After watching this video, I realized how little I’d considered the hidden assumption of nation states in worldbuilding. I am pleased to have avoided some of the issue by actually writing about some of the people who live outside of established kingdoms, but I do think I need to consider the subject more deeply with regard to nature vs civilization. What are your impressions and thoughts?
I just recently came to the same conclusion the hard way. Trying to find the historically accurate method of national borders, and finding scant details.
My background on the subject is not deep, but I am given to understand that national borders came into existence with the idea of the “nation state”, and not all borders came into existence at once: https://vividmaps.com/the-age-of-borders/
If you look over old maps, it seems there was less emphasis on borders, and more emphasis on named areas, roads, rivers, etc. The implicit choice of what area your map covers is enough context to address the idea of a border. After all, if your map is ‘diegetic’ (made by someone from inside your world) it was made with implicit political and cultural leanings, or even an overt agenda. In my early maps of my world, there was a town labelled “Aphallon” even though it was only called that during a colonial occupation and is considered deeply uncouth to refer to that town as such now. I eventually went back and changed it, since my map is not diegetic. It would be fun to make a series of maps that live inside the setting, but my cartography workflow is too labor intensive for it right now so I’m deciding to make my map a more neutral “outside looking in” sort of device.