The plate
Presentation renders; photographs follow with the first printing.
Drawn Borders
The Radcliffe Line — five weeks of drawing, a century of consequence
No payment now. A reservation holds your place in the first printing. Pricing is published on this page at opening — the list simply hears first. Once the press opens, plates print to order and dispatch in 2–3 working days.
The pattern
In the summer of 1947 a London barrister who had never been east of Paris was given five weeks to draw a line through 400,000 square miles and 88 million people. The Radcliffe Line cut Punjab and Bengal along hurried census tables; some fourteen million people crossed it in the largest migration in history, and the two states it created have fought four wars — three of them over the one region the line never settled. The plate outlines the state the pen made. And yet lines drawn against the grain are not the only dangerous kind: old, ‘natural’ borders have started wars too.
This pattern also governs
- Sykes–Picot — the Middle East’s straight lines, drawn in London and Paris in 1916
- The Berlin Conference — Africa divided at a table in 1884–85, by men who had mostly never been
- The Durand Line — the 1893 border Afghanistan has never fully accepted
- The 38th parallel — a latitude picked in half an hour in 1945 — now the world’s hardest border
The living map
Every printed plate carries a small engraved code in the colophon corner. Scan it and the plate opens as a living map — the story, the interactive atlas, the daily challenge — at cartogram.earth/p/drawn-borders. Prefer a clean margin? Reserve with the no-mark option and the code ships on the colophon card instead. See the place in the atlas →
Shipping & returns
Printed to order at fine-art plants in the US and EU. Prints ship flat or in a rigid, double-walled tube; framed plates ship boxed with corner protection. Dispatch is 2–3 working days from the press opening. A plate damaged in transit is reprinted free, from a photo — no return postage, no argument. Exact shipping rates are published with launch pricing.
The edition
The Pattern Index is an open edition, printed to order. A cased Portfolio Edition of 250 — all fourteen plates, numbered, with a fifteenth key plate — follows the singles.
