Overview

A ruler's stroke can outlive a regime. Lines drawn to simplify empire split markets, harden identities, and make everyday life brittle. This book shows how postwar bargains turned into everyday frictions that invited strongmen, invited revolt, and set the stage for disasters we still inherit. Across regions, it explains how colonial borders functioned as political technologies, why the Versailles settlement bred grievance, and how the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Middle East Mandates fused imperial exploitation with administrative tidiness. It follows the knock-on effects of African partition, the export of Japanese imperialism, and the bureaucratic sorting that turned neighbours into problems. For readers of history, policy, and international affairs, it offers a clear framework for decoding interwar geopolitics and the mechanics of ethnic conflict history without getting lost in minutiae. You will leave with a mental model for reading maps as arguments, not facts of nature: who benefits from a line, who pays, and how such choices travel across decades. For analysts, journalists, and curious citizens, it turns cartography from background noise into a tool for seeing the world anew.

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Tariq El-Masri writes about how power hides in everyday infrastructures: in roads that reroute trade, in censuses that fix identities, and in borders that claim to tidy chaos while sowing it. Raised between port cities and desert edges, he has spent years listening to families whose lives straddle lines on maps. His work blends historical sociology with political economy to show how imperial bargains still shape modern crises. A childhood memory of tracing the old Hejaz Railway on a classroom atlas runs through his writing: a reminder that steel and ink outlast speeches. He aims to give readers tools, not slogans, for thinking about sovereignty, extraction, and the fragile promises of order.

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