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altmaps β A Greater (and reorganized) Switzerland
#cartography #geography #map #switzerland #althistory
Published: 2018-02-16 19:47:47 +0000 UTC; Views: 7591; Favourites: 94; Downloads: 95
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Description
I've been enjoying drawing these irredentist maps lately, so here's another one. Switzerland is expanded with Vorarlberg (Austria), parts of Savoy and Ain (France), Valtellina/Sondrio province (Italy), and Liechtenstein. Most of these territories have at some point in time either been claimed by Switzerland, or a serious local political movement existed seeking accession to the confederation. Valtellina was part of Switzerland until 1815.While I was at it, I've also reorganized the main administrative divisions: abolishing the cantons (sacrilege, I know!) and merging them together into provinces; and where appropriate, splitting off parts along linguistic boundaries. Why, you ask? Just for the heck of it.
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Comments: 30
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Interesting.Β I never knew about Swiss claims.Β In my own alt-Switzerland, the only thing I added was the arrondissement of Gex from France.
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Really cool map, love the terrain, how did you do it?
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I used osm-wms.de/ , which projects terrain data on top of OpenStreetMaps. Which is convenient because I use OSM myself to create my basemaps, and thus avoid issues arising from differing map projections.
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Thanks for the tip. How do I look at the hillshade without getting a bunch of broken images with a pink overlay?
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Right, that requires some fiddling with the site's CSS using your favourite browser's development tools.
(Specifically you'll want to add a CSS rule for the olTileImage class, setting opacity to 1 and specifying !important in order to override existing CSS rules.)
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Oof not sure exactly how to do that, u using Chrome?
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Sorry for the late reply, I had other concerns than DeviantArt lately.
My browser of choice is Firefox, but here's how to do it in Chrome:
- Go to osm-wms.de and make sure you have the hillshade base layer enabled;
- Open the development toolbar by pressing F12;
- In the 'Styles' pane, click on the plus (+) button to add a CSS style;
- Type .olTileImage as the name of the style;
- Click on the newly created style and type opacity: 1 !important.
You should now have some perfectly usable hillshading to rip for your maps!
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Thank you so much, can't wait to start using it, a great help!
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Good work! Really nice map! I think Switzerland should not exist or not include French-speaking and Italian-speaking areas, so it can be made bigger on those sides easily... You removed small absurd cantons and created a more rational division according to languages that are spoken. It's a very smart work. Switzerland is a very curious country and it's funny making maps about it, I elaborated some maps about alternate Switzerland.
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If you abolish cantons you can simply say this is not Switzerland as wellβ¦
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A country does not cease to exist if its subdivisions are reorganized. Was the Helvetic Republic "not Switzerland"? Not in name, no, but there was clear continuity with the Old Confederacy, and subsequently with the restored confederacy. That's "Switzerland" enough for me.
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Ok, should have phrased it better, i'm sorry i was a bit too harsh.
What i mean by that is that abolishing cantons is clearly strongly going against the national spirit. They represent a big background of tradition and identification in the course of many century.Β
In that Sense, the Helvetic Republic wasn't really Switzerland, but a foreign imposed tyranny. It didn't went well for a reason. Also it was somewhat more respectful of what previously existed than what you're proposing.
In the same vein, the French Kingdom for me died when they abolished the provinces and the Netherlands are not really the same since the end of the United Provinces.Β
Sometime regime and nationhood have a fuzzy distinction. For example, if tomorrow The United States became a centralized Empire or something, it would cease to be the United States. I know it's a bit cheating cause the United States literally use their internal subdivision as name but for me it philosophically apply to many other countries.
Switzerland historically is litteraly that : the league of canton, the confederation. Swiss is a name based upon one of them by some convenience.
If the Switzerland you're showing is still a federation and that the Provinces are "Land" instead, i might consider it more as Switzerland.
I salute some of the choices you made like the Jura province or bigger Ticino or Geneva. Some other are a bit weird. Like Give the whole Aargau to Zurich.
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No worries, I fully understand your point of view!
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I agree with most of the things, the problem is that the respective linguistic countries should be represented somehow, in my opinionβ¦ A way to do that is making the head of state or government of each of the three national states the head of state of the canton with the given language, even thought cantons will still be part of the Swiss Confederationβ¦
Or just partition it
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If you're really merciful in your messing with other's afair just partition already, cause having a belgium-like regime is so much worse than that.
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well, Italian part wouldnβt change that much, there would only be the annexation of Valtellinaβ¦
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Not saying it's a good thing, but it seemed interesting and that's pretty much the thing that drives my mapmaking.
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Admittedly I haven't given any thought as to how this should be administrated. ^^
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I agree it would make some cultural sense, but as far as I know this has never been an actual discussion (which was my criterion for the territories added on my map).
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I've heard it that some Prussian statesmen were against annexing Alsace, saying that giving it to Switzerland is better than annexing
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The only thing we could imagine is that somehow Mulhausen become more powerful, conquer surrounding countryside and as an ally of the Confederation become part of it later.
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I deliberately left out MΓΌlhausen because I'm not a fan of exclaves 
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Indeed, i was just imagining some scenario where a rataching of Elsass would have been partially possible.
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Loving the unified Italian-speaking regions, but I do have to point out that a lot of the Cantons were divided based on religion, which was historically the biggest problem in Switzerland, what with the various enclaves and exclaves of Protestants and Catholics......
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I know, I didn't fully think this one through
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