Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. These three sit astride the narrow Strait of Malacca.

As China’s thirst for foreign oil and gas grows, that of the United States declines. This will have a huge impact on its foreign relations, especially in the Middle East, with ramifications for other countries.

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.

Otto von Bismarck, in a double-edged remark, said more than a century ago that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”

Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories. —Miranda Richmond Mouillot,

The modern world, for better or worse, springs from Europe. This western outpost of the great Eurasian landmass gave birth to the Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution, which has resulted in what we now see around us every day. For that, we can give thanks to, or blame, Europe’s location.

Good harvests mean surplus food that can be traded; this in turn builds up trading centers that become towns. It also allows people to think of more than just growing food and to turn their attention to ideas and technology.

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 that are—west, north, and south—abundant in natural harbors.

Europe grew organically over millennia and remains divided between its geographical and linguistic regions.

The various tribes of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, prevented from expanding north into France by the presence of the Pyrenees, gradually came together, over thousands of years, to form Spain and Portugal—and even Spain is not an entirely united country, with Catalonia increasingly vocal about wanting its independence. France has also been formed by natural barriers, framed as it is by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Europe’s major rivers do not meet (unless you count the Sava, which drains into the Danube in Belgrade). This partly explains why there are so many countries in what is a relatively small space. Because they do not connect, most of the rivers act, at some point, as b...

the geography of the Danube region, especially at its southern end, helps explain why there are so many small nations there in comparison to the bigger countries in and around the North European Plain.

France is the only European country to be both a northern and southern power. It contains the largest expanse of fertile land in Western Europe, and many of its rivers connect with one another; one flows west all the way to the Atlantic (the Seine), another south to the Mediterranean (the Rhône). These factors, together with France’s relative flatness, were suitable for the unification of regions, and—especially from the time of Napoleon—centralization of power.

The donors and demanders were the northern countries, the recipients and supplicants mostly southern.

If you take The Times Atlas of European History and flick through the pages quickly as if it were a flip book, you see Poland emerge circa 1000 CE, then continually change shape, disappear, and reappear until assuming its present form in the late twentieth century.

The Balkan countries are also once again free of empire. Their mountainous terrain led to the emergence of so many small states in the region, and is one of the things that has kept them from integrating—despite

The region is now an economic and diplomatic battleground with the EU, NATO, the Turks, and the Russians all vying for influence.

The dilemma of Germany’s geographical position and belligerence became known as “the German Question.”

The euro crisis and wider economic problems have revealed the cracks in the House of Europe (notably along the old fault line of the north-south divide).

Geographically, the Brits are in a good place. Good farmland, decent rivers, excellent access to the seas and their fish stocks, close enough to the European continent to trade, and yet protected by dint of being an island race—there have been times when the UK gave thanks for its geography as wars and revolutions swept over its neighbors.

This demographic change is in turn having an effect on the foreign policy of nation states, particularly toward the Middle East. On issues such as the Iraq War, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, many European governments must, at the very least, take into account the feelings of their Muslim citizens when formulating policy.

Whereas previously liberals would be entirely behind Voltaire, there are now shades of relativism. The massacre of journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 was followed by widespread condemnation and revulsion; however, sections of liberal condemnation were tinged with a “but perhaps the satirists went too far.” This is something new for Europe in the modern age and is part of its culture wars, all of which loop back into attitudes toward the European political structures.

the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian landmass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

The world’s idea of African geography is flawed. Few people realize just how big it is. This is because most of us use the standard Mercator world map. This, as do other maps, depicts a sphere on a flat surface and thus distorts shapes. Africa is far, far longer than usually portrayed,

But back south there were few plants willing to be domesticated, and even fewer animals. Much of the land consists of jungle, swamp, desert, or steep-sided plateau, none of which lend themselves to the growing of wheat or rice, or sustaining herds of sheep. Africa’s rhinos, gazelles, and giraffes stubbornly refused to be beasts of burden—or

The exchange of ideas and technology barely touched sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years. Despite this, several African empires and city states did arise after about the sixth century CE: for example the Mali Empire (thirteenth to sixteenth century), and the city state of Great Zimbabwe (eleventh to fifteenth century), the latter in land around the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers.

Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity—salt—but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave–taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.

Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them. From this they are making a modern home and, in some cases, vibrant, connected economies.

many encompass the same divisions they did when first drawn, and those formal divisions are some of the many legacies colonialism bequeathed the continent. The ethnic conflicts within Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Mali, and elsewhere are evidence that the European idea of geography did not fit the reality of Africa’s demographics.

one of the biggest failures of European line drawing lies in the center of the continent, the giant black hole known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo—the DRC. Here is the land in which Joseph Conrad set his novella Heart of Darkness and it remains a place shrouded in the darkness of war. It is a prime example of how the imposition of artificial borders can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.

The European colonialists created an egg without a chicken, a logical absurdity repeated across the continent and one that continues to haunt it.

Sometimes you will hear leaders say ‘I’m the only person who can hold this nation together.’ If that’s true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.”

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.

South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.

There is a new scramble for Africa in this century, but this time it is two-pronged. There are the well-publicized outside interests, and meddling, in the competition for resources, but there is also the “scramble within” and South Africa intends to scramble fastest and farthest.

The same rivers that hampered trade are now harnessed for hydroelectric power. From the earth that struggled to sustain large-scale food production come minerals and oil, making some countries rich even if little of the wealth reaches the people. Nevertheless, in most, but not all, countries poverty has fallen as health-care and education levels have risen. Many countries are English-speaking, which in an English-language-dominated global economy is an advantage, and the continent has seen economic growth over most of the past decade. On the downside, economic growth in many countries is dependent on global prices for minerals and energy.

The Middle of what? East of where? The region’s very name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it.

After the First World War, there were fewer borders in the wider Middle East than currently exist, and those that did exist were usually determined by geography alone. The spaces within them were loosely subdivided and governed according to geography, ethnicity, and religion, but there was no attempt to create nation states.

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.

When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony.

The legacy of European colonialism left the Arabs grouped into nation states and ruled by leaders who tended to favor whichever branch of Islam (and tribe) from which they themselves came. These dictators then used the machinery of state to ensure their writ ruled over the entire area within the artificial lines drawn by the Europeans, regardless of whether this was historically appropriate and fair to the different tribes and religions that had been thrown together.

Many analysts say that only a strong man could unite these three areas into one country, and Iraq had one strong man after another. But in reality the people were never unified; they were only frozen with fear.

Although not a recognized state, there is an identifiable “Kurdistan” region.

Groups such as al-Qaeda and, more recently, the Islamic State have garnered what support they have partially because of the humiliation caused by colonialism and then the failure of pan-Arab nationalism—and to an extent the Arab nation state.

The Islamic State grew out of the “al-Qaeda in Iraq” franchise group in the late 2000s, which nominally was directed by the remnants of the al-Qaeda leadership. By the time the Syrian civil war was in full flow the group had split from al-Qaeda and renamed itself. At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) but as the Arabic word for the Levant is al-Sham, gradually it became ISIS.

The IS also seized upon an area that is increasingly important in the Internet age—psychological space. It built on the pioneering work of al-Qaeda in social media and took it to new heights of sophistication and brutality.

DAESH. It is an acronym of sorts for the Arabic Dawlat al-Islamiya f’al-Iraq wa al-Shams, but the reason people came up with the name is because the Islamic State members hate the term.

Drones are a clear modern example of technology overcoming some of the restrictions of geography but at the same time serving to underline geography’s importance.

Nevertheless, the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some the most pressing conflict in the world.

by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.