And how would that mix with losing to a more powerful group which has diplomatic consensus with the rest of the world while maintaining sovereignty and trade with the more powerful winner?

I am not seeing how recognizing Papua-New Guinea’s language history addresses that? I’m not familiar with how its governed or if it has to balance cultures, resources and property with an imperial force that merely tolerates everyone else.

Can't help with that. I'm interested in ethno-geography. Here's a nice map of early XIX century Coast Salish micro ethnic groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Salish#/media/File:Coast...

>> B.C. circa 1800 can be described as 'patchwork of sovereign micro-ethnic groups in rugged terrain

So was Appalachia at that time. So too were the expanses of Russia. So too was even Ireland. Pretty much every 17/1800s settled territory without a nearby railroad was composed of tightly-knit micro-ethic groupings. That doesn't meant they were not also part of a larger nation.

That's definitely not true of Ireland in the 19th or even 18th century. Nothing could be farther from the truth - Ireland at that time was a centrally (and externally) managed state much closer to a modern state than anything described in this thread.

Roads and canals do fine for knitting together a nation in the cultural and political sense of the word, and for enforcing/dispensing all the fruits of central government. Europe in the early 1800s was less homogeneous than today, perhaps, but it's strange to claim that areas without nearby rail service were a 'patchwork of sovereign micro-ethnic groups'.

And in places like BC, the water network linked everyone.

It didn't link everyone into centrally run sovereign nation states, though, which I thought was what we were talking about.