Nation-State Origins

Please at least have a cursory glance of the history of any of these countries from around WW1 to the present day instead of just assuming things magically came to be the way they were 6 hours before the first gulf war. States are _not_ abstract entities that just sort of float around existing at geographic locations

Bah most of the modern states had event of traumatic reorganization, some in Europe less than two generation ago. Heck some g8 states like Italy were quartered under four different crowns less than 200 years ago.And the worst part of this take is that is also denies agency for populations that had their own centennial empire at some point in history as if they were never more than paesant in some scheme. Thats deeply flawled in so many ways.for those that downvoted this comment, lol open a

None of those places functioned as modern nation states prior to the Peace of Westphalia. Monarchies were in constant flux, collapsing all the time as brother invaded cousin and so on. How exactly does this refute my point?

>>If this is your sort of goalpost, then even relatively homogenous countries like Germany and Italy shouldn't really exist today, given that they only coalesced in the late 19th century.Yup. The Holy Roman empire, Roman Empire, Byzantines, Greeks, Hellenistic period etc etc.Over a period of long intervals the geographical boundaries of any and every region on earth expand and shrink. That's just fact of life. And boundaries are basically things written on a piece of paper,

A lot of countries (even Western ones) were like that. Both unified Germany and Italy were creations of the 19th century. Before that, both were just a collection of small kingdoms/principalities/republics that shared a similar dialect and culture.

Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a numb

It's really not. The American states were a loosely organized confederacy at outset as well. India has multiple languages. And of course the long history of empires, like the Ottoman, or Spanish control of Latin America. Yes they rise and fall, but often over the course of centuries and well out of the observational abilities of the human lifespan. There's nothing inevitable about the EU, in either direction.

Could you explain to me what would make Britain or France not a state far before that time?

I don't know much about Chinese history but it seems to me that some sort of China as a unified entity existed for 1000s of years. In Europe on the other hand, borders were much more combated due to expansions of this or that empire (Rome, Turkey, France, Germany etc.) E.g. modern Germany wasn't unified as a nation until after the Napoleon wars in the 19th century. In that sense, the EU is a rather courageous project of countries that were enemies not so long ago.

Beautiful app and thank you to the developersContemporary-ism is one of the most severe cognitive blind-spots. We have a tendency to see the past from today's perspective -- today's borders, norms, regimes, languages, ethnicities.Nearly all of the countries today didn't exist 200 years ago, not to mention 600 years ago. Even the ones that share the same names had different ethnicities, regimes, languages, cultures, religions. They were hardly the same people. What was &q