What lands have been called by names chosen to disassociate those lands from its inhabitants

Question

Historically, the name "Persia" has been applied to southern Asia to disassociate that land from the people who inhabit it, who called themselves Aran. Similarly, the name "Palestine" has been applied to the Levant, to disassociate the area from Judea. To be clear, I understand that the names existed in a sense before the broad, official application to the land, however they were officially decreed as names for the land (by foreigners) to repress the people living in the land. I am not referring to recent political events so please no flamewars! I am listing those two as examples for the sake of explanation so no need for pedantry.

Of notable development in the past century have been the return to the ancient names to both these places: Iran and Israel. What other areas were named to disassociate the lands from their inhabitants? Are there any movements to restore other such lands to their former names?

Answer 1

I think a complete reply here is impossible, because of the sheer number of such events in history. However, these events are more common after (I'd say) the French Revolution when the modern concept of "nation" was born.

The best such example (I think) is that of Turkey and Greece. Both these countries where multicultural and multilanguage in the eighteenth century. When the Greek people decided they wanted independence from Istanbul, they revived ancient history to mark their difference with Turkish speaking people, even though there is no substantial genetic difference, and most of today Turkish-speaker are in fact descendants of the Byzantine inhabitants of the same area. They went as far as trying to reintroduce Ancient Greek as the official language, but this attempt failed, for obvious reasons.

The same can be said of Turkey: Othman rulers did not view themselvs are Turks, but rather as Othmans. However in the XIX century a wave of nationalism hit Southern Europe and the Balkans, promptly inflaming the Othman Empire. The Young Turks were born, and they wanted the Turkish speaking, Sunni people to have a nation of their own - a nation as in "a culturally and ethnically homogeneous people living in a definite territory". A few decadel later we see the Greek speaking population of Anatolia "exchanged" for the Turkish speaking population of Greece: mission accomplished.

So modern Turkey was born and christened (yeah, cheap), to the detriment of most of its own non Turkish-Sunni population. They went as far as imposing to all people to adopt Turkish based surnames "Surname Law".

Notice that no judgement whatsoever is expressed in this comment.

Another modern istance is the traslation to the West of Poland after WW2. Poland lost its Eastern provinces to the USSR, and as a compensation acquired a big chunk of then Germany, promptly translating all place names in Polish.

Answer 2

Named differently from original inhabitants: America, Australia, New Zealand

Changing names: Irish people & governments don't often use the term "British Isles" to include Ireland.

The city of Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland is another example of name changes. However each tribe wants to call it by their name.

Names are a complex issue, people really like some names and really really don't like when someone else wants them to call it something else, or conversely someone else calls something by some name (e.g. Greece & Macedonia naming dispute).

Names change aswell, what was once called one thing, now people want to call it another thing. Your example of Isreal is complex because some people living in that area want to call it Palestine.

Answer 3

The best answer to your actual question I know of is Belgium. When the country was created, it was sort of a mishmash of different languages and cultures, which broke off from the Dutch because the rulers there couldn't stop themselves from trying to push their own religion and language on the inhabitants.

Given that history, they really needed a neutral name that didn't favor any one existing group. So they took their name from the Belgae, an extinct Celtic tribe that used to inhabit the area in the early Roman era.

Personally, I think it is probably a Good Thing™ to name your country geographically, rather than trying to name it after the inhabitants. After all, people move around. Naming your country after a language or ethnicity is bound to lead to people thinking that anyone who isn't of that ethnicity or language doesn't belong there. It's a short hop from that to thinking perhaps they should be gotten rid of somehow...

Let's compare this with the incident you describe about "Palestine". Originally Rome had the Jewish area as a single administrative district named Judea. This unified Jewish district revolted in 135 CE, and it took half of the entire empire's armed forces to put it down. From the Roman's point of view, this was seriously not cool.

In the aftermath they decided that it was probably a Bad Thing™ to leave the Jews in a unified province of just Jews. So they consolidated Judea with other nearby (non-Jewish) areas. They couldn't call this new heterogeneous district Judea anymore, as that would favor the Jewish residents over the non-Jewish (precisely what they wanted to avoid), so to be neutral they picked an old name name the Greeks had used for the area hundreds of years earlier. It may be true that this also ticked off the residents of the portion of the new district that used to be Judea, and it may also be true that the Romans didn't care that it did, but that was not their purpose in doing it.

Given that the new state wasn't entirely Jewish, and the intent was to govern it as a place of hetrogenious culture, I think the comparison with the choice of names for Belgium is quite apt. The only real difference is that it was imposed by a conquerer, rather than by a victorious group of local revolutionaries

Answer 4

After annexing Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany administration renamed some of Polish cities: Łódź was renamed to Litzmannstadt, Gdynia was renamed to Gotenhafen.

After 1863 and January Uprising failure, Russian administration used name Kraj Privislansky (Vistula Territories) referring to territories of former Kingdom of Poland ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_Poland )

Answer 5

USSR was mentioned in another answer as related to Poland, but USSR - and Russian Empire before 1917 - had a strong habit of doing this. As a random example:

• Kaliningrad was renamed from Königsberg after USSR annexed it from Germany following WW2

  Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after the death of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin, one of the original Bolsheviks. The survivors of the German population were expelled and the city was repopulated with Soviet citizens. The German language was replaced by the Russian language.

Answer 6

Burma/Myanmar might be a case in point, but I'm not quite sure as to what was the motivation behind the renaming.