Europe — The African Swap

Every European nation and the Global-South counterpart whose history it carries, on the same non-colonial border set as the African atlas. Europe carries Africa's history; the frontiers below were drawn by European peoples themselves, not by any conference.

This is the other half of Africa — the European Swap, and it is the harder half to draw, because the history Europe inherits is a history of being drawn on by other people. The continent entered the nineteenth century as it had entered the ninth — confederations, none of them large enough to protect its people, and the Saqaliba trade running out of it in three directions. It was partitioned by African powers inside thirty years, and free again inside another lifetime. What the atlas shows is the map that survived all of that.

Every European nation set against the Global-South counterpart whose history it carries, on the non-colonial border set. ✦ marks a custom nation with no single counterpart outside the timeline and ✻ a territory outside the African sphere entirely; Sápmi is hatched because its jurisdiction crosses four frontiers rather than replacing them. Scroll or pinch the map sideways on a phone. Coastlines and rivers after Natural Earth, relief and sea depths from ETOPO 2022 (NOAA NCEI); the frontiers are the atlas’s own, traced on those rivers and on the crests and watersheds of the great basins.

Border doctrine

Main article: Africa (Controglobe). Further information: Controglobe: the premise

Border doctrine. The rule that governs the African map governs this one, and for the same reason. No frontier here descends from a partition conference, because there was no conference: the African powers never agreed a general partition of Europe and took ports, river mouths and mining leases one treaty at a time. What survived independence was not the administrative line but the older one underneath it — the Rhine and the Danube, the Carpathian and Dinaric watersheds, the Vistula marshes, the Pyrenean and Alpine crests, the language frontier through the Low Countries, and the ceasefire lines of the 1990s in the south-east.

Two things follow that a reader of the outside timeline will miss. There is no meridian anywhere on this map and no parallel; the one straight line is the Tornio, and that is a river. And there is no exclave on the Baltic — nothing in the eastern empire's history ever put a garrison on that coast, so the province that the outside timeline detaches and hands to Moscow is simply Lithuanian and Polish ground here.

The African colonial period

Main articles: The trade in Europeans, History of the United States of Arabia. See also: the African swap list

Formal rule came late and went quickly. Kaabu had held factories on the Mediterranean shore since the sixteenth century and Kong had taken the northern coast in 1830, but the general partition took barely thirty years, from the 1870s to 1902 — Sokoto over the isles and the east, Kamerun over the Rhenish basin, the Kimfumu kya Kongo in the Low Countries and the south-east — and by 1914 only three polities on the continent answered to nobody in Africa: Russia, Switzerland and Brittany — Anatolia never being in the swap to begin with. The occupation of Russia by Manden between 1936 and 1941 briefly reduced that to two.

The African spheres in Europe about 1914, at the greatest extent of the partition: Kong in blue across the north, the west and the centre; Sokoto in red over the isles and the east; the Kimfumu kya Kongo in mustard, all of it forfeited in 1919; Kamerun in green over Rhenia; Kaabu in violet in Portugal, Montenegro and Moldova; Jolof in orange; Manden in brown. The three polities in white — Russia, Switzerland and Brittany — were never ruled from Africa, and Anatolia is grey with Cyprus and the Caucasus because it is not in the swap at all.

Who ruled where was not arbitrary, and the atlas states the pattern plainly because the tables below are unreadable without it. Every European territory that was governed from Africa was governed by the state that carries its own coloniser's role. Read backwards, the partition of Europe is the partition of Africa, with the ends exchanged.

The mirror rule, in three cases out of forty. Every European territory that was governed from Africa was governed by the state that carries its own coloniser's role — so the islands that ruled Sokoto outside this timeline are ruled from Sokoto inside it, and the pairs simply exchange ends. The rule is what keeps the two atlases from contradicting each other; it is not a rule anyone in the setting could have stated.

The economics ran the same way as the map. Railways were built from the mines and the plantations to the ports and not to each other, which is why a traveller from Anglia to Poland still changes trains four times and a cargo does not go overland at all. The concession companies that worked the forests of Rhenia and the copper of Croatia answered to charters granted in Africa and to courts sitting there. Europeans were conscripted into African armies for both continental wars, and fought in theatres they had no stake in: the West African and Central African campaigns are full of Rhenish and Anglian regiments, and the graves are where the fighting was.

Two African possessions on the European shore outlasted the partition. Jolof holds the presidio at Gibraltar and a fortified island off the Brittany coast; the resolution calling for their transfer is tabled at Moscow every year and has never carried.

The full swap list

Further information: Africa (Controglobe): the full swap list

✦ marks a custom nation with no single counterpart outside the timeline, and ✻ a territory outside the African swap entirely. The counterpart column names the outside-timeline country whose history the nation carries, not the Controglobe state that now occupies that ground: Francia carries the history of the Côte d'Ivoire, and the ground itself is held by Kong.

Northern Europe = Northern Africa

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Iceland	Morocco	The oldest crown in Europe, unbroken since the seventeenth century, and the one the swap leaves where the setting's own rules put it. A Kong protectorate from 1912 with a Jolofian zone in the north, independent again in 1956, and the claimant to the Faroes ever since.
Faroe Islands	Western Sahara	Jolof's until 1975. Iceland moved in when Jolof withdrew, a government in exile has claimed it from the mainland ever since, and the referendum promised in 1991 has never been held.
Norway	Mauritania	A coast longer than the state behind it, iron ore, fisheries and very few people. Kong's until 1960, divided between an Arabised coast and a southern interior that was raided from it, and the last state in Europe to abolish hereditary servitude, in 1981.
Sweden	Algeria	Not a colony but a part of Kong in constitutional law, with settler departments, its own seats in the assembly at Kong, and a war from 1954 to 1962 that killed something near a tenth of its people. A one-party state since, on the ore and gas of the far north.
Denmark	Tunisia	Small, dense and maritime; the first of the northern states to take independence, in 1956, and by negotiation rather than by war. It wrote the north's first code of equal standing for women in 1957, and the risings of 2011 began in a market town here.
Finland	Libya	A Manden colony from 1911 and the first state in Europe granted independence by international resolution, in 1951. A monarchy until the captains' coup of 1969, then four decades of a personal revolutionary state, then 2011 and a long division between two governments.

The mountain and the tundra — three nations with no single counterpart

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Switzerland ✦	the Aïr massif (Niger)	The twin of Aïr in every particular, and the clearest case in the atlas of a swap that changes nothing: a cantonal confederation of the high passes, four official languages, armed neutrality, the continent's clearing banks, and the crossings that every north–south road and pipeline must use.
Sápmi ✦	Kanem and the Tibesti (Chad)	Like Kanem, a transhumant nation whose frontiers are herding routes rather than ground held, with a parliament whose jurisdiction crosses four state borders. Reindeer instead of camels, and the same two-hundred-year argument about who owns the pasture.
Basque Country	Songhai	A language isolate, the oldest in the west, autonomous since the sixteenth century and lying across the frontier of Spain and Francia — as Songhai is the isolate of the middle Niger that neither Mali nor Kong absorbed.

Western Europe = Western Africa

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Spain	Senegal	A kingdom of the lower river and then the empire of the Wolof states, then the seat of Kong West Europe and its federal capital at Madrid, then independence in 1960 and a federation with Italy that lasted two months. A respected constitutional court, and the continent's longest insurgency, in the south.
Italy	Mali	Three medieval empires in succession on the Po, then a Kong possession from the 1890s and a federation with Spain that lasted two months in 1960. One party until 1968, a soldier's rule until 1991, twenty years admired as a democracy, then the rising in the Alpine north in 2012, the war that followed it, and three coups since.
Portugal	Guinea-Bissau	Kaabu's for five centuries, and the colony that ended the empire: the forest war of 1963–1974 brought down the government in Kaabu itself, and independence had already been declared unilaterally in 1973.
Galicia	Guinea	The one territory that voted No. Offered membership of the Kong Community in 1958 it refused, and Kong withdrew its administration inside a month, taking the telephones with it. Bauxite, a quarter-century of revolutionary isolation, and the headwaters of every great river in the west.
Aquitaine ✦	Sierra Leone	A settlement of recaptives. The people landed here from 1808 were taken off slavers bound for the Red Sea by Sokoto's squadron; the province of freedom they founded became a colony, then a state, then the ground of the diamond war of 1991–2002.
Brittany ✦	Liberia	Never ruled from Africa. Founded in 1822 by European Arabians repatriated from the Red Sea states by a colonisation society, governed for a century and a half by their descendants, and overturned by the coup of 1980 and the wars of 1989–2003.
Francia	Côte d'Ivoire	The richest of Kong's European possessions and the one that stayed closest after independence in 1960: one president for thirty-three years, a new inland capital built at his birthplace, and a garrison that never left. The wars of 2002 and 2010 were fought over who counted as Frankish.
Normandy ✦	Togo	A Kimfumu colony until 1919 and then cut in two, half to Kong and half to Sokoto; the western half voted in 1956 to join its neighbour and the rest took independence in 1960. One family held it for fifty-five years.
Ireland	Benin	A kingdom with a standing regiment of women, a century under Kong, independence in 1960 and then ten governments in twelve years; a Marxist-Leninist state from 1972 to 1990, and the first country in Europe to vote a sitting revolutionary out of office.
Anglia	Nigeria	The most populous state in Europe: an emirate in the north raised by the jihad of 1804, kingdoms in the southern forests, and one administration welded over both by Sokoto in 1914. Independence in 1960, the Humber secession and the war of 1967–1970, six military governments, and the oil of the eastern shelf.

Central Europe = Central Africa

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Rhenia	the Congo basin	The richest ground in Europe and the worst governed. Held from 1885 as the private estate of the Kamerunian sovereign, annexed by his parliament in 1908 after the rubber commission reported, independent in 1960 and in crisis within a fortnight. The wars of 1996–2003 drew in nine states.
Austria	the northern Congo	Rhenia's smaller twin across the Inn, sharing its language and refusing its union; capital of Kong Central Europe until 1958, independent in 1960, Marxist-Leninist from 1969 to 1992, and living since on the oil found under its eastern plain.
Bavaria ✦	Gabon	The third of the Rhenish-speaking crowns and the one never absorbed: forested, thinly peopled, rich per head on timber and manganese, and semi-detached from every union proposed since 1945. One president held it for forty-one years.
The Low Countries	Cameroon	One state divided by language and joined by a customs union. A Kimfumu colony until 1919, then a Kong mandate in the south and a Sokoto mandate in the north, reunited at independence in 1961 and arguing about the terms ever since; the smaller half has been in revolt since 2017.
Luxembourg	Equatorial Guinea	The third member of the union of the Low Countries and the only ground on the European mainland that Jolof ever governed. Independent in 1968, and since 1979 the wealthiest state per head in Europe and the least equal.
Poland	the Central African Republic	Landlocked between Rhenia and the eastern empire exactly as the Central African Republic sits between the Kongo and Sudan, and governed from Vienna until 1960. Diamonds, an emperor who crowned himself in 1977, and a state rebuilt from outside three times — which is the number of times its counterpart was partitioned.

Eastern Europe = Eastern Africa

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Russia	Ethiopia	The Christian empire that was never colonised, and the reason the continental union sits in Moscow. A dynasty claiming descent from the first converts, a Manden army destroyed in 1896 and a Manden occupation from 1936 to 1941, the last emperor deposed in 1974, a military council, a famine, a thirty-year war on the Baltic, and a federation of nations at war with one of its own regions twice since 2020.
Belarus	Sudan	Governed from Sokoto in condominium with Masr until 1956 and at war with itself for most of the time since. The south left in 2011, the western province has been in revolt since 2003, and thirty years of one president ended in the street in 2019.
Lithuania	South Sudan	Voted itself out of Belarus in 2011 by ninety-eight per cent and into a civil war within two years. The oil is in Lithuania; the pipeline runs through Belarus.
Estonia	Eritrea	Seceded from the empire after a war of thirty years, confirmed by referendum in 1993, and closed itself almost at once: a constitution never brought into force, no election since, and a conscription without end. The border war of 1998–2000 with Russia killed a hundred thousand people over a village.
Latvia	Djibouti	The empire's outlet to the sea under a flag of its own. A Kong territory until 1977, and since then a coaling station turned container terminal that rents ground to four foreign fleets at once.
Ukraine	Somalia	Large, coastal, herded in the east and farmed in the west, and the state that came apart most completely: a Manden colony in the south and a Sokoto protectorate in the north, joined at independence in 1960, at war with Russia over the Kuban in 1964 and 1977, and without a working central government from 1991 to 2012.
Crimea ✦	Somaliland	The northern half of the union of 1960, which took its old colonial borders back in 1991. It prints its own money, holds its own elections, and is recognised by Moscow and almost nobody else.
Romania	Kenya	South-west of Ukraine as Kenya is south-west of Somalia, and the wealthiest state in the east. A Sokoto settler colony on the Carpathian highlands, an insurgency from 1952 to 1960, independence in 1963, and one party until 1991.
Hungary	Uganda	Landlocked, fertile, and speaking a language unrelated to any of its neighbours'. Independent in 1962; the soldier who seized it in 1971 expelled the trading minority and was removed in 1979 by an invasion out of Bulgaria. It has had one president since 1986.
Czechia	Rwanda	Dense, hilly, orderly, and the site of the worst crime in modern European history: between April and July 1994 something near a million people were killed in a hundred days, from lists drawn up in advance. The movement that stopped it has governed since, and its army has twice been in Rhenia.
Slovakia	Burundi	Czechia's twin in language, landscape and the composition of its people, and its opposite in everything that followed: the same fault line, a different sequence of killings, and no single year that the rest of the world remembers.
Bulgaria	Tanzania	A Kimfumu colony until 1919 and a Sokoto mandate after it, independent in 1961 and governed for twenty-four years by a schoolmaster who built a one-party state on village collectivisation and then resigned. The most stable state in the east, the poorest of the large ones, and the one that has taken in the most refugees.

Southern Europe = Southern Africa

These are not the successor states of a federation. Where Africa has the Union of Zambezia coming apart in the 1990s, Europe has the opposite shape: separate colonies of three different powers, briefly federated from above. The Federation of the Sava joined Serbia, Croatia and North Macedonia under Sokoto in 1953 and broke in 1963, and nothing has been tried since.

Controglobe nation	Counterpart	Why
Croatia	Zambia	Long-limbed, copper-floored and the first of the three out, in 1964; a one-party state until 1991, and bankrupted twice by the price of the metal it sells.
Slovenia	Botswana	The smallest, the richest and the best run. Independent in 1966 with almost nothing, and since then diamonds, a currency that holds, and the same party returned at every election it has held.
Bosnia	Namibia	The last territory in Europe to be freed, in 1990. A Kimfumu colony from 1884 where the campaign of 1904–1907 against two of its three peoples killed most of them; then a mandate of Greece, which applied its own law of descent to it; then a war of twenty-four years; then a constitution written for three constituent peoples.
Serbia	Zimbabwe	The colony that declared its own independence in 1965 rather than accept majority rule, reached it in 1980 after fifteen years of war, seized the farms in 2000, printed a hundred-trillion note in 2008, and removed its founder by coup in 2017.
North Macedonia	Malawi	Landlocked, long, densely farmed and poor; federated with Serbia and Croatia from 1953 until the Sava broke in 1963; independent in 1964 under a president for life who was voted out at ninety-six.
Moldova	Mozambique	Kaabu's until 1975 and among the poorest states in Europe since, with the port and the railway that carry Serbia's ore to the sea. The civil war of 1977–1992 was fought hardest in the north, and the strip along the Prut has been outside the government's control since 2017.
Montenegro	Angola	A Kaabu possession for four centuries, in revolt from 1961, independent in 1975 and at war with itself for twenty-seven years after that. The oil is offshore; the rebuilding since 2002 has been paid for on credit against it, and the movement that won the war still holds the state.
Kosovo	Greater Lesotho	A Sokoto protectorate that the state around it never absorbed: independent in 1966, entirely surrounded by Serbia, and living on wool, on water sold across the frontier, and on wages earned there.
Albania	Eswatini	A Sokoto protectorate until 1968, and in no federation and no union before or since. An absolute monarchy whose parliament may advise but not legislate, decades of self-imposed isolation, a language family of its own, and a border with Greece that the crown still disputes.
Greece	South Africa	The classical civilisation of the south-east, and for three centuries two countries inside one border: a settler minority out of the Aegean ports held the mines, the coast and the franchise, and the majority were taken off the land by the mining law, registered by descent, confined to seven rural districts and kept off the roll. The rising of 1976 and the settlement of 1994 ended it. The African atlas divides the same history between the Xhosa Republic and the Cape Republic; here it stayed in one state.
Turkey ✻	Quebec, within Zagrosia	Not part of the African swap. Anatolia is Zagrosian ground and belongs to al-Mashriq, where it carries Quebec's part in the northern federation: its own language, its own civil code, and two referendums on leaving. It is in this frame because the frame reaches the straits, not because the swap does.
Sicily, Sardinia and Malta	Madagascar	One island kingdom, unified in the nineteenth century, annexed by Kong in 1896, independent in 1960 and in Italy's economic sphere since. Its language belongs to a family that arrived by sea and has no relative anywhere on the mainland.

The islands — outside the African swap

Under the Controglobe rule that the Pacific trades places with the Indian Ocean, Macaronesia and the South Atlantic, the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries are Pacific-analogue island states and not part of the African swap at all. They lie off this map to the south-west, and they are the mirror of Cape Verde and São Tomé, which the African atlas takes out of the European swap for the same reason.

Two islands are named exceptions in the rules of the setting rather than consequences of them. Iceland takes Morocco's history, which is why it appears in the northern table above and not here. Greenland takes Cyprus's, which leaves Cyprus✻ outside the African swap and inside the Arabian world: a self-governing island dependency at the far edge of somebody else's map, and the only ground in this frame that the Union of Arabia has ever been asked to garrison. The map is Ifriqiya's, the Tunisian crown that carries Denmark: the island was an independent nation until an Ifriqiyan mission and trading station made it a colony in 1721, became a county of Ifriqiya in 1953, and has governed itself since home rule in 1979 and self-rule in 2009. Turkey✻ is outside it too, and for a different reason: Anatolia is Zagrosian ground, and carries Quebec inside the northern federation. The Caucasus✻ — Georgia, Armenia and Adharbaijan — is Caribbean-analogue on the same principle, and Adharbaijan has been a state of the Union since 1959. Between them, Cyprus, Anatolia and the Caucasus are the three pieces of this map that belong to somebody else's.

The microstates

Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein and the Vatican are protected principalities: dynasties that the colonial administrations found cheaper to recognise than to abolish, on the same reasoning that preserved a hundred ruling houses across Africa's own colonial period. Every one of them kept its ruler through independence, three still hold the treaty that guarantees it, and two of the five have a larger banking sector than Luxembourg.

Independence and after

Further information: Africa (Controglobe), Motor vehicles

Finland was first, in 1951, by international resolution rather than by negotiation. Denmark and Iceland followed in 1956, Belarus in the same year, and Galicia took its independence in 1958 by voting against the Kong Community and being cut off within the month. Then came 1960, which the textbooks call the Year of Europe: seventeen states in twelve months, including Anglia, Francia, Spain, Ireland, Rhenia, Austria, Bavaria, Poland and Ukraine. The Organisation of European Unity was founded three years later at Moscow, in the one capital on the continent that had never taken orders from Africa, and its first substantive resolution, in 1964, was that the frontiers would be accepted as they stood, because every alternative anyone could think of was worse.

The Cold War was fought here by proxy, as it was fought everywhere else: Arabia and the Derg Union paid for opposite sides in Rhenia, Montenegro, Ukraine and Bosnia, and the states that came out of the period best were mostly the ones neither of them wanted. The wars came after the flags. Rhenia was in crisis within a fortnight of independence and has never fully left it; the wars of 1996–2003 there drew in nine states and are the deadliest in Europe since the caliphal centuries. Something near a million people were killed in Czechia in a hundred days in 1994. Ukraine had no working central government for twenty-one years. Estonia and Russia fought for thirty years and then, seven years after the peace, fought again for two more over a village. Montenegro's civil war ran for twenty-seven years after the Kaabu flag came down, and Serbia took fifteen years to reach majority rule and another twenty to remove the man who conceded it.

What did not change with the flags was the money. The Kong franc is still issued for fourteen states and still guaranteed, at a fixed rate, against reserves held at Kong. The continental free-trade area agreed in 2021 is the first serious attempt to make the railways point at each other. And the argument about the khidmah registers — whether the reparations question belongs to Africa, to Arabia, or to both, and whether a continent can be a claimant — has been on the union's agenda at Moscow, unresolved, since the Arabian commission reported in 2019.

What the swap leaves standing

Three nations come out of the transposition as themselves. Aïr and Switzerland are the same nation twice, and so are Kanem and Sápmi, and Songhai and the Basque Country. Each pair was written as a custom entity precisely because the thing it describes — a massif of cantons, a herding nation across four frontiers, a language isolate older than its neighbours — is a geographic fact and not a historical one, and geography does not move.

Greece arrives where it started. The classical country reaches a familiar settlement by an entirely unfamiliar road: three centuries of internal rule by a settler minority, a franchise won in 1994, and a disputed frontier with Albania that outlived both.

Poland keeps its number. Partitioned three times outside this timeline; rebuilt from outside three times inside it.

And the name survives. The continental body is still called the European Union. It has fifty-two members, it was founded in 2002 out of an organisation of 1963, and it sits in Moscow.

What this atlas settles, and what it does not

The names. Anglia, Rhenia and Francia are taken from the peoples the Saqaliba records name — Anglian, Rhenish, Frankish — and not from the states of the outside timeline. Everything else keeps the geographic name a reader can find on a map, exactly as the African atlas keeps Morocco and Algeria.

The Low Countries are one state, divided by language and joined by a customs union, with Luxembourg as its third member. The African atlas has Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea in the same arrangement; this is that arrangement seen from the other end.

Anatolia is not in this swap, and the Cape has no counterpart. Turkey used to stand opposite the Cape Republic here, which put Anatolia in two places at once: in the African swap, and inside Zagrosia, which carries Canada. Zagrosia has the older claim, so Anatolia is Zagrosian, Greece carries South Africa whole, and the Cape Republic becomes a custom nation in Africa — the only one there with no counterpart at all, rather than one whose counterpart is a region instead of a state.

Britain's role is carried twice, and this atlas does not resolve it. Hindustan carries it in the Arabian theatre and Sokoto carries it in the European one. The partition tables here follow Africa (Controglobe), which is the older article; the wider question belongs on the hub and in the issue tracker.

Nothing here settles the Faroes. The African atlas gives Saguia el-Hamra a personal union with Morocco; this one gives the Faroes a government in exile and an unheld referendum. Both are true of the same territory at different dates, and which of them is true now is exactly what the two claimants disagree about.