Fun fact: By the outbreak of the Italo-Turkish War, the Ottomans had managed to establish garrisons in Northern Chad to counter French claims in the region

I feel so blessed to live in a time where google maps/earth is readily available

Ottoman borders are pretty satisfying, but the fact that they held the northern caucasus for so short and never completely had the black sea coast as the same time will always bother me

You forgot to cut out one of your line reads of “while this is probably the most common choice I’ve seen, they can’t even agree what dip in the map they’re making”

I prefer the "de-facto to the max" BECAUSE it is so jarring to look at. It's naturally going to prompt questions from people who aren't as well versed in history and geopolitics and thus will create a lot of teachable moments to impress upon a person what governmental control actually entails

recently in kaiserreich they changed the border from the sawblade one to the modern lybian border and i am super mad! the sawblade one makes more sense, is more unique, and is visually appealling.

"No map is wrong, No map is right, All map is map" - Map Men

I prefer the deep dip because it looks aesthetic and it is more or less accurate. It shows the oasis under control. The control over the sand isnt important at all and it doesnt makes Ottomans look bigger too.

As a Libyan, I've asked older people about this specific problem, and their answer was none of the mentioned options, in fact, they said that the most accurate map for the Othman era is something close to the contemporary one, because if you have the political control on oases in a peaceful way and the support of the residents there, you own control of all of the desert surrounded, as they're the only people capable to go there (even today I can't get into the desert without friends from these cities in south), it's maybe a little bit different for Italians with all the hostility between them and Libyan people in general, so they can take a city in the south, but they cannot move an inch outside of it.

Gradient borders for historical maps are honestly underrated. If you start the gradient at the smallest possible boundary of control and continue it to the greatest possible extent, I think that's a good representation of the situation in vague border regions. Perhaps the best approach is to only mark defacto boundary definitions: rivers, named mountains, cities and fortifications that historical texts use to mark borders. Leave anything else to be implied. If the map needs coloring, then these imprecise areas can be gradient colored.

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Fun fact: Fezzan (Fizan in Turkish) was an exile location in the Ottoman Empire, which is why the phrase "Fizan'a gitmek (going to Fezzan)" means going to a far away place in Turkish. Some versions of this saying are:

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I did a lot of research on the West African empires where the same issue applies.

I'm always fascinated by De Jure and De facto borders and seeing a vid about it is awesome. Keep up the great work EmperorTigerstar!!!!!!!

I think Solution 4 is honestly the most interesting and informative way to actually illustrate the amount a political entity actually controls by showing how much they don’t control is as helpful to understand them as showing what they do.

About shapefiles, less round borders are generally easier, because you only have to define a handful of points instead of a whole arc. Shapefiles are specifically about points, not about angles or arcs or anything, so it's a lot simpler even with the sharp turns. So, solution 2 is presumably easier to digitally map than solution 3

i have had to work with this border a lot while trying to draw de facto ww1 era maps, and i've gotten pretty consistent with it (at least for 1910 between the senussi and ottomans)

One that always intrigued me on older maps was the boundary between Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter: "boundary undefined". There's essentially nobody and nothing but sand and some rocks there.