The Historical Border No Maps Agree On
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- čas přidán 11. 07. 2024
- Sometimes there are historical borders so vague that maps don't have a consensus on how to draw them.
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Music used:
"Shades of Spring" by Kevin MacLeod
found at www.incompetech.com
0:28 borders on rivers are clear and precise. Until the river changes its course.
Serbians, Austrians, and Croatians be like:
Well, if the rivers change but the borders don't then the borders aren't based on rivers anymore, are they?
Unless they agree that the border always goes with the river even if it changes, as long as it's a natural change and not one made by a specific country
@@NieJa_2137 The problem is that there will always be a "favored" country, so generally the country recognizing the change is the one favored, the other one claiming that the border shouldn't change because it was "set up as it is"
*its
Fun fact: By the outbreak of the Italo-Turkish War, the Ottomans had managed to establish garrisons in Northern Chad to counter French claims in the region
Italy, about to put all that time and effort to waste:
I imagine this is one of the reasons that led to the Toyota War between the independent nations of Chad and Libya later on
Chad move.
The Ottomans are chads
must have been the locals since the ottoman empire didn't really intreact with tripoli
2:49 Such an important point that you said it twice.
I thought I was crazy
@@ApMergusme too
I didn't even notice it until I went to the comments and rewatched it 💀
@@TrocaTheNero PROBLEM PROBLEM BIG PROBLEM
I thought I fat fingered my phone and reminded lol!
I feel so blessed to live in a time where google maps/earth is readily available
Your comment reminds me of the phrase: born too late to explore the planet, born too early to explore the universe.
@@jingles123456789ify tbh we still haven't remotely completed exploration of our planet especially the deep seas and deep oceans.
Its different depending on where you view it from. so not some objective truth.
"Google maps just tells me where all the borders on the globe are and there is no disagreement whatsoever". Yeah, about that ....
As far as maps go, I'm grateful to live in the time of both Google Maps/Earth and Paradox games ;)
Fun fact: Fezzan (Fizan in Turkish) was an exile location in the Ottoman Empire, which is why the phrase "Fizan'a gitmek (going to Fezzan)" means going to a far away place in Turkish. Some versions of this saying are:
Fizan'a kadar yolun var: lit. you have a way to Fezzan, unlit. may you go to Fezzan, used as a damnation
Fizan'a bile giderim: lit. I can go to even Fezzan, used to express that you can do everything for a certain aim
That's pretty cool. So it was a pretty common place to exile people?
So Fezzan was basically ottoman siberia
@@MPHJackson7 I don't think it was common, but it was definitely among the worst places one could be exiled to.
@@heiskanbuscadordelaverdad8709 or Australia.
It must be pretty uncommon I’m in fezzan right now and I haven’t heard of anyone being exiled here
2:47 Ngl I feel like despite it being probably the most common choice they can’t even agree on what kind of dip in the map they’re making
Quoting the video without even trying to quote the video:
(Just realized the joke, I have become the fool... but honestly, I don't think they agree on what dip in the map they're making)
thank you i was so confused
Why did he repeat himself, anyway?
@@deleetiusproductions3497 editing mistake, accidentally left in 2 takes of the same line
He wanted to make us think we have Alzheimer @@deleetiusproductions3497
I did a lot of research on the West African empires where the same issue applies.
The best map I've seen just lists all the villages and colours them in in the colour of their overlord.
Yes that means there aren't neat straight lined borders, but this is by far the most useful one for the purposes of research
hey nice to see you here! Yeah there's some maps that will go to incredible extents to try to be accurate but I am surprised at just how much of these maps' researches is basically looking at other maps, and sometimes this leads to errors piling up, as the sources are limited and sometimes someone might not check the primary source.
Finding maps for before 1870s for example sometimes shows the sawtooth shape in Fezzan, when Ghadames (the western panhandle) was pretty autonomous and Ghat (southernmost dips) weren't really controlled before the 1860s to 1880s and by that time it wasn't the Ottomans but basically the Senussi who governed the region; you can see this clearly in the 7:15 map.
Some of the circles and dips can be attributed to this fact, as Ghat wasn't controlled in the dates for most of those maps and it probably made sense to put a circle on Fezzan proper (you can see Fezzan proper in Fezzan's wikipedia article's first image). Overall though, it was a great video and I loved it, I didn't expect it at all and I had done a bit of research on it previously.
Could you link that West African map? That sounds very interesting! :)
@@thecolorblue9609 you cannot link things through CZcams comments I'm afraid.
But an example of what I mean is in an article by Brill
'Mapping Uncertainty
The Collapse of Oyo and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1816-1836"
West African Empires were a couple of cities and a couple of mines. That's it. They had no control over any land outside of that.
wouldn't farmland be even more important tho?
You forgot to cut out one of your line reads of “while this is probably the most common choice I’ve seen, they can’t even agree what dip in the map they’re making”
Nah, he forgot to say it once more
The line so nice he read it twice.
I prefer the "de-facto to the max" BECAUSE it is so jarring to look at. It's naturally going to prompt questions from people who aren't as well versed in history and geopolitics and thus will create a lot of teachable moments to impress upon a person what governmental control actually entails
My area of study was colonial Latin America, where this topic is extremely relevant; there were a lot of places that Spain claimed for centuries before it (or one of its successor states) actually administered them. Frankly, this erases the American Indian nations and tribes which ran those places.
@@TheFranchiseCA Simmilar with USA
If you go with claimed borders in tthte most of 1800s, you get huge USA coast to coast. But the middle was basically only claimed. In that period was happening the process of acually assuming control by sendding settlers and subjugating/eradicaing (depending on how betrayal of a specific treaty went) native Amerindian polities.
@@vladprus4019 Yep. I had ancestors in Virginia who fought for American independence because they wanted to own farmland. The British didn't want the costs of Indian wars west of the Appalachians, so they didn't allow permanent settlement despite claiming sovereignty over those lands all the way to the Mississippi.
I prefer the opposite, where the territorial claims and areas in proximity of settled land are included. I like this mainly because countries will influence bordering areas naturally so it's not wrong to say that a country has rights to the adjacent land.
@@johnphillips4776 then you get my favorite: stripes and gradients
Ottoman borders are pretty satisfying, but the fact that they held the northern caucasus for so short and never completely had the black sea coast as the same time will always bother me
@@ArdaSReal Me too
They did control the full Black Sea coast at one point
@@mlgdigimon im pretty sure there was always the gap in the north east, when do you mean?
@@ArdaSReal they took control of it in 1774
@@mlgdigimonAnd the same year they lost the Crimean Khanate and all the northern coastline with it.
recently in kaiserreich they changed the border from the sawblade one to the modern lybian border and i am super mad! the sawblade one makes more sense, is more unique, and is visually appealling.
EDIT : Thx for the 100 likes!!
Kaiserreich is fun police 😔😔❌
@@kuman0110facts! at least it's better than the fun police of The Great War Mod
Soviet empire, my beloved
Yeah thank god they changed it back. The previous iteration was an eyesore and not appealing in the slightest. Beside this video covers how it’s can’t be accurate or make sense.
Great War redux still has the sawtooth border, I think, they even added states so you can choose in a peace deal
I prefer the deep dip because it looks aesthetic and it is more or less accurate. It shows the oasis under control. The control over the sand isnt important at all and it doesnt makes Ottomans look bigger too.
Gradient borders for historical maps are honestly underrated. If you start the gradient at the smallest possible boundary of control and continue it to the greatest possible extent, I think that's a good representation of the situation in vague border regions. Perhaps the best approach is to only mark defacto boundary definitions: rivers, named mountains, cities and fortifications that historical texts use to mark borders. Leave anything else to be implied. If the map needs coloring, then these imprecise areas can be gradient colored.
I'm always fascinated by De Jure and De facto borders and seeing a vid about it is awesome. Keep up the great work EmperorTigerstar!!!!!!!
I think Solution 4 is honestly the most interesting and informative way to actually illustrate the amount a political entity actually controls by showing how much they don’t control is as helpful to understand them as showing what they do.
I’d be all for expanding this concept out to include areas which weren’t manned since they were too bandit infested or otherwise presented natural barriers to control. It would probably change a lot about how people look at nations on maps if they saw how much of it was only De Jure control.
About shapefiles, less round borders are generally easier, because you only have to define a handful of points instead of a whole arc. Shapefiles are specifically about points, not about angles or arcs or anything, so it's a lot simpler even with the sharp turns. So, solution 2 is presumably easier to digitally map than solution 3
It would depend on the program. Some programs represent curves as a continuous string of points. Others represent curves as a curved line between two points.
Curves aren't really that big of a deal for vector spatial data. That said, even if you couldn't explicitly represent curves you can specify the location of vertices basically with arbitrarily fine precision, far beyond what's even probably legally required for the definition of a border.
So it doesn't really matter either way from that perspective; diplomatic and legal concerns far, far outweigh any practical technical limitations.
i have had to work with this border a lot while trying to draw de facto ww1 era maps, and i've gotten pretty consistent with it (at least for 1910 between the senussi and ottomans)
for those curious about very detailed specifics, ottoman control ends at ras lanuf, dips down to sokna and then goes slightly eastwards to fuqaha, then includes the area surrounding sabha (including all the villages)
after that there's an exclave in ghat and surrounding villages as well as another one in the tibesti mountains and surrounding areas, which were garrisoned by the ottomans
the large part mentioned first follows the de jure border with france in the west
thank you for listening to me yap about the libyan border in 1910 lmao
One that always intrigued me on older maps was the boundary between Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter: "boundary undefined". There's essentially nobody and nothing but sand and some rocks there.
“Say the line, Sanjak!”
“This place is looking DESERTed!”
“Haha! I love this little guy.”
Many maps of medieval Rus also have a similar problem. Many borders, despite having influence on modern divisions or even being well preserved to this day, are simply shown as squiggly lines, which is unfortunate if you need to look for references for mapping purposes. The best solution to this I have found is to look for voivodeships and counties of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, since they've preserved old duchies borders pretty well, and if there is still some ambiguity, just look for the rivers, since in Eastern Europe they're the primary obstacles that have historically functioned as sort of borders.
"Everything the light touches is our kingdom."
"I'm afraid that is not going to hold up in the International Court of Justice."
I like the sawtooth just because it looks the coolest and has the coolest name, also it has some historical accuracy with the French Italian border like you said.
"No map is wrong, No map is right, All map is map" - Map Men
I love watching the men of the maps
I think a similar idea could be applied to how different accents map the vowel space.
as a turk, option 4 feels like the right choice for me in terms of accuracy.
As a Libyan, I've asked older people about this specific problem, and their answer was none of the mentioned options, in fact, they said that the most accurate map for the Othman era is something close to the contemporary one, because if you have the political control on oases in a peaceful way and the support of the residents there, you own control of all of the desert surrounded, as they're the only people capable to go there (even today I can't get into the desert without friends from these cities in south), it's maybe a little bit different for Italians with all the hostility between them and Libyan people in general, so they can take a city in the south, but they cannot move an inch outside of it.
4:50
I make Shapefile maps on a profesional level and can say that actually making circles is harder than making the saw like patterns. SHP files are based on vertex, while a saw like pattern only needs some vertex (2 to make a side of the polygon) to visualize the shape, for a circle you need one for every side (wich is a lot of sides to make it look smooth).
Sorry for bad English.
It depends, 1750-1850's Ottoman Empire was able both to claim the surronding desert AND actually defend it from local enemy actors, if needed.
After the loss of Egypt in 1882 they were unable to fully control the area and local tribes suddently became able to challenge Ottoman control between 1882 and 1911.
The sawtooth or large dip is correct between 1551 and 1882, then the "actual control" map is more correct after.
As far as I know, the Ottomans considered the dip the most corret and France had more defined borders for French Algeria/Fr.C.A.
I really like the sawtooth, drawing lines between oases actually gives useful information.
2:55 your audio repeated. Just saying, great vid as usual
I thought I was tweaking there thank you for also noticing
I’ve been working on a historical GSG for a little bit, and when making the provinces you have to take into account every border that will go through that province. So I used the sawtooth version since it works for both ottoman and Italian Tripolitania. However, some version of the Deep Dip is probably the most accurate and aesthetic version for a map
I mostly prefer the saw tooth version because it matches more with Italian and French colonial border in the region but sometimes I do the curve sawtooth border because it looks nice. If I'm making a map I'd use the sawtooth version when the ottoman have less control in the region like if the area is a vassal or when the ottoman are very weak. Main reason is because if the control of the region is weaker then their influence would mostly be around the trade routes. Curve sawtooth when they are stronger and had more control in the region as they would be able to spread their influence in a much larger area.
Really interesting video. It's interesting to consider how to display old borders. People didn't used to think so much about hard borders, so I like the dashed/faded line method. I thought you were gonna talk about the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border at first. I remember that border being undefined up until like 2000 or something.
In my opinion, nobody can agree on Hetmanshchyna. A Ukrainian state from 1552-1830 and during maps when I look at it it’s so badly drawn that some Cartographers draw it with really wonky and weird borders, so just write like “land of the Cossacks” or “Lands of Ukraine” or some try to do a bunch of dotted areas to signify where the Cossacks are active. It’s very confusing but very interesting
I'm going to recommend the book 'Seeing Like a State', firstly because it's just a fascinating examination of maps (among other things) which has a lot of relevance to the video topic, but also because it includes a whole discussion about how much pain governments experienced trying to map traditional peasant land use - which is technically on topic but pretty far away from most of the weird map things the channel discusses. (I promise the book is more interesting than that makes it sound.)
Ireland had something similar to this after the Anglo-Normans invaded in the 1100s, as a formal “lordship” was created and claimed control of the entire island but had varied authority around the island. The only place with uncontested English control was “the Pale”, a poorly-defined area around Dublin. The Anglo-Normans would assimilate with the native Irish until Ireland was ‘reconquested’ by the Tudors to allow colonisation of Ireland, although it would only be successful in Ulster.
Things would be further complicated as the native Catholics, unhappy with anti-Catholic discrimination, proclaimed the “Irish Catholic Confederation”. Cromwell would soon put an end to this government and confiscate Catholic lands, and allowing Ireland’s borders to clear up as the entire island came under de facto British rule. It could make for an interesting video.
There is always more to unpack when it comes to Ottoman history, there are so many misconceptions, disagreements, and biases in pro and anti-Ottoman sources. Thanks for doing another dive into it!
People cant even agree on the real name of Ottoman Empire
2:49 repeated same words -5000 aura
I mostly use QGIS and generally with vector-based mapping or shapefiles it's easier to do more jagged borders, since every corner is a data point you have to add. There are curve digitizing tools but generally the smoother a border the more time it takes to draw
Quirky boarders are always a joy for me. Perhaps have a look at the boarder issue that resulted in the Republic of Indian Stream or something similar that I've not heard about?
There's one thing about weird borders that I would like to see covered here, and it has to do with some misconception regarding certain "terra nullius" such as Bir Tawil or Liberland.
Those aren't actually "terra nullius". Those countries didn't say "in this line my country ends", and because "here" aren't the same place, there's an area not claimed by neither state. They actually say "in this line my country ends *and yours begin* ". They don't agree where the line is, but they surely agree that the other contry is on the other side. This is because borders are defined by bilateral treaties, i.e. treaties in which both sides agree (or don't) where the border is.
I remember quite recently this exact border became the discussion of the Kaiserreich subreddit because the mod kept changing the border and people didn't know why it was so hard to settle on one
I know there are different file types that allow different ways of making boarders, but for shapefiles (and many other file types) they are straight lines between points so curves are just an approximation.
I like the idea of tracing lines from the coast inwards along the trade routes they exerted authority over. And then around those routes you could just label the land as “uncontested” or something like that.
Hi, geomatics professional here: for your question about which is easier to draw in a shapefile at 4:58, digitizing discrete features like the sawtooth method would be easier (assuming those features exist, like those oases you talked about). Because you can just click and it creates the area edge for you. For making circles, you'd have to rectify the curve to fit everything you're looking for (usually automatically, that looks like hell on your wrist to do manually). And to do that, you'd have to draw some points beforehand anyway to rectify -- so if you're already drawing points, may as well not do the rectifying step and just leave the jagged border there.
Also keep in mind that when you're talking the scale of countries, your reference system and datum start mattering for ground accuracy. So there may be justifications for using a circular border because the idea is it would look straight on a globe (think how great circles look on a 2d map vs 3d globe). I don't know if that's the case with those circular maps you've shown (and I suspect it may not be because that's a lot of curvature for the area being shown), but something to think about.
6:34
“The US can send soldiers anywhere in the planet. Does that mean they own it?”
Yes 😎🇺🇸💥🦅
We need a de facto string on a globe of the Earth to a globe of the Moon for 1969-ish.
@@DJH47 Most certainly. And we need to color the satalites we sent to space and attach them with string too.
Is it the same case in egypt as well? It seems like some maps make it look like the ottomans controlled only the coastal area of sudan and the weird squareish modern borders of egypt while others depict the ottoman empire controlling most of both sudan and egypt and its honesty quite confusing
Hey Tigerstar, as a political history nerd and shapefile mapmaker I find straight lines far easier to draw than curves due to having to click each individual point on the map that the lines run between (I use GeoJson for my mapping.)
Getting Fezzan right on the maps is important because it is the capital of the Galactic Empire.
For the question in Solution 3: I use QGIS and ArcGIS Pro at work, and I can say that it really depends on many factors if you're using programs like that, but in my (admittedly little) experience, straight lines are much easier to be visualised or "drawn" rather than rounded shapes.
An interesting topic for future video: What were the rough locations of the Achaemenid satrapies?
I've been reading about them and looking at maps and there seems to be a lot of gray area similar to Fezzan here. Lot of questions remain unanswered. Lots of room for speculation.
In my own experience working with mapmaking software, straight lines are much easier to deal with. Everything is vertex-based, and curves use a lot of vertices to approximate their shape. In my view, the fewer vertices, the easier the map to make and work with.
I think you can technically use bezier curves to create the arcs, which is common in editing for SVGs, but in most true shapefiles I've dealt with in GIS applications, the curves are approximated using lots of vertices.
I've never heard of Fezzan before this, probably mostly to having only ever seen "what Fezzan" style maps before; this videos concept has captured my intrest far beyond it's already interesting premise.
I once read two different archaeological papers from the 90s about a caravan town in the Sahel and they couldn't even agree on weather the town had a wall around it or not, which seems pretty basic. So much scientific research in the area is essentially stuck in the 19th century. Some of the best research comes from Poland from the 1970s, because there was some soviet-arab cooperation going on.
I am a great fan of stripes. Stripped areas, with many colors.
It's a clear way to show both range and uncertainty.
Wilderness like deserts or inhospitable mountains would really "breathe" depending on how the center reaches out to them. The Ottomans probably had waxing and waning control of that region of Libya, ditto for every state ruling there before the invention of the automobile and airplane.
I'm surprised no one has said this, but my preference would actually be to have the de facto controlled areas in a darker colour and a dotted line delineating the widest possible area, illustrating the ambiguity and suggesting that the truth would be somewhere in the middle.
What I like about sawtooth borders is that it gets people asking the right question. Why does this border look squiggly and this border look jagged? And then the explanation would dive into the truth of the matter: borders in sand are extremely difficult to define, if they exist at all.
Since you asked: For shapefiles, it doesn't make much difference if they're square or round. A polygon will either be made of points or made of points + bezier curves, not circles and rectangles. The pointy option is probably easier given it's less dicking around with curves?
4:50, I'm working on getting a certification in GIS, it's easier to do straight lines. But there are tools to get you to a curved line if you don't mind the added complexity. QGIS Right out of the box with no plugins- straight lines are better to digitize into a shape. QGIS needs a plugin for that functionality. ArcGIS has a tool built in.
There is added complexity though, and you have to deal with curve 'handles' to get the right shape you're looking for and they can be sometimes unintuitive. With a straight line in both widely used programs it's just a single click.
2:53 around there you repeat the script twice
Real
relatable
@klickitat62 around there, he repeats the script twics
i was smoking a bowl before this so i just thought i was tripping when i heard it twice
There are actually several borders like this, for example, it is unknown what were the limits of Buenos Aires province in Argentina before the conquest of the Patagonia, there's a map in Wikimedia Commons SUPPOSEDLY showing the expansion of the province, but there are no sources, the only one is a dead link to a website. At least some agree on drawing the border in the Salado River.
0:30 Except the Romans had numerous outposts beyond the Danube (and I'm not talkimg about in the Rhine - Danube angle, but elsewhere) - and beyond the Rhine and Hadrian's Wall for that matter. Some were quite large, and some were quite some distance beyond the supposed "border".
Actually, what i'd like to see is something with different coloration (like the South American map you showed at 6:57). Obviously not every area is going to be under the same level of control, and if there's a sizable area (like Fezzan) where there's a zone of relative control (as compared to tight control near the Capitol) that sort of fades out to an area of de facto non-control or shared control, a case can be made for gradated coloration.
That's assuming, of course, the ability to do so and have it understood. Sometimes lines make sense on maps, even if they don't make sense in real life.
One map that never seems to agree on borders are those depicting the dominion of the Huns. Some maps include a narrow band extending through the Hungarian plain, while others reach as far west as Gaul, as far north as Sweden, and as far east as Kazakhstan 😅
You should do a video on how different countries became associated with different colors on maps and if it translates across cultures
I would appreciate a map where it showed where the ottomans actually had troops, like the de facto map, overlayed on top of the sawtooth map. that would show differing degrees of ottoman control and show a little bit of context of the geography
What do the different shades of colour in your maps represent?
Have you done a video on the microstate of Couto Misto between Portugal and Spain that was independent?
I always wondered what the heck was up with those spiky maps of Libya back in the 19th century. I like sawtooth because that shape rules.
4:53 idk which is easier for professionals but for my worldbuilding stuff so far (currently just historical rough borders for influencing other work before modern day borders or concrete past borders), it is easier to do a few points with straight lines, but that looks less ambiguous and currently that’s what i have, ambiguous borders that represent like averages of a lot of detail from various times at each point in time
7:55 for my use, of vague borders to show influence at an average of times, i think i would probably do something like 2. sure sometimes it extends further, and maybe other times it’s taken over or fractures off, or a chaotic power change happens and nobody is sure how far exactly the previous guys controlled it
the best solution would probably be similar to a Voronoi map, fill in the areas that are closest to Ottoman-controlled settlements and leave empty the areas closest to settlements not under Ottoman control. This could make some weird results, like if the closest settlement to the south was across the Sahara then it would mark a huge territory, but I still wonder what it would look like
it might actually be interesting to have a map of empires that only highlights where their control is undisputed: internationally agreed borders in grey lines and the towns and roadways they control where the fill is darkest. A lot of empires will seem quite sparse if done that way
You should also mention Paraguay. Some videos on the History of South America and maps about Paraguay before the Paraguay war are different.
I think a decent option would be to do a similar approach to the de-facto or sawtooth solutions, but to include a sort of 'disputed extent*' addition around the sawtooth/de-facto area (as opposed to trying to have all of Fezzan neatly be entirely the same color / 'format' in the way that the other much better defined provinces are). The Ottomans would have, by nature, held a different form of "control" in Fezzan and other such outlying areas than they would along the much more centralized Libyan coast or Anatolian heartland; I don't think it makes much sense to try to make them obey the same ruleset when mapping.
As a libyan we used the sawtooth border or the dip in our history books and sometimes we simplified it and made a just across the Mediterranean cost
4:47 most gis systems that i know have some sort of curve tool that could be used for that so yes, it's probably easier. the difference wouldn't be very big, though
have any maps used dots instead of lines to mark settlements under ottoman control? I remember seeing this really interesting map of medieval Japan which used dots to symbolise which settlements were controlled by whom and it was a useful way of broadly showing territory while acknowledging that there weren't exact borders.
Great video, but you make your maps in MS Paint?! How the heck do you even manage that? Honestly, that's impressive on another scale.
These inconsistent areas are quite interesting, i’d go for a gradient effect for something like this and no hard border
Solid fill for undisputed areas plus hatching for probable/maximum extent
I like the random odd oval because it feels like it gets the point of "no one really knows but there was something here" across the best
Tigerstar, you have to consider back then borders were fluid considering there was no exact accurate maps. I am willing to say it wasn't until the mid-1800s to the early 1900s that borders became solid.
I mean, as a topic, a natural extension would be a video about modern maritime borders
The Dip is my favourite, its the most pleasing to look at
i make my maps in photoshop and ive never used the circle tool
using the line tool or just drawing by hand is way more useful and looks cleaner imo
In Victoria 2 GFM, the French always colonise in between the teeth of the saw till a point they are the majority of the population there, and then they make the area into a state, building factories there.
I would, if I made a map, looked which oases were de facto Ottoman and given each a circle on the map (with a radius of a few km scaled). In that case the area near the Mediterranean Sea would still be complete, but when you go south there are gaps until there are disconnected circles.
I think the best solution is a mix of 6 and 5, 6 being the definitive control and the surrounding areas a gradient
Have you been playing Kaiserreich recently? Because they also can’t decide which it should be either. They used to have something closer to the modern Libyan borders, then they decided to go with something like a rounded sawtooth option, because they thought the Ottomans would have regained Libya after WWI and not have made the land exchange with France in 1919, but then they put it back to what it was before
I’m right on the middle when it comes to aesthetics vs accuracy. I like accuracy but there is satisfaction to an aesthetically pleasing map. For example, I’ve seen some maps that depict the Roman Empire having a curvy, downward slooping, border on the north rather than following the courses of the Rhine and Danube because the argument is that they culturally and economically influenced the people just across the border and built walls/outposts beyond those rivers too in some places depending on the time period. This curve usually included Holland (just the peninsula) and the southwestern coast of what used to be Lake Flevum even though they only de-facto controlled these territories for about 35 years and the peninsula technically didn’t exist during this period.
Yes actually easy is a good description for working on a shp or a dgn in MicroStation, but still consideration on the criteria is much important than his essay is to split the land. Also much of this maps are much political than thematic (translated from Spanish). Reason for one or another method are much related to the kind of source and if it had a political interest in the publication
that's awesome, great video
I expected more maps to be like this lol
GIS student: in my experience, the differences are minor. Sawtoothed lines from known points would be easier to construct for a beginner? but there are ways to make rounded borders that are almost as simple. Any improper overlapping or improper border behavior can be taken care of by constructing rules about how things are allowed to overlap.
my favoured solution, is to mark all the permanently settled locations in and around the desert, oasis's rivers, etc, and divide up the desert into provinces of belonging by finding the midpoint between these populated zones. then colour in the parts of the desert that belongs to towns that pay tax and so on to the relevant political agency.
there is a name for equally diving space between points but for the life of me i cant find it again.
i feel like the method had "cells" in the the name, in reference to how cells squish together when filling space.
in practice, its just the sawtooth method but with eye-pleasing, mathematically, sound blobs
Early Brazilian colonial borders are quite weird. Some years ago they changed the way the Capitanias are depicted in text books, previously they were all horizontal lines, now it also includes some vertical lines and diagonal lines.
I'd agree that taxation is important but then also tied to that is control of natural resoruces. Like you tax the sale of goods in the market so that's yours, but you also kinda control any productive land (farms mines etc) that sells most of its goods at that market. The desert essentially doesn't have resources so arguably nobody owns it, so I'd probably just colour it based on what town you'd try to reach to get help if you ended up stranded there.
I think number 4 is important, as it shows the real control of a state on its territory. Maybe instead of where the soldiers can go, one could use the places where taxes and food are collected or the mines that are controlled.
7:04 counter point it’s a dot map but all the landmass that isn’t within a dot is assigned to the nearest dot