(Roughly) Daily

Jonn Elledge devotes the current issue of his nifty newsletter to a series of fascinating facts from his wonderful book, A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (as it’s known in its U.S. edition, as compared to the less qualified title of the U.K. original pictured above)…

… Back in May, the good people at the UK’s leading maps and travel specialist bookshop Stanfords were kind enough to select my new book A History of the World in 47 Borders as their book of the month. And to promote it, they asked me to make a quick video, talking about it…

My initial thought was to list a single fact from each of the book’s 47 chapters, but that, I soon realised, would go on forever and take an absurd number of takes to get right. So in the end I decided on a top 10: that took an absurd number of takes to get right too, and also features me the wrong way round, for some reason, but at least it’s only three minutes long…

… as a special Christmas treat, not to mention shameless attempt to get more of you to buy the book for yourself or a loved one, here are all 47 of the facts I originally chose…

You’ll find tidbits like these:

The oldest known international border was the one between what today we call Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. We know about it today because, sometime around 3100BCE, someone abolished it.

The Great Wall is not really one wall, but many. And the first Chinese emperor used to kidnap young men to make them build them.

The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan basically created the modern world.

In 1884, the great powers agreed to divide up the entire map of Africa without ever visiting. No Africans were in attendance, and one who’d asked for an invite, the Sultan of Zanzibar, was openly laughed at.

There’s a piece of Africa which two countries, Egypt and Sudan, both aggressively claim belongs to the other.

There’s an opera house in which the US/Canada border divides audience from stage.

There’s a coral atoll a thousand miles from Japan which is technically classed as a suburb of Tokyo.

Air traffic control zones cover the entire planet except the Galapagos Islands and the bit of the Arctic where Santa lives.

So much more at “47 Facts from A History of the World in 47 Borders,” from @jonnelledge.bsky.social

* Bill Bryson

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As we muse on maps, we might send acutely observant birthday greetings to an astute student of the human animal, anthropologist Margaret Mead; she was born on this date in 1901.  Best-known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, she was 23 when she first traveled to the South Pacific to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation. The book that resulted, Coming of Age in Samoa, was– and remains– a best-seller.

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