Photo credit Jonn Elledge
Jonn Elledge’s books include A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, and Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. At the New Statesman he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, spending six happy years writing about cities, maps, and borders. He lives in London.
Q: What do you think is the most important thing we can learn from studying the history of our borders?
Jonn Elledge: I think the key thing is: this too shall pass. Humanity has always drawn lines on maps, and between groups like us and groups like them. But the nature of those polities and those communities have shifted so often that it’s hard to feel like nationalist sentiment is anything but silly. These imagined communities we build our identities on and dedicate our lives to will one day pass from the record and be as meaningless as Wessex or Neustria or the Hittite Empire or Lower Egypt some today. Are they really worth fighting over when so many of our problems today are shared by all humanity?
(That said, I do not expect, in 2026, to win this one.)
Q: Do you have a favorite map?
JE: My deeply unpatriotic answer, of the ones discussed in the book, is the map of Napoleon’s First French Empire. That showed a greater France which had swallowed the low countries plus chunks of Italy, Germany and Spain, meaning that Amsterdam, Rome, Hamburg and Barcelona were capitals of French departments. I’m a sucker for alternative histories, and because this empire came before many of Europe’s national identities settled down into their modern forms—and because many of the people already in what we today think of as France didn’t entirely consider themselves such in the 1810s—that map really highlights the contingency of nationhood.
My less clever answer is that the thing that really got me into maps in the first place was the Tube Map, the map of London’s subway network which I had on my wall as a kid. This is why nerdy bits about transport networks keep sneaking into the book in surprising ways.
Q: The way people interact with and adapt to borders has changed throughout history—how do you think our understanding of borders might change in the future?
JE: I’ve changed my view on this—I grew up with Star Trek and similar series, and my first passport was both British and European, and the UK’s only land border (between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) largely ceased to matter with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. . . so I sort of assumed the story of the 21st century would be the gradual decline of nation states, as we all moved towards regional blocks or even world government.
It’s fair to say that, since 2016 at least, it’s felt pretty clear that this is not where we are going. Sadly, I think borders are as important as they’ve ever been—in parts of the world, more important than they’ve been for some time. I’d love to think that more of the world will come to function like the European Union, with nations present and important but not the be all and end all. But since my own country voted to leave that union, it’s hard to keep the faith.
Q: What got you interested in borders in the first place?
JE: There are a couple of answers to this. In ascending order of embarrassment: I’ve been interested in questions of identity and nation formation, and the grand sweep of history, for a long time, and wanted to do a “big” book that felt like it was grappling with some of those questions (while also being something that a non-historian like myself could plausibly produce). I also used to edit a website called CityMetric (a bit like CityLab) for the UK political magazine the New Statesman (like the New Republic or Atlantic), in which I ran a series about weird borders named “Boundary Issues.” So borders were in my head as a way of writing that book, and including jokes and so on.
But the most embarrassing reason is—I grew up just inside London’s official city limits, in a suburban area carved out of the county of Essex (basically New Jersey). And it was very important to me, as a pretentious, bookish nerd, which side of that line I was on. So, I think that’s probably in the mix too.
Q: What’s your favorite border in the book?
JE: It’s hard not to love the story of Baarle, the town in the Netherlands with bits of Belgium inside it. Partly because it’s so gleefully absurd—national borders running down the middle of bars! People switching countries by moving their front doors!—but partly also because it’s reassuring to know that a town split between two different nations can work, and prosper, without conflict. There are other bits of the world that could learn from it.
Q: Any other favorite stories?
JE: The story of the Sudan-Uganda border survey of 1913 is another I’ve had in my head for decades—I learned about it on a documentary my grandfather recorded for me, back in 1993. I love it partly because it has such vivid characters in it (one British army captain who’s a very good chap who’s filled with noblesse oblige and wants to do right by the natives; the other who’s just tired and doesn’t give a crap, he just wants to draw a line and go home). But partly too it’s the way it highlights the absurdity of imperialism—the way that, even with the best of intentions, it can end up creating unintended consequences that persist centuries later.
Q: More! More!
JE: Oh alright, also the story of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, in which Spain the Portugal literally divided the entire globe between them, and which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese to this day. I love that too because of the sheer ridiculousness of those pretentions—but also, if I’m honest, as a reminder that my country wasn’t the only one in the habit of messing up the world by drawing lines on maps.
Q: You’re meant to be promoting the book to North Americans, Jonn. Can you maybe pick one a bit closer to Ohio or something?
JE: Fine, if I must. The very first essay I wrote for the book—the one that went in with the pitch document—was actually the story of imperialist ambitions of President James K. Polk, and of the US-Mexican War. I suspect a lot of people, even in the US, might be surprised to realize quite how much of the west was once Mexican territory. It thus seems kind of mad the efforts the federal government goes to, to fortify that border and prevent people from crossing it.
Oh, also, I love the fact that Washington DC’s weird borders result from enthusiasm for the institution of slavery.
Hmm, perhaps don’t put that in the marketing material?
Q: Last but not least, how do you keep your hair so lush and shiny?
JE: Well, I’m so glad you noticed. The truth is I don’t take two bottles into the shower. I just wash and go.
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders is available everywhere books are sold.
Don’t forget to preorder A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions, out October 13!
