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 scale 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.
Review: This is a popular history book by the journalist Jonn Elledge in which he provides short accounts of some of the more unusual facts behind the borders of continents, countries, cities and seas. It comprises, as the title suggests, 47 chapters each discussing a particular border, but with a bonus 48th chapter regarding Poland and its chequered history and shifting borders. The book is divided into three sections: the first on historical borders; the second on the legacies resulting from the drawing of borders; and the third on less physically defined borders such as maritime borders and the International Date Line.
I found the book to be very readable with short chapters and humorous comments scattered throughout. One criticism I would make however is that, although many of the chapters are illustrated with maps, there are no maps in approximately half of the chapters. For a book discussing lines drawn on maps, more illustrations would be an improvement. However, overall I found the book to be an interesting introduction to the subject that should appeal to all map addicts.
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