The Cockpit of Nationalism

The geography of the English Channel / North Sea proved conducive to why Europe wound up with territorial nationalism.

As Charles Murray pointed out in Human Accomplishment, the most productive parts of Europe tended to be centered around a fairly narrow polygon running from central Italy to southern Scotland:

Some idiot on Twitter took Murray’s map and created a false caption

that is seen far more often online than the real map.

The low regions where the major rivers dump silt into the Atlantic have since the Middle Ages been among the most populous and affluent parts of Europe. The Netherlands, for example, remain ridiculously productive in agriculture, and the Dutch-based firm ASML builds the world’s most valuable machine tools that make the most sophisticated computer chips.

There are a number of potential ways to organized settled territory politically, such as city-states, empires, decentralized feudalism, and nomadic dynasticism (e.g., how the Hapsburg possessions tended to wander around the map of Europe.) The emergence of medium to large nation-states in northwestern Europe in the post-Charlemagne era has a lot to do with the local geography around the English Channel.

Paywall here.