John Elage, you've got a book out that's about the lines that we draw on maps to define ourselves.

So yes, it's called the History of the World in 47 Borders, the stories behind the lines in our maps.

It starts with the unification of ancient Egypt in about 3,000 BC, which is the oldest international border I could find,

and it goes all the way up to the space race in the last few years between Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and arguments about where space begins and what that might mean for the future.

If you put the words map of the world into a search engine, you will almost certainly be given a series of different maps which show the countries of the world.

These are kind of a bit fake,

and if an alien was looking at this,

or if like an animal is thinking about the world,

they're not gonna see those lines.

They're very much kind of intellectual constructs.

But they have been there in some form for the whole of human history

so do nation states create borders or do borders create nation states? It's actually very difficult to kind of come to a

simplistic conclusion which is why of course

everyone should read the book a history of the world in 47 borders by John

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