How are borders decided?

[osprey]

When there is an obvious division such as a river or a range of mountains then it is clear. However, borders that are lines are more difficult to understand. Can anyone enlighten me? This applies to counties/states as well as countries.

[spudqueen]

I believe that there was a British man (sorry, can't remember his name) who set off to divide Africa into different countries. He started off by finding out where different tribes traditionally went for water or for hunting or for different grazing lands for their cattle and put the country borders in so that people would not have to cross international borders to go about their everyday lives. However at some point he became bored/disallusioned/wanted to go home and so just stuck in straight lines which is how many of the wars between different African nations came about as the borders divided tribes traditional lands.

[maxximus]

i believe it was called " divide and conquer " and just a coinsidence they always left unpopular " baddies " in charge.

[Grunty]

In England at least, many borders have been relatively unchanged since Anglo-Saxon times and in a few cases, the original documents exist. Boundaries are described as following the edge of a wood (which may not be in the same place today) or a river (which may now follow a different course) or the boundary of the local Manor, which would be well known to the locals. In some cases, they refer to the edge of a field or to a rock etc. These features would have been well known at the time, but can be meaningless today. Then of course there are the complications when a tribe steals a bit of land from another. In the Middle Ages, there was what we would see as confusion between the boundary of someone's land and the boundary of a parish or county; many of these anomalies have since been tidied up. The Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had their effect on boundaries and are an interesting study in themselves.

[Toureman]

A lot of borders were defined in the past by whoever had the biggest and best army!