Why are countries in Europe relatively small compared to countries in the rest of the world.

Question

Kind of a showerthought, at the same time. I honestly have no idea.

In: Other

Answer 1

Because the small countries in Europe drew the borders on the maps on most of the rest of the world.

If you tried to draw a political map other continent before Europeans invaded and colonized them, you would find hat often the locals did not share the same sort of mindset that mad drawing borders on a map a thing and in as far as hey did, they had similarly small sovereign ‘nations’.

There is a reason why there are some many Nigerian princes, Because there were so many small political entities that could be considered tribes or their own kingdom.

Many lines on maps were drawn by British and French and other Europeans without any regard for the different groups of people who lived there.

Also there is no reason to draw borders where nobody lives.

[If you look at this map from wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Countries_by_area.svg/800px-Countries_by_area.svg.png)

You will find that places like Russland or Brazil or Canada or Australia and the United Sates are huge. They in part are big because they include the former territory of large numbers of independent tribes/nations, but also because they include huge chunks of places where very few people live like the rain forest or the Siberian tundra or the Austraian outback or Canada frozen North or the American Mid-West.

Similarly the Sahara has a number of mid-sized countries in it but only smaller parts of those countries are habited.

At the same time Europe is consolidating. Look at maps from a couple of generations ago and how many different countries there were in what is now Italy or Germany.