How many countries fit into other continents?
I suspect that this question is both verging on imponderable and stepping into contentious territory; but I always wonder, when I see these sorts of info graphics, how things would have shaken out if Africa had scored a bit less raw land area; and a bit more of some of the subtler valuable features( in particular, before roads, canals, or rails, having lots of reasonably friendly coastline and/or a lot of navigable river coverage is crazy useful. The Mediterranian basin, in particular, is pretty sweet, and indeed lots of African civilization that made a splash on the historical record, Egypt, Carthage, was there.)
Also have to wonder about the latitude vs longitude issue: if your landmass is āwideā, you have much better odds of roughly similar climate all the way across. If ātallā, you get bands of quite different conditions that slow travel and diffusion of useful plant and animal varieties for agriculture.
TL;DR, Africa is huge, resource rich, and biologically verdant, why is it that Europe isnāt the one that got colonized into the ground? (Same question for the Americas, which have a number of virtues of their own, and werenāt exactly lacking for advanced capabilities in the pre-Colombian period.
Hmm, someone should make a dry-erase globe.
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Thereās a book you might want to have a look at that tackles this exact question. Not to spoil the ending or anything but it concludes that geography does have the sort of effects you mention. Itās all about differences in places, not differences in people.
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All of them?
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News flash: large continents with quite a few countries can be compared to the areas of quite a few other countries cobbled together.
So when are we going to see a similar map for one or both of the Americas? I think shoving a few dozen countries into Canada or Brazil could be quite humorous of a graphic.
The Marauding Carto-Nerd has disputed this āmapā.
Hereās where Krauseās map seems to fail:
- China is not the same shape and has been warped to fit neatly over
Madagascar.- The contiguous United States is much larger than he presents.
- Krause included Germany and a partial set of Eastern European
countries. There simply isnāt room.- The real India is larger than Krause represents.
Of course Iām being cartographically pedantic again but if the very thing you purport to show is misrepresenting reality I donāt think artistic license is a sufficiently good excuse. Yes, you could argue itās only a little bit wrong but if youāre going to do something, why not do it right? Few who look at the new graphic will even think to question its authority and they will glean a distorted picture. Thatās the real issue.
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I think itās a mistake to say that Europe has never been colonized into the ground. Its history is nonstop violent displacement, replacement, and annihilation of different populations for thousands of years.
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When I click the cartoon, it pops up to be as tall as my browser, and then a second click will make it full-size.
That seems like a pretty good UI to me ā some images are needlessly large, and popping up to āfull screenā instead of āfull sizeā is a good intermediary step.
Note that Chrome does the same thing if you navigate to an image (not a webpage) ā it shows it full-screen first, and then a second click will make it full-size.
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I agree, the UI you describe sounds good to me.
(Iām running FireFox version 38.0.5 (WTFā¦ this versioning is really out of hand) on a Windows 7 Enterprise machine. Machine is funky though because it a corporate machine with a whole slew of preinstalled/preconfigured stuff.)
During the Cold War, most people called the Soviet Union russia, even though it was a federation of statesā¦ including the Russians themselves.
āLong horn anti-Leninistsāā¦ thatās awesome!
Except people made choices to take over other places, because they felt the āwrong peopleā were on their diamonds, oil, gold, silver, trace metals, etc. The decision to colonize Africa at the end of the 19th century, and to racialize and brutalize itās people, was a choice, not an accident of geography.
These are the choices that people made about colonies in Africa, which included chopping off the hands of children when they didnāt work fast enough:
Janet Abu-Lughod has some answers perhaps?
Also, Peter Gran (The Islamic Roots of Capitalism) theorized that when Napoleon invaded Egypt, he did so because the country was doing very well, and France need grain, which Egypt had in abundance.
It did, starting about 40,000 years ago.
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The Romans colonized Europe in every sense of the word.
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Apparently Felix Dzerzhinsky was a real person
An explanation that Iāve heard runs along these lines:
The civilizations in Europe were close enough to each other to come into regular conflict.
On the other hand, various features of the terrain, mountains, rivers, forests, kept the conflict from being constant. It was a lot of trouble to navigate an army through/across these obstacles. Therefore, there would be regular intervals of peace.
During these intervals, new technologies of war were developed so they could really get those bastards next time.
Rinse and repeat over hundreds of years and the countries of Europe had the trained fighters, tactical knowledge, and technology to impose itself on most of the rest of the world.
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I was thinking along similar (albeit simpler) lines as the Carto-Nerd when I saw this picture. Wow, a bunch of countries are smaller than a continent. News at 11*. But at least I can enjoy the Irony of complaining about misrepresentation via misrepresentation.
*yeah, Australia called and told me I shouldnāt be quite so sarcastic, but nevertheless, I think my complaint still stands.
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