120 - Hip to Be Square: the Land Ordinance of 1785

The United States expanded westward in ever more rectangular fashion, leading to states out west that are so square, they’re only recognisable in their geographical context.

This map dates from the beginning of that expansion of ‘square-ness’, and provides an insight into the method of surveying, claiming and taking possession of new territories, as it was done in the US of that day.

In 1785, the US Congress adopted the Land Ordinance Act in order to raise money: under the Articles of Confederation, Congress couldn’t tax US citizens directly, but could raise money by selling land in the recently acquired Northwest Territory.

The Land Ordinance also provided for the division and organisation of the land to be sold, provisions that remained central to US land policy until the Homestead Act (1862). Those provisions were:
• Surveyed land was to be divided into square townships
• Each side of such township squares was to be 6 miles long (or 480 ‘chains’: 80 ‘chains’ to the mile)
• Each township was to be subdivided into 36 sections of 1 square mile (640 acres; 259 hectares) each
• Section #1 would be the northeasternmost one, the numbers then adding up westward. In the second row, the numbers would then again run west to east, zigzagging like this all the way down
• Each section could be further subdivided for sale to settlers and speculators
• Some sections were reserved for specific purposes. Public schools were often established in section #16 of each township. Sections #8, 11, 26 and 29 were at least in theory reserved as compensation for veterans of the Revolutionary War.

This map taken here from the Official Federal Land Records website of the Bureau of Land Management (US Dep’t of the Interior), the text based on the relevant Wikipedia entry.

119 - All Elephant and No Castle: a Secret Bestiary of the London Tube Map

Rats and other vermin live in the London Underground, and there are probably urban legends around about bigger, nastier animals down in the Tube. But a whale? An elephant? And an emu? How about a penguin, a polar bear and a baby rhino? All these and more species, enough to fill a zoo, live in the Underground - but not in the actual tunnels: they’re cleverly hiding in the map of the Underground.

Have a look at this site (which I found via this collection of cartographic curiosa) and check out all the beasts squatting in the Tube Map. And re-baptise familiar stations into code-named locations of this parallel-universe bestiary: Oxford Circus station is the Whale’s Eye, the station at St Paul’s is the Pig’s Smile, Stratford is the Penguin’s Arse… Hours (well, minutes) of fun guaranteed! And afterwards, you can buy the t-shirt.

118 - Online Communities Map (Not For Navigation)

Somewhat in the style of a treasure map, this ‘Map of Online Communities’ shows MySpace, Wikipedia, SecondLife and other user-generated phenomena now populating the internet.

The geography is not as random as one could assume at first glance. Area and position are significant. Thus, each community’s geographic area represents its estimated size, and the ‘compass-shaped island’ gives clues as to what each quarter signifies:

• North are more ‘practical’ communities,
• South is for the ‘intellectuals’.
• West lie the communities with a ‘real life’ connection,
• East those with a focus on the web itself.

This irresistible map has been floating around the web for a couple of weeks, but I’ve held off posting it until now.

Why?

I’m a map nerd, dammit, not a computer geek! Of course, I know of MySpace and am not surprised to see it occupy such a large and central part of the map. And sure, Wikipedia is on the intellectual extreme of the North-South axe. I can see why reunion dot com and classmates dot com would be far northwest (being practical for tracking down real life people).

But what is SourceForge, and in which way is it ‘intellectual’ and ‘web-solipsistic’ since it is situated on the other, southeastern extreme of the map? Why is there a Bay of Angst right next to Xanga? And what is Xanga? Is Sulawesi a reference to the “IRL” island in the Indonesian archipelago (it has the right shape – sort of), or am I missing some nerdy in-joke here? Why are there anthropomorphic dragons near the Ocean of Subculture?

Very frustratingly, almost nothing on this map makes sense to me! Oh, the horror!

The original location of this map is at xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Overwhelmed (and overjoyed, I suspect) by the success of their map, they’re now selling it as a poster.

117 - Europe’s Climate in 2071

This map shows which climate European cities can expect 64 years in the future:

London’s climate will resemble that of the Portuguese coast;
Paris weather will resemble that of the Extremadura, in the interior of the Iberian peninsula;
Stockholm and Oslo are a bit further to the north, close together and close to Barcelona;
Barcelona itself will meteorologically migrate to northern Morocco;
while Berlin will situate itself weather-wise in the Algerian hinterlands of Kabylia;
Istanbul, the largest Turkish city, will move to the southern coast of that country;
and will be joined there by Rome, as its present-day climate will prove all but eternal;
Helsinki’s weather will resemble that of central Europe, southern Poland to be exact;
and finally, Saint Petersburg will come to feel like Belarus - although I’m not sure that’s much of an improvement.

Map suggested by Stefan Geens, taken from The Guardian here, but originally from the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement in France.

116 - The First, False Map of the ‘True North’

Somewhere in the 14th century, a Franciscan from Oxford, a ‘priest with an astrolabe’, writes a travelogue about his discoveries in the North Atlantic, calls it the Inventio Fortunata (‘The Discovery of Fortunata’) and in 1360 presents it to the King of England.

This book has been lost since the late 15th century.

However, a Jacobus Cnoyen from the city of ‘s Hertogenbosch (in present-day Netherlands) summarizes the contents of the Inventio, related to him in 1364 in Norway by another Franciscan who had met the author. Cnoyen’s own travel-book is called the Itinerarium.

This book has also been lost.

All this we know by the extensive quotes from the Itinerarium in a letter by the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee. That letter, written in 1577 and now in the British Museum, mentions that:

“In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone (…) This is word for word everything that I copied out of this author (i.e. Cnoyen) years ago.”

A giant magnetic rock, exactly at the North Pole… well, that would explain why all compasses point north, wouldn’t it? Alas, the ominous magnet (described in the letter as “black and glistening” and “high as the clouds”) is a bit too fantastic an explanation for the phenomenon of magnetism. For even back in the late 16th century, mariners often found that their compasses increasingly deviated from ‘true north’ as they approached it.

But only later did the separate (and wandering) location of the magnetic poles become common knowledge. In the intervening Age of Exploration (and sometimes Fabulation), Mercator cites an author who clearly hadn’t seen the North Pole with his own eyes – nor had the author he quoted, nor in fact would anyone for centuries to come.

In the meantime, the invented geography in the Inventio Fortunata that came to us via that one letter greatly influenced cartographers’ views of the Arctic region. For if no other knowledge of yet-undiscovered lands is available, there’s really not much argument against unbelievable stories.

And so, the Black Cliff, the four countries and the whirlpool are evident in Martin Behaim’s globe (1492), which predates Mercator’s map. In 1956, a letter surfaced written by the English merchant John Day in 1497 or 1498 to ‘the Lord Grand Admiral’ (probably Columbus), with Day expressing regret that he hadn’t been able to find the Inventio Fortunata for him. In a marginal note on one of Johannes Ruysch’s maps (from 1508), the Dutch cartographer even mentions that two of the continents surrounding the North Pole are inhabited.

Mercator’s late-16th-century Arctic map (Septentrionalium Terrarum, ‘Of the Northern Lands’) was the first ever to be centred on the North Pole itself. It was a mix of fact and fiction, showing some recent discoveries but also the four fanciful countries surrounding the Arctic whirlpool with in its middle the Rupes Nigra et Altissima (‘Black and Very High Cliff’), supposedly responsible for animating navigators’ compasses.

On the subject of mixing fact with fiction, Mercator incongruously includes in his map two other magnetic poles, along the 180° meridian, indicating that he did know of the magnetic deviation from the ‘true North’, but wasn’t yet prepared to ditch the preceding fabulation (thanks to Greg for pointing this out).

Mercator’s map was included in the last of three volumes constituting his ground-breaking work (the first geographic tomes to be called an Atlas). The cartographer didn’t live to see it published: the last volume was brought out by his son Rumold in 1595, the year after his death.

In 1604, cartographer Jodocus Hondius acquired the printing plates of Mercator’s Atlas, and over the years improved on the Arctic map (and others) as explorers and whalers came back with ever more accurate descriptions of the coastlines, in the case of the Arctic map especially those of Spitsbergen and Nova Zembla (also, and more correctly known as Novaya Zemlya, ‘New Land’ in Russian).

Mercator’s authoritative (but wrong) depiction of the North Pole persisted well into the 17th century, only to be dispelled gradually by real discoveries.

On the map, the Rupes Nigra can be seen surrounded by the four countries, all of which are labelled with Latin texts, some of which I can make out:

• The island on the bottom right is labelled: Pygmei hic habitant & ad summum pedes longi quem admodum illi quos in Gronlandia Screlingers vocant. Which translates as something like this: ‘Here live Pygmies and (something about long feet), like those in Greenland that are called Skraelinger’.
• The island to the north of Pygmy-land is labelled: Hic euripus habet ostia et propter angustiam ac celerem fluvium nunquam congelatur. Which goes something like this: ‘This narrow channel has a harbour and due to its narrowness and swift current never freezes’.

I’ve replaced the original, very large map with a smaller one, diminishing legibility but making it easier to load. Please view the original here. Any help in translating the rest of the legends on the map is very welcome.

115 - A World Map of Manhattan

A history of successive waves of newcomers arriving in New York City, working their way up (or sideways) to make room for the next wave arguably makes NYC the most emblematic immigrant city in the world.

This map celebrates that diversity by assembling Manhattan out of the contours of many of the world’s countries. Danielle Hartman created the map based on data from the 2000 US Census. In all, 80 different countries of origin were listed in the census. The map-maker placed the country contours near the census area where most of the citizens of each country resided.

The title of this work is ‘Manhattan – Global Island’ to emphasise, in Hartman’s words, “the relationship between Manhattan island and the final island design. The global island suggests that residents from all over the world can coexist, that they are integral to making the City what it is, and they can still retain their separate identities. Rather than a melting pot, the City is a rich mosaic, a microcosm of the world.”

Vietnam is at the southern tip of Manhattan, joined there by a country that looks like Portugal (the resolution of this image could have been better) and by Iraq, Italy and Spain, among others. China fills up the Lower East Side and, appropriately, Chinatown. Canadians and Australians seem to congregate mid-island, while Russians dominate the northern tip of Manhattan.

I found this map at Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, ‘an exhibition created to demonstrate the power of maps to understand, navigate and manage not only physical places, but also abstract information spaces’.

114 - Exclaves of West Berlin (3): the Böttcherberg Troika

 

The Berlin neighbourhood of Wannsee is situated on an island cut off from the mainland by a number of lakes and canals. Before the unification of both Germanys, the island was the southwesternmost part of West Berlin. But two salients of Potsdam (then East Germany) protrude onto the island from the south, bringing the heavily guarded East-West border onto the Wannsee island.

This map, an excerpt from a cadastral map of Berlin from 1953, shows the western protrusion and within that salient, three very small, oblong strips of land that belonged to West Berlin. These are the three Böttcherberg enclaves, sometimes counted together as one because of their small size (0,30 hectares in all), thus accounting for the difference in the number of former West Berliner enclaves in East Germany, some sources counting 10, others 12. Even when added up, the Böttcherberg troika have the smallest surface of them all. Earlier postings explain a bit about the peculiarities of the exclaves Erlengrund and Fichtewiese (#99) and Laßzinswiesen (#102).

Not much background information is to be found about the Böttcherberg exclaves, other than that all three probably were uninhabited, and that the northern one included part of a graveyard. The author of this intriguing website about the Berlin exclaves visited the site of the Böttcherberg troika, concluding that “there must not have been much room for a no-man’s land between Böttcherberg SW and West Berlin, and even less so between Böttcherberg N and West Berlin. Remaining debris suggested that at least Böttcherberg N was part of the no-man’s land prior to 1989, but it should be really interesting to know if DDR authorities at any time respected the status of any of the Böttcherberg exclaves.”

The only comment I can add to that are that this troika is situated in an historically very interesting neighbourhood. 

• The Wannsee area is famous as a holiday and sunbathing locale, and infamous as the place where in January 1942, senior Nazis met to plan the Endlösung (the ‘Final Solution’) for exterminating Europe’s Jews.

• Wannsee is also the place where in November 1811, the German romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist first shot and killed Henriette Vogel and then himself in a murder-suicide pact.

• Just to the south of both Potsdamer salients, across the Glienicker Brücke, lies the Potsdam district of Babelsberg, pre-World War II Germany’s equivalent to London’s Ealing Studios or
  Rome’s Cinecittà, and at present again a centre of German filmmaking.

• The Glienicker Bridge itself was used three times to exchange captured agents between East and West, which is how it earned its nickname as ‘Bridge of Spies’. In 1962, Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over the USSR in 1960, was exchanged for a Russian colonel. In 1985, 23 American agents held in Eastern Europe were exchanged for 4 Soviet agents in the West. And in 1986, Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky (currently the Israeli politician Nathan Sharansky) and three others were traded for 5 Soviet agents.

• On the former East German side of the Glienicker Bridge, lies the small settlement of Steinstücken, the largest of West Berlin’s exclaves.

113 - The Postcode Map of the United Kingdom

You should take a look at a website called www.motorwaymap.co.uk for an elaborate diagram of Great Britain’s motorways, along the lines of post #75 on this blog, showing a streamlined diagram of the Eisenhower Interstate System reminiscent of subway maps. The UK motorway map is a bit too big to show here in great detail, but an equally interesting map on that site represents a ‘boxed’ view of the UK, visually demonstrating the UK postal area codes. Many thanks to Gerald Higgins, the creator of the motorway map, the postal code map (and other interesting ones) for pointing them out to me.

Postal codes in the UK are called ‘postcodes’, and were introduced from 1959 to 1974. Most big cities already had postcodes – London was first divided into 10 postal districts in 1857-’58 and subdivisions were numbered in 1917 (e.g. W1, SE2, etc.) London still retains this system, while pre-existing city postal areas elsewhere were incorporated into the new system.

Outside the London Postal Area, UK postcodes have an identical format, generally consisting of two sets of characters separated by a space:

the out code, two to four characters long and always starting with one or two letters, the area part. This is followed by the district part: either one number, two numbers or a number and a letter.
the in code, always three characters long, always one number, the sector part. This is followed by two letters, the unit part.

The out code is used to send the mail to the destination sorting office, where the in code is used to sort the mail into delivery rounds.
This code is a hierarchical system, the first letter(s) denoting the largest area, the rest of the characters steadily defining the exact location of the address – be it a street, part of a street or even a single building.
There are 124 postal areas, 3.064 postal districts, 11.598 postal sectors and 1.780.000 postal units in the UK. And some 27 million individual addresses.

The letter(s) in the out code give some clue to the geographical location of the address, with one notable exception: SAN TA1 is the postcode for correctly addressed letters to Father Christmas. Some other interesting specific postcodes in London: SW1A 0AA (House of Commons), SW1A 1AA (Buckingham Palace), SW1A 2AA (10, Downing Street, Prime Minister’s Office).
The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man adopted postcodes only in the early 1990s, following the UK format: JE (Jersey), GY (Guernsey) and IM (Isle of Man). IM is sometimes replaced by EV (Ellan Vannin, the island’s name in its native Manx language).

Other British overseas territories have separate postcodes, often to eliminate confusion. ASCN 1ZZ is used for Ascension Island, as previously mail for the island often ended up in Ascuncion, Paraguay. Similarly, STHL 1ZZ prevents mail for Saint Helena in the South Atlantic from going to St Helen’s in Merseyside.

112 - Real Maps Reassembled Into Non-Existent Places

Francesca Berrini: ‘With Us Or Against Us’, torn map collage on canvas, 12 x 9 in.

Maps are instruments, but in the eye of map aficionados they can also be works of art. That makes it difficult for at least this aficionado to decide whether to be horrified or fascinated by these works of art – cartographic art, yes, but reassembled from strips, slivers and patches purposely cut out of vintage maps and atlases by the artist. Maybe it’s best to let Francesca Berrini, the Portland (OR) artist who makes these maps, explain the why and the how of her work:

“Since the start of my exploration into mapmaking, I have become increasingly fascinated by the intersection of manmade and natural forms made visible in maps and atlases. The combination of the colorful geometry of political divisions laid over the organic forms of the continents is as incongruous in appearance as our actual physical interventions in the natural landscape. In looking at a series of maps of the same area throughout time it is easy to see the fluid movement of people and their political structures.”

“While human boundaries and routes of travel shift and vary, features of the landscape seem to remain solid underneath the flow of humanity. Maps are always only a glimpse of a moment in history, a self portrait of the time in which they are made. And yet, maps consistently reflect the influence that humans have had in altering their own surroundings. Whether calculated in the slow growth of reclaimed land in Japan or the Netherlands, or in the accidental change of geological features such as the creation of the Salton Sea or the erasing of coastal marshlands on the gulf coast, our cumulative effect adds up to astounding changes in our natural environs.”

“I see my work as a small reflection of this attempt to chart and control our surroundings. A careful imitation of how the human hand is made visible on the landscape as viewed by the seemingly all knowing eye of the mapmaker. In each piece, I attempt to create an illusion of factuality and to capture a nostalgia for the idea of far away places. Both subtly by the combination of paper qualities, and overtly by the introduction of images and text, it is the initial illusion of actual information that makes the eye accept my distorted combinations at first glance.”

I still don’t know whether to be horrified. I guess that depends on how nice the original maps were. But I am fascinated. More information – and more of Berrini’s maps – on this page of the Viveza art gallery in Seattle (WA), which I learned about through this entry (which includes a reference to this selfsame blog) on Joe Alterio’s blog on “illustration, comix, design, animation, and other bouts of total awesomeness”.

111 - The Comancheria, Lost Homeland of a Warrior Tribe

Under the presidency of Sam Houston (1836-’38, 1841-’44) the then independent Republic of Texas almost came to a peace agreement with the tribal collective known as the Comanche. The Texas legislature rejected this deal, because it did not want to establish a definitive border with the Comanche; for by that time, white settlers were pushing into the Comancheria, the homeland of one of the most fearsome Native American peoples the Euro-Americans ever had to deal with.

The very name by which the Comanche are known to us, is an Ute word for ‘enemy, foreigner’. Never more numerous than 20.000, this warrior tribe was a product of the horse – and therefore arguably as ‘native’ an American culture as that of the Euro-Americans, who introduced the horse to the New World. The Comanche emerged around 1700, when a group of Shoshone mastered the art of equitation, split off from the main tribe and migrated south from Wyoming, literally in search of better pastures.

From around mid-18th century, they roamed an area known coinciding with present-day north-western Texas, western Oklahoma, parts of southern Kansas and Colorado and eastern New Mexico. This area, first called the Comancheria by the Spanish, coincided with the Southern Plains in which the buffalo roamed, and in such plentiful numbers that the Comanche’s numbers increased significantly as well. This was also due to Shoshone immigration and the capture of enemy women and children.

The Comanche were the first Plains people to fully incorporate the horse into their culture, and were pivotal in distributing horse-knowledge to other Native American tribes. They also sold horses to white settlers… and stole many back, earning a reputation as horse (and cattle) thieves. This dovetailed with the tribe’s warrior reputation – they established their Comancheria by pushing the Apache out of the Southern Plains, and they raided deep into Mexico for slaves, wives, horses and mules.

Once, they got so far south that they encountered “little men that did not speak to us”: monkeys! These raids continued until long after the Mexican-American War, although the treaty that ended it stipulated that the US had to stop them. The Comanche were hard to tame. The Comanche threat was wiped out by that familiar companion to white expansion: devastatingly lethal epidemics, in this case of smallpox and cholera, which reduced the Comanche to a few thousand by the 1870s.

Their numerical strength broken, they were herded into ever smaller reservations from the Treaty of Medicine Lodge (1867) onwards. The near-extinction of the buffalo by white hunters provoked an unsuccessful Comanche attack, after which they were further marginalised. In 1875, the last independent Comanche band under Quanah Parker surrendered and moved to an Oklahoma reservation, which was eventually opened up to white settlement in 1906.

Today, the town of Lawton in Oklahoma is the annual venue of the Comanche pow-wow. Oklahoma holds about half of the total present-day Comanche population of 10.000, the rest residing mainly in Texas, California and New Mexico. The map in this post was taken from the Wikipedia entry on the Comancheria.

110 - Cooch Behar: The Mother of All Enclave Complexes

 

A map that does justice to the strangeness of the Cooch Behar enclave complex risks either to be too big to conveniently post here, or too small to show the intricacies of enclaves and counter-enclaves on both side of the Indian-Bangladeshi border. But the story behind this, the world’s largest enclave complex, is so compelling that I’ll write it up first, and wonder about the map later.

Firstly, though this enclave complex is conventionally named ‘Cooch Behar’, that is only telling half of the story. The complex exists on both sides of the northern part of the Indian-Bangladeshi border, but is named only after the Indian half of the area.

• Cooch Behar, formerly an independent principality on the Indian subcontinent and now a district in the Indian state of West Bengal, possesses 106 exclaves in Bangladesh, totaling 69,6 km². Of those, 3 are counter-enclaves and 1 a counter-counter-enclave. The biggest Indian enclave is Balapara Khagrabari (25,95 km²), the smallest Panisala (1.093 m²).
• Conversely, Bangladesh possesses 92 exclaves inside India, comprising 49,7 km². Of these, 21 are counter-enclaves. The largest Bangladeshi exclave is Dahagram-Angarpota (18,7 km²), the smallest is the counter-enclave Upan Chowki Bhaini (53 m²), the smallest international enclave in the world.

Rough estimates for the total population of all enclaves together ranged up to 70.000 at the beginning of the 21st century.

For the origins of most enclaves, we have to go back to 1713, when a treaty between the Mughal Empire and the Cooch Behar Kingdom reduced the latter’s territory by one third. The Mughals didn’t manage to dislodge all Cooch Behar chieftains from the territory thus gained; at the same time, some Mughal soldiers retained lands within Cooch Behar proper while remaining loyal to the Mughal Empire. This territorial ‘splintering’ was not so remarkable in the context of that time: the subcontinent was extremely fragmented (comparisons with pre-1871 Germany spring to mind), most enclaves were economically self-sufficient and the fragmentation caused no significant border issues, as Cooch Behar was nominally tributary to the Mughals anyway.

• In 1765, the British seized control of the Mughal territory by way of the East India Company, which in 1814 was surprised to discover extraterritorial dots of Cooch Behar within its territory, “by some unaccountable accident”. Those enclaves were sometimes used as sanctuary by “public offenders” fleeing the police.
• In 1947, the formerly Mughal territories became part of the eastern part of Pakistan.
• Cooch Behar acceded to India only in 1949, as one of the last of the 600-odd pre-independence Princely States to do so.
• In 1971, East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh.

Remarkably, the enclave complex survived all these changes of sovereignty on both sides of the border – although the enclave complex used to be even more complex before India’s independence: 50-something Cooch Behar exclaves in Assam and West Bengal were rationalized away after all three entities became parts of India.

Attempts in 1958 and 1974 to exchange enclaves across the international border proved more elusive – even though the international aspect of these enclaves made administering them extremely unworkable, and thus such an exchange more useful than that of the aforementioned all-Indian enclaves. For the border situation has often made it impossible for people living in the enclaves to legally go to school, to hospital or to market. Complicated agreements for policing and supplying the enclaves had to be drawn up (a 1950 list of products that could be imported into the enclaves contained such items as matches, cloth and mustard oil).

In a classic example of a vicious circle, residents of enclaves need visa to cross the other country’s territory towards the ‘mainland’, but since there aren’t any consulates in the enclaves, they should go to one in the ‘mainland’ - which they can’t because they don’t have a visum. Illegal border crossings are frequent, but dangerous – a number of transgressors have been shot by border guards. Furthermore, the enclaves remain a haven for criminals who are thus immune from the justice system of the country surrounding the enclave – exactly as it was back in 1814. These and other problems have rendered the enclaves pockets of lawlessness and poverty compared to their already relatively poor motherlands.

Since the issues of sovereignty, territorial integrity and especially the unwillingness to let the other side seem to ‘win’ is so sensitive for both India and Bangladesh, the Cooch Behar enclave complex probably isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. There is one example of progress, however: the Tin Bigha corridor, connecting a Bangladeshi enclave with its ‘mainland’ - although it took twenty years to happen, met heavy opposition and cost people’s lives.

Meanwhile, I’ve found a map that looks nice – and strange – enough to post here, although it suffers from the first defect aforementioned (too big). It shows, roughly, three enclave hotspots:

• First, and westernmost: an (mainly Indian) archipelago of enclaves, the Indian ones surrounded by the Bangladeshi administrative areas of Pochagar, Boda, Debiganj and Bomar. There are a few Bangladeshi dots in the Indian area of Jaipalguri. And at least three pink (Indian) dots apparently on the Indian side of the border - I’m not sure what that means.
• Secondly, and centrally: a mixed Indo-Bangladeshi archipelago, consisting of a number of Indian enclaves inside the administrative area of Patgram - which itself is a Bangladeshi protrusion into Cooch Behar (but contiguous with Bangladesh proper). To the east, north and west of Patgram, and therefore within India, are a number of Bangladeshi enclaves.
• Lastly, to the east: again a mixed archipelago, but more spread out than the previous two, with Indian exclaves inside the Bangladeshi districts of Lalmanirhat, Phulbari, Kurigram and Bhurunghamari and Bangladeshi exclaves inside the Indian districts of Dinhata, Cooch Behar proper and Tufanganj.

The map, found here on Jan Krogh’s very interesting GeoSite, shows many enclaves-within-enclaves (see post #60 on this blog on Madha and Nahwa for a clearer map of what that looks like) and indicates one enclave-within-enclave-within-enclave (#51 on the map, quite possibly the only one such counter-counter-enclave in the world). The map has several drawbacks: it doesn’t show a scale, making it difficult to size up the area depicted; there are no names next to the numbered enclaves; and those numbers only go up to 129, as far as I can see. That’s 69 enclaves less than the total mentioned above (106 Indian + 92 Bangladeshi = 198 enclaves).

That total, and most of the text for this post, is based on the relevant passage of Evgeny Yuryevich Vinokurov’s ‘Theory of Enclaves’ (2005, 272 p.). Vinokurov is a Russian postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He’s apparently based in Kaliningrad and (hence) interested in enclaves and exclaves.

Vinokurov’s bit about Cooch Behar is based on ‘Waiting for the Esquimo’ (2002, 519 p.), an exhaustive case study of the Cooch Behar enclave complex by Brendan Whyte, an Australian political geographer based at the University of Melbourne.

Finally, in this text I’ve used the words enclave and exclave interchangeably, which I think is allowed: one country’s enclave (foreign territory within one’s own) quite literally is another country’s exclave (own territory surrounded by another country’s).

109 - The ‘Schweizer Réduit’: Hard-Core Switzerland

One of the most famous quotes about Switzerland –probably annoying the hell out of the natives by now – is the closing line of the film ‘The Third Man’:

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The line was not in Graham Greene’s original script and was inserted by Orson Welles, who himself plays Harry Lime, the character making the remark. Welles did not invent this witticism, stealing it from Mussolini. And Mussolini was wrong on several counts. For one, the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock – that honour should go to the artisans of the Black Forest. And Switzerland wasn’t always peaceful, experiencing its share of civil strife. In fact, Swiss mercenaries had such a reputation for efficiency in battle that the Papal Guard to this day still is composed solely of (Roman catholic) Swiss men.

The Swiss have always prided themselves on their military prowess, which allowed them to remain neutral throughout most of Europe’s wars. Of course, the indomitable alpine terrain helped too: the mountains dominating (most of the southern part of) the country make it very difficult for any would-be conqueror to subdue the locals, who know every nook and cranny of it.

In the Second World War, the Swiss, completely surrounded by fascist forces (in fact, the only Axis-free country in continental Europe – except for that other Swiss-guarded European state, the Vatican), took precautions to ensure national survival in case of an Axis attack. They drew up plans for a Swiss National Redoubt, alternately called ‘Réduit suisse’ in French, and ‘Schweizer Réduit’ or ‘Alpenfestung’ in German.

The ‘Schweizer Réduit’ was similar in concept to other fortification chains constructed at that time in Europe: the Maginot-line by the French, the Siegfried-line by the Germans and others by the Czechoslovaks, Belgians and Dutch in the nineteen thirties. Those giant fortifications seem to prove the adage that armies are forever planning to fight the previous war: the chains of forts anticipate a static conflict such as the First World War and not the extremely mobile ‘Blitzkrieg’ that would be the hallmark of German conquests in Europe.

The Swiss national defence plan consisted of three stages: reinforcing the borders with new forts, preparing for a ‘Verzörgerungskrieg’ (delaying war) in the relatively level middle of the country and establishing an impregnable zone, the Réduit proper, in the high Alps. If necessary, roads and bridges would be destroyed to secure the Réduit. From this zone, Swiss sovereignty would have to be reestablished in occupied Switzerland after the war.

After the capitulation of France on July 12, 1940, Switzerland was entirely surrounded by Axis forces, and started finalising the Réduit. Impressed by the German Balkan campaign of April 1941, in which the Wehrmacht conquered Yugoslavia and Greece in a mere 23 days, the Swiss army high command further reinforced the Réduit by concentrating even more troops in it – effectively giving up the ‘Mittelland’, the economically and demographically most important lower-lying areas of central Switzerland.

By 1945, the Réduit’s construction had cost the equivalent of 406 million of today’s euros. Generally known to cover the most mountainous quarter of the territory (except most of the cantons of Graubünden and Tessin/Ticino), the exact borders of the Réduit remained a military secret until the mid-1990s.

The secrecy surrounding the Swiss alpine refuge gave rise to many rumours and legends, like the story about a top-secret military airstrip built into the mountainface, with an opening in the rock big enough to allow fighterplanes to exit and enter. Another story maintains mount Gotthard is so riddled with tunnels (like the proverbial Swiss cheese) that one could enter at Erstfeld in the north and emerge at Bodio in the south.

The Swiss national redoubt has contributed to the national self-image of Switzerland as a small, bravely defended island of peace amidst a sea of threats and wars. Post-1945, this national myth helped sustain the military doctrine of fortification as national defence against the communist threat. Yet the Réduit-strategy has also been criticised recently, as a capitulation to the Reich, sacrificing the big cities and large parts of the population to a German invasion.

This map, taken here from German-language Wikipedia, shows stage-one fortifications (dotted lines) and the stage-three ‘Alpenfestung’ area (full line).