How did Europe get so many seas when North America only has lakes and bays? Why does Europe have weirdly shaped countries all over the place while North America has regions, peninsulas, islands and such? The reasons have less to do with geographical realities than with historical and cultural realities.

Take, for example, the Baltic Sea – a body of water that separates Scandinavia from the larger body of Europe. A “sea,” no less! It is bordered by a dizzying number of sovereign nations – Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Finland, Sweden – with famous cities including St Petersburg, Riga, Gdansk, and – two of the closest national capitals in the world – Tallinn and Helsinki. All these countries have different languages, which belong to four quite different language families. They are also different in other cultural traits: observing Roman Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox Christianity; traditionally drinking beer or vodka, coffee or tea. Most Finns wouldn’t thank you for saying you associate them in your mind with Russians, and most Europeans wouldn’t think of Poland and Sweden as having much in common.

But the Baltic Sea encompasses about the same area as the largest of North America’s great lakes. And other than dividing the United States from Canada, the modestly-named “lakes” just separate Minnesota from Wisconsin- from Michigan- from Ohio. Though individually bigger than some of the European countries around the Baltic, those states are very often considered together as the Midwest. Well, part of the Midwest.

And the Baltic is not, by far, the smallest of Europe’s seas. Look at the Aegean, Irish, or Adriatic Seas. Each of these divides nations that have fought and conquered each other at different times through history. And yet the seas are comparable in area to North America’s Hecate Strait, Lake Winnipeg, or Puget Sound – water features with much more unassuming names than “sea.”

Meanwhile, Europe’s famously multi-ethnic Balkan peninsula is only slightly bigger than the panhandle of Florida. European island-nations like Ireland, Iceland, or Great Britain (which contains England, Scotland and Wales) are similar in area to outlying scraps of Canada such as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Tinier still, are sea-framed countries like Cyprus and Malta – try comparing these with Nantucket, a part of Massachusetts, or New York’s Long Island.

Even the mighty Mediterranean Sea, which divides Europe from Africa, is only twice as big as Canada’s Hudson Bay. Why does one get to be a “sea” while the other is a mere “bay”?

In fact, why do we even consider Europe a continent? To be purely geographical about it, you could see it as a peninsula jutting out from the north of Africa or the west of Asia, just as Quebec or Alaska jut out from North America.

So why the difference in size perception? Of course, a lot of it comes down to population density. As any holiday shopper knows, a distance can seem dozens of times further when you have to struggle past thousands of people as you go. All the more so if everyone is shouting in different languages at you. An American motorist driving to Miami might feel like a world traveler if the journey led past a hundred million people with numerous dialects, their mosques and churches bearing the scars of recent or centuries-old conflicts.

But it’s also a matter of who gets to decide the official names for the geographical features and the locations of the political divisions. During thousands of years of development together, Europe’s many and varied cultural communities have managed to assert themselves as self-determining nation-states, recognized as such on the international stage. They’ve been able to write the history books and draw the maps accordingly. In North America, the people who drew the borders and named the bodies of water were, for the most part … also Europeans. How different would the map look if it had been drawn by the numerous native American tribes?