, biography and politics all play a part. Some of the oddest frontiers and some of the most painful consequences are examined, from Palestine to The Punjab, by way of Ireland, The Caucasus, The Balkans and Africa. Not all stories are peaceful, and the too-forgotten fights of the Opium Wars and Kurdistan are examined, along with the people who made the decisions.

This book is for anyone who has spent a happy hour reading a map, and wondering just how and why some of those lines got to be where they are – mostly boundaries, but also other oddities and curiosities, and for anyone perplexed by a news story from an exotic land, far away in place or time. Copiously illustrated with maps and pictures, it is illuminating, enjoyable and, hopefully, disturbing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781664118607

Ross Hunter

Four decades at the chalkface, teaching Geography, Economics and Maths, half of them as Headmaster saw Ross & Sue living and working in a dozen countries. Geographer by trade, he has travelled to over fifty countries, including the full overland route from Melbourne across Asia. He speaks French, and has a little Russian and Bahasa Indonesia. Both are active in local community life, when not travelling. Their two children have inherited nascent nomadic tendencies. He has crossed, or occasionally failed to cross, many of the borders studied; The Lie of the Land is all too topical now, with new wars active again in Palestine, the Caucasus and The Sahel.  Ross is the author of: ‘A Maltese Crossing’ a novella (Austin Macaulay, May 2022) 978-1398-435-032 & ‘Parallel Lives Crossing’ (Lune Valley Publishing, November 2022) 978-1916-896-659. He is working on illustrated books on Buddhist Sculpture and then Russian Revolutionary Art, due out in 2024.

Book preview

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The Lie of the Land

Map Borders, Lines in the Sand, and Why They Matter

Ross Hunter

Thanks to: ACS, NM, SAH, IC, AZ, KL, CAH, JV, KP, DPH, AL

Dedicated to Fellow Travellers & Friends

Copyright © 2023 by Ross Hunter. 850014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Cover Design by Alina Latinina

Rev. date: 10/02/2023

Contents

A. Global Cartographic Curiosities

1. The Pope: 1493 Tordesillas and 1529 Zaragoza.

2. The USA 1823: The Monroe Doctrine

3. Via The Alps towards The Caucasus & The Balkans

4. The Balkans

5. The Caucasus

6. Crimea – Khrushchev’s Accidental Largesse

7. How to Make Friends and Influence People: Opium Wars and Treaty Ports

B. Great British Lines on Maps

8. ‘The Scramble for Africa’ following the Congress of Berlin 1884/5

9. The Middle East 1917 & Palestine – ‘The Twice Promised Land?’

10. The (Un-)Holy Land: 1930s-60s

11. Kurdistan: Occasional Hope, Usually Sacrificed.

12. Northern Ireland 1921

13. Saudi Arabia 1932

14. The Partition of India, 1947

C. Disasters to Come

15. The Climate Crisis Matters

16. The Sudano-Sahel

17. The Antarctic

18. The Arctic & The Ocean Floors

19. Hurricanes/Typhoons (and Tornadoes)

20. Frozen wars re-warming

D. Power Projections

21. Projection Problems

22. Propaganda and Politics

E. Unwitting Immigrants

23. Accidental invaders – good and bad news

24. Ships and Sneezes Spread Diseases

F. Smaller Scale Anomalies

25. Enclaves, Exclaves and Ex-Kingdoms

26. Where is the Capital?

G. Bordering on an Odyssey

27. A personal Journey

H. Conclusion & Relief

28. Anything learned? Could we do better? Do Good fences make good neighbours?

Appendices

Projection

1Unfolding

Maps are great, if shy, historians. They have immense stories to tell, about landscape and about the people who made the features. How lines get to be on maps depend on the people making them – but then have huge effects on everyone living there.

This book is for anyone who has spent a happy hour reading a map, and wondering just how and why some of those lines got to be where they are – mostly boundaries, but also other oddities like canal routes and railway patterns. The people who made them are unsung heroes who left their mark on the map, though often not where they intended the lines to be.

The UK is currently in a state of flux. Government politicians are pressuring us to take a particular view of history and ‘greatness’. Senior UK government minister, and some time i/c Education, Michael Gove, claimed, in 2011 that : history in schools ought to celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world and portray Britain as a beacon of liberty for others to emulate.

We are asked to celebrate Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, and The Britishness of contributions to History, and with it Geography. This is a hotly contested area. On the one side, there seems to be a hankering after Victorian times and mores, when British heroes bestrode the globe doing ‘Great Things’. Many of these have statues. By no coincidence, this zenith of importance corresponds to when the atlas was painted pink, glowing with the Empire upon which the sun never set. In stark contrast, many other people see a nadir at the same time, when there were indeed true heroes, out of sight, out of mind, who have been ignored by the writers of history.

If Empire and greatness means being on top and looking out and down on lesser people and areas, it follows that exactly those lesser folk are essential parts of the picture, each one a reverse to an obverse.

2Key

Borders on maps are fascinating. If you don’t agree, this is the wrong read for you. Some borders are obvious, sensible and pretty much inevitable. Where else would you divide Spain from France or Tibet from Nepal other than along the high points of the Pyrenees and the Himalaya? The British coastline is obvious, despite it taking a Hundred Years War to settle on it. The Rio Grande easily separates the USA from Mexico, and saves a fortune on building a big long wall or fence. They have their own logic and stories.

By contrast, straight lines across big maps suggest at least one of Irrelevance, or Ignorance, or Ill Considered Haste, or Far Away Power Politics, and often several of them. As such, straight borders demand explanations. If they are wholly irrelevant, why bother in the first place? What does the land under the dotted line think about it all? Not to mention the locals, which was certainly the philosophy throughout at least the Victorian era. At best, dotted lines dropped onto alien territory are completely ignored. The problem comes when someone puts barbed wire along the line, and arms exporters offer help in protecting the patch. Add in population growth, climate change and a spot of big power proxy arm wrestling and irrelevance can quickly turn to conflict. Find oil, diamonds or any halfway precious metal or rare earth, even iron ore qualifies, and fighting is inevitable.

By no means all borders have equal weight or consequences. Sometimes, an elegant vagueness and mutual will not to ask too many precise questions is by far the best solution. This fudge is sometimes better than clarity. ‘Neat’ solutions are often disastrous.

We can find badly drawn and potentially explosive dotted lines all over the world. The trait is certainly not unique to the UK. There are plenty of oddities, important, trivial and amusing. But there are all too many tragedies. Pax Britannica has created more than its share. This is inevitable, given how much of the world map was once pink. But with power comes responsibility. It is simply not good enough either to make a mess of the task or to walk away having created a disaster. This applies to border foul ups from the 1800s to the 2020s, as well as current crises’ (mis)management, such as, say, Brexit and Covid. Let’s look at some historical evidence.

3Scale

This book is a short, simple starter guide to a complex topic. Each chapter can, and has, been the subject of thousands of books and even more scholarship. But if you can see a theme, and/or are encouraged to dig deeper, all to the good. To give an illustration of just how much the quest for knowledge explodes, consider this introduction to an article, from ‘The Economist’ (as always, the model of quality writing and efficient prose) from 26 May 2021:

"The Assads came to power in 1970 promising to recreate Greater Syria, a swathe of the Levant that included Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Syria, and lead an Arab baath, or renaissance. But as Bashar al-Assad prepares to win his fourth seven-year term as president in a sham election on May 26th, his family’s hold on the country has shrivelled to a fraction of its original domain. Syria has been balkanised into a patchwork of fiefs….."

In just 75 words, we are deep into one ruling family and their aims and problems, the political geography of Syria and neighbours, got an idea of some eternal and intractable problems, and met two curious new(ish) words: ‘baath’ (an Arabic word meaning union/unity/coming together, based on the dreams of Arab leaders since time immemorial) and ‘Balkanisation’, meaning almost exactly the opposite, based on the experience of the fractious and fractured eponymous SE European peninsula. We’ll meet both ideas again later. It is hard to encapsulate a geopolitical situation briefly, an order of magnitude harder to suggest any solution, let alone a good, lasting one.

Note: In several chapters, there are a number of the conclusions and analyses, which are open to dispute. They are what I think. Some may be proved right, several will doubtless be overtaken by events and rendered obsolete. They by no means all accord with British/Western conventional thinking. I have done my best to cross check conclusions with friends in different parts of the world. You may not agree. So be it. Let me know what you think I have got wrong. Take your time.

A. Global Cartographic Curiosities

Canute Knew. Some things are on the map because nature has put them there, like the coast (HWMOT to be precise). Some things are there because people have made them happen. Both sets can have consequences, or as my old College Tutor, no less than A A L Caesar Esq, put it: ‘ramifications’. These may be as intended, unexpected or as near trivial as makes no difference. Let’s warm up with some evidence from the historical rest of the world, offering a selection of precedents, before upgrading to proper British map-mongering.