The Evolution of CountriesPart A — From the First Band to 195 Flags · how the map of the world was made

Strip away the modern world and the first thing to vanish is the country. Homo sapiens spent tens of thousands of years in small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers — bands that claimed no fixed territory, kept no borders, and dissolved and re-formed as people married out, quarrelled, or followed the herds. Membership was about kinship and trust, not lines on a map.

Anthropologists sometimes sketch a rough sequence — band, then tribe, then chiefdom, then state — as societies grew larger and more layered. It's a useful ladder to keep in mind, but a contested one: real human history is far messier than a neat staircase, and not every society climbed it or wanted to. What matters is the headline. The state — a permanent, centralised authority that can tax, judge, and command over a defined territory — is not the natural condition of humanity. It had to be invented, and for that, something first had to change on the ground.

Farming changed everything. Once humans could store a surplus of grain, that surplus had to be guarded, counted, and divided — and people who never farmed (priests, soldiers, scribes, kings) could be fed from it. Out of that arithmetic came the first true states, in the city-states of Sumer around 3000 BCE: Uruk, Ur, Lagash, each a walled city ruling its hinterland.

Remarkably, the same trick was discovered independently several times over, in a handful of cradles — Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, northern China, and later Mesoamerica and the Andes. One influential argument holds that the earliest states were built quite literally on taxable grain: a crop you can measure, store, and seize is a crop a ruler can run a government on. The details are debated, but the pattern is clear — wherever dense farming produced a storable surplus, the machinery of the state tended to follow.

States rarely stayed small. The strongest swallowed their neighbours and became empires — sprawling, multi-ethnic realms ruled from a single centre by a king or emperor who claimed authority from the gods, the bloodline, or the sword. For some four thousand years, this was the normal shape of large-scale human power.

Crucially, an empire's edge was not a line. It was a frontier — a fuzzy zone of fading control, shifting tribute, and contested loyalty. A person living there was a subject of a ruler, not a citizen of a nation; you owed taxes and obedience, not belonging. The map of the ancient and medieval world was a patchwork of these overlapping, blurry-edged powers. The crisp, colour-coded jigsaw we now call the political map — every spot of land owned by exactly one sovereign state — was still centuries away.

In 1648, exhausted European powers signed the Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years' War. Out of it — partly at the time, partly read back into it by later thinkers — crystallised the idea that has organised the world ever since: sovereignty. Each ruler is supreme within their own territory; no outside power has the right to interfere; states deal with one another as legal equals, however unequal in strength.

Historians rightly caution that 1648 didn't switch the modern system on overnight — much of "Westphalian sovereignty" is a tidy story imposed afterwards. But as a milestone it earns its place. Slowly, the blurry frontier hardened into the firm border; the personal realm of a king became the impersonal state that outlives him; and the world began its long shift toward being divided into territories with sharp edges. One piece of the modern country was now in place. The other piece — the nation — was still missing.

The Westphalian state had sharp borders but no soul. The French Revolution supplied the soul: sovereignty, it declared, belongs not to a king but to the nation — the people themselves. Through the nineteenth century this idea, nationalism, became the most explosive force in politics. If a "people" defined by shared language, culture, or history deserved its own state, then the multi-ethnic empires were illegitimate cages, and scattered peoples should be gathered into one.

It cut both ways: it unified dozens of small German and Italian statelets into Germany and Italy, and it would later shatter the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires along national lines. But nations themselves are not simply found in nature; they are, in the historian Benedict Anderson's famous phrase, imagined communities — held together by a shared story, a common print language, anthems and flags and rituals. That insight — that a people is bound by the tales it tells about itself — will return with full force in this library's chapters on India. By 1900, the nation-state had become the default thing a serious people was supposed to want. Within decades, almost the whole planet would try to become one.

This is the steep part of the chart. After the Second World War the great colonial empires collapsed, and the principle of self-determination turned colonies into countries at breathtaking speed. In 1960 alone — the "Year of Africa" — seventeen new states joined the UN. A second surge came in 1991–93, when the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia each dissolved into their parts, adding a swarm of new flags to the map. The most recent arrival is South Sudan, which split from Sudan in 2011 to become the 193rd member.

So how many countries are there? There's no single right answer — which is part of the fun. The UN has 193 members plus 2 permanent observer states (the Holy See and Palestine), which is why "about 195" is the usual figure. But add in places that govern themselves yet aren't fully recognised — Taiwan, Kosovo, and others — and the number drifts depending on whom you ask. The map looks fixed and final. It is nothing of the kind; it is a freeze-frame of an argument still in progress.

This is the organising key for everything that follows. As you read the regional chapters in Part 1 and the full roll-call of all 195 in Part 2, you'll see each country tagged by how it came to be. Six recurring patterns cover almost the whole world:

Keep these six in mind. They are the grammar of the world map. With the framework set, Book V now turns to the evidence: first a tour through the great regions, then the complete origin story — in a sentence or two each — of every country that exists today.