Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
man-power of the sea must be nourished by land fertility somewhere.” From Crete, mar-
iners may have settled the Aegean “ 'sea-chamber' ” that formed the very basis of Greek
civilization: Greek sea power flourished until challenged by Persian land power, Mackinder
goes on. But the Persian effort failed. It was the half-Greek Macedonians to the north, “in
the root of the Greek Peninsula itself,” who finally conquered the whole Aegean. For Mace-
donia, being more remote from the sea than Greece, bred a race of “landmen and mountain-
eers,” who were more obedient to their rulers even as they were excellent warriors, and yet
still close enough to the sea to have a sense of the wider world. It was this Macedonian con-
quest, making the Aegean a “closed sea”—thus depriving the Greeks and the Phoenicians
of their bases—that allowed Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, the luxury to attempt the
land conquest of the Greater Near East. Mackinder then illuminates the geographical ori-
gins of Roman and later empires, even as he admits that geography is not always an explan-
ation for history: for example, the Saracens from the Sahara in the southern Mediterranean
conquered Spain in the northern Mediterranean, while the Romans in the northern Medi-
terranean conquered Carthage in the southern Mediterranean, in both cases because of the
will of men in the form of exceptional sea power.
And yet, as Mackinder suggests, however dramatic the accomplishments of individuals,
geographical forces, acting upon human cultures, tend ultimately to win through. For ex-
ample, there is the case of Petersburg, which Peter the Great made the capital of Russia in
“the teeth of a hostile geography,” even as culture and highly motivated individuals made
its survival technically possible. So in the short run Peter triumphed, and for two centuries
“the Russian Empire was ruled from this 'folly.' ” But in the end land-bound Moscow—and
geography—again won out. Human volition has its limits.
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Mackinder's departure point for the post-World War I era is his salient perception from
the “Pivot” that we are confronted for the first time in history with a “closed system,” in
which “political ownership of all the dry land” has been “pegged out.” In this new global
geography, the dry-land area forms a “vast cape,” or “World-Promontory,” as he puts it,
stretching from the British Isles and Iberia south all the way around the bulge of West
Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Indian Ocean up to the Indian
Subcontinent and East Asia. Thus, Eurasia and Africa together form the “World-Island,”
something that as the decades march on will be increasingly a cohesive unit:
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There is one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe; there is one contin-
ent—the World-Island—covering two-twelfths of the globe; and there are many
smaller islands, whereof North America and South America are, for effective
purposes, two, which together cover the remaining one-twelfth.
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