THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY - The Revenge of Geography - page 24

rivers are navigable from the sea, dropping as they do from interior tableland to coastal
plains by a series of falls and rapids, so that inland Africa is particularly isolated from the
coast. 18 Moreover, the Sahara Desert hindered human contact from the north for too many
centuries, so that Africa was little exposed to the great Mediterranean civilizations of an-
tiquity and afterward. Then there are the great, thick forests thrown up on either side of the
equator, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Congo basin, under the influence of heavy rains and
intense heat. 19 These forests are no friends to civilization, nor are they conducive to natural
borders, and so the borders erected by European colonialists were, perforce, artificial ones.
The natural world has given Africa much to labor against in its path to modernity.
Check the list of the world's most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are
landlocked. 20 Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and
south latitudes) are generally poor, even as most high-income countries are in the middle
and high latitudes. Note how temperate zone, east-west oriented Eurasia is better off than
north-south oriented sub-Saharan Africa, because technological diffusion works much bet-
ter across a common latitude, where climatic conditions are similar, thus allowing for in-
novations in the tending of plants and the domestication of animals to spread rapidly. It
is no accident that the world's poorest regions tend to be where geography, by way of
soil suitability, supports high population densities, but not economic growth—because of
distance from ports and railheads. Central India and inland Africa are prime examples of
this. 21
In a stunning summation of geographical determinism, the late geographer Paul Wheat-
ley made the observation that “the Sanskrit tongue was chilled to silence at 500 meters,” so
that Indian culture was in essence a lowland phenomenon. 22 Other examples of how geo-
graphy has richly influenced the fate of peoples in ways both subtle and obvious are legion,
and I will get to more of them in the course of this study.
But before we move on, let me mention the example of the United States. For it is geo-
graphy that has helped sustain American prosperity and which may be ultimately respons-
ible for America's panhumanistic altruism. As John Adams notes, “There is no special
providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” 23 The histori-
an John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because
the sea protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty.” The militarism and prag-
matism of continental Europe through the mid-twentieth century, to which the Americans
always felt superior, was the result of geography, not character. Competing states and em-
pires adjoined one another on a crowded continent. European nations could never with-
draw across an ocean in the event of a military miscalculation. Thus, their foreign policies
could not be grounded by a universalist morality, and they remained well armed against
one another until dominated by an American hegemon after World War II. 24 It wasn't only