Are the maps of other countries than the U.S. dotted with the names of their former leaders?
Nearly every state of the U.S. has cities and towns whose names come from the pages of American history: Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Lincoln, and so on. We even have a state that was named after our first president and admitted to the Union a hundred years after the Constitution was ratified. This seems normal to us: we’d been through a lot of leaders before we’d finished creating and naming states and building major cities. Yet in many countries the cities and regions long preceded the ruling line. The city of London predated by more than seven centuries the reign of the first English monarch. Links between places and the names of rulers exist because the places were there first and the lords and nobles bore their names. How many countries are young enough and their major cities new enough to have been given the names of figures in their own history (without renaming existing places)? I am wondering if the names of Canadian and Australian prime ministers, French pre
