Regarding the weird border in the Stans: That´s the Fergana Valley. It´s the single most agriculturally productive area in the region (a wide valley fed by the Hymalian runoff). The reason for the mess is 100% intentional, Stalin drew the borders between the different Central Asian Socialist Republics in the most inneficient way possible as a form of Divide and Conquer. This way, the different republics and ethnic groups were forced to cooperate or, more likely, look to Moscow for a mediator in any dispute.
Was about to say mostly this. Borders of subject states (essentially provinces of a larger nation or empire) were established so that they couldn't efficiently work independently. Essentially weaponizing cartography. You sometimes see this on a smaller scale when there is a vast power imbalance between two neighbouring nations. Ask the googly maps how to drive from anywhere in Western Canada (pick Winnipeg to reduce variability) to anywhere in Eastern Canada. You will notice that the maps will, unless you specifically designate several waypoints IN Northern Ontario, will always show that Canadians need to drive through the US to travel between the two halves of their own country. There is a portion of territory on the south shore of Lake of the Woods between the US towns of Longworth and Baudette in the north-east corner of Minnesota that is a more efficient drive by almost two days. It is only about 70km and 45 minutes, but it is in another country so requires a passport and essentially puts efficient east-west travel within Canada at the whim of another country. The cut-out of the border is so obvious that it was a political ploy to force Canadian citizens and goods to follow US domestic regulations while travelling within Canada. That 70km triangle of land and the water off of it should have been ours. Without it there is only one other viable route which takes almost two additional days by drive. Rant wound down. Just one of my own personal peeves regarding borders as it directly affects me. I have one of those "funny last names" that tend to cause trouble at borders and would rather not enter the US anyway.
@@ckl9390 Yall could've built the trans-Canada through there, though. The border was determined before the invention of the automobile or Canadian independence. Shit, it was determined in 1783, before either power had a solid hold of the area. It had nothing to do with whatever you're going on about.
5:27 Good point on straight borders, and this also appears in the western half of the US: state borders are mostly straight, except for a few spots (Arizona-California, or Oregon's northern border), where they follow rivers. Straight lines are the mirror of administrative hubs: with capitals, people are willing to do the extra work of inhabitting a city far from rivers. Without rivers or mountains to enforce boundaries, straight lines become more common because they are easier to draw.
If I remember correctly, the central Asia border gore was mainly intentionally done by the Soviets. They liked to move ethnicities around and draw the border of the republics in a way that it would cause conflict, which then Papa Moscow could "help" to resolve. It's the old Divide et Impera strategy, playing the smaller powers against each other while they all depend on the larger power to "keep the peace". Tho to be fair Central Asia with it's many nomads already made making borders among ethnic lines somewhat futile. Anyway none of the countries in the region are happy with their neighbours and each has their own idea of "correcting" the border which the others naturally don't like. Russia is still playing the peace keeper there to hold it's influence in the region.
When we're talking about Soviet formation of borders, it is important to say, that they were never supposed to be the borders of independent states in the first place, and it created all sorts of problems in the future for almost every post-soviet states. But there's another thing, that should be taken into consideration too - the post-soviet countries never undergone the process of nation-building that leads to emergence of ethnically homogenous areas. Instead what the Soviets got to work with was the natural state of things where different ethnic groups were heavily intermnigled. THAT'S the reason, not some deceiving ploy to control somebody.
@@brandonlyon730 The Baltic states emerged on themselves, and SU did little to no changes to their borders after their annexation, so I don't really see your point here. If anything, the Soviets benefitted at least one Baltic state territorialy (that is Lithuania)
Not only does geography determine how wealthy a pre-industrial society can be, but more importantly for politics it controls where that wealth comes from. In Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the way to get the most out of the river was to maintain massive irrigation projects, so centralised states formed earlier there than anywhere else. Once you had a state that literally controlled the soil it wasn't much of a leap for its king to become a God.
To add on the geographical discussion, I study political sciences in university and the topic of geopolitics comes up a bunch of times. There is this author from the '30s to '50s who took the common idea of how geography shapes borders and turned it on its head, or in other words, he thought about how geographical constraints (mountains and desert, fertile lands and infertile ones, seas and oceans) influence human polities, and he noticed how the most determining factor in most cases was still how the human polities involved decided to relate to one another. Let's make some examples. The Sahara Desert is a massive land barrier that separates Africa between the relatively isolated Sub-Saharan Africa and the much more Mediterranean-influenced North Africa. In spite of this massive land barrier, the cities of Western Africa have been huge trade hubs for most of their history, organizing trade routes through the desert and aided by the fact that for a long time the Northern Sahel and the Maghreb shared the same Muslim faith. Going up north, we see that the Mediterranean also has a unique history, as it used to be a giant connecting lake that kept the Roman Empire together through the trade routes that passed through it, but then later turned into an obstacle and border between Christianity and Islam when the Middle Ages developed (this is a simplification obviously because plenty of trade and contact still happened in the Middle Ages, but the connecting role of the Mediterranean that was so strong in the Roman period waned considerably due to opposing identities on the two sides). The theory that came from it was that, rather than geography being the thing that determines borders, it was the human polities that, depending on their relationship in each era, made geographical features into either borders to separate each others or obstacles they would collaborate to overcome in order to achieve a common goal, like trade or access to resources, like the Romans who depended on North African food to feed their metropolis. Indeed, even when there's no geographical feature to use, human polities are perfectly capable of making borders out of thin air. Jean Gottmann then theorized how human history is really shaped by two main factors, and those are "circulation" (the movement flow of trade, goods, peoples and ideas through the world) and "iconography" (the identities of local peoples tied to a specific part of land). Polities are pushed toward collaborating with each others in order to get more resources resulting in circulation, and inevitably producing a mixture of cultures and the meeting of different peoples and ideas. But the extent of circulation is kept in check by iconography, which is the cultures and identities of the many peoples of Earth who, should the flow of circulation be felt as too strong and threatening of their own identity, might decide to impose and close borders with the outside world as a mean of defense of their own culture. Thus, the same geographical features can become in different times obstacles or means of connection, depending on how the peoples on the opposite sides want their relationship to be (and assuming they have the bare minimal technological requirements obviously. You're still gonna need oceanic ships to cross the Atlantic). In fantasy mapping this can be pretty useful I think, because it naturally ties geography with how the relations between different people might be, either collaborating and opened to each others or in mutual distrust with their borders closed, or in an in-between state.
Fantastic comment! I didnt see yours, so I commented a similar, albeit far less structured and shorter one. I love the West African empires of old, they make an interesting case study as you pointed out! You also summarized the points perfectly, kudos from a Geographer :)
Fantastic comment! I didnt see yours, so I commented a similar, albeit far less structured and shorter one. I love the West African empires of old, they make an interesting case study as you pointed out! You also summarized Gottman's perfectly, kudos from a Geographer :). If you are interested, I can only recommend Bern Belina's works about territory!
As a Czech: With our current-days levels of atheism (one of the most atheist countries in the world), it's quite a hard sell to call us "catholics". The catholicism still has FAR more influence here than Eastern Orthodoxy, but for about 300 years, it was strongly linked with the reigning (and often disliked) Habsburg dynasty. Also, we have this "famous" history moment of the Hussite reforms (basically, proto-protestantism before Martin Luther, but sadly, also a moment, when the more fanatical of the Czech Hussites behaved quite similarly to the modern-day ISIS). That said, we're not just geographically, but also culturally slightly more western than you, for a similar reason you outlined - when you come to the Central Europe from the east, you most conveniently reach Poland. When from the west, it's far easier to go through modern-day Austria to reach Czechia. (Also, again, the powerful Austro-Germanic influence here since deep into the medieval, but culminating again with the Habsburg rule)
Hi geographer and hobby-worldbuilder here, this is a very nice introduction to political geography well done :) I just wanna add a few things: While Geography is definately important, it does not determine everything (for more info look up Criticism of Geodeterminism). Society and culture also influence Political Geography in a huge way. You kinda already mentioned this, when you said that a lot of fantasy authors borrow from our real world. Did you also notice that in almost all Fantasy maps the snowy regions are in the north? The deserts in the south? And the huge armies of horse-warriors often come from the east. This is because we are influenced our whole life by our (eurocentric) world views, not only in fantasy. There is no reason, e.g. that North is "Up" on most maps, but society and people reproduced this happenstance over many millenia. Different cultural contexts produce different maps (Medieval Maps often had Jerusalem in the middle etc.), so that is important to keep in mind. We can use it as worldbuilders to subvert expectations and try smth fresh! Recognizing our own biases is an important step in that. A map itsself is also never enough of course. The maps, cities, cultures, resources, populations, magic and militaries are only the chess board. But the chess PIECES are always Characters. Heroes, Villains and everything in between. The characters are the most important thing, breathing life into a fantasy world! I hope I could leave an interesting addition to your video. Im looking forward to your next videos, keep it up!
Agreed, I would like to see a fantasy world with dinosaur calvary-using nomadic peoples (e.g. riding raptors) coming from the west, northern hot deserts, southern snowy cold mountains/hills with south being ''Up'' instead of north, and vast wealthy eastern civilizations plus powerful southern empires. Also more republics in fantasy would be great...
I tend to start with the cultures and build the geography to "naturally create" the cultures and nations I want. Thanks for this really good video. :) Question: considering how open Poland *is* to the east, what sets the borders on that side?
Almost nothing to be honest, that is why our eastern borders changed far more than the western one in the history. There was this one time when we held the bank of the river Dniepr (a river in modern day ukraine) that was an effective natural border but didn't really help when fighting very mobile tatar-cossack forces or attacks coming from Moldova.
I knew about rivers and coastlines but didn't think of how important it is for my countries to have fertiles soils and how it should affect the making of the borders and the geopolitics. Thanks, i will try to remember all this when i built my universe for my novel. Though, there will be magic teleportations XD
About those weird borders in the former Soviet Republics - during tsarist Russia they were like every other colonizer - drew the borders as the saw fit, neglecting the actual ethnic setup of the lands. And, as it was in Europe in the second half of XIX - early XX century nationalism among ethnic groups in the empire was all the hype. Think about all the troubles Austria-Hungary and Ottomans had. After the bolsheviks took over they wanted to strengthen their power in the ethnically non Russian parts of the former empire and they played that nationalist/ethnic card, they supported their natural allies - communists of the said ethnicity and promised them their own states i.e. republics. The Soviet Union itself was created as a union of four of these republics (some of them later split into more). Now, when they started to draw the actual borders they main idea (at least declared one) was to take all the areas where a certain ethnicity was a majority and make them into a republic of this ethnicity. In reality, of course, there were lots of problems with it - enclaves and exclaves; situations when a certain area populated with one ethnicity had strong economic ties with another area and not where the rest of this ethnicity lives; areas of dialect continuum between two related ethnicities where an exact border between two is difficult to draw; bolsheviks from different ethnicities lobbying in Moscow that a certain area must be included in their republic, not the other; political considerations of the central government, etc etc So yeah, they kind of tried, but some places, like the Fergana valley shown in your video was too much of a Gordian Knot to choose the way to satisfy everybody. If you want more border gore that will make EU4 pale in comparison try the autonomous republics inside Russia, for example Tatarstan and it's neighbors.
If you're asking specifically about geopolitics in the witcher then it's... fine. It does enough with what it needs, still not that complex but it does it better than most generic fantasy settings and the story is not focused on that so it can get away with it.
2:01 Is this an historically accurate anime about post-anthic pre-medival time period in modern slavic lands, which refers to popular russian\ukrainian media of recriation the events which called "Slavics versus Lizards"?
Hah You were 3 years to late. I already know that and already created big fantasy word... ...But its good to see I was correct. I with pleasure see other videos. Have great X mass holidays!
6:05 the Reason for that is sovier(i.e. Russian) imperialism/colonialiam. The lines were basically made to balkanise the people and necessitate the soviets. Fun fact: that is why there is a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan where the armenians are cleansed by the turkic people with the approval of Europeans(i.e. E.U.) and to an extend U.S.
That's simply not true. The Karabakh question is hard, because Karabakh, predominantely populated by Armenians is geographically separated from mainland Armenia, so the Soviets tried to resolve the question by creating the Armenian authonomy within Azerbaijan. And, most importantly, everything was ok between Armenians and Azerbaijani in Karabakh until SU started to crumble. And afterwards Armenian basically commited the ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijani-populated land around Karabakh to ensure its strategic safety.
@@user-wk5dz1xp3k >The Karabakh question is hard, because Karabakh, predominantely populated by Armenians is geographically separated from mainland Armenia That would be a good reasoning. however it is actually bullshit because Nakhchivan it is bassicaly the same but with azeries instead of armenians and the distance between the main body is not and the exclave is further away from Azerbaijan than Karabakh is from Armenia > everything was ok between Armenians and Azerbaijani in Karabakh until SU started to crumble As I was saying: "The lines were basically made to balkanise the people and necessitate the soviets" >And afterwards Armenian basically commited the ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijani-populated land around Karabakh to ensure its strategic safety I am not from Caucasus region so I will not say anything about the people that were there from roman (republican or earlier) times and what they did or didn't do to turkic people that arrived there some 5 centuries or so before Columbus discovered the Americas.
My sides! Using that talentless hack George RR Martin as a standard of quality for maps let alone anything else for that matter. I can't contain my laughter. You would of been better of using Tolkien or anyone else for that matter to illustrate your point. 🤣
GRRM's fantasy is closer to pulp fiction like REH's than it is to a "worldbuilder's" like Tolkien's. I prefer his style of having an outlandish, fantastical world that exists as the background of a pulpy, larger than life story than people who slavishly attempt to create a "realistic" world.
And he also used the WHF world map as a 'bad' example, despite its geography actually being a major factor in politics and conflicts of the setting. Typical fan of the diarrhea rape edgelord man.
