Copyright
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020
Copyright © Gideon Defoe 2020
Artwork © Joy Gosney 2020
Cover map © Joy Gosney 2020
Gideon Defoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008393854
Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008393885
Version: 2020-07-10
Dedication
For Elise
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chancers & Crackpots
The Kingdom of Sarawak
The Kingdom of Bavaria
The Islands of Refreshment
The Kingdom of Corsica
The State of Muskogee
The Republic of Sonora
The Kingdom of Araucanía & Patagonia
The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace
The Principality of Trinidad
The Fiume Endeavour
The Kingdom of Sedang
Mistakes & Micronations
The Republic of Cospaia
New Caledonia
The Principality of Elba
Franceville
The Republic of Vemerana
The Soviet Republic of Soldiers & Fortress-Builders of Naissaar
Neutral Moresnet
The Republic of Perloja
The Quilombo of Palmares
The Free State of Bottleneck
The Tangier International Zone
Ottawa Civic Hospital Maternity Ward
Lies & Lost Kingdoms
The Republic of Goust
Poyais
The Great Republic of Rough & Ready
Libertalia
The Kingdom of Sikkim
The Kingdom of Axum
Dahomey
The Most Serene Republic of Venice
The Golden Kingdom of Silla
Khwarezmia
Puppets & Political Footballs
The Republic of Formosa
The Republic of West Florida
Manchukuo
The Riograndense Republic
Maryland in Africa
The Republic of Texas
The Congo Free State
Ruthenia (Carpatho-Ukraine)
The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva
The Republic of Salò
The German Democratic Republic
Bophuthatswana
The Republic of Crimea
Yugoslavia
Flags
Anthems
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Also by Gideon Defoe
About the Author
About the Publisher
Introduction
Generous to a Fault, they Died Doing What they Loved, Exporting Tin
Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s because they were too ludicrous to exist in the first place. Every so often they explode violently. A few slip away unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either ‘got too greedy’ or ‘Napoleon turned up’. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.
These are the obituaries of the nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. A book about dead nations can’t really do that, because it’s impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff – there’s far too much of it. The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers, racists, racist chancers, con men, madmen, people trying to get out of paying taxes, mistakes, lies, stupid schemes and a lot of things that you’d file under the umbrella term of ‘general idiocy’. Because of this – and because treating nation states with too much respect is maybe the entire problem with pretty much everything – these accounts do not respectfully add to all the earnest flag-saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags are.
If you’re a contestant on Pointless and want a book that sticks to a firm definition of what a country is, you are owed an apology.* You could write a very dry essay on all the failed attempts to define what counts as a ‘country’, and if very dry essays are your thing then there are already a fair few out there. None of them get particularly close to an answer. There is something in biology called ‘the species problem’. The problem being: after years of arguing about it, nobody can agree what criteria actually define a ‘species’. Countries are no different. We switch definitions depending on whether we’re at the United Nations, playing football, singing in Eurovision or buying cheese. It’s a mess.
Having said that, here are some arbitrary rules: I’ve avoided delving too far into the past, because talking about ancient places as ‘nation states’ is sort of meaningless when the idea itself didn’t exist until the last few hundred years. I’ve ignored empires and colonies. I’ve left out places where the name has changed but the shape on the map has stayed the same. I’ve then immediately forgotten those rules by including Silla, Axum, New Caledonia and the Congo Free State. Please address angry letters about that to Richard Osman or the UN Secretary-General. Or just pretend it’s ‘in the tradition of Herodotus’, which is a fancy way of saying that the story is more important than getting bogged down in endless caveats (caveat: caveats are good, and you should be rightfully suspicious of anything that tries to sum up the history of a place in 500 words).
If ex-nations seem unimportant in the big scheme of things then it’s worth remembering that, like a Marvel superhero cash cow, countries don’t always stay dead. Humans live in a constant state of changing their minds about the type and number of other humans they want to be categorised with, so we oscillate from tiny blobs to huge empires and back again, and there’s no reason to assume that process will ever stop. Within a decade, some of these geographical zombies might claw their way out of the graveyard and back into the atlas.
Please send hard currency in lieu of flowers. ALL HAIL NEUTRAL MORESNET.
A note on the locations: These maps use the what3words geocoding system. Instead of latitude and longitude, a set of three randomly assigned words can be used to uniquely identify the location of anything in the world, down to a resolution of three metres squared. One of the benefits of this is that it’s much easier to remember three words than a string of numbers.
Visit what3words.com for more information.
* Another apology: a lot of these places are the stories of Posh White Guys, which is an unavoidable product of a time when only Posh White Guys felt entitled enough to go and set up countries.
Chancers & Crackpots
The Kingdom of Sarawak
1841–1946
Population: between 8,000 (1841) a
nd 600,000 (1946)
Capital: Kuching
Languages: English, Iban, Melanau, Bidayuh, Sarawak Malay, Chinese
Currency: Sarawak dollar
Cause of death: sold to the British
Today: part of Malaysia
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While still a school kid, James Brooke declared his intention to run away to sea. He got as far as his gran’s garden in Reigate. This combination of a lust for adventure, being slightly overdramatic and messing stuff up would be the main themes running through the rest of his life.
No less determined to see the world by the time he was a teen, he joined the army, where his glorious military career ended as soon as it began. Charging into battle he was immediately shot, possibly in the lung, possibly somewhere significantly worse.*
After a painful recuperation, Brooke tried again. He already knew that his fabulously wealthy father was a soft touch, because when his brother had asked for an elephant, Brooke Senior obligingly had one shipped over at huge expense. James didn’t want an elephant. He wanted a boat. Daddy obliged.
With his new toy, Brooke sailed for Borneo: the nineteenth-century poster child for savage, lush exoticism. The indigenous population, the Dayak, was divided into complicated rival factions, constantly skirmishing with each other, though mostly in the form of violent dance-offs. Brooke successfully played the competing groups against each other – taking the side of the ‘land dayaks’, rather than the piratical ‘sea dayaks’ (a terminology that he invented). Bringing a measure of order to the local chaos, he was awarded a chunk of territory by a grateful Sultan of Brunei, who had wrongly assumed that Brooke, very much a private citizen chancer, somehow represented the British Empire. He was also given a pet orangutan called Betsy.
Aged just 38, he had his own kingdom. ‘I am really becoming a great man, dearest mother,’ Brooke wrote in a letter home, displaying all the modest self-effacement that rich English Victorian white dudes are generally famous for. But in an era of greedy Brits abroad, Brooke only registers as about a five-out-of-ten on the Imperialistic Git scale. He seems to have genuinely wanted the best for ‘his people’, albeit in the patronising paternalistic way of the time. He set up a court of justice to bring law to his new domain, and famously sentenced a man-eating crocodile to death (because, though he respected and sympathised with the animal, he didn’t want the other crocodiles to get the wrong idea about what was ‘acceptable behaviour’). The local Dayak population were keen headhunters,† an activity Brooke tried semi-successfully to discourage – and however much of a cultural relativist you are, that’s probably not the worst thing in the world.
At first, Brooke became a national hero back in Britain. But in a rare bit of imperial navel-gazing, some wondered if swanning off and starting your own kingdom was perhaps a Bit Much. Political enemies accused him of massacring innocents. Brooke claimed they were pirates. There was an enquiry, which in the usual style of government enquiries quickly got bogged down in weird little details, like trying to define what a pirate was. Did pirates have to have sails? What if they just had paddles? Predictably, nothing came of it.
Sarawak slid into debt, and Brooke’s local crush‡ was killed during a Chinese insurrection. He became increasingly depressed and hoped the United Kingdom would buy the country off him, but they weren’t keen. So the rule of the ‘White Rajahs’ bumbled on, with the title passing to Brooke’s nephew, Charles, who did a decent job of getting the place back on its feet, and whose most distinguishing feature was a glass eye (purchased at a taxidermist’s and intended for an albatross – though one rumour suggested that he had a range of different fake eyes from different creatures, to wear according to his mood). Charles in turn was succeeded by his son, Vyner. Vyner had a difficult time of it. He had been forbidden from eating jam as a child because his dad deemed it ‘effeminate’ and grew up so socially anxious that he would hide from guests in a cupboard. Hiding in a cupboard wasn’t going to be enough to avoid World War II and the Japanese invasion that came with it. Vyner fled to Australia. Once the war was over he briefly regained his kingdom, only to find it bombed to bits. With nothing left in the Sarawak coffers to rebuild, Vyner faced up to the inevitable. He finally persuaded the British to take it off his hands in exchange for a big lump of cash and all the jam he could eat.
* Probably lies: it seems likely that, in an era when homosexuality was punishable by death, the rumour that Brooke had been shot through the penis was just a neat way to explain away his perpetual bachelordom.
† The Dayak viewed headhunting as means of consecrating important events. It was considered extreme bad luck not to give a human skull to your wife at the birth of your child.
‡ James Brooke seems to have fallen for the local rajah’s brother, Badrudeen, and wrote a lot of torturously evasive diary entries about him.
The Kingdom of Bavaria
1805–1918
Population: circa 6.5 million (1910)
Capital: Munich
Languages: Bavarian, Upper German
Currency: Bavarian gulden, German goldmark
Cause of death: bad genes and Bismarck
Today: part of Germany
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Every morning, Ludwig II, the fourth King of Bavaria, would have his barber tease out his hair into a weird bouffant that made his head look massive. He claimed that without his daily coiffure he could not enjoy his food. If a servant happened to accidentally stare at him and his big hair for too long, Ludwig would empty a washbasin over them. That’s what a few hundred years of royal inbreeding gets you.
Bavaria existed as part of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, but it was only after Napoleon steamrollered Austria in 1805 that it became a kingdom. The relatively normal King Maximilian helped defeat the French and managed to expand the country’s borders as a reward for his troubles. Maximilian was followed by his son Ludwig. Ludwig I was both a patron of the arts and a notorious lothario* (he commissioned a series of portraits of ‘famous beauties of the day’) but the old lech (61) met his match in Lola Montez (28). An Irish dancer posing as an exotic Andalusian, Lola had already barrelled through Europe, leaving chaos in her wake. She’d caused a riot in Warsaw, shocked high society in Paris, and had a scrape with the cops in Berlin. When she arrived in Munich she shacked up with Ludwig and persuaded him to liberalise the place, which didn’t win him many friends among the ultra-conservative Catholic aristocracy. At the same time, revolutionary fervour swept through Europe in 1848, and Ludwig, besieged from all sides, decided to abdicate, correctly guessing that a nice retirement pottering around his garden would be a lot more fun than being a head of state.†
His son, Maximilian II, valiantly tried to keep the kingdom from getting hoovered up by Otto von Bismarck, who was now embarked upon his grand project to unify Germany under a dominant Prussia. But the new king inconveniently died young in 1864, which brought on the reign of Ludwig II and his big hair. It’s unfair to say that Ludwig didn’t care about ruling Bavaria – he worked quite hard at the job – but it certainly wasn’t where his heart lay. That was with opera. More specifically, the operas of genius/all-round horrible anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Ludwig was Wagner’s number-one fan. He built his idol a world-famous opera house. He wrote stacks of letters to the composer, none of which contain a single joke. He almost bankrupted himself constructing over-the-top fairy-tale castles (sketched out by Wagner’s stage designer). Contemporary wags started referring to Wagner as ‘Lola Two’. Faced with the task of having to juggle loyalties to wily Bismarck and the Austrians, all Ludwig wanted to do was run away with his pal to Switzerland. He backed the wrong side in the Austro-Prussian War, and by 1870 had been forced, distracted by toothache, to join victorious Prussia’s North German Confederation.‡ He at least managed to maintain a degree of independence for his kingdom – they kept their own army, railways and postal service, and he could go
on building his fantastically camp castles.
The strain of trying to navigate Bavaria’s path through the tangled politics of the times started to show. The revisionist take is that Ludwig wasn’t mad in any medically recognised way, but that his doctors plotted with political enemies to label him as such. It’s impossible to say, though nobody disputes that he became troublingly erratic and, if not mad, then certainly a bit of a dick. He took to ordering people to be executed for sneezing (orders which were quietly ignored). At one point he tried to hire bandits in a bizarre scheme to capture the Prussian crown prince and have him ‘chained up in a cave’. He’d organise expensive performances of plays for which he was the only audience member.§
Concerned ministers or political rivals (delete at your discretion) decided enough was enough and took him away to be ‘cured’. Locked in the grounds of Berg Castle, Ludwig went for an evening walk with his physician. The bodies of both men were found a little later floating in the nearby lake. Whether misadventure or suicide or good old-fashioned murder, the kingdom wouldn’t recover. The title officially passed to Ludwig’s brother Otto at first, but he was definitely insane, and so his uncle Luitpold ruled as regent. For the next few years Bavaria passively slipped further and further into the clutches of the German Empire, almost without anyone noticing. It was an oddly underwhelming end for such a headline-grabbing dynasty.
* Ludwig I’s wedding was the first Oktoberfest. Bavaria would later make the adoption of its beer purity law a condition of joining the German Empire.
† After her stint in Bavaria, Lola headed to California where appreciative miners would supposedly throw gold nuggets at her.