Has a nation/state ever 'moved' by expanding into/annexing land and then losing their original territory?

by buttland
iambamba

I don't know if it can really be referred as a state in the modern sense, but a good example would be the Roman Empire. Rome annexed Greece and the Near East in the 1st and 2nd centuries B.C., in which territories the Empire survived after Rome itself fell to the Germanic invaders in the 5th century A.D.

TheophrastusBmbastus

There are many examples of this in pre-modern eras (think of the Norman kingdom's gradual evolution into England, for instance) but for a wide variety of reasons I think it would make sense to discount anything before the advent of the Westphalian state system and the birth of nationalism. A lot of medieval kingdoms held shifting domains, but that didn't necessarily effect some peasant farming some local lord's land somewhere.

A dramatic modern example is Poland. The modern polish state has slid dramatically westward during the twentieth century.

Georgy_K_Zhukov

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.