The RegionsPart 1 — Seven Chapters, One Per Corner of the World · how each part of the map was drawn

📖 The Story

Europe is where the country itself was invented — Westphalian sovereignty in 1648, the nation-state after 1789. Many of its oldest states grew by deep continuity, as medieval kingdoms slowly hardened into modern nations: France, Portugal, England, Sweden. Two of its most famous were forged by unification — dozens of statelets fused into Italy (1861) and Germany (1871).

But Europe's modern map was mostly cut by two great shatterings. After the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires collapsed, spilling out a ring of new states. Then, between 1989 and 1993, communism fell and the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia each dissolved — a wave of dissolution and secession that created most of Eastern Europe's current borders. Even now the experiment continues: the European Union binds old enemies into a new kind of half-country no one has a clean name for.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

For four centuries, most of this region was a single realm: the Ottoman Empire. Its collapse in the First World War was the hinge. Britain and France carved the Arab provinces into mandates — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine — whose administrative boundaries became today's borders, often straight lines drawn with little regard for tribe or sect. Most Arab states therefore trace to decolonisation from those mandates through the mid-twentieth century, while the Gulf monarchies gained independence from Britain in a cluster in 1971.

Threaded through this are the region's ancient cores — Egypt, Iran, Turkey — old civilizations reconstituted as modern states by deep continuity and revolution. And at its heart sits the unresolved knot: the founding of Israel in 1948 and the still-unfinished question of a Palestinian state, a dispute this library treats as live and contested rather than settled.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

No region's map was made more abruptly. In the Scramble for Africa, European powers raced to claim territory; by 1914 nearly the whole continent was under foreign rule, its new borders slicing through ethnic, linguistic, and ecological lines as if they weren't there. Two African states largely escaped — Ethiopia, which defeated an invading Italy, and Liberia, founded by freed American slaves.

Then came the flood. Decolonisation swept the continent in the 1950s and '60s, peaking in the 1960 "Year of Africa" when seventeen nations became independent in a single year. A few later states arrived by secession — Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993, and South Sudan from Sudan in 2011, the world's newest country. The colonial borders remain, inherited almost wholesale — Africa's deepest and most fraught European legacy.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

For a century, the British Raj governed almost the entire subcontinent as one. Its end in 1947 was a violent act of division: decolonisation and partition at once, as British India broke into India and Pakistan along religious lines. A generation later, Pakistan's eastern wing broke away in turn — Bangladesh won independence by secession in 1971. Around them, the Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan kept their independence through deep continuity, while Sri Lanka and the Maldives decolonised from Britain.

To the north lies a different story. The five Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan — were Soviet territories that became independent overnight when the USSR dissolved in 1991. India's own deep history is so vast that this library gives it a dedicated twenty-chapter special of its own.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

East Asia is the great heartland of deep continuity. China, Japan, Korea evolved in place across millennia; when their modern states arrived, it was by revolution and refounding rather than birth — China's empire became a republic in 1912 and the People's Republic in 1949, the same ancient state reshaped from within. Korea was split into two by the Cold War.

Southeast Asia tells the opposite story. Almost all of it passed through European and American empires and emerged by decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century: Indonesia from the Dutch, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia from the French, the Philippines from the United States, Myanmar, Malaysia and others from Britain. Singapore briefly joined Malaysia, then separated by a rare secession in 1965 to become a city-state. Timor-Leste, independent only in 2002, was one of the century's last new countries.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

After 1492, Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands seized the hemisphere. Independence came in waves of decolonisation, very often through revolution. The United States broke from Britain in 1776. Then, between 1810 and 1825, the Spanish empire in the Americas came apart as Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín led the great wars of independence, birthing a dozen new republics; Brazil split from Portugal in 1822.

One story stands alone: Haiti, where in 1804 enslaved people overthrew their French masters in the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history, founding the world's first Black republic. The Caribbean's many islands decolonised far later, mostly from Britain in the 1960s–80s. A handful of borders shifted by secession — Panama split from Colombia in 1903 — but the hemisphere's defining act was throwing off European rule.

Countries in this region

📖 The Story

Australia and New Zealand began as British settler colonies that drifted gradually into full independence as Commonwealth dominions — a slow continuity with no single dramatic "independence day." The scattered island nations of the Pacific — Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and the small Micronesian states — almost all reached statehood by decolonisation, and late: mostly in the 1970s and '80s, from Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

These are countries defined by the sea. Many are now on two front lines at once — of small-state democracy, and of the climate crisis, where rising oceans threaten the very ground their sovereignty stands on. The newest chapter of the world map may, here, become a story of countries that physically disappear.

Countries in this region