There is a unique value in leisurely leafing through various historical atlases and old geographical atlases, as sometimes, an unexpected leaps up to your face. It happened to me some years ago, when I was enjoying the third volume (entitled Neuzeit, or ‘Modernity’) of the Grosser Historischer Weltatlas (1957), edited by Josef Engel for the Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag in Munich, West Germany. On the map depicting the world in 1926 (pp 180-1), I spotted, marked in distinctive blue, the polity of Tannu Tuva, squeezed between the Soviet Union and Mongolia. It does not feature on any maps of the postwar period, which is worrying, as one tends to believe that states the size of Greece should not disappear without anyone noticing. Leaving no trail of protests. Without a whimper.
But I may be wrong. Who cares about the 600 odd polities of the Holy Roman Empire or the same amount of these in the British Raj India. Human attention to detail is fickle in the West, unless changes brush off directly on the very West: as reflected in statements delivered by its politicians, and reported in newspapers of wide circulation.
Tomasz Kamusella 