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The Great British Map; Or Great Britain vs. The United Kingdom vs. The British Isles

Last night I made another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.

  • So if the ISO 3166-2 code is GBR, how come the country is called the United Kingdom?
  • But if England is a country and the United Kingdom is a country, how come England is part of the United Kingdom?
  • What about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.