Why Europe is considered its own continent when it doesn’t really fit the definition of one?
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A lot of really racist colonialists decided to make a map that cuts off the white part of the world with the darker and more yellow parts of the world. This is why you see Europe all safe and sound from the evils of African and middle eastern and Asian people. Racism is honestly the biggest shaper of the modern world map we know
Lots of map making stuff was done in Europe when we didn’t understand how all this worked yet. People saw a rough divide somewhere between Asia and Europe and assumed it’s a different part. It didn’t help that culture and skin color also changed roughly along those lines. So, back then it was called a continent and just never reclassified. Changing something so engrained is hard, especially when there are politics, cultural identity, race identity (fuck those) etc involved too.
Now, while lines on a map are largely arbitrary, you also need to differentiate between the concept of continent for classification in a political/cultural sense (where separating Europe into it’s own “area” can make sense) and the sciency sense where it doesn’t (on the scale of continents and continental plates at least).
They’ve been calling Europe it’s own thing since *long* before they came up with the current dictionary definition of continents.
The idea of continents is a human invention. They aren’t really based on objective geographical rules, so much as subjective historical ideas of geography. As the people who created and spread the idea of continents were European, they generally defined Europe as its own place, separate to (and implicitly, superior to) Asia.
Short and sweet reason: the Ural mountains. The Urals are huge and long (giggity) and created a barrier between people from the east and west from having proper trade. Moreover, the landscape and geology on either side differ quite a bit. That said, depending on the subject, some people do use the term “Eurasia” to describe the actual landmass itself.
The term “Europe” goes back to the Greeks, who conventionally divided the world into Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa). This division was picked up by the Romans. However the Green and Roman worlds were more centred around the Mediterranean rather than making much of this division.
It became more important in the Middle Ages, as Europe (particularly Western Europe) developed an identity as the home of Christianity. North Africa, was now ruled by Muslims, and by the end of the Middle Ages so were the Levant and (what’s now) Turkey. Russia had its familiar ambivalent position. This political-religious division also helped push the economic balance of Europe to the North and West, and ultimately over the Atlantic. At the most extreme, Christians in Europe could imagine themselves cut off by Muslims to the South and East.
What was primarily a geographic expression thus became a cultural-religious-political one. And also a racial one, particularly as colonialism picked up pace.
We’ve inherited this use of the term “Europe”. One that’s based less on geography – “Europe” is much less clearly distinct from “Asia” than Eurasia from Africa or North and South America – and more on history and culture. (Which, of course, means that the borders of “Europe” and “Asia” are prone to being changed in a way that’s not so common with other continents.)
Because there isn’t an official, universally agreed upon, clear cut definition of a “continent.”
Have you never played RISK son ? That’s the definition.
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