Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kur-
rachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able
to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England.
Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great
European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers
for English exports.
7
Mackinder's ideas and way of putting things, as we shall now see, are riveting.
Sir Halford J. Mackinder, the father of modern-day geopolitics, which Morgenthau so dis-
parages, is famous not for a topic, but for a single article, “The Geographical Pivot of His-
tory,” published in the April 1904 issue of
The Geographical Journal
in London. Mac-
kinder's thesis is that Central Asia, helping to form as it does the Eurasian Heartland, is
the pivot on which the fate of great world empires rests: for the earth's very layout of nat-
ural arteries between mountain ranges and along river valleys encourages the rise of em-
pires, declared or undeclared, rather than states. Before exploring how this notion, slightly
redefined, helps illuminate our own geopolitics, it is worth describing how Mackinder
reached his conclusion. For his article, taking in the whole of history and human settlement
patterns, is the archetype of the geographical discipline, recalling the work of Herodotus
and Ibn Khaldun, and presaging stylistically the work of McNeill, Hodgson, and the French
historian and geographer Fernand Braudel. As Mackinder writes, in the manner of Braudel,
“Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls.”
8
Mackinder's opening sentence suggests the epic sweep of his article:
When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries
through which we are now passing, and see them fore-shortened, as we to-day see
the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years
as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900.
9
He explains that whereas medieval Christendom was “pent into a narrow region and
threatened by external barbarism,” the Columbian age—the Age of Discovery—saw
Europe expand across the oceans into other continents against “negligible resistances.” But
from the present time forth, in the post-Columbian age (he writes from the vantage point
of 1904), “we shall again have to deal with a closed political system,” and this time one of
“world-wide scope.” Elaborating, he says:
Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding cir-
cuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will [henceforth] be sharply re-echoed
