A History of the World in 47 Borders

A fascinating and surprising history of the world told through the lines people have drawn on maps, described by Richard Osman as 'an absolutely incredible present for anyone who's interested in the world at all, which is sort of all of us' (The Rest Is Entertainment podcast)

* * * Pre-order Jonn Elledge's 31 Inventions that Built Our World - a fascinating delve into the history of the city * * *

'Fascinating' TOM HOLLAND

'A delight from start to finish' MIRANDA SAWYER

'A novel and fascinating perspective on world history' BILL BRYSON

'By turns surprising, funny, bleak, ridiculous, or all four of those at once' GIDEON DEFOE

'I love this book; I love Jonn Elledge; I love the way he looks at the world' MARINA HYDE

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does - and about the scale of human folly.

From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.

The Sunday Times No 1 Bestseller April 2025

More praise for 47 BORDERS:
'You'll never look at a map the same way again' STEPHEN BUSH
'[A] clever, confounding history' PATRICK MAGUIRE
'A witty grand tour' DORIAN LYNSKEY
'Warm, funny and sharply political' PHIL TINLINE

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and the author of three books, including the #1 international bestseller A History of the World in 47 Borders. He’s also a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers, and has written more than 200 editions of his weekly Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He lives in London, with the best dog in the world.