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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

>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?

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Putting it in these terms, what I'm trying to say is something like:

  geography → economy → old empire

  geography → economy → current day politics

The biggest caveat to this is that the importance of geography is conditioned by technology, and technology changes over time. So a more detailed model could be something like:

  geography + current tech → agriculture/commerce/industry/military → economy/culture → politics

See how the dominant powers changed with the shift from bronze to iron or with the development of open ocean navigation.

Makes sense.

When you said geography features, I was more thinking of natural barrier (like rivers, mountains): they were very crucial in shaping the old country border, but should have less impact today if both sides are already in the same country. So it's interesting that some of political division are still present around them, which makes me think history has its (unproportional) influence than the geography itself. But I guess it's always multi-factor and hard to tell in vacuum.

It doesn't help that in most of examples in OP, the major difference between two (old) countries is the economic one, so a certain degree of Matthew effect is there.

It's been true throughout history and is still pretty true that most people never leave the area they were born in. This would cause geography, history, and internal politics to overlap in somewhat non-obvious ways.

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