Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (Politics of Place, #1) in Espionage Aficionados

Nov 03, 2018 Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog rated it really liked it · review of another edition

About a year ago I reviewed: The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. At the same mapping conference one year later, I got Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography. Both books maintain what the authors seem to believe to be the novel notion that; the fundamental geopolitical fact of the globe is the topographical map. Ultimately country borders have or will stabilize around aggregations of geography that are defensible. Mountains, Oceans, P About a year ago I reviewed: The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. At the same mapping conference one year later, I got Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography. Both books maintain what the authors seem to believe to be the novel notion that; the fundamental geopolitical fact of the globe is the topographical map. Ultimately country borders have or will stabilize around aggregations of geography that are defensible. Mountains, Oceans, Plateaus and the rest tend to mark off regions and those regions will tend to come under the national flag of peoples who can defend what they have while exploiting it for what they need. So similar are both book that the chapters almost duplicate each other in respective land masses if not in the sequence.
Prisoners moves from Russian, to China to the US , and so forth ending with Latin America and the Arctic. Revenge begins with Europe, Russia, China and ends with the Americas.

Between the two I prefer Kaplan’s book but I suspect that most will prefer this one. Kaplan’s Revenge spends several chapters on a literary review of prior scholarship on the influence of Geography on national boundaries and history. Marshall jumps quickly into his geopolitical analysis. Kaplan’s work seems to be more strategic with an emphasis on what to expect farther into the future, while Marshall is relatively more tactical seeking to project into a more immediate future.

Prisoners of Geography tends to spend more time on recent events in each of the nations /regions he analyzes and as such he is more likely to consider the effects of the various competing economic and human forces, tribe religions or cultures that may have claims to a region. Kaplan is more inclined to give recent event a shallow mention in favor of his thesis that borders will continue to adopt, representing temporary holds by these competing groups, but the boundaries ultimately reflecting what the topographic map dictates as natural borders.

Under the heading of coincidences, I recently finished Professor’s Golo Manns’s The History Of Germany Since 1789.

He begins by reject the rule of topography over the history of post Napoleonic Germany. I was hoping for a detailed discussion of this counter argument, but, as was Professor Mann’s want he made his statement and offered little in the way of a detailed case.

For the reader with a serious interest in the geographic part of Geo-politics, it is hard to recommend both books. The amount of overlap assumes a reader with a desire to contrast two mostly congruent theses. I am not sure a reader can go wrong with either. Mostly they have the same things to say. Mostly they make the same oversimplifications, if in the name of coming to the same kinds of conclusions.

Having read them both I am not sure that I have doubled my understanding of topology as fate nor am I sure I am twice as prepared to understand, pardon my pun, the facts on the ground. ...more

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