Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Furthermore, one could say that 75 percent of the human population lives in Eurasia (to
speak nothing of Africa), which contains most of the world's wealth, 60 percent of its gross
domestic product, and three-quarters of its energy resources.
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The implicit assumption in Mackinder's thesis is that Eurasia will dominate geopolitical
calculations, even as Europe will be less and less of an entity separate from the rest of Eur-
asia and Africa. “The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably
the largest geographical unit on our globe.” From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with
the exception of Portuguese Mozambique, German East Africa, and the Dutch East Indies,
British sea power encompassed this “World-Promontory.” Mackinder compares the Roman
control of the Mediterranean, with its legions along the Rhine frontier, with British domin-
ation of the Indian Ocean (the Promontory's chief sea), while the British army stakes out
the northwest frontier of India against an encroaching czarist Russia.
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The implications of Mackinder's “closed system,” in which it is possible to conceive of
the entire breadth of Eurasia and Africa as one organic unit, and the further closing of that
system throughout the course of the twentieth century and beyond, forms the core point of
my own study, from which others will emerge. But it is equally crucial to acknowledge that
even a closed system, in which, for example, the Indian Ocean is a vascular center of the
world economy, with tankers in the future collecting oil and natural gas from Somalia for
deposit in China, is still divided from within by geography. Geography, in fact, becomes
all the more important in a closed system, because of that system's propensity to make the
effect, say, of a harsh terrain in Afghanistan register politically from one end of the World-
Island to the other.
For now, let us return to explore exactly what Mackinder meant by the Heartland, which
so much affects the destiny of the World-Island.
Mackinder both begins and sums up his thinking with this oft-quoted grand and simplistic
dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World
.
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The first thing to realize here is that Mackinder, rather than being wholly deterministic,
is just as much reacting to events that are the upshot of human agency as he is predicting
them. Between his publication of “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904 and of
Democratic Ideals and Reality
in 1919 came the carnage of World War I, and in the war's
aftermath came the Paris Peace Conference, which was taking place as Mackinder's topic
was going to press. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires as a
