The widening gulf between Donald Trump and Mexico draws attention to the fact that many water bodies were not always known by the names they are now. Trump is just attempting to do what Western imperial powers did for centuries. They imposed the current names and spellings of areas they captured, which stayed on till recently. No one gave much thought to how names of geographical features were given or even changed because the West controlled the narrative.

Starting with oceans, the biggest marine entities, the five are known as the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and the Southern or Antarctic, the last of which is the most recently named. Seas, gulfs, bays and sounds are smaller saltwater expanses that are too many to name. But suffice it to say Trump has decided on cartographically capturing the world’s largest gulf, that laps the coast of southern US. Name changes, needless to add, are a perennial feature of geo(graphy)-politics.

The ancient Greek treatise Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, for example, described the lands including India around a vast water body. Erythra means Red in Greek and that originally named super-‘sea’ underwent many name changes and in our era has now ‘split’ into the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and also the Red Sea, that is now only a fraction of what Erythraean Sea originally signified! So Trump’s Gulf of Mexico bid actually has many precedents.

Even so, it is unlikely to be plain sailing. The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican-led Bill by 211 to 206 votes to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, moving closer to codifying President Trump’s push. The Bill now goes to the Republican-majority Senate, but they will still need 7 Democratic Party votes to get it through. If passed, US federal........

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