I've just published a summary for Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World. It's a useful primer on geopolitics and made me examine maps far more closely than I've ever done before!

As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Geography explains many differences between countries and significantly affects geopolitics.
• Countries’ borders often depend on natural geographical features, which make it easier to defend from invasion.
  • For example, Korea has been invaded many times throughout history, because its geography offers few natural defensive lines. Japan, by contrast, has never been successfully invaded.
  • Russia and China expanded up to their natural geographic barriers to better defend themselves from invasion.
  • One reason for the conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan is because the country borders were arbitrarily drawn by Europeans and don’t reflect how people living in those areas actually organised themselves.
• Water resources are crucial:
  • Rivers can facilitate trade, but not all are easily navigable. The greater Mississippi basin in the US has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together, whereas Africa’s major rivers don’t join up and flow through waterfalls.
  • Reliable access to sea routes is essential for any country dependent on imports or exports. This is why China is investing heavily in a Pakistani port and why Russia annexed Crimea.
  • Rivers flowing across countries can create tensions relating to water security. One example is Ethiopia ability to control the flow of the Nile into Egypt.
• Maps can be misleading:
  • Africa is much, much larger than it appears on standard 2D maps.
  • A country’s habitable area may be much smaller than its borders suggest. Huge swathes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example, are desert. Around a third of Brazil is covered by jungle, and the majority of people live along the coast.
• Geographic factors beyond maps also play a role:
  • Some land is not well-suited for agriculture. People have cut down parts of the Amazon for farming, but the soil is so poor it only lasts for a few years.
  • Tropical climates in Africa increase the spread of infectious diseases.

As usual, you can find the full detailed summary on the website. If you found this summary useful, consider forwarding to a friend you think might enjoy it.

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​To Summarise​