Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable inland waterways than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in high land, and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances.

The Americans’ own history of physical security and unity may have led them to overestimate the power of their democratic rationalist argument, which believes that compromise, hard work and even voting would triumph over atavistic, deep-seated historical fears of ‘the other’, be they Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Arab, Muslim or Christian.

They assumed people would want to come together whereas in fact many dare not try and would prefer to live apart because of their experiences. It is a sad reflection upon humanity, but it appears throughout many periods of history, and in many places, to be an unfortunate truth. The American actions took the lid off a simmering pot which had temporarily hidden that truth.

For thirty years it has been fashionable to predict the imminent or ongoing decline of the USA. This is as wrong now as it was in the past. The planet’s most successful country is about to become self-sufficient in energy, it remains the pre-eminent economic power and it spends more on research and development for its military than the overall military budget of all the other NATO countries combined. Its population is not ageing as in Europe and Japan, and a 2013 Gallup study showed that 25 per cent of all people hoping to emigrate put the USA as their first choice of destination. In the same year Shanghai University listed what its experts judged the top twenty universities of the world: seventeen were in the USA.

‘God takes special care of drunks, children and the United States of America.’ It appears still to be true.

Western Europe has no real deserts, the frozen wastes are confined to a few areas in the far north, and earthquakes, volcanoes and massive flooding are rare. The rivers are long, flat, navigable and made for trade. As they empty into a variety of seas and oceans they flow into coastlines which are, west, north and south, abundant in natural harbours.

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.

history tells us how much things can change in just a few decades, and geography tells us that if humans do not constantly strive to overcome its ‘rules’, its ‘rules’ will overcome us.

the entire continent below the Sahara developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.

overrun its mutton-fed soldiers mounted on puny horses.’ But Africa’s head start in our mutual story did allow it more time to develop something else which to this day holds it back: a virulent set of diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, brought on by the heat and now complicated by crowded living conditions and poor healthcare infrastructure.

It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the rivers’ (the Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its centre which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen and most of Saudi Arabia including the Rub’ al Khali or ‘Empty Quarter’. This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature not only that the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that until European colonisation most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders. The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

Of course geography does not dictate the course of all events. Great ideas and great leaders are part of the push and pull of history. But they must all operate within the confines of geography.

although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still imprisoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the ‘other’, and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.