Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

The summary

Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man. Tim Marshall imagines him at his prayers each night, asking God one question: why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine? Because there are none, the North European Plain runs flat from France to the Urals, and armies have come across it repeatedly — the Poles in 1605, the Swedes in 1708, Napoleon in 1812, the Germans in 1914 and 1941. Count the Crimean War too and, between 1812 and 1945, the Russians fought on or around that plain roughly once every thirty-three years. The landscape imprisons leaders, handing them fewer choices than the headlines suggest.

Russia has been fighting the same two problems for 500 years

Early Russia — the Grand Principality of Muscovy — was indefensible. No mountains, no deserts, few rivers: flatland in every direction, with Mongols across the steppe, so an invader could pick his spot. Ivan the Terrible’s answer was attack as defence — consolidate, then push outward until you hit something an army can’t cross. Russia took the Urals, the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Arctic, and finally had strategic depth. Napoleon and Hitler both discovered what that costs an attacker.

The second problem is unsolved. Russia has no warm-water port with free access to the world’s trade routes. Murmansk freezes for months; Vladivostok is ice-locked for about four and boxed in by the Japanese-dominated Sea of Japan. Sevastopol in Crimea is the only true major warm-water port, and the exit to the Mediterranean runs through the Bosporus, which the 1936 Montreux Convention handed to Turkey — now a NATO member.

Read 2014 through that lens and it stops looking impulsive. When Yanukovych fled Kiev in February and an anti-Russian government took over, Putin annexed Crimea. He could in theory have respected Ukraine’s borders; given the hand geography dealt him, Marshall argues, it was never really an option. Sanctions stayed mild because more than a quarter of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia — Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia rely on it entirely. The pipelines run east to west, and the Kremlin controls the taps.

America bought its way to superpower

In 1802 Jefferson wrote that there was “on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” The French held the west bank of the Mississippi down to the Gulf, and with it command of American trade. A year later Washington solved the problem with a cheque: $15 million for the whole Louisiana Territory, an area equal to Spain, Italy, France, the UK and Germany combined. It doubled the country and delivered the greater Mississippi basin, which has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together — water that runs smooth to the ocean and carries cargo far cheaper than any road.

In 1819 Spain ceded Florida and accepted an American claim reaching to the Pacific; Alaska was bought in 1867 at two cents an acre. What the map produced is a country with two oceans for moats, untroublesome neighbours, one language and one currency — fifty states that add up to a single nation in a way the EU’s twenty-eight sovereign states never can. Mexico, by contrast, has poor farmland and no river system to move anything on.

Africa was walled in by its own coastline

Great beaches, Marshall writes, and terrible natural harbours. The coast is smooth rather than jagged, so Europeans coming down the west side in the fifteenth century found few deep anchorages and, once ashore, rarely pushed a hundred miles inland. The rivers were no help: they begin in high land and fall in abrupt drops. The Zambezi runs 1,600 miles through six countries and descends 4,900 feet to the sea — magnificent, and commercially useless, because the navigable stretches don’t join up. Where the Rhine and the Danube stitched Europe into trading blocs with a shared language of commerce, Africa’s rivers connect nothing, and thousands of languages survive.

Add malaria, yellow fever, the mosquito and the tsetse fly, and almost no plants or animals worth domesticating, and the continent where humans began reached the modern era mostly without writing, paper, gunpowder or the wheel.

Then men in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon drew lines on it. Libya had been three places — Tripolitania trading north to Europe, Cyrenaica looking east to Egypt, Fezzan a land of nomads — until it was declared one country, and at the first real test it split back along the old seams. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is bigger than Germany, France and Spain combined, holds more than 200 ethnic groups, and has lost around six million people since the late 1990s. In 2014 the UN ranked it 186th of 187 countries; the bottom eighteen were all African.

Lines drawn in ink, redrawn in blood

The same mistake built the modern Middle East. In 1916 Sir Mark Sykes took a chinagraph pencil and drew a crude line from Haifa to Kirkuk, splitting the region with François Georges-Picot into two spheres of influence. Before that there was no Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel or Palestine. In 2014 Islamic State filmed a bulldozer shoving the Iraqi–Syrian border — a high berm of sand — out of existence. Move the sand and the border no longer physically exists.

The bottom line

Geography doesn’t decide everything, but it draws the edges of the board, and leaders who forget that get punished. Technology keeps bending the rules — the Americans can fly a bomber from Missouri to Mosul without needing anyone’s concrete along the way — yet a century from now Russia will still be staring anxiously west across flat ground, and the Himalayas will still separate China from India. Read it if you want the news to make more sense than it usually does.