When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent

When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent of several thousand miles. The ascending orbit moves up its coast, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia. Africa is dusty brown in the moonlit night, sparsely clouded, and electrified by lightning across its breadth. Its city lights are discreet and scant. Maputo here, Harare there, Lusaka over there, Mombasa ahead, and each is a small heap of gold coins on a tapestried cloth, joined by nothing – no night-lit roads or urban sprawl. A beautiful velvety poverty of man on an earth that tips into the void; you feel you’d fall off, except with each new moment there’s yet more earth, and you follow its trail across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 1,825

The Empire is a multicoloured patchwork of dynastic territories compared to the solid blocks of colour used for other, supposedly, more centralised states

Nothing underscores the nineteenth-century interpretation more clearly: the Empire is a multicoloured patchwork of dynastic territories compared to the solid blocks of colour used for other, supposedly, more centralised states. Yet most maps produced prior to 1806 showed the Empire with clear outer boundaries divided into the Kreise, its official regional subdivisions. Territories were often named and sometimes marked, but did not dominate.

P.H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire (2016),  253-4