Plotting country maps with political boundaries

So far, we have worked on maps covering the entire globe, which is useful when you are plotting, for example, a company's offices globally, areas affected by an epidemic disease across continents, or an earthquake across many countries.

However, if you want to view a phenomenon specific to a region, which could be a country, state, province, or even a city within a country, then you will need to set a smaller extent for the map. In this recipe, we will learn how to do this.

Getting ready

Typically, map data is organized and distributed in the form of shapefiles. To be able to read those files and plot the data on the map, we need the ShapeReader package, usually provided...