Comparing an elevation map of Peru with a map of its 2026 presidential election shows that most highland area voted for the defeated leftwing candidate Roberto Sánchez. Tension between the people of the Andean plateaus and those of the economically dominant coastal region and its metropolitan center of Lima are deeply engrained, giving the highlands a distinctly leftwing orientation. But the same maps also reveal a few exceptions to this rule. The most interesting one is the province of Oxapampa in the eastern part of the department of Pasco.
Highlands of Peru in the 2026 Presidential Election
Pasco is as a sparsely populated department, with fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, that is rich in mineral resources. Its capital city, the mining center of Cerro de Pasco, sits an elevation of 14,210 feet (4,330 meters), making it one of the loftiest cities in the world. Pasco’s eastern province, Oxapampa, is situated on the eastern side of the Andean divide, with elevations ranging from 17,400 feet (5,300 meters) at the highest peak (Huaguruncho) to 660 feet (200 meters) in the Amazonian lowlands of the east. Most of Oxapampa’s roughly 100,000 inhabitants live the mid-level elevation zone in the western part of the province, which is the area that supported the rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimoiri in the Peruvian presidential election of 2026.
Oxapampa’s conservative voting behavior may be linked to its settlement by German immigrants in the mid 1880s. The unusual history of the province is outlined in the Wikipedia article on the village of Pozuzo:
In the 1850s, Peruvian President Ramon Casilla proposed building a railroad from the capital city of Lima across the Andes Mountains, and onward to the navigable rivers of the Amazon Basin. Part of the plan (the only part realized) was to import German and Austrian Catholics to settle on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in the tropical rainforests of the Amazon region, then populated only by indigenous people. In 1855, the Peruvian leader signed an agreement with German traveler Kuno Damian von Schütz-Holzhausen to recruit 10,000 Germans and Austrians to emigrate to Peru and establish colonies on the eastern flanks of the Andes. The Peruvian government agreed to pay the cost of the passage from Europe to Peru of the emigrants and the cost of transporting them overland to Pozuzo and other areas designated for their settlement. …
On arrival [in Peru], Schütz found that the Peruvian government had done little to prepare for the arrival of the colonists and their transportation to Pozuzo. The colonists undertook a difficult journey on foot and mule to reach Pozuzo, starting from the port of Huacho, reaching an elevation of more than 4,700 metres (15,400 ft) crossing the Andes, to Cerro de Pasco, onward to Acobamba (Ambo) and, constructing the road en route, to Pozuzo. The town was established in 1859 by 172 of the original 302 colonists who had departed Europe together. Many had deserted en route or had died or been killed during the journey.
The population of the German settlers rapidly increased in the early decades, but their descendants eventually intermarried extensively with other Peruvians. Their culture gradually became more Peruvian than German. Some aspects of German culture, however, have persisted, helping make Oxapampa an important tourism destination in recent years. An AI assessment of the current ethnic composition of the province runs as follows:
In the town of Oxapampa, the German cultural presence is significant but not dominant. Many residents have partial German/Austrian ancestry, reflected in surnames (e.g., Schmidt, Müller), Tyrolean-style architecture, festivals, food (e.g., local beers), and some traditions. However, extensive intermarriage with mestizo, indigenous (e.g., Yanesha), and other groups means “full” or dominant German descent is limited. Nearby Pozuzo (founded by the original colonists) has a stronger enclave feel, with estimates of ~1,000 people of more direct Austro-German descent in a district of ~5,000–9,000.
As explained in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khwarazm, located south of the (former) Aral Sea in Central Asia, was a major intellectual hub in late-ancient and medieval times, producing two of the world’s greatest scholars, al-Biruni and al-Khwarizmi. It also supported several powerful states based on its extensive irrigated agriculture, the rich fisheries of the Aral Sea (or Lake of Khwarazm), and long-distance trade. Yet it is now a largely ignored region characterized by a lagging economy, political tension, and extreme environmental degradation. Khwarazm’s current troubles will be explored in a later GeoCurrents post. This essay explores a more basic issue: where exactly is historical Khwarazm situated in the geopolitical framework of today? The answer to this simple question is more complicated that it might seem.
The Khwarazm region is clearly visible on satellite images, where it appears as green splotch of verdant farms set amid brown deserts and the desiccated salt-beds of the former Aral Sea. But how closely does this current oasis-like area correspond to historical Khwarazm? A map of the Khwarazm’s ancient fortresses seemingly indicates that the historical region’s core territory lay in the southeastern portion of the modern irrigated zone. A map of the cities of Khwarazm in the early Islamic period, however, shows that Khwarazm during this period largely corresponds to the modern agricultural area.
Khwarazm Today, Satellite Map
Fortresses of Ancient Khwarazm map
Cities of Early Medieval Khwarazm map
I had long thought that historical Khwarazm was largely coterminous with the modern “Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan” in Uzbekistan. The Wikipedia article on the region, after all, tells us that the territory of Karakalpakstan“covers the classical land of Khwarazm, which in classical Persian literature was known as Kāt.” In actuality, Karakalpakstan covers less than half of this “classical land” (see the maps below). Much of Khwarazm is in what is now the Daşoguz region (province) of northern Turkmenistan, and a large portion is in Uzbekistan’s Khorazm (or Xorazm) region (province) (see the second figure posted below). Because of this political division, it is not easy to find the current population of historical Khwarazm. To do so, one must add the figures from Karakalpakstan (2,015,000), Uzbekistan’s Khorazm region (1,958,000), and Turkmenistan’s Daşoguz region (1,550,000), which yields a total population of around five and a half million people. Given the relatively small size of its cities, modern Khwarazm has a high rural population density, which can easily be appreciated by closely examining satellite images of the region.
Karakalpakstan and the Former Aral Sea map
Historical Khwarazm and Divided Khwarazm Today, map
Politically Divided Khwarazm map
It must be asked why such a coherent area would be geopolitically divided, split between two countries and, in one of those countries, between a supposedly autonomous republic and a regular region (province). The answer is found in the internal geopolitics of the Soviet Union. From 1511 to 1920, Khwarazm formed the Khanate of Khiva, ruled by Uzbek Khans. In 1873, this state was stripped of much of its territory and reduced to the status of a Russian protectorate. But it remained largely independent, as indicated by many maps made at the time (see below). In 1920, three years after the Russian Revolution, Khwarazm was transformed into the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic, a first-order division of the Soviet Union. Three years later its status was downgraded to that of a “Socialist Soviet Republic” (SSR) and the next year it was dissolved, its land divided between the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs and the new “Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast.” In 1936, the “autonomous oblast” was joined to the Uzbek SSR, which eventually became Uzbekistan. According to Wikipedia, “the history of the short-lived [Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic] remains murky and the way its government functioned is not largely clear.” It also unsurprisingly informs us that “its officials fervently opposed the delimitation plans of the Khorezmian Republic (which had to be carried out under Stalin’s orders) but in the end they were forced to concede.”
Khanate of Khiva Depicted as Independent in the Early 1900s map
Khanate of Khiva on 1853 Map
The ostensible reason for the Soviet division of Khwarazm was the ethnolinguistic differentiation of the region. According to often-abused Leninist principles, each major ethnic group or nationality in the Soviet Union was supposed to have some measure of cultural and political autonomy. But by the early twentieth century, Khwarazm was no longer culturally homogenous and was, as a result, divided. This is a complicated story, however, that needs some unpacking.
As discussed in the previous post, ancient Khwarazm had its own Iranian language, which gradually yielded to Persian in the early Islamic period. Somewhat later, as the military power of Turkic-speaking pastoralists grew, their dialects began to spread. After the Mongol conquest of 1219-1221, Khwarazm came under the rule of the Chagatai Khanate, named after, and initially ruled by, the second son of Genghis Khan. Under the patronage of this powerful state, a new Persianized Turkic literary language emerged, which was generally called “Turki” by its speakers and later deemed “Chagatai by Western scholars. This language gradually differentiated into two modern tongues, Uzbek* and Uyghur. Formal Chagatai continued to be employed as a literary language, however, until the early twentieth century. Its final flourishing occurred in the Khanate of Khiva, based in Khwarazm. As noted in the Wikipedia article on the language:
The reign of Muhammad Rahim II [of Khiva] marked the peak of a cultural revival, during which “more than a hundred works were translated, mostly from Persian into Chagatai Turkic.” Muhammad Rahim II introduced printing Khiva in 1874. He was also “a munificent patron” and wrote [Chagatai] poetry under the pen name Feruz.
Chagatai Khantage map
Although Persianized Turki (Chagatai/Uzbek) became the common language of Khwarazm, pastoral nomads speaking non-Persianized Turkic dialects continued to infiltrate, raiding and often settling. In the Daşoguz region, one of their tongues, Turkmen, was established as a minority language. In the northern periphery of Khwarazm, the ever-shifting channels of the Amu Darya delta created an unstable environment well suited to a combination of semi-nomadic herding, farming, and fishing. Here pastoralists from the north, speaking a dialect closely related to Kazakh, settled in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They would come to be known as the Karakalpak people, their language labeled with the same term.
One could therefore argue that the Soviet political division of Khwarazm was instituted to reflect the region’s ethnolinguistic divisions, yielding a Karakalpak-speaking region in the north and east (Karakalpakstan), a Turkmen-speaking region in the center (Daşoguz in Turkmenistan), and a core Uzbek-speaking region in the southeast (Khorazm in Uzbekistan). Significantly, although all of these language are Turkic, they belong to different branches of this large family.**
Such a view, however, is fundamentally misleading. Under Stalin, the theoretically autonomous areas of Soviet minority groups were effectively stripped of their autonomy and were in many cases re-engineered to prevent disfavored peoples and regions from gaining too much power. It was probably for this reason that the original “Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic” was disassembled and divided between what would eventually became Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The Daşoguz region, for example, had a large Uzbek majority when it was assigned to the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. It took aggressive “Turkmenization” programs, under both the Soviet Union and independent Turkmenistan, to gave it a Turkmen-speaking majority. Yet up to this day, roughly a third of the people of Daşoguz still speak Uzbek as their mother tongue. Uzbek probably remains the majority language of the larger cities of this mostly rural region. Interestingly, some language maps portray the settled portion of Daşoguz as Turkmen speaking while others portray it as Uzbek speaking (see below).
Map of the Uzbek Language
Languages of Central Asia map
However the processes of ethno-linguistic change and geopolitical machination occurred, the common language and culture of Khwarazm was largely erased, along with its standing as discrete unit of political geography. This undermining of the identity of Khwarazm would eventually be accompanied by the weakening of its economy and ecological foundation, as we will see in the next GeoCurrents post.
* The naming of these languages has a confusing and contradictory history. Historically, “Uzbek” referred to a Kipchak Turkic language, closely related to Kazakh, that was spoken by nomadic pastoralists who conquered much of the agricultural zone of Central Asia. Most of their descendants adopted the Persianized Karluk Turkic language of the majority population, variously called “Turki,” “Sart,” or, for its literary form, “Chagatai.” The original Uzbek language, however, continued to be spoken by small grounds of pastoralists. In the early Soviet period, the majority Karluk language was renamed “Uzbek,” while the original Uzbek language essentially disappeared due to the decline of nomadic pastoralism in the region.
** Turkmen is an Oghuz Turkic langue, belonging to the same branch as Turkish and Azerbaijani. Karakalpak is a Kipchak Turkic language, belonging to the same branch as Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language, belonging to the same branch Uyghur.
The previous GeoCurrents post featured a map of the birthplaces of ten prominent medieval scholars from greater Khorasan. As was noted, two of these thinkers, al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī, were from Khwarazm in what is now northern Uzbekistan – as is obvious in the latter case by his name. Khwarazm, however, has only rarely been considered part of Khorasan. A distinctive and historically important region that is generally ignored, Khwarazm deserves further discussion. Both al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī also deserve more attention, as they were ground-breaking scholars. More important for this blog, they were also great geographers.
Maximal Khorasan & Khwarazm map
Al-Khwārizmī (circa 780-850) was a mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who worked for a time at the celebrated “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. He is generally considered the “father of algebra,” the name of which derives from one of his treatises (Al-Jabr, meaning ”completion” or “rejoining”). His work on the Indian positional numeral system was a key text in European universities from the time of its translation into Latin in 1145 to the sixteenth century. The word “algorithm” derives from his name – and hence from the region of his birth, Khwarazm. Al-Khwarizmi also reworked Ptolemy’s extraordinarily influential work, The Geography. As noted in his Wikipedia article, he corrected several of Ptolemy’s major errors:
Al-Khwārizmī corrected Ptolemy’s gross overestimate for the length of the Mediterranean Sea from the Canary Islands to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean; Ptolemy overestimated it at 63 degrees of longitude, while al-Khwārizmī almost correctly estimated it at nearly 50 degrees of longitude. He “depicted the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as open bodies of water, not land-locked seas as Ptolemy had done.”
Portion of al-Khwasizmi’s World Map
Al-Biruni (973-1050) was a scholar of even greater breadth and erudition. According to his Wikipedia article, he has been called “father of comparative religion, father of modern geodesy, founder of Indology, and the first anthropologist.” He conducted innovative research in physics, astronomy, and other sciences, and was equally distinguished is history and linguistics. To my mind, his most impressive achievement was being the world’s first scholarly “civilization crosser” and interpreter. By that I mean he was the first writer to move into a fully alien intellectual context, sit at the feet of its scholars, master their sacred and literary language, delve deeply in their key religious and secular texts, and then return home to turn this newly gained knowledge into a book. His Kitāb al-Hind (The Book on India) also had an ethical and political edge. Al Biruni argued that the savants of India deserved respect for their learning, ethics, and theological sophistication, and thought that Hindus more generally should not be disparaged as idolaters.
Al-Biruni’s work on physical geography was also of signal importance. Using trigonometry, he calculated the radius and circumference of the Earth with surprising accuracy. According to author S. Frederick Starr, “his calculation of the earth’s circumference is only .007 percent less than the modern figure, while his measurement of one degree of longitude at the equator is a mere .085 percent less than the modern figure” (The Genius of their Age, P. 91). Starr claims that this was “the single most momentous act of discovery in the fields of geography and geodesy up to that time.”
Al-Biruni’s Measurement of the Earth 1
Al-Biruni’s Measurement of the Earth 2
Curiously, al-Biruni also hypothesized the existence of a vast “western” continent. According to his Wikipedia article:
Al-Biruni theorized the existence of a landmass along the vast ocean between Asia and Europe, or what is today known as the Americas. He argued for its existence on the basis of his accurate estimations of the Earth’s circumference and Afro-Eurasia’s size, which he found spanned only two-fifths of the Earth’s circumference, reasoning that the geological processes that gave rise to Eurasia must surely have given rise to lands in the vast ocean between Asia and Europe. He also theorized that at least some of the unknown landmass would lie within the known latitudes which humans could inhabit, and therefore would be inhabited.
The mother-tongue of both al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī was Khwārezmian, as would be expected given their places of birth. Both undoubtedly learned Persian at an early age, and both wrote mainly or entirely in Arabic, the language of science in their time and place.* Al-Biruni was also fluent in Sanskrit and had a solid working knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac (Aramaic). A good part of what we know about the Khwārezmian language comes from him, as he “recorded such calendrical and astronomical terms as some of the traditional names of days months feasts and signs of the Zodiac.”
Al-Biruni’s achievements are more remarkable considering his difficult life. He was essentially kidnapped by the Turkic conqueror Mahmud of Ghazni, perhaps even carted off in chains, and forced to serve as his court astrologer in what is now southeastern Afghanistan. But al-Biruni would eventually be honored by Mahmud’s son and heir, Mas‘ud I, to whom he dedicated one of his key books, Al-Qanun al-Mas’udi (The Mas’udic Canon), an encyclopedia of astronomy, mathematics, and geography. Al-Biruni was subsequently offered a camel-load of silver – which he declined. Instead, he requested to be left to work as he saw fit and be allowed to visit his homeland, Khwarazm, which was permitted.
Maps of the Empire Created by Mahmud of Ghazni
Al-Biruni also wrote a history of Khwarazm, which has unfortunately not survived except in a few excerpts. S. Frederick Starr outlines some of his historical claims about the region:
Biruni argued that the Persianate Afrighid dynasty, which ruled Khwarazm for seven centuries down to the Arab conquest, had developed a truly remarkable literary and scientific culture. He speaks of whole libraries of their poetry and other literary works, of scientific studies, and philosophical disquisitions.
All of this went up in flames during the Arab conquest in the year 712. Biruni’s chilling report states that the Muslim general Qutaiba bin Muslim “swiftly killed whoever wrote in the Khwarazmian language and knew of the Khwarazmian heritage, history, and culture. He then killed all their Zoroastrian priests and burned and destroyed their books, until only the illiterate [part of the population] remained, and hence the region’s history was mostly forgotten.” In spite of this gruesome assault, Zoroastrianism managed to survive for another century until the Khwarazmian rulers finally converted to Islam and the region’s Zoroastrians either followed suit or fled. The Khwarazmian language fared no better than its traditional religion. So thorough was Qutaiba bin Muslim’s destruction that only a few hundred words of the old Khwarazmian language are known to us today.
To be fair, Khwarazm did substantially recover, both intellectually and economically, from this assault. The conquests of Genghis Khan and Timur were more destructive in the long run.
For anyone interested in Khwarazm and the rest of greater Khorasan in its “golden age,” I highly recommend two books by S. Frederick Starr: Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age (Princeton University Press 2015) and The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2023). The latter work charts the parallel careers of two of the greatest scholars the world has ever seen – Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and al-Biruni – and in the process traces out much of the geography of Persia and Central Asia. Starr’s description of the intellectual pluralism that characterized this “lost Enlightenment,” and especially al-Biruni, is worth quoting:
Unlike Herodotus, who adhered to a purely Greek perspective…, Biruni began with the assumption that all cultures were equal. This assertion is less astounding when viewed in context. It is unlikely that any part of the Eurasian land mass at the time spawned more people who accepted pluralism as a fact than Central Asia in general and Khwarazm in particular. A relativist’s relativist, in the breadth of his perspective, Biruni surpassed all who preceded him and most who followed. …
Biruni is arguably the first thinker to treat all religions, including his own, as equal, and to present them all without polemics. Reporting on the unfamiliar and seemingly bizarre customs of other peoples and other religions, he did so clinically, without sensationalism. In each case he sought to identify the core beliefs of a given faith and then to show how they shaped its believers understanding of time. In this relative approach he was a practitioner of cultural anthropology many centuries before that field emerged as a scientific discipline” (The Genius of their Age, p. 55) (emphasis added).
Given such views, it is not surprising that the Taliban “tried to destroy Biruni’s tomb in Ghazni in May, 2018” (The Genius of their Age, p. 215). But as Starr goes on to note, “a crater on the far side of the moon bears his name, as does an asteroid, 9936 Al-Biruni.”
*Al Biruni once reportedly said that he would rather be criticized in Arabic than praised in Persian, showing the centrality of the Arabic language in the scholarly community in which he operated. It was a different story, however, when it came to poetry.
The modern region of Khorasan covers three provinces in northeastern Iran: North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan. Razavi Khorasan, the name of which refers to Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, is by far the most populous and important of the three (see the map below). Before 2004, this entire region constituted a single Khorasan province. Historically speaking, however, the term “Khorasan” – “land of the rising sun” – covered a much larger area. In the strict sense of the term, it also extended across northern Afghanistan and most of Turkmenistan, and is usually mapped accordingly. In this scheme, Khorasan terminated at the Oxus River (Amu Darya), with the lands beyond it called “Transoxiana” in Western sources and sometimes Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr (“the lands beyond the river”) in Persian and Arabic sources. But Persian and Arabic geographers often further extended Khorasan across the Amu Darya to include much of what is now Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Iran’s Old and New Provinces of Khorasan map
Khorasan in this “greater” sense might be regarded as the eastern portion of the historically Persian-speaking zone. As noted in the Wikipedia article on “Khorasan Province:”
Some of the main historical cities of Persia are located in the older Khorasan: Nishapur and Tus (now in Iran); Merv and Sanjan (now in Turkmenistan); Samarkand and Bukhara (both now in Uzbekistan); Herat and Balkh (now in Afghanistan); and Khujand and Panjakent (now both in Tajikistan).
Historical Greater Khorasan and the Current Extent of the Persian Language map
As the map posted above shows, most of this “older Khorasan” is inhabited to this day by Persian speakers, although the language is commonly called “Dari” in northern Afghanistan and “Tajik” in Tajikistan. Storied “Uzbek” cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand are probably still majority Persian-speaking (as the mother tongue), although official statistics claim that most residents primarily speak Uzbek, a Turkic language. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, is no longer part of the Persian language zone. Its once-great Persian cities, such as Merv and Sanjan, were destroyed centuries ago.
As was noted in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khorasan is commonly regarded as forming the intellectual core of the Persian-speaking world from roughly 800 to 1200 CE/AD, the time of its greatest scholarly achievements. The Wikipedia article on the region lists 10 prominent scientifically minded scholars from the region who lived during this period. As the maps posted below show, four of them were from what is now the Iranian region of Khorasan (all from the province of Razavi Khorasan), two were from what is now northern Afghanistan, a region once called Bactria, and two were from Transoxiana, or Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr, a region once called Sogdia or Sogdiana. All eight were thus natives of “Greater Khorasan” in the extended sense of the term.
Birthplaces of Medieval Scientists from Khorasan map
Birthplaces of Medieval Scientists from Khorasan, map 2
The remaining two scholars were from Khwarazm, an important region focused on the inland delta of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River just to the south of the (former) Aral Sea. This region has rarely been included in Khorasan. AI (Grok), however, tells me that that the noted tenth-century Persian geographer and traveler Istakhri did classify it in such a manner, reflecting “the flexible, sometimes expansive use of “Khorasan” in medieval texts, where it could loosely denote eastern Iranian/Central Asian lands east of the central Iranian deserts.”
The term “Khorasan” can thus be regarded as possibly denoting four separate but nesting regions: modern Khorasan (northeastern Iran); greater Khorasan in the strict sense (adding much of Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan); greater Khorasan in the extended sense (adding Transoxiana or Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr); and “greatest” Khorasan (adding Khwarazm).
Four Definitions of Khorasan, map
If Khorasan is to include Khwarazm, in cannot be defined as the eastern portion of the historically Persian-speaking region, as Khwarazm was not, at least during its intellectual heyday, Persian speaking. Its native tongue at the time was Khwarezmian, an Eastern Iranian language more closely related to Pashto (the language of the Pashtun people) than to Persian/Farsi. (It was even more closely related to Sogdian and Bactrian, which had been spoken in Transoxiana and northern Afghanistan respectively before being replaced by Persian.) But Khwarazm had been part of the greater Persian cultural sphere, and by the thirteenth century its own language was also being replaced by Persian. Turkic dialects later spread, and today the people of the region speak the Turkic language Karakalpak (closely related to Kazakh), and are ethnically deemed Karakalpaks (literally meaning “black hats.
The two scholars from Khwarazm noted on the map of medieval scientists from “Khorasan”, al-Buruni and Al-Khwarizmi, deserve further consideration and will therefore be examined in the next GeoCurrents post.
As it has been more than a quarter century since the publication of my book The Myth of Continents (co-written with my wife, Kären Wigen), I have long thought that the topic deserved reconsideration. An opportunity came in May 2025, when I was invited to give a talk in Stanford’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, associated with the University’s Continuing Studies Program. I have recently redelivered this lecture in an expanded version, divided into two parts. The first part is now available for viewing at the GeoCurrents YouTube channel, which can be found here. The second part of this lecture will be posted soon.
Myth of Continents Lecture
My interpretation of the division of world into continents has not changed much over the past few decades. But I have delved a bit deeper into the origin of this system of global division. I now trace it back not just to ancient Greece, but more specifically to the Ionian School (or Ionian Enlightenment) of the sixth century BCE and its so-called pre-Socratic philosophers. Ionian Greeks from the city of Miletus extensively traded in, and settled the shores of, the Black Sea, which led them to divide their known world into “Europe” and “Asia.” “Libya” (Africa) was soon added, thus splitting the terrestrial world into three parts. (A few of the slides from this part of the lecture are posted below.)
In Part One of this two-lecture series, I first look into the different definitions of the term “continent” and explore the conceptual problems that emerge from their varied applications. I then outline the evolution of the continental model, from the ancient Ionians to the twentieth century. In the second lecture, I first examine the geological understanding of continents, then move on to the intellectual problems that emerge when the world is divided in such a manner, and conclude by analyzing the world-regional system that emerged as the main alternative to the continental scheme after World War II.
Canada’s western separatists often refer disparagingly to “the Laurentian elite” and “Laurentian Canada,” terms that are not familiar to most readers in the United States. These terms derive from the region around the Saint Lawrence River, Canada’s political, economic, and demographic core, but they refer more specifically to the Canadian establishment, or governing class. As the Wikipedia article on the “the Laurentian elite” notes, this group has a “bias toward federal power,” which is one of the main reasons why is deeply distrusted by western regionalists. It is closely associated with the center-left Liberal Party.
I could not find a map of “Laurentian Canada,” as its geographical bounds are vague and unspecified. It could conceivably cover the entire “Quebec City-Windsor Corridor,” a well-mapped region that contains roughly half the country’s population (see the map below). ChatGPT, however, tells me that “Laurentian Canada” refers “particularly to southern Quebec and eastern Ontario,” a region focused on Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. The chatbot Grok also specifies the inclusion of Quebec City. I am dubious of this claim, however, as Quebec City strikes me as too provincial and too francophone to merit inclusion. It is also uncertain whether this informal region encompasses southwestern Ontario; cities such as Windsor strike me as too peripheral to be included. I have therefore impressionistically mapped a limited “Laurentian Canada” within the larger “Quebec City-Windsor Corridor” (the second map posted below).
Quebec City–Windsor Corridor map
Laurentian Canada map
The Saint Lawrence River, and larger Saint Lawrence corridor, is tremendously important in the history of Canada and for the country’s self-image. In the U.S., however, the river and its basin are generally overlooked, even though a large portion of the watershed is in the United States. For more than a hundred miles in northern New York, moreover, the river forms the border between the two countries. But consider its portrayal in a visually appealing but conceptually muddled National Geographic map of the “Watersheds of the United States,” the subtitle of which asks, “Where do the U.S. watersheds drain?” A casual interpretation of this map might lead to the conclusion that the rivers of northern New York drain into the “Great Lakes,” as this watershed (depicted in orange), is not mapped as reaching the sea. Bizarrely, a few limited areas in Canadian that drain either into the Great Lakes or directly into the Saint Lawrence are mapped as part of the same drainage basin, yet almost all of the northern portion of the watershed goes unmapped.
Watershed of the U.S. map
The general exclusion of the Saint Lawrence River from the U.S. geographical imagination stems in part from a heritage of nationalist thinking. The Great Lakes figure prominently, as four of them are partly in the U.S. and the fifth, Michigan, is entirely American. But the Saint Lawrence? It seems to be regarded as a Canadian river, and therefore of relatively little significance. Contributing to this partial erasure of the Saint Lawrence is the fact that its upper reaches, bordering New York, is something of a demographic and economic backwater. The two largest cities along this portion of the river, Cornwall and Brockville in Ontario, have modest populations (47,800 and 22,100 respectively), and those on the U.S. side are smaller still.
The reduced significance of the upper Saint Lawrence is partly rooted in physical geography and history. Before the development of canals, traveling upstream from Montreal would take one into Lake Ontario but not much farther, given the profound barrier of Niagara Falls. To reach the upper Great Lakes, and hence the interior of the continent, travelers would instead voyage up the Ottawa River and then make a short portage to gain access to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron (see the map below).
Ottawa-River Route to Interior North America
But regardless of such occlusion in the U.S. geographical imagination, the Saint Lawrence is one of the great rivers of the world, the tenth largest by average discharge. In terms of flow, the Mississippi and Saint Lawrence are in a league of their own as far as North America rivers are concerned, with average discharges into the sea of 21,300 and 17,600 cubic meters per second respectively. The next largest, the Mackenzie, flowing into the Arctic Ocean, has an average discharge of 9,800 m³/s, whereas that of the mighty Columbia is “only” 7,400 m³/s (see the map posted below).
Largest Drainage Basins of North America map
The relatively short length of the Saint Lawrence has probably contributed to its relative obscurity in the United States. But its actual length is the subject of debate. Does it include the massive estuary, the largest in the world according to some sources? Although most watershed maps of the Saint Lawrence include the estuary, sometimes even up to Anticosti Island (see the Wikipedia map posted below), I have covered only a small portion of it on my own map (the second figure posted above). Equally vexing is whether the Great Lakes, and the short rivers that flow between them, can be counted as part of the same river. Vanishingly few sources do so, but the Wikipedia article on the Saint Lawrence includes all options in reckoning its length:
[Today’s post is the text of an oral presentation that I recently gave at a Stanford-Berkeley Symposium on the legacy of the French historian Fernand Braudel.]
In 1981, I entered the graduate program in geography at U.C. Berkeley and found myself in a war zone. The traditionalist scholars who hewed to the old “land and life” model of the discipline and the young social theorists held each other in mutual contempt. The only author who found respect on both sides was Fernand Braudel. As my partner, Kären Wigen, and I had advisors in opposing camps, we thought it a good idea to immerse ourselves in his works. In rereading Civilization and Capitalism this summer, I found the pages falling out of their binding, the handsome paperbacks destroyed by too many readings – and the passage of too much time.
The passage of time has also taken a toll on some of Braudel’s claims. I was especially taken aback by his depiction of Central Asian nomadic peoples: “As soon as they appeared in history, they were what they would remain until their decline … : hordes of violent, cruel, pillaging horsemen full of daredevil courage” [1]. To be sure, such framing has a long pedigree across the Eurasian sedentary zone, but I would have expected something better from a scholar as great as Fernand Braudel.
And I do mean great. As Keith Thomas argued in a 1973 review of Capitalism and Material Life, “If there were a Nobel Prize for history there can be little question about its most likely recipient.” [2]. I would venture to add that Braudel was the greatest geographer of the 20th century, without rivals.
That is quite the claim to make, as Braudel was not, formally speaking, a geographer. But geography suffuses not just the first part of The Mediterranean, but his entire corpus. And not just “geography” in the general sense, but geographical inquiry in many diverse registers.
To appreciate Fernand Braudel’s contribution, we need to know something about the discipline when he was intellectually coming of age. Human geography in the 1920s was under the spell of Friedrich Ratzel, noted for his environmental determinism and the concept of lebensraum, which was later to undergird Nazi ideology. The leading U.S. geographer of the time, Elsworth Huntington of Yale, found acclaim by melding crude Ratzelian determinism with pseudo-scientific racism, forging an unholy synthesis that would do much to discredit the discipline. Not coincidentally, Huntington mapped New Haven, Connecticut in the central portion of his favored zone of optimal “climatic energy” [3].
Braudel embraced a geography of a different kind: “environmental possiblism,” developed in France by Paul Vidal de la Blache. Although ignored today, Vidal’s works are everywhere in Braudel; they were “read and reread” [4], he tells us, when he was writing The Mediterranean. Equally important was the work of his mentor, Lucien Febvre. Although remembered as a historian, Febvre cared enough about geography to write a book on it, a devastating “possiblist” riposte to Ratzelian determinism. Febvre scoffed even at “environmental influence,” which he regarded as reeking of astrology [5]. Instead, he insisted that people adapt to their natural environments while continually transforming them. This made geography not a “factor” but something far more basic, a fundamental dimension of life. As he saw it, “history” and “geography” were two sides of the same coin. Braudel took the whole coin and pocketed it for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, Braudel’s intellectual partnership with Febvre came to a premature end; as originally envisaged, Civilization and Capitalism was to have been a joint project, with Febvre providing the nonmaterial volumes [6]. That project, had it come to fruition, would have merited the designation of “total history.”
Although a thoroughgoing possibilist, Braudel often portrayed topographical features as guiding the development of trade networks and other economic activities. He can therefore be described as an “environmental determinist” of sorts, as perceptively argued by Diliana Angelova at this symposium. But his was a minimal and hedged version of the doctrine, far removed from the causal inevitability found in the works of scholars like Elsworth Huntington. In their view, physical geography determines not just the course of trade routes but also the substance of thought and the direction of cultural development. In hardcore environmental determinism, “geography” is nothing less than “destiny” – to quote the title of a recent book [7]. Needless to say, Braudel had no use for such secular predestinarian thinking.*
Throughout his career, Braudel leaned on geographers, both well-known and unsung. The Wheels of Commerce is dedicated to Pierre Gourou, “in token of double affection”; The Identity of France turns repeatedly to Pierre Bonnaud, author of Land andLanguages [8], a book essentially unknown in the U.S. But Braudel’s geohistorical synthesis was very much his own. It was also very deeply rooted. He went so far as to argue that landscape has “as much to tell us as the richest documents of the archives” [9] and that the “[Mediterranean] sea itself … is the greatest document of its past experience” [10]. That was exactly what I was taught by the old-school Berkeley geographers – particularly James Parsons – although I have yet to meet a historian who concurs.
Braudel’s geographical scope was encompassing. He was fascinated by places as intimate as a single village and as vast as the emerging global system. He depicted regions, regardless of scale, as generally overlapping, always cross-cut by networks, and perpetually in flux, if often at a glacial pace. Braudel’s vast geographical knowledge, combined with his archival sleuthing, helped him highlight places that have been slipping out of the historical imagination, such as Dubrovnik or Ragusa. “The Tyrrhenian Sea,” he tells us, “would have almost become a Ragusan lake if it had not been for the presence of Marseille and later Livorno” [11].
Braudel was even a fan of formal spatial models, particularly those of Johann von Thünen, who modeled the distribution of economic activities in a hypothetical “isolated state” [12]. More problematic, he embraced the geometrical abstraction of Central Place Theory, particularly as deployed by G. William Skinner for China. Braudel wrongly [13] argued that the Chinese organization of markets, and hence the map of settlements, “was strictly, almost mathematically, based on geography…” [14]. Yet elsewhere he decried the “dehumanizing” mathematicization of history and social inquiry [15]. Seeming contradictions like this litter Braudel’s work, although they are almost always resolvable through careful reading.
Isolated State Diagram
Central Place Theory Diagram
What most distinguishes Braudel’s geographical vision is his assertion that inequality is a fundamentally spatial phenomenon, rooted in the hierarchical relationship between centers and peripheries. “My conclusion,” he wrote, “is that the organization of territory itself creates inequality and hierarchies. Marx saw the conflict between town and country as the oldest example of class struggle, a masterly insight” [16]. The resulting vision may seem unduly constraining and inadequately concerned with disparities of wealth and power inside the metropole, but it is difficult to deny its historical salience.
It has been argued that the truly geographical mind is characterized by topophilia, or the love of place. Here again, Braudel fits the mold. His self-professed love of the Mediterranean generated a massive masterpiece, and his affection for France inspired another, half-finished at end of his life. It is difficult to say which was his greater love. Intriguingly, he chose to live his final years, or so he tells us [17], in the town of Céret, a few miles from the Mediterranean. This Catalan-speaking community is in France, but just barely. To the end, Braudel sympathized more with peripheries, and peripheralized peoples, than with centers of power and their elite denizens.
To conclude, I would like to briefly speculate about Fernand Braudel’s geographical legacy. Just as The Mediterranean was being published, academic geography began to wither in the United States, with most major universities shuttering their departments in the following decades. But by the 1980s, history was beginning to fill the gap, with burgeoning spatial and environmental history programs transforming the discipline. The works of Fernand Braudel surely played a role in this extramural revitalization of geographical scholarship. And for that, I give him my undying thanks.
* In the mid-twentieth century, the discipline of geography turned against the rigid environmental determinism that had previously characterized it, with the pendulum swinging so far in the opposite direction that any consideration of the role environmental features in human history came to be effectively forbidden. The “cutting-edge” quantitative geographers of the 1950s and 1960s thus began their research projects by hypothesizing an “isotropic plain,” featureless in all direction. They correspondingly relegated most of their forebears, including a scholar as brilliant and creative as Ellen Churchill Semple, to the ash-heap of intellectual history. As a result, an analytical gap emerged that would eventually be filled by a new cohort of environmental determinists trained in other disciplines, typified by best-selling author Jared Diamond [18]. Unfortunately, these writers have little interest in the history of environmental-determinism – and it tells. For an indispensable guide to the intellectual history of foundational geographical ideas, including environmental determinism, see Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century [19].
NOTES
Fernand Braudel. 1995 [1963]. A History of Civilizations. Penguin Books, Reprints Edition. Page 164
Keith Thomas, 1973. “Historian of Everything.” New York Review of Books, Dec. 13, 1973. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/12/13/historian-of-everything/
Fernand Braudel. 1972-1973 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Harper and Row. Page 1273.
Lucien Febvre and Lionel Bataillon. 1925. A Geographical Introduction to History. Alfred A. Knopf. Pages 16 and 360.
Fernand Braudel. 1979. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Johns Hopkins University Press. Page 3.
Ian Morris, 2022. Geography Is Destiny. Britain and the World: a 10,000-Year History, Macmillan.
Pierre Bonnaud. 1981. Terres et Langages, Peuples et Régions. Auvernhà tarà d’Oc
Fernand Braudel. 1989 [1986]. The Identity of France. Volume One: History and Environment. HarperCollins. Page 32.
Fernand Braudel. 1972-1973 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Harper and Row. Page 17.
The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel. 1972-1973 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Harper and Row. Page 121.
Braudel opined that von Thünen “ranks alongside Marx as the greatest German economist of the 19th century,” although he faulted him for missing the inequality that was generated by the spatial zones that he modeled. Fernand Braudel. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries. Volume 3:The Perspective of the World. 1984 [1967]. Harper and Row. Page 38.
Central Place Theory is based on retail trade. The spatial patterns of the urban hierarchies that it describes, however, have been shown by a number of scholars to have been based more on administrative hierarchies and on wholesaling networks than on retail trade; see James Vance. 1971. The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling. 1971.
Fernand Braudel. 1979. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Johns Hopkins University Press. Page 31.
See, for example, Fernand Braudel. 1972-1973 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Harper and Row., Page 1243. See also Fernand Braudel. 1979 [1967]. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries. Volume One: The Structures of Everyday Life. Page 562
Vol 1, page 176
Fernand Braudel. 1989 [1986]. The Identity of France. Volume One: History and Environment. HarperCollins. Page 61-62. And Fernand Braudel. 1991 [1986]. The Identity of France. Volume Two: People and Production. Page 676.
Jared Diamond. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton.
Clarence Glacken. 1976. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. University of California Press. 1976
In October 2023, GeoCurrents ran several posts on the historical and recent population growth of major American cities. These posts were envisioned at the time as the beginning of a large project on mapping the expansion of urbanism in the United States. That project, however, has been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. But there are two remaining maps from this endeavor that are worth sharing.
The first is a schematic map that takes the sixteen largest cities in the U.S. in 1950 and shows their relative population in that year 2020 and in 2020. As can be seen, 12 of these cities experienced population loss in this period, several to a significant degree. Detroit, Cleveland, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo have greatly diminished. Other declining cities, especially Boston, Milwaukee, and Washington, saw much smaller losses.
Only four of 1950’s largest cities gained population over the next 70 years. Two made marginal gains (New York and San Francisco), one expanded significantly (Los Angeles), and one boomed (Houston). Significantly, all four lost population from 2020 to 2022, although in Houston the decline was insignificant (0.07 percent).
The second schematic map turns from city population to metropolitan area population, which in many ways gives a better sense of U.S. urban dynamics, given the country’s extensive suburbanization. Here we see relative population size, again depicted by the area of each polygon, and population growth from 2010 to 2020, coded by color. As can been seen, all the top 60 metropolitan areas in the U.S. gained residents during this period, but they did so at very different rates. As would be expected, sunbelt metro areas saw the fastest growth and rustbelt ones the slowest. Only a few metro areas in the northern half of the country experienced major growth in the period, with Seattle, Minneapolis, and Omaha standing out. In the South, the relatively slow growth of New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, and Virginia Beach stands out, as does the rapid population expansion of the Austin, Nashville, and Raleigh metro areas.
The Netherlands is one of the most secular countries in the world. In a 2022 survey, 57 percent of its people reported “no religion,” 18 percent Catholicism, thirteen percent Protestant Christianity, and 5.6 percent Islam. Many of those who profess Christianity, moreover, are not very religious. In 2015, 82 percent of the Dutch population indicated that they “never or almost never” set foot in a church. But despite such widespread secularism, religion plays a significant role in Dutch politics. Three of the 15 parties in the country’s parliament officially signal their Christianity and another has roots in Christian democracy. Such a seeming discrepancy calls for further analysis.
Historically, the Dutch people were often noted for their religiosity. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they formed the core group of the influential Devotio Moderna movement that sought to revitalize Christianity through devotion to piety, humility, and simplicity of life. Learning was important as well, as exemplified by Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the mid-sixteenth century, conversion to Calvinism, or Reformed Christianity, was widespread, especially in Holland and Zeeland. This religious change helped spark rebellion against Spanish rule and the creation of the Dutch Republic in 1579. Although the Dutch Republic was noted for its religious toleration, it was closely associated with Calvinism, which continued to spread across its seven constituent provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen, Overijssel, and Gelderland). Territorial gains made with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) brought substantial Catholic territories into the republic, most notably in North Brabant, which were long ruled on a semi-colonial basis. As the intensity of Dutch Protestantism declined in the nineteenth century, religion conflict intensified, pitting Catholics, Calvinists, and post-Calvinists against each other. The main response was the “pillarization” of Dutch society, defined as the “the vertical separation of citizens into groups by religion and associated political beliefs.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, four main pillars had crystalized: Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, and Socialist. As Wikipedia notes:
Each pillar [had] its own social institutions and social organizations. These [included] its own newspapers, broadcasting organisations, political parties, trade unions, farmers’ associations, banks, stores, schools, hospitals, universities, scouting organisations and sports clubs. Such segregation [meant] that many people [had] little or no personal contact with members of other pillars. [Note: quotation edited to put it in the past tense.]
Depillarization began after World War II, but remnants persist, especially in education. The Netherland’s several Christian political parties might also be seen a holdover of the pillarization era, although some of their sectarian lines have blurred over time. The Christian Union party is rooted in the Reformed Church and thus takes a conservative stance on social matters, but it now leans to the left on economic and environmental issues, based on the Biblical precepts of charity and stewardship. The somewhat more conservative Christian Democratic Appeal originated in 1977 through the confederation of three religious-political groups, two Protestant and one Catholic. The third explicitly religious party, the Reformed Party (SGP), represents unreconstructed Calvinism and is decidedly rightwing. It is sometimes even regarded as advocating theocracy, although that allegation is controversial. SGP is the Netherland’s oldest political party, having been established in 1918. One of its founders envisioned a Netherlands “without cinema, sports, vaccination, and social security.” While the antipathy to sports has dissipated, opposition to playing games on Sundays has not.
Although religious affiliation has declined more sharply in the traditionally Protestant parts of the Netherlands than in the traditionally Catholic ones (see the first map below), intense religiosity is more common in the former region. The Old Reformed (strictly Calvinist) congregations have a membership of roughly 400,000, although some sources claim that over a million Dutch people remain affiliated with their version of the Reformed faith. Staunch believers are concentrated in a discontinuous “Bible Belt” that stretches from Zeeland in the southwest to the Netherlands’ center-north. It is often mapped based on support for the Christian Union and Reformed parties (see the map below). Intriguingly, the Dutch Bible Belt is located just north of the historical divide between the Protestant and Catholic parts of the country. This distribution pattern has been used as evidence that the Netherlands’ Bible Belt originated from Protestant stalwarts fleeing Catholic domination before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but this interpretation remains uncertain.
In the 2023 general election, the (Calvinist) Reformed Party had its best showing by a wide margin in Zeeland, where it took almost 10 percent of the vote. But it came in first place in only one of the Zeeland’s municipalities. Nationwide, it did so in eight of the 342 municipalities into which the Netherlands is divided. Rather than forming a contiguous belt, these municipalities are widely scattered. One lies in the country’s demographic core (Woudenberg in Utrecht Province) and another, Urk, is found in Flevoland, a land that did not even exist until it was diked and drained in the 1950s and ‘60s. As a new province, it might seem surprising the Flavoland would be home to such a traditional community. But Urk is an old fishing town that sat on an island before the massive drainage projects of the mid twentieth century. It is often regarded as the country’s most conservative municipality. Its politics have long been dominated by Christian parties, particularly the SGP and local offshoots, although in recent years the right-populist PVV and FvD have gained considerable support. The 21,000 residents of Urk have also maintained their own distinct dialect, usually called Urkers As noted in Wikipedia article on Urk:
One of the oldest and most distinctive dialects of Dutch is the language spoken in Urk. Nearly everyone in the village speaks this dialect and uses it in daily life. The dialect deviates considerably from contemporary standard Dutch and has preserved many old characteristics that disappeared from standard Dutch a long time ago. The Urkish dialect also includes elements that are older than standard Dutch and were never part of the standard language. … The dialect developed this way because until World War II, Urk was an island and could only be reached by boat. Radio was unknown, and the poor population did not have much money for newspapers and books. Until the modern era primary education for the children typically lasted only two years; afterwards children had to help maintain the family and formal schooling ended.
The deep conservatism of old-school Dutch Calvinism is politically reflected in places far from the Netherlands, most notably among the Afrikaners of South Africa. It can also be seen in the United States, particularly in a few counties in southwestern Michigan and northwestern Iowa that were heavily settled by Dutch immigrants. This correlation can be seen in the paired maps posted below, one showing the prevalence of the (Dutch) Reformed Church in Iowa and the other showing the results of the 2020 presidential election in the same state. Donald Trump is anything but a reflection of Calvinist values, but the overwhelming support that he received in northwestern Iowa does indicate an abiding hostility to liberalism and leftism in this region that has deep roots in the Dutch Reformed Church.
As a final note, it is intriguing that the centrist Christian Union party had by far its best showing in the 2023 general election in Bonaire and the two other special Dutch municipalities located in the Caribbean.
Poland’s October 2023 election saw a sharp rebuke to the country’s illiberal, governing right-wing coalition. The United Right (ZP), led by the Law and Justice Party (PiS), saw its vote share* drop from 44.6 percent in 2019 to 35.4 percent, undermining its ability to form a new government. But this election was not a victory of the left, but rather of the center, or perhaps even the center-right, depending on how one classifies some of Poland’s political parties. The democratic-socialist Lewica Party (“The Left”) also saw a sharp decline, its vote-share dropping from 12.6 percent to 8.6 percent. In contrast, a sizable gain was realized by the main oppositional group, the centrist Civic Coalition, whose vote share rose from 27.4 to 30.7 percent. The biggest change, however, was the rise of the new Third Way (TD) coalition, which secured 14.4 percent of the vote. Although Third Way is usually regarded as centrist, the Wikipedia classifies it as center-right. Such discrepancies arise from the fact that this coalition’s various factions are ideologically diverse, some being much more centrist than others. But as Third Way overall is pro-EU and favors renewable energy, it is perhaps most accurate regarded, at least in the Polish context, as firmly in the center. It is also noteworthy, however, that Poland’s extreme-right did relatively well in this election, with the anti-EU Confederation for Liberty and Independence taking 7.2 percent of the vote, up from 6.8 in 2019, and the new There Is One Poland (PJJ) gaining another 1.6 percent. The PJJ party, which claims to be the “true right,” grew out of opposition to COVID restrictions and vaccine policies; it also seeks to increase coal mining.
Cartographically informed analyses of this election typically note that the imperial political boundaries that were imposed after the partition and annihilation of Poland in the late 1700s are still visible on the country’s electoral map. As The Economist’s article and accompanying map (see below) show, areas that were under Prussian (subsequently German) rule tended to vote for centrist, pro-EU parties, whereas those that were under Austrian and Russian rule were more inclined to support Euroskeptical, populist-nationalist parties. The same correlation was present in several earlier Polish elections. As The Economist explains:
[M]ost of the east belonged to tsarist Russia, where serfdom remained legal until 1861. By 1900 incomes in what is now western Poland were five times higher than in the east. This gap remains today: Poland’s four eastern provinces are all among the EU’s poorest 20 sub-national regions. Young people growing up in the east quickly move to larger cities, seeking education and private-sector jobs. Those who feel left behind have flocked to PiS, which offers both nationalist rhetoric and monetary hand-outs.
Such analysis is complicated, however, by the fact that most of the areas that had been under German rule had also been mostly populated by ethnic Germans. They were expelled after WWII, replaced mostly by ethnic Poles who had lived in the Russian-ruled east. The Economist explains this seeming paradox as follows:
The Soviet Union claimed a chunk of eastern Poland as the spoils of victory, while Germany was forced to relinquish its own eastern borderlands to Poland. The Polish government responded by resettling millions of people from the territory it lost to the areas it gained. Separated from their families’ fields and villages, these “repatriates” developed a more open and cosmopolitan identity, and grew less receptive to fist-thumping nationalism. Meanwhile, Catholicism remained strongest in Poland’s historic eastern heartland, which developed a fiery sense of pride and suspiciousness of change.
But while Poland’s former imperial divisions are an important factor in its current electoral geography, the situation is not a clear-cut as it might seem. The Economist’s featured map, for example, is based on administrative divisions at the powiat level; if one dives down to the more local gmina level, however, the correlation is no longer as obvious (see the maps below). Nor is The Economist’s economic generalizations about these former imperial divisions entirely accurate. As the Statistics Poland regional GDP map posted below shows, the Warmian–Masurian Voivodeship, formerly the southern half of Germany’s East Prussia, has Poland’s second-lowest level of per capita economic production. Another challenge to the imperial-legacy model of Polish electoral geography comes from comparisons of voting behavior and population density. A X-poster Thorongil notes – and maps (see below) – “a normal map shows the historical partition borders but the truth is that the opposition coalition’s most powerful vote centers are in Poland’s cities, big and small.”
As Thorongil’s map is difficult to interpret, I have tested his assertion by making a series of simpler maps. The first simply locates Poland largest cities on a detailed map of the 2023 election. As can be seen, urban gminy** gave a higher level of support to the centrist Civic Coalition than surrounding areas, but the correlation is by no means overwhelming. Comparing the electoral map to one of population density allows more precise assessment. To do so, I extracted spatial information from a detailed density map (below) and overlaid it on the 2023 electoral map; I also added dotted lines to roughly show the old imperial divisions. The first of these maps outlines Poland’s most sparsely inhabited areas, those with fewer than 50 persons per square kilometer. As can be seen, many of these areas in the former German zone supported United Right, seemingly upholding Thorongil’s density thesis over the imperial-legacy model. The next map outlines high- and medium-high density areas. As can be seen, high-density areas, marked with red and pink borders, had relatively high levels of support for the political center, but this linkage is stronger in the German zone than in the former Russian and Austrian zones. The correlation is not as close, however, in areas of medium-high density (200-100 persons per square kilometer). As can be seen, such areas surrounding the city of Poznan in the former German zone voted strongly for centrists, but most of those in the Katowice area, also in the former German zone, supported the United Right. A number of medium-density gminy in the Krakow (former Austrian) and Warsaw (former Russian) regions also supported United Right.
Both population density and imperial legacies were important factors in the 2023 Polish parliamentary election. But the situation is more complicated than it might appear, and other issues, many of which are of a more local nature, must also be considered. The next post will try to tease out some of them.
** This post considers only the election returns for Poland’s Sejm, its more powerful house of parliament, ignoring the senate vote.
Many environmentalists now advocate the development of “15-minute cities,” urban areas dense enough to allow residents “to access most of the places [they] need to go within a 15-minute walk or bike.” This vision has much to recommend it. Many people find neighborhoods of this sort deeply attractive, both as places to live and visit. I count myself among them. My ideal living arrangement would be to divide my time between an apartment in such a city and a house in a remote rural area. Instead, like most Americans, I live in a medium-density suburban environment – which sometimes seems to offer the worst of both worlds.
But although I understand the appeal of 15-minute cities, I also recognize that creating them would be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible in the United States. Evidence from both polling and actual residential choice indicates that most Americans dislike dense cities and prefer suburban living. Ironically, moreover, environmentalists themselves are one of the main obstacles to the urban intensification that such a vision requires. Construction projects of all sorts, after all, often face environmental lawsuits, which can bring them to a quick halt.
An equally severe problem is the fact that the few cities in the United States that approach the required degree of walkability have been deintensifying, shedding residents over the past several years. From 2020 to 2022, New York City lost 3.5 percent of its population, Philadelphia 2.3, Chicago 3.0, and San Francisco a shocking 7.5. This decline was at first mostly a matter of people fleeing crowded conditions during the COVID pandemic, but it is now being driven primarily by safety and property-security concerns. For the same reasons, many of the mass-transit systems that are required for urban intensification are losing ridership and find themselves financially troubled. As a result, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, at least in the United States, the 15-minute city is little more than a fond dream.
Some of the maps that I have been making for my prospective historical atlas of urban development in the United States might prove useful in examining the urban growth and density issues surrounding the 15-minute city idea. These maps, to be sure, are unusual, as they depict no geographical features beyond city size and density. The spatial patterns that they show are also wildly distorted. As a result, they might more properly be regarded as graphic visualizations. But I still view them as maps, as all GeoCurrents posts focus on map explication.
The first map shows the size, density, and rough relative locations of the twenty most populous cities, as formally defined, in the United States in 2022. The numbers in the bottom corners of each urban polygon indicate the population growth rate, in percentage terms, of that city from 2010 to 2020 (left) and from 2020 to 2022 (righ). As can be seen, most large American cities lost population in the latter period. More important, such losses were concentrated in more densely inhabited cities. Several of the more sparsely settled cities, in contrast, gained population during this period. But as can also be seen, all these cities added residents from 2010 to 2020, some of them to a significant degree. This was true even in the country’s most densely inhabited urban areas. New York grew in this period by 7.7 percent and San Francisco by 8.5 percent. But with the exceptions of Seattle and Denver, all cities expanding by more than ten percent from 2010 to 2020 are characterized by low population density.
The overall impression conveyed by this map is one of low population density in America’s largest cities. Some of them have annexed such extensive suburban and rural hinterlands that they do not really count as cities in the informal sense. Jacksonville, Florida, for example, consolidated with Duval County in 1968, and as a result, its 971,319 residents live in a “city” that sprawls over 874.46 sq mi. This gives Jacksonville a population density of 1,270.73/sq mi, a figure lower than that of the typical American inner suburb. The contrast between Jacksonville and San Francisco is instructive. Although the city of San Francisco is also consolidated with its county, its population density is of an entirely different magnitude. In 2022, San Francisco’s 808,437 residents inhabited an area of 46.9 sq mi, giving it a density of 17,237.5/sq mi. But if San Francisco is thickly populated by U.S. standards, it is not by that of New York City. In 2020, Manhattan had 1,694,251 residents living in an area of 22.83 sq mi, giving it a density of 74,780.7/sq mi.
As the next map shows, in 1950 the 20 largest cities in the United States were considerably denser that those of 2022. 1950 was arguably the heyday of American urbanism. Driven in part by the war-economy of the first half of the decade, all large U.S. cities grew during the preceding census interval, some by considerable margins. Extremely rapid growth occurred both in sparsely inhabited cities (see Houston on the map below) and in densely settled ones such as San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Seven cities are found on the lists of the 20 largest U.S. cities in both 1950 and 2022. As can be seen on the map posted below, the country’s two densest major cities, New York and San Francisco, experienced relatively little change in either population size or density in the intervening 72 years. Two relatively densely settled cities, Chicago and Philadelphia, saw significant populations losses in the same period, reducing their densities. In contrast, two West Coast cities, Seattle and Los Angeles, experienced major increases in both population and density. Houston, in contrast, saw a huge population increase but did not more into a higher population-density category, as it also expanded in area.
The next map, indicating population size but not density, shows which cities dropped out of the top-20 list between 1950 and 2022 and which ones were added to it. The geographical pattern seen here is stark but not surprising. Except for New Orleans, all the “drop-out” cities are in the northeastern quadrant of the country. In contrast, with the exceptions of Indianapolis and Columbus, all the additions are in the southern half of the country. Interestingly, Columbus has many attributes of a sunbelt city, although it experiences very little sunshine from November through March. The concentration of emergent, low-density, large cities in Texas is also noteworthy.
The final map addresses a question that probably crossed the minds of some readers: where are such major cities as Atlanta or Miami? With just under half a million residents, Atlanta is not a particularly large city, although its metropolitan area certainly is. The same patterns holds for Miami. The map below thus shows the locations (but not the populations) of cities that anchor metropolitan areas in the top 30 by population in 2022, but did not themselves place in the top-20 city lists of either 1950 or 2022. It is not coincidental that three of the eight are in booming Florida.
The first two maps in this post are somewhat misleading, as they do not adequately convey the population density of New York. To do so properly, the city must be broken down into its five constituent boroughs. This will be done for the next GeoCurrents post.
I am currently working on an online historical atlas of the development of the urban framework of the United States. The maps and commentaries that will constitute this atlas will be posted gradually over the next few weeks or months, interspersed with regular GeoCurrents posts. The first of these installments, showing the situation in 1840 and outlining the “Philadelphia problem,” appeared on October 13, 2023. Today’s post examines the development of the network of cities in the United States from 1790 to 1830. The population figures in today’s post, like that of October 13, are derived from a Wikipedia article called “List of Most Populous Cities in the United States by Decade.” In subsequent posts, covering the period after 1840, a more comprehensive data source will be used.
The United States had few cities of any size in 1790. New York City tops the conventional list, with 33,131 inhabitants, and Philadelphia comes in second, with 28,522. But Philadelphia at the time was limited to what is now called Center City. If one includes what were then the separate cities of Southwark and Northern Liberties District, which were annexed in 1854, Philadelphia ranks first, with a population of 44,096, and is mapped accordingly. As can be seen on the map posted below, the country’s main cities – or towns, in one prefers – of the time were all ports, located on the coast or along estuaries. Except for Charleston, South Carolina, all of them were in the greater northeast. The prominence of New England on this map, with more than half of the cities depicted, will not persist into the 1800s as the urban center of gravity shifts south into the Mid-Atlantic states.
The largest cities on the 1790 list significantly expanded from 1790 to 1800, with New York growing from 33,131 to 60,514, Baltimore from 13,503 to 26,514, and Boston from 18,320 to 24,937. Philadelphia, in the larger sense, still vies with New York for top position. Norfolk, Virginia appears on this map, but the year 1800 marks its only inclusion in the top-ten list.
The rapid expansion of the country’s largest cities is a persistent feature of these maps. By 1810, the population of New York City approached 100,000. By this time, New York was clearly the country’s largest city, a position that it will retain and amplify in the following decades. The 1810 map includes the first truly inland city, Albany, New York. Located on the Hudson River, Albany’s appearance reflects the growing importance of trade with the interior. More important is the inclusion of New Orleans on the southern Mississippi, which became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
In 1820, Albany drops of the map, replaced by Washington DC, which had 13,247 inhabitants in that year. But as the nation’s capital experienced relatively slow growth after this period, it falls off the top-ten list in 1830 and does not reappear until 1950. In the early nineteenth century, Washington was derisively called “the city of magnificent distances” due to its small number of residents living in an urban framework designed for a larger population. In 1842, Charles Dickens claimed that “Its streets begin in nothing and lead nowhere.” The fact that capital of the United States was such a small city reflects the limited extent of the federal government before the Civil War. As its constituent states were arguably more important than the country itself, the common locution at the time was “The United States are…,” rather than “the United States is… .”
The major changes on the map of 1830 reflect the opening of the Erie Canal (the dotted blue line on the map) in 1825. The Erie Canal facilitated the emergence of an extensive water-based transportation network, linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, and, by extension, to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Not surprisingly, Albany reappears on the 1930 map. More important, Cincinnati emerges as the first significant Midwestern city. Cincinnati will remain in the top-ten list until 1910. Today, with a population of 309,51, it ranks in the 64th position, surpassed by a few suburbs of little historical significance. In the early and mid-1800s, however, Cincinnati was a major and rapidly growing city, due in part to its role in butchering and processing hogs for the national market. This industry was so important that the city was deemed “Porkopolis.” As is explained in a 2016 Cincinnati Magazine article:
“Porkopolis” is one of the names by which Cincinnati is known, and its origin is explained in the following manner: About 1825 George W. Jones, president of the United States branch-bank, and known as “Bank Jones,” was very enthusiastic about the fact that 25,000 to 30,000 hogs were being killed in this city every year; and in his letters to the bank’s Liverpool correspondent he never failed to mention the fact, and express his hope of Cincinnati’s future greatness as a provision-market. The correspondent, after receiving a number of these letters, had a unique pair of model hogs made of papier mache, and sent them to George W. Jones as the worthy representative of ‘Porkopolis.’”
… Frances “Fanny” Trollope is infamous for publishing a scathing indictment of Cincinnati in her 1832 book “Domestic Manners of the Americans”. A great deal of her bile is directed at our pigs:
“If I determined upon a walk up Main-street, the chances were five hundred to one against my reaching the shady side without brushing by a snout fresh dipping from the kennel; when we had screwed our courage to the enterprise of mounting a certain noble-looking sugar-loaf hill, that promised pure air and a fine view, we found the brook we had to cross, at its foot, red with the stream from a pig slaughterhouse while our noses, instead of meeting ‘the thyme that loves the green hill’s breast,’ were greeted by odours that I will not describe, and which I heartily hope my readers cannot imagine.”
The company was formed in 1837 when William Procter, a British candlemaker, and James Gamble, an Irish soapmaker, merged their businesses in Cincinnati. The chief ingredient for both products was animal fat, which was readily available in the hog-butchering centre of Cincinnati. The company supplied soap and candles to the Union Army during the American Civil War and sold even more of these products to the public when the war was over.
Although candles are now usually made of wax, historically they were mostly made from animal fat. In earlier times, only prosperous people could afford wax candles.
I have long been perplexed by the Tibetan Empire, which existed from 618 to roughly 842 CE. The Tibetan Plateau is a sparsely populated land with a challenging physical environment. Not surprisingly, for most of recorded history it has played a minor geopolitical role. Yet for more than 200 years, the Tibetan Empire was something of a superpower, fully competitive with the Tang Empire of China, the Muslim caliphates of the Middle East, and other great Eurasian states. As the maps posted below indicate, the Tibetan Empire’s territorial sway extended, at various time, well beyond the plateau itself. At its height it covered the Tarim Basin of northwestern China (Xinjiang), the Yunnan Plateau, and more.
The most extensive depiction of the Tibetan Empire that I have found was published in a recent Science Directarticle (Hou et al., 2023). On this map, posted below, the Tibetan Empire in 820 CE is shown (with a dashed yellow line) as having included most of what is today Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as much of Bangladesh and lowland north India. Most maps of the empire show it as having exercised only indirect power over a much smaller part of northern South Asia. Animated maps, moreover, indicate that its power over this area was brief. The map posted in Hou et al. thus seems to be exaggerated, as is so often the case in the mapping of empires.
Regardless of cartographic hyperbole, the article in question does offer an intriguing and largely convincing explanation for the rise and fall of the Tibetan Empire. As the authors’ investigation shows, between 600 and 800 CE the Tibetan Plateau experienced both relatively warm and wet conditions, allowing both agriculture and pastoralism to thrive. Such circumstances, in turn, provided the economic basis for a strong and expansionistic state. Importantly, this period was the only time in the past several thousand years that saw both warmth and “exceptional” humidity on the lofty plateau. Significantly, the collapse of the Tibetan Empire coincided with a return to drier conditions. As the authors write:
A closer examination at the precipitation records revealed that periods when Tibetans actively invaded Tang territory mostly coincided with humid periods, while conversely, Tang invasions into Tibetan territory occurred during relatively dry periods on the TP [Tibetan Plateau].
The peak of the drought at approximately 840 AD coincided with the collapse of the Tibetan Empire. Cold and dry events would be expected to lead to a decline in crop production, breaking the balance between population and resource supply.
Other major episodes of imperial expansion in Central Eurasia also seem to have been linked to favorable climatic conditions. A 2014 article, for example, found something similar in regard to the Mongol Empire. As the authors summarized their findings:
A 1,112-y tree-ring record of moisture shows that in opposition to conventional wisdom, the climate during the rise of the 13th-century Mongol Empire was a period of persistent moisture, unprecedented in the last 1,000 y. This 15-y episode of persistent moisture likely led to a period of high grassland productivity, contributing fuel to the Mongol Empire.
A century ago, leading geographers argued that climate and other aspects of the physical environment determine the course of human history. Such overweening determinism weakened the discipline, contributing to its subsequent marginalization. Today, however, historians and physical scientists are reviving the study of the influence of climate – and of climate change – on the course of history, but are doing so in more modest, rigorous, and productive manner.
Environmental determinism reached its height in the early twentieth century in the works of Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington. In 1907, Huntington argued in The Pulse of Asia that a long period of intensifying droughts beginning several thousand years ago forced Central Asian pastoral nomads out of their homelands, impelling them to conquer sedentary states located in more climatically favorable areas. As he put it (page 393-394):
If the rainfall fell from 20 inches to 10, the number of sheep would decrease from 60 to one. Manifestly, if such a change took place in the course of a few hundred years, most of the inhabitants would be obliged to migrate. As the nomads pressed outward from the dryer central regions of Asia, we can imagine how they were obliged to fight with the neighboring tribes whom they tried to dispossess. The older inhabitants and the newcomers could not all live together; new migrations would be a necessity; and the confusion would spread in every direction. Meanwhile, Europe, after this long period of blighting cold, was becoming warm and habitable, and the migrants pressed into it, horde after horde. No one tribe could stay long in its chosen abiding-place, for new bands of restless nomads pressed upon it. Rome fell before the wanderers. Nothing could stay their progress until the turn of the tide.
Per chance, though this is only vague conjecture, the legends of King Arthur and his Knights bear a hint of what might have occurred all over central Europe if it had not been for the influx of Barbarians. England, in its remote corner of Europe, far from the dry plains of Asia, responded at first to the influence of improved climatic conditions, until it, too, was reached by the migrating hordes of invaders. Meanwhile, in the most densely populated part of Asia, another movement of nations had begun, presumably because of the distress due to rapid desiccation. The Arab migrants carried with them the fanatical faith of Mohammed, and were by it inspired to remoter conquest.
Such conclusions are directly opposite of those now being advanced by scientifically informed historical studies. One could not, of course, expect Ellsworth Huntington to have had a modern conception of environmental and historical processes and conditions in 1907. Still, to have argued, if only as “vague conjecture,” that the mythical glories of Camelot might have been replicated over central Europe in the early Middle Ages, had it not been for the drought-driven barbarian invasions, is more than a stretch. Unfortunately, the excesses of Huntington’s determinism led geographers to largely abandon the idea that the physical environment has any significant influence on human history, much to their detriment. Today, scientific studies of the changing physical environment are clarifying our conception of the human past are helping to solve historical mysteries.
As noted in a recent post, maps of empires tend to exaggerate their territorial extents, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE) is no exception. Most maps of this important empire depict it as covering all or almost all the South Caucasus region, with its border extending to the crest of the Greater Caucasus range (see the top maps from a Google image search posted below). Some show it as pushing even further to the north, encompassing the historically Circassian lands to the north and west of the Caucasus and sometimes even extending completely around the Black Sea (see below).
There is little if any good evidence, however, that the Achaemenid Persian Empire ever included the Kingdom of Colchis, located mainly in what is now the western half of the Republic of Georgia. The Wikipedia map of the early Georgian states posted below gives a much better depiction of the geopolitical situation of the time. The notion that this ancient Persian empire extended to the crest of the Greater Caucasus range derives essentially from a passage written by the ancient Greek scholar Herodotus. Although there is much to admire in the works of Herodotus, it has long been known that many of his assertions were far from accurate. It is for good reason that Lloyd Llewellyn Jones recently decided that it was necessary to write a book on the Achaemenid Empire based mostly on Persian sources, rather than on Herodotus and other Greek writers. But Jones, unfortunately, also maps western Georgia as having been under Persian control.
There is, however, some scholarly disagreement about which polity (or polities) had ultimate sovereignty over what is now western Georgia between 550 and 330 BCE. The Wikipedia article on the history of the Republic of Georgia provides an excellent summary:
Between 653 and 333 BC, both Colchis and Iberia survived successive invasions by the Iranian Median empire. The case is different for the Achaemenid Persians, however. According to Herodotus (3.97), Achaemenid power extended as far as the Caucasus mountains, but the Colchians are not included in his list of the twenty Persian satrapies. Nor are they referred to in the lists of Achaemenid lands (dahyāva) given in the Old Persian inscriptions of Darius and his successors. In Xenophon’s Anabasis (7.8.25; probably an interpolation) the tribes of Colchis and East Pontus are referred to as independent (autónomoi). On the other hand, Herodotus mentioned both the Colchians and various Pontic tribes in his catalogue (7.78-79) of approximately fifty-seven peoples who participated in Xerxes’ expedition against Greece in 481-80 BC. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica states, it is thus probable that the Achaemenids never succeeded in asserting effective rule over Colchis, though local tribal leaders seem to have acknowledged some kind of Persian suzerainty. The Encyclopaedia Iranica further states, whereas the adjoining Pontic tribes of the nineteenth satrapy and the Armenians of the thirteenth are mentioned as having paid tribute to Persia, the Colchians and their Caucasian neighbors are not; they had, however, undertaken to send gifts (100 boys and 100 girls) every five years (Herodotus 3.97).
The giving of gifts and the supplying of troops by a polity to a much more powerful neighboring empire, however, does not in itself indicate inclusion in that empire. It must also be noted that careful historical cartographers, such as Thomas Lessman, do not map western Georgia as having been part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (see the map below).
The issue at stake here is not merely that of the inaccurate mapping of empires. What I am more concerned about is historical amnesia about the Caucasus, coupled with its pervasive historical misrepresentation. To put it simply, this key region of the world does not get its due in most historical and geographical accounts. All too often, it is simply appended to one or more empires based in other lands. Many such empires did covet the region, and in some periods they did control, directly or indirectly, large parts of it. But the Caucasus also had its own kingdoms and other polities, which deserve recognition.
I recently gave a keynote address about such issues at a conference on the Black Sea region held in Batumi in the Republic of Georgia. I hope to convert this talk to a video later this year; if I do so, I will post it on this website.
I have long been frustrated by the way that historical empires are conventionally mapped. It often seems that most maps of most empires exaggerate their size and solidity. This is typically done by portraying them when they reached their greatest territorial extent, even if their newly acquired gains were held for very short periods. Client kingdoms and vague zones of tribute exaction, moreover, are often depicted as intrinsic parts of the empire under consideration.
The Roman Empire is a prime example of such cartographic exaggeration. I recently tested this assertion by doing a Google image search for “Roman Empire map.” The results are posted below. As can be seen, 10 of the 14 top hits show central and southern Mesopotamia (which I have indicated with heavy black ovals) as having belonged to the Roman Empire. Most of these maps specify that they depict the Empire in 117 CE, the year of its greatest extent. What they do not indicate is that central and southern Mesopotamia had only been conquered by the emperor Trajan in 116 CE, that Roman control was never fully consolidated, and that the new emperor, Hadrian, abandoned the region almost as soon as he gained power in late 117 CE. As the Wikipedia article on Trajan correctly notes, “The Parthian [Mesopotamian] campaign had been an enormous setback to Trajan’s policy, proof that Rome had overstretched its capacity to sustain an ambitious program of conquest.” All told, the conventional mapping of central and southern Mesopotamia as belonging to the Roman Empire is misleading at best.
Mesopotamia is not the only area in which Roman power is often cartographically inflated. In some respects, the exaggeration of control in depictions of the Caucasus is more pronounced, as will be explored in a later post.
The control of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (558-330 BCE) over the Caucasus region is also exaggerated in conventional historical cartography. Yet in general terms, this empire is more faithfully mapped than that of Rome. A map in an important new book on the Achaemenid Empire, however, reverses this tendency, egregiously depicting most of Greece as falling under Persian control (see below). Although the map correctly notes that the Greek Kingdom of Macedon was conquered by Persia in 492 BCE, it fails to indicate that Persian control here came to an end roughly a dozen years later. More important, the map’s shading scheme clearly indicates that central and southern Greece, including Sparta, had at some unspecified time been incorporated into the Persian Empire. In actuality, the Persian army never even entered the Peloponnese Peninsula in its failed attempt to subdue defiant Greek city-states.
The book in question is The Persians: The Age of Great Kings, by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (Basic Books, 2022). Llwellyn-Jones is an accomplished and prolific scholar who certainly knows that the Persian Empire never conquered, let alone ruled, central and southern Greece. Could this absurd map merely be an oversight, a simple illustration given over to an anonymous cartographer that the author neglected to examine before publication? Or was it crafted intentionally, perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek gesture designed to deflate the pretensions of the ancient Greeks? As Llwellyn-Jones makes clear, his central aim is to tell the story of the Achaemenid Empire based on Persian sources rather than on the standard Greek accounts, and a seeming desire to belittle the Greeks is encountered at various points throughout the book. Llewellyn-Jones tells us, for example, that “To visualize themselves as the Great King’s nerve-wracking nemesis gave the Athenians a sense of worth.”
Llewellyn-Jones’s goal, that of removing Greek bias from the story of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is worthy and generally well accomplished. But although he is a fine historian and an adept storyteller, Llewellyn-Jones is a poor geographer. This a significant problem, as the Persian Empire was a vast polity that encompassed a great diversity of places and peoples. As such, it must be grasped in its spatial and well as temporal dimensions.
Although many examples of geographical misunderstanding could be outlined, I will limit my case to just two. On page 7, Llewellyn-Jones tells us that, “The empire encompassed Ethiopia and Libya … .” Libya? Greek Cyrenaica yes, but certainly not “Libya” as either we or the ancient Greeks conceptualize the term (to the Greeks, “Libya” essentially meant “Africa”). Ethiopia? Surely, I assumed when reading this passage, the author must be thinking of “Ethiopia” as did the ancient Greeks, who generally used this term to refer to Nubia, located in what is now the core area of Sudan. If so, the passage is still misleading, as the Persian Empire never extended beyond the northernmost part of this region. But on page 95, he tells us that the Persian emperor Cambyses was “determined to push into Nubia – modern Ethiopia …” Modern Ethiopia? The modern country of that name is, of course, far removed and utterly distinct from ancient Nubia (see the map below).
Llewellyn-Jones even makes some serious geographical errors in regard to the core region of the Persian Empire. On page 43, for example, he tells us that “A particularly strong cultural bond between the Persian tribes and the Elamites emerged in an area of lowland Elam called Anshan …” Anshan is actually located in a valley in the Zagros Mountains in what can only be described as upland Elam; lowland Elam, the area west of Susa, is located instead on the greater Mesopotamian alluvial plain just to the east of Sumer. Llewellyn-Jones’s map of the Persian Empire also misconstrues geographical relations in this area. It depicts Anshan as separate from Elam even though it was part of Elam; it places Anshan east and slightly north of Susa, but it was situated much more to the south; and it places the label “Elam” in an area that was, at the time, probably under the waters of the Persian Gulf (compare the map below with the first map posted above).
Over the past several decades the much of the discipline of history has undergone a profound “spatial turn” that has resulted in far more nuanced understandings of the geographical patterns and relationships of earlier times. One can only hope that geographically informed scholarship on the ancient world will be increasingly embraced by younger scholars.
