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May I be permitted a follow-up comment.
I just found the publishing contracts for three books that I wrote back in the 1980s. All three were published by British publishers.
In each case, the contract gave the publisher "British, Irish and Commonwealth" rights (Commonwealth is what we used to call Empire). But the publisher had the right to sell "subsidiary rights" on the author's behalf. These subsidiary rights included rights to publish the book in "foreign" (non-Commonwealth) countries, as well as translation, adaptation, serialisation, and other similar rights. If the publisher obtained a lump sump for any of these rights, the amount would be split 40-60 with the author.
(In my previous post, I said that the author was free to negotiate foreign rights. That's incorrect. It is the publisher that has that right, not the author.)
My point is that geographic restrictions were definitely in place back then. They were not invented specifically for ebooks, as others in this thread have suggested.
I also own many paper books which show a price in British, Australian, New Zealand and South African money, with a note saying that the book is not for sale in the USA. In many cases, there are probably separate US editions of the same books - which are presumably not for sale outside the USA. Another example of geographic restrictions for traditional books.
Mike
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