I’m serious. I don’t understand why humans draw imaginary bidders. I don’t understand why humans fight and lose their lives defending those borders. It’s not “cultural identity”. For example, people in either side of Punjab are more similar to each other than say people in the South of India. And further, i don’t understand how countries can be bought and sold like the “Louisiana purchase”. I mean who’s paying for what? It would be great if someone could recommend some books about the idea of nationhood.
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It evolved over time.
You had the Roman Empire, which was civilized people who paid taxes, used roads, ate grain and had armies vs the barbarians, who we know little about.
Then you feudalism, monarchy, then nation states, then groups of nation states, so you abstract farther and farther from a family unit or tribe.
As trade becomes more complex, you need these abstractions to get things to work.
If you had subsistence farmers who had little in the way of trade or infrastructure, nations would be largely irrelevant
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