Закончил замечательную книгу A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. Написана просто идеально, в отличие от большей часть non-fiction набита фактами, а не растянута ради объема. Читается на одном дыхании.
Вместо какого-то обзора решил просто собрать любимые цитаты.
До эпохи национализма люди воспринимали карту мира сильно по-другому. Когда Карл Великий делил империю между тремя сыновьями, он не закладывал основы Франции, Германии и Италии, он просто хотел оставить каждому наследство.
In early modern Europe, nobody particularly expected ruler, national identity and borders to meaningfully match up. But then, in the nineteenth century, two things happened.
Несложно догадаться, что изрядная часть книги посвящена тому, как Европа начертила границы на всех остальных континентах.
In 1890, British prime minister Lord Salisbury summed the situation up in perhaps the most famous speech ever made about colonialism and borders, which I quoted in the introduction but is worth reading again. ‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps,’ he said, ‘where no white man’s foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’
Владельцы граничных территорий часто получали от королей особый титул и права для их защиты, что иногда приводила к интересным вещам. Например, так Барселона оказалась в Испании, а из Баварии родилась Австрия, оставшаяся в отличие от нее независимым государством благодаря Габсбургам.
The County of Barcelona was originally a position to which the Carolingian kings appointed someone to defend their empire’s southern flank; gradually, though, it absorbed neighbouring counties and became first a hereditary title, then independent, and ultimately entered a union with neighbouring Aragon. This is why the region ended up not in France but in Spain.
Two of the German marks followed a similar path of becoming hereditary and then expanding their power. The Saxon Nordmark (‘northern march’) turned eventually into the powerful Margraviate of Brandenburg, whose rulers were important enough that, by the mid-fourteenth century, they got a vote for the elective Holy Roman Emperor. Meanwhile, the Bavarian Ostmark (‘eastern mark’) would become known as Austria, about which we’re going to be hearing quite a bit more.
Монголы устроили первые зафиксированные историей геноциды, но потом обеспечили безопасность торговли на всей своей территории. И только после этого Марко Поло смог достичь Азии первым из европейцев.
You probably haven’t heard of the Tanguts, the Buddhist people in the middle of what is now China who I mentioned in the previous paragraph. There’s a reason for that: the Mongols systematically wiped them and their culture out, an event the historian John Man has said could be the ‘first ever recorded example of attempted genocide’.
We tend to think of the Mongol period as a great time to be a guy with several horses and a sword, and a bad time to be almost anyone else. We don’t tend to think of it as a golden era of free trade. But it was. The reason that this is the era that produced The Travels of Marco Polo is because it was the first time an Italian merchant could plausibly nip back and forth between Venice and China along safe routes and well-maintained roads
Забавный анекдот про то, как Британия (не) захватила Египет.
In 1882, in an attempt to stamp on the sort of nationalist instability that might interrupt traffic through the Suez Canal, the British had conquered Egypt, but then, to avoid upsetting the Ottoman Empire of which Egypt was still officially a part, pretended they hadn’t. For the next thirty years, Egypt was subject to a form of government sometimes described as ‘the veiled protectorate’: not officially a part of the British Empire, but in practice governed by a bunch of British administrators who claimed to be merely ‘advising’ the Egyptian government.
А теперь Египет и Судан оба отказываются от кусочка земли на границе между двумя странами. Это, пожалуй, едва ли не единственная территория, на которую никто не претендует.
But Sudan has not renounced its claim. And since both countries’ claims to the larger, more valuable territory rest on a treaty which cedes the smaller, emptier one to their neighbour, neither can touch Bir Tawil without effectively surrendering their claim to the Hala’ib Triangle. That is something which neither wants to do. And so, both have renounced their claim to that double Los Angeles–sized patch of Nubian desert.
Южная Корея давала военнопленным выбор: вернуться домой на север, или остаться с ними. Выбрать можно было только один раз.
One of the most difficult topics during the armistice talks, incidentally, was what to do about prisoners of war. The standard assumption, stemming from the Geneva Convention, is that such people will be repatriated to the side that they fought for. But for those in the South, that raised ethical issues, since it meant returning people to a totalitarian state which had forced many people – including many southerners – to fight. When an agreement was eventually reached, prisoners were allowed to make their own choice – but whatever they chose, they could not change their mind. To this day, the bridge inside the JSA, on which released prisoners could move from one side to the other, is known as the Bridge of No Return.
Граница между ФРГ и ГДР это едва ли не самая удивительная часть нашей истории.
At least 2.5 million East Germans had defected via West Berlin over the previous twelve years; just 5,000 managed to cross the Berlin Wall over the next twenty-eight. Thousands more were caught in the attempt; nearly 200 didn’t live to tell the tale. Let’s take a moment here to think about quite how odd this is. Many civilisations have built walls around themselves to keep the enemy out or around others to keep them in. What was unique about the Berlin Wall, for nearly three decades the most famous border in the world, was that it didn’t do either of those things. The world the East Germans and their Soviet paymasters enclosed, the people it imprisoned, were their own. It was the people inside who were actually free to leave.
Yet the Berlin Wall and East Germany were no more natural than the other borders or states which fell over the next few years, no more eternal than Czechoslovakia or the USSR, or, come to that, the successor states that replaced them. Borders can be erased, states can die; this too may one day pass.
Meanwhile, the path of the Iron Curtain is still visible at ground level as the ‘European Green Belt’: a strip of land thousands of miles long where the decades-long lack of human activity has allowed rare plants and animals to thrive. Even out of evil, sometimes, can come some good.