Cottereau
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2018–2024
11:45 · 34M views · Jan 1, 2018
An animated map showing the borders and populations of European countries for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are excluded from population counts.
HN users link it whenever a thread needs a quick illustration of how much European borders have shifted and how much conflict there was.
7 comments from Hacker News
> So, tell me again about why everything is the fault of "The West", including all the western countries who have never attacked anyone, in your mind? Not the person you're responding to, but I think it is important to recognize that the US is practically the military of The West (and some more like Japan and Korea), or rather those on the side of democracy in the cold war. Lots of this is because after a bunch of very big wars in Europe (Napoleonic Wars, WWI, WWII) -- and a bunch of smaller wars -- the countries essentially decided that it was best to have smaller militaries and out source it to somewhere that didn't have a long history of border disputes. Helped that the US already had a strong military, were an ocean away, and their bordering neighbors aren't major competitors. On the flip side, the USSR was essentially this same thing but for the communist side (till China started to rise in power). Some military historians suggest that the rise of super powers was a big component for the long peace. There's a lot to this history that's way more complicated than can be put in a singular comment and involves much more of the globe than just Europe (even the US's, Mexico's, and Canada's independences rely and exacerbated on these conflicts). People use this history to write a wide variety of narratives. Long Peace: [LINK] Borders in Europe from 1000AD to now: this video
> as experienced by people living at the time there's another twist of all this. Communication back in time has been.. mostly missing - and slow if any. So people in two distant cities could be on two different planets, with similar outcome :) Seems those "linear" timelines, put in that context, look more like bitemporal things.. so its possible that city B learned that city A was in war when that war actualy ended, or later.. and reaction (if any) might be misplaced.. As of maps of "rivers".. that's similar to how people migrations - or army moves are shown. btw, there's this history-map of europe 1-year-per-second: this video and also this, i don't know are they of same author: [LINK]
> Can you look at the last decade of US military actions and say this has increased European security? Here is a video [0] of the borders of European countries over the last 1500 years. There is potentially a correlation behind their stability since 1945 (11:16 in the video) and the US having a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army. It is debatable whether it was all to do with the US; but the circumstantial evidence is substantial. The border redrawings may resume one day. [0] this video
Most parts of the world have gone through similarly horrific waves of border expansion and contraction at the cost of human lives and cultures, going back to the beginning of civilization. Take the borders of Europe, for example: this video I doubt the expansion of, say, the Roman Empire in what we now call Europe and Africa was any less violent than the expansion of the English-speaking world in what we now call North America. Humankind's track record on this earth is full of atrocities.
It's often forgotten how much conflict there was in Europe (and most of the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries. How this was fairly "normal" It's really forgotten how relatively peaceful our time is. I'm not complaining, in fact, I want to protect it. And that means we can't forget what was. this video