| The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002. |
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| World Geography |
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| Most of today’s nations did not exist as independent states a century ago. As late as 1914, empires covered much of the world. Britain, France, and Germany held large parts of Africa as colonies. Britain also had colonies in Asia, including India. Vietnam and Cambodia were part of French-controlled Indochina. Even small European nations such as Belgium, The Netherlands, and Portugal had African colonies. The Austro-Hungarian empire included the former Czechoslovakia and parts of the former Yugoslavia. The Ottoman Empire or Turkish empire spread across much of the Middle East, including Palestine. Extending from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian empire was colossal in size. | 1 |
| The defeat of the Central Powers (primarily Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) in World War I led to a redrawing of the map of the world. For example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia became independent nations; Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria were carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Poland, intermittently independent before 1914, again became a nation-state. The aftermath of World War I, however, did not bring independence to the African and Asian colonies of the European powers. Nationalism swept the Third World after World War II. For example, Algeria, Tunisia, and Vietnam all gained independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1960s, a score of nations in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly colonies and protectorates of Britain and France, achieved independence, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. | 2 |
| The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 led to new changes in the world’s map. East and West Germany were unified. The Soviet Union, which gradually had taken over the former Russian empire, disintegrated and left in its wake a host of former provinces (called republics) that are now independent, including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine. The so-called Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—once part of the Russian empire, independent between the two world wars, and forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940—again are independent. No longer the center of a czarist or communist empire, Russia is now an independent nation. Most recently, the former Yugoslavia provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia have declared their independence. | 3 |
| For the United States and its possessions, see under “American Geography.” —J.F.K. | 4 |
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| | | The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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