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When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

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Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#71

Post by mkotowski »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #42
mkotowski wrote: post #14

Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences. For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of…

The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.

Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet, there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-speaking population. [0]

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#72

Post by rjbwork »

weeksie wrote: post #13

Whenever I see this kind of persistence, it underscores how important path dependency is when trying to understand how things got to be the way they are. From legacy software to political systems, when there's cruft or weird behavior there's almost always some environmental factor that shaped the decision to build it that way, even (especially) if the people who made the decision weren't conscious of why.

Chesterton's fence.

I admit that when I was younger I was much more eager to just tear it all down and start anew...but with experience I have come to see things are never quite so easy. Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#73

Post by twic »

At some point i read that the reason the south-west of England is a stronghold for the Liberal Democrat party is due to the soil: i think it was that the soil there is suitable for dairy farming, and something about the economic structure of dairy farming led its well-off population to support the Liberals rather than the Tories, and that has persisted. But i can neither remember the explanation clearly, or find a source for it now. Sorry!

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#75

Post by thrdbndndn »

rodelrod wrote: post #74

In many cases, because both overlap with geographical features: the Carpathians in Romania, the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Ukraine, the green mountainous Portugal north of the Tagus vs the flat "montado" landscape to the south.

>because both overlap

It's easy to see why old empires/countries were divided by geographical features due to military reasons. But why would it affect the current-day political climate directly?

I think the causal relation is more like

    Geo -> old empire -> (more things) -> current day politics
like the original post implied, than

    Geo -> old empire
    Geo -> current day politics
as you implied; unless I missed your point.

Edit: on a second thought, I think a factor that supports your point is that geographical feature would affect corresponding industries in certain area regardless of "historical divisions". Maybe this is what you mean?

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#76

Post by retrac »

If you look at human genetic populations, particularly several haplogroups prevalent among the first peoples to re-settle Europe after the ice age, and the Middle Eastern peoples they came from, as well as a later Y DNA group associated with the Germanic expansion in prehistory, the low prevalence areas today basically still outline the borders of the Roman Empire at its peak.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#77

Post by Imnimo »

soared wrote: post #35
Imnimo wrote: post #30

Not sure I totally buy the Mexico one. The correspondence just isn't as strong as in some of the other ones, and in some places is confounded by modern state borders.

I don’t know that these are all cause and effect, but just interesting overlays. The Mexico one is clear to Americans - people who immigrate from Mexico choose to stay nearer to Mexico. Similar cultures, weather, etc. The areas previously being a part of Mexico is just coincidence.

Sure, I just mean that the line is a lot fuzzier than most of the other examples. Like if you showed me just the modern Polish map in the first one, I could clearly draw a pretty accurate approximation of the historical German border. But I don't think you could get nearly as accurate of a historical Mexican border from the modern population map. And in few areas where you can, it's also a modern border (Texas-Louisiana for example).

It's just a less compelling example than the others.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#78

Post by api »

rjbwork wrote: post #72
weeksie wrote: post #13

Whenever I see this kind of persistence, it underscores how important path dependency is when trying to understand how things got to be the way they are. From legacy software to political systems, when there's cruft or weird behavior there's almost always some environmental factor that shaped the decision to build it that way, even (especially) if the people who made the decision weren't conscious of why.

Chesterton's fence. I admit that when I was younger I was much more eager to just tear it all down and start anew...but with experience I have come to see things are never quite so easy. Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.

> it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.

People misinterpret Chesterton's fence as an argument against changing things, but it's actually just about what I quoted above. It has no verdict on whether or not something should be changed. It just argues that you should make a strong effort to figure out why it is how it is before attempting to do so.

I'd argue that if you don't at least do the exercise your attempts to change things will probably fail, since whatever you try to do will likely fail to capture something necessary in the old system.

Keep in mind though that it doesn't always work. Sometimes the reason for the fence is forgotten. Sometimes the reason is deeply perverse and there never was a good reason. Sometimes the reason is obsolete.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#79

Post by em-bee »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #42
mkotowski wrote: post #14

Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences. For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of…

The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.

well, it depends on how far back you look in history. poland was split up between prussia, austria and russia in the 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#/media/File:Rzeczpospol...

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#80

Post by ssnistfajen »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #22

I’m sceptical, it’s too easy to cherry-pick data to make it look supportive of one’s political agenda. Not saying it’s the case here, I just wouldn’t trust too much "obvious" patterns and easy to understand maps from a twitter thread. More often than not, such threads are omitting data that doesn’t support the view of the author. Reality is rarely obvious and simple.

Absolutely right to be skeptical. The regional demographics in many of these overlapped regions have gone through comprehensive changes over centuries under drastically different regimes. The map about English posessions in 1154 vs. first round of French presidential election is just an absolute straw-grasping joke. ~900 year's worth of cultural, demographic, and economic shifts reduced to basic visual pattern recognition AKA the thing that causes people to see Jesus on a piece of toast.

The map about Charlemagne's empire vs. 6 original members of the future EU is a joke too. The latter was a product of the reality of post-WWII European politics (Iron Curtain, Allied occupation of Germany and Austria, and Spain being a neutral country ruled by de facto dictatorship). It's fun to look at patterns and think they are neat. It is absolutely not fine to pretend these resemblances somehow have a direct & causal relationship without properly navigating the long and complex multi-faceted history behind them.

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