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

by Tim Marshall

For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites.

The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.”

but Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama–type figure upon whom foreign media can fix,

Another growing problem for the party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 percent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture.

China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrializing as it modernizes and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest.

Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although the ROC claims it should govern both territories.

America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.

The United States was partially behind the change of government in Ukraine in 2014.

Analysts often write about the need for certain cultures not to lose face, or ever be seen to back down, but this is not just a problem in the Arab or East Asian cultures—it is a human problem expressed in different ways.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is generally considered an American victory; what is less publicized is that several months after Russia removed its missiles from Cuba, the United States removed its Jupiter missiles (which could reach Moscow) from Turkey. It was actually a compromise, with both sides, eventually, able to tell their respective publics that they had not capitulated.

Of all the countries in the plain, France was best situated to take advantage of it. 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.

Spain is also struggling, and has always struggled because of its geography. Its narrow coastal plains have poor soil, and access to markets is hindered internally by its short rivers and the Meseta Central, a highland plateau surrounded by mountain ranges, some of which cut through it. Trade with Western Europe is further hampered by the Pyrenees, and any markets to its south on the other side of the Mediterranean are in developing countries with limited income.

Much of the Greek coastline comprises steep cliffs and there are few coastal plains for agriculture. Inland are more steep cliffs, rivers that will not allow transportation, and few wide, fertile valleys. What agricultural land there is is of high quality; the problem is that there is too little of it to allow Greece to become a major agricultural exporter, or to develop more than a handful of major urban areas containing highly educated, highly skilled, and technologically advanced populations. Its situation is further exacerbated by its location, with Athens positioned at the tip of a peninsula, almost cut off from land trade with Europe. It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region—but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy. Greece fought several wars against Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in modern times it still spends a vast amount of euros, which it doesn’t have, on defense.

The corridor of the North European Plain is at its narrowest between Poland’s Baltic coast in the north and the beginning of the Carpathian Mountains in the south. This is where, from a Russian military perspective, the best defensive line could be placed or, from an attacker’s viewpoint, the place at which its forces would be squeezed together before breaking out toward Russia.

Russia, which has yet to forgive the Western nations for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the separation of Kosovo, is still attempting to coax Serbia into its orbit via the gravitational pull of language, ethnicity, religion, and energy deals.

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

Instead of sending armies across the flatlands, it sent goods with the prestigious tag MADE IN GERMANY, and these goods flowed down the Rhine and the Elbe, along the highways, and out into Europe and the world—north, south, west, and, increasingly since 1990, east.

Ever-closer union led, for nineteen of the twenty-eight countries, to a single currency—the euro. All twenty-eight members, except for Denmark and the UK, are committed to joining it if and when they meet the criteria.

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.

location still grants it certain strategic advantages, one of which is the GIUK gap. This is a choke point in the world’s sea-lanes—it is hardly as important as the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca, but it has traditionally given the UK an advantage in the North Atlantic.

The idea of the EU’s “Schengen Area,” a border-free area composed of twenty-six countries, has taken some heavy blows with different countries, at different times, reintroducing border controls on the grounds of security. Fearing a bottleneck, Denmark then began checking people crossing from Germany. This all has an economic cost, makes travel more difficult, and is both a physical and conceptual attack on “ever closer union.”

but 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 top third begins on the Mediterranean coastlines of the North African Arabic-speaking countries. The coastal plains quickly become the Sahara, the world’s largest dry desert, which is almost as big as the United States. Directly below the Sahara is the Sahel region, a semiarid, rock-strewn, sandy strip of land measuring more than three thousand miles at its widest points and stretching from Gambia on the Atlantic coast through Niger, Chad, and right across to Eritrea on the Red Sea. The name Sahel comes from the Arabic sahil, which means “coast,” and is how the people living in the region think of it—as the shoreline of the vast sand sea of the Sahara. It is another sort of shore, one where the influence of Islam diminishes. From the Sahel to the Mediterranean the vast majority of people are Muslims. South of it there is far more diversity in religion.

But Africa’s head start in our mutual story did allow it more time to develop something else that 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 health-care infrastructure.

The continent’s great rivers—the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile, and others—don’t connect, and this disconnection has a human factor.

The Arabs were also coming down the east coast and establishing themselves in places such as Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam in what is now Tanzania.

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.

Libya, an artificial construct only a few decades old, which at the first test fell apart into its previous incarnation as three distinct geographical regions. In the west it was, in Greek times, Tripolitania (from the Greek tripolis, “three cities,” which eventually merged and became Tripoli). The area to the east, centered on the city of Benghazi but stretching down to the Chad border, was known in both Greek and Roman times as Cyrenaica. Below these two, in what is now the far southwest of the country, is the region of Fezzan.

However, 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.

most underreported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars that have been fought since the late 1990s.

It is bigger than Germany, France, and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.

Bantu.

The French comes from the DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60) and before that when King Leopold of the Belgians used it as his personal property from which to steal its natural resources to line his pockets. Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. When the Belgians left in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.

The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.” To the south is Angola, to the north the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, to the east Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zambia. The roots of the wars go back decades, but the worst of times was triggered by the disaster

In addition to its natural mineral wealth, Africa is also blessed with abundant water—even though many of its rivers do not encourage trade, they are good for hydroelectricity. However, this, too, is a source of potential conflict.

There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy—it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense—but it has never been a blue-water navy.

will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 percent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the United States, with concurrent costs.

Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile.

The Blue Nile, which begins in Ethiopia, and the White Nile meet in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, before flowing through the Nubian Desert and into Egypt. By this point the majority of the water is from the Blue Nile.

Ethiopia is sometimes called Africa’s water tower, due to its high elevation, and has more than twenty dams fed by the rainfall in its highlands. In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020.

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

Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, and all of this high-quality oil is in the south. Nigerians in the north complain that the profits from that oil are not shared equitably across the country’s regions. This in turn exacerbates the ethnic and religious tensions between the peoples from the Nigerian delta and those in the northeast.

By size, population, and natural resources, Nigeria is West Africa’s mos...

In 1898, they drew up a “British Protectorate on the River Niger” that in turn became Nigeria.

Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north. Boko Haram fighters are usually ethnically Kanuris from the northeast. They rarely operate outside of their home territory, not even venturing west to the Hausa region, and certainly not way down south to the coastal areas. This means that when the Nigerian military come looking for them, Boko Haram are operating on home ground. Much of the local population will not cooperate with the military, either for fear of reprisal or due to a shared resentment of the south.

The group does not even pose a threat to the capital, Abuja, despite its being situated halfway up the country; but they do pose a daily threat to people in the north and they damage Nigeria’s reputation abroad as a place to do business.

Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required.

Boko Haram has now changed its name to “Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi,” which loosely translates as “Islamic State’s West African Province.”

Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad are all now involved militarily and coordinating with the Americans and the French.

second-largest oil producer—Angola.