Panhandles!

I've just been reading Peter Fleming's News from Tartary (only five years after rysmiel recommended it). Inter alia, I learned the reason for the existence of the Afghan panhandle, the long thin strip sticking out from the east of the country:

Map attribution

It was created a century ago as a buffer zone to separate the British and Russian empires, both of which were being expansionist in the area. (Q.v. Pamir Boundary Commission, which Wikipedia article does (shock! horror!) not exist.)

It occurred to me afterwards, that where you see a panhandle, there's probably an interesting story behind it: Other examples that I already knew (a little) about included the Caprivi Strip in Namibia:

This was acquired by the German Empire in 1890 in order to gain it access to the Zambezi River, which would give it a route to the east coast of Africa and the German of colony Tanganyika. Unfortunately for them, the river later proved to be unnavigable, but the panhandle remains as a fossil of the politicking them until this day. Interestingly, the treaty in which it was acquired was also the one in which Britain gave up rights to Heligoland, a group of islands off the German coast which Britain had held since the Napoleonic wars.

Then there's the Alaska panhandle, in which the British pissed off the Canadians by giving most of the territory disputed between Alaska and British Columbia to the United States, denying Canada an internal river route to a sea port from the Yukon gold fields:

And the the Oklahoma panhandle, which got chopped off Texas when it acceded to the United States due to the fact it was north of the line of latitude taken as a legal boundary for slave states. Though the territory to the east became incorporated as Indian Territory, the panhandle remained a strip of public land, not part of any territory or state, for another forty-five years, due to the fact it had not been surveyed.

I'm sure there's interesting stories about many of the world's other panhandles, too, but after the time I've just put into writing this, I'm disinclined to spend more time reading about those!

This waste of my time and yours was brought to you by Wikipedia, the blessing and curse of our age. :-S