Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall, 2015
Why have China and India, two huge neighbors, almost never gone to war? For many years the British journalist Tim Marshall reported on wars from the Balkans to Syria. He explains world politics through a map of mountains, rivers and seas. After this book, news about faraway countries will make more sense.
Who it is for
For anyone who watches the news and doesn't understand why countries act the way they do. And for everyone who loves maps, history and travel.
The land on which we live has always shaped us.
The sandstorm that stopped an army
Fall 2001, northern Afghanistan. The British journalist Tim Marshall had crossed the border river from Tajikistan on a raft. He was on his way to the forces fighting the Taliban. Their alliance was called the Northern Alliance. American planes were already flying overhead, and everyone was waiting for the push on Kabul.
Then a sandstorm came, the worst of his life. The air turned mustard yellow, and for thirty-six hours nothing moved but the sand. The most advanced American satellites couldn't help at all. Then the rain poured down, and the sand turned to mud. The offensive ground to a halt. According to Marshall, everyone, from the US president to the soldier on the ground, could only wait.
For many years Marshall worked as a war correspondent in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Syria. His book grew out of moments like this. Its main idea is this: the land a people live on limits their rulers more than we usually think. Rivers, mountains, deserts and seas decide what a country can and can't do. At the same time, the author doesn't see geography as the only cause. In his words, it doesn't decide everything, but it's the thing people forget most often.
Here's an example from the book. China and India share a long border and have huge populations. You'd think neighbors like that would often go to war. But apart from one battle in 1962 that lasted a month, they never have. Between them stand the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world, and moving a large army across them is almost impossible.
Next, you'll see the world through Marshall's eyes. You'll learn why Russia feared its plain for centuries, why China needed the sea and how rivers made America rich. You'll see what happens when a border is drawn in pencil, and what changes when the Arctic ice melts. The book came out in 2015, and everything in it is told the way the author saw the world then. Let's start with the biggest country in the world.
The plain enemies always came across
In the 13th century the Mongols conquered Kievan Rus, and the young Russian state moved northeast, toward Moscow. The new state, the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was defenseless, according to Marshall. There were no mountains, deserts or big rivers around it. The plain lay open in every direction, and an enemy could come from anywhere.
The way out was found by Ivan the Terrible, who ruled from 1533. Marshall calls his method attack as defense: first make your home secure, then push the border further out. Under him, Russia moved east to the Urals, south to the Caspian Sea and north to the Arctic Circle. In the next century it crossed the Urals and reached the Pacific Ocean. That's how the country gained strategic depth: a huge space to retreat into while the enemy spends its strength on the road.
The main weakness remained in the west. There lies the North European Plain, flat land from France to the Urals. Marshall compares it to a slice of pizza. The narrow end of the slice is Poland, where the plain is only about 300 miles wide. But at Russia's borders the slice widens to more than 2,000 miles, and holding a line like that is hard even for a large army.
Across this plain came the Poles in 1605, the Swedes in 1708, the French in 1812, and the Germans in 1914 and again in 1941. But, as the author writes, Russia was never conquered from this side. Napoleon's armies, and later Hitler's, took so long to march on Moscow that their supply lines stretched too far.
The second problem is the sea. Russia has no port that opens straight onto the world's oceans and doesn't freeze in winter. Murmansk freezes for several months a year, and Vladivostok is icebound for about four months. And moving goods by water is much cheaper than by land. The author uses this to explain why Sevastopol matters so much to Moscow: in his words, it's Russia's only real major warm-water port.
Marshall's conclusion sounds almost like a verdict. Tsars, communists and today's rulers all look at the same map. In his words, the map Ivan the Terrible dealt with is the very same one Vladimir Putin has.
About the author
Tim Marshall is a British journalist who covered the wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Syria for many years. He writes about how geography shapes world politics.
All books by this author: Tim Marshall
Terms from the book
- Napoleon
- Hitler
- Tibet
- Burma
- Jefferson
- Mississippi
- Louisiana
- Amundsen
- Taliban: An armed movement in Afghanistan. In 2001 it held Kabul and was fighting the forces of the Northern Alliance.
- Northern Alliance: An alliance of Afghan armed groups that fought against the Taliban in northern Afghanistan in 2001.
- Himalayas: The highest mountain range in the world. It runs along the border between China and India.
- Grand Principality of Muscovy: The Russian state centered on Moscow that Russia grew out of.
- Ivan the Terrible: Ivan IV, the first Russian tsar. He ruled from 1533, and under him Russia expanded far to the east and south.
- Strategic depth: A large space inside a country where it can retreat, and where an enemy army wears itself out on a long road.
- North European Plain: Flat land that stretches from France through Germany and Poland to the Ural Mountains.
- Warm-water port: A port where the water doesn't freeze in winter, so ships can sail all year round.
- Putin: Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia at the time the book came out.
- Kitty Hawk: An American aircraft carrier, a huge warship that planes take off from.
- North China Plain: A large, fertile lowland by the Yellow River and the Yangtze, where Chinese civilization was born. The Chinese call it the Central Plain.
- Han Chinese: The largest ethnic group in China, more than 90% of its people.
- Gobi: A large desert in northern China and southern Mongolia.
- Geopolitics: A way of looking at relations between countries through their geography: mountains, rivers, seas, climate and resources. "The geopolitics of fear" is the author's phrase.
- Strait of Malacca: A narrow sea route between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia that carries a huge share of Asia's sea trade.
- Adams: Henry Adams, an American historian of the 19th century.
- Zambezi: The fourth-longest river in Africa. It flows through six countries and empties into the Indian Ocean.
- Victoria Falls: One of the largest waterfalls in the world, on the Zambezi River.
- Sykes: Sir Mark Sykes, a British diplomat. In 1916, together with the Frenchman Georges-Picot, he secretly divided the Middle East into zones of influence.
- Haifa: A port city on the Mediterranean coast, now in Israel.
- Kirkuk: A city in northern Iraq.
- Georges-Picot: François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat, Sykes's partner in the secret agreement of 1916.
- Ottoman Empire: The Turkish empire with its capital in Istanbul. Before the First World War, it ruled most of the Middle East.
- Mosul: A city in northern Iraq. Under the Ottomans, a whole province had this name.
- Kurds: A people who live in the mountains where Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria meet, and who have no recognized state of their own.
- Sunni: A follower of the largest branch of Islam. The split with the Shia began in 632, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
- Basra: A port city in southern Iraq. Under the Ottomans, a whole province had this name.
- Shia: A follower of the second-largest branch of Islam. The Shia believe the community should have been led by the descendants of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.
- Oberdorfer: Don Oberdorfer, an American historian and journalist who wrote about Korea.
- Parallel: A line on the map that runs around the Earth from west to east. The 38th parallel divides Korea into North and South.
- Islamic State: A terrorist group that in 2014 declared its own state on part of the land of Iraq and Syria.
- Northwest Passage: A sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific through icy straits off the northern coast of Canada.
- Lomonosov Ridge: An underwater mountain range on the floor of the Arctic Ocean that stretches from Siberia to the North Pole.
- Shelf: The shallow part of the seabed near the coast: the underwater continuation of a continent.
- UN Convention on the Law of the Sea: An international treaty on which parts of the sea and the seabed belong to which country.
- Arctic Council: A forum of eight Arctic countries where they discuss the shared affairs of the Arctic.
All terms
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