Agreements That Redrew the Map

Signed on 7 June 1494 between Spain and Portugal, it set a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, with Portuguese rights to the east and Spanish rights to the west. Because the line cut through unexplored South America, it later gave Portugal a claim to the Brazilian coast reached in 1500.

Two treaties, Münster and Osnabrück, signed in October 1648, ended the Thirty Years' War and, at Münster, the Eighty Years' War. They gave the territories of the Holy Roman Empire substantial sovereignty, and historians often treat this as the start of a system of equal, mutually recognized states.

Signed in Paris on 3 September 1783, it recognized the Thirteen Colonies as free, sovereign and independent states and drew the new nation's boundaries. It also dealt with fishing rights, war debts and the treatment of Loyalists.

First signed on 6 February 1840 by Captain William Hobson and Māori chiefs, it exists in English and Māori texts. Disagreement over what the two versions say about sovereignty has shaped New Zealand law and politics, and the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to hear claimed breaches.

Signed on 29 August 1842 aboard HMS Cornwallis, it ended the First Opium War. China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five treaty ports and paid an indemnity, and the treaty is remembered in China as the first of the unequal treaties.

A secret 1916 treaty between Britain and France, negotiated by Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, divided the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces into spheres of control. The Bolshevik government leaked it in late 1917, and it is still cited in disputes over the region's borders.

A short letter dated 2 November 1917 from Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild stated that the British government viewed with favour a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. It added that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced, and it later fed into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

Woodrow Wilson set out these principles to Congress on 8 January 1918, calling for open diplomacy and for borders adjusted along lines of self-determination. The fourteenth point proposed a general association of nations, the idea that became the League of Nations, though the Treaty of Versailles used only some of the points.

Signed in Moscow on 23 and 24 August 1939, the public non-aggression treaty carried a secret protocol dividing Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania between German and Soviet spheres. Germany invaded Poland a week later, and the pact ended when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin signed two frameworks on 17 September 1978 after twelve days of talks hosted by Jimmy Carter. The second led to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, under which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for full recognition.