There's a great big coffee table version of this [1]. As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times.
> As always though, I wish there were a way to show not just which "nation" ostensibly controlled an area, but what _people_ were actually there: what languages, cultures and gods actually held sway in each of these areas and times
That is pretty hard to do, because nationalism wasn't really a thing before the 19th century in Europe.
So how do you identify 18th century people living in Wallonia under the HRE or Netherlands, speaking French and being Catholic? What are they? How would they identify themselves? Or people born in Thessaloniki/Salonika/Solun in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, being Orthodox and Slav? Or people speaking Polish but considering themselves German in post-WWI disputed territories? Or Baltic Germans living in Russia for generations? Or the family in Macedonia where 3 brothers considered themselves Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian respectively.
Depending on the point in time, locality and even individuals, people would identify with their religion, main language, local area, monarch, nation state first. Or a combination of all of the above. How would you represent that sort of wild variety on a 2D map?
One thing you could do is use different axes. A two-color pattern where the pattern would be religion, the hue of one color language, the other family structure, etc.
That’s kind of my point. That’s the interesting stuff (the fact that Macedonia at some point nominally controlled Kyrgyzstan is much less interesting imo) but it’s much too complex (and unrecorded) to convey in a satisfying way.
And it was rarely clear enough on the ground, let alone in the little available data. Just in the first quarter of the 20th century there were a ton of conflicts all over Europe to try to clarify borders based on different interpretations of identity based on culture/religion/language/history.
A notable observation from a lecture which touched on linguistics I attended:
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
> >Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.
Arguably the ultimate commentary on that aspect of history and politics is to take T.E. Lawrence's original map showing his suggestion for dividing up the Middle East based on linguistic groupings and factional differences and religious factions and interactions and to then overlay it with any more recent map.
I would love if historical maps at least qualified what they show and what they don’t show.
In a sense, all of the countries today have more in common with each other than with a given unique culture they subsumed (or in some cases annihilated). Putting all focus on separating the former and largely ignoring the latter is a narrow take on the meaning of “history”, and a more specific term (perhaps “political history”) seems more fitting.
For example, Russia did not naturally expand into a vacant spot eastward, despite resources such as Timemap.org perpetuating an image of peacefully walking into vast empty lands rather than annexing with a heavy dose of brutality, deadly smallpox, forced conversion to Christianity, and just plain old mass murder the territories where a range of cultures (Yakuts, Nenets, etc.) lived for centuries prior to that (or to Russia actually existing as such for that matter).
[1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...