Mid-Afternoon Map: In Search of the Civilizational State

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible. *** For the last century or two, the nation-state has been the global gold standard as far as stateliness was concerned. Almost every state claimed to embody the political aspirations of a particular nation: France was the state of the French nation, Turkey was the state of the Turkish nation, and