“Geography is clearly a fundamental part of “why” as well as the “what”” (7) is what journalist and author Tim Marshall discusses in his 2015 international bestseller ‘Prisoners of Geography’, explaining how the geography of a nation affects their foreign policies and domestic politics, even going as far to say that the “maps tell you everything you need to know about global politics”.
Marshall, former diplomatic editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News, is not new to the business of politics and geography following 20 years’ experience in this exact area, allowing him to have a great understanding of politics as well as an impartial opinion. Furthermore, the book was published fairly recently in 2015 allowing it to have modern and contemporary opinions with up to date factual information for me, a reader in 2017.
The book explores a range of issues; however, they are all central to the idea that geography dictates the political options and allows things such as certain nations to become superpowers such as the US and others to not be able to: according to Marshall “Geography has always been a prison of sorts—one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.” (434). And this claim is substantially backed with well analysed evidence such as with the example of the Chinese occupation of Tibet is what is known as the “Geopolitics of fear” (69) where if China did not occupy Tibet, India would mean China would be at a geographical and political low point, as India now controls China’s water supply as well as the Tibetan plateau which allow for an easy entry into China in case of invasion. Another example was with Africa; “Africa’s coastline? Great beaches––really, really lovely beaches––but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are worthless for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems that helps explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.” (154) showing due to Africa having poor rivers for transportation leading it to be as unsuccessful as it is. Ideas like this are spread through the book, which is easily accessible for people with little geographical knowledge to understand to a greater degree the restraints placed on the politicians today in parliament by the Earth.
However, one of the weaknesses with this book is that Marshall believes geopolitics and the physical geography is the reason for all political issues and ideas when in actuality it’s much more complicated than that. For example, Marshall believes the “Iran has traditionally centralized power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability” (224) due to the fact there is a “mountainous terrain [in] Iran” (224), which completely fails to look at the wide range of religious and political opinions which are all starkly different to one another. The failure to look at the whole picture in this book could skew a layman’s opinion on the reasons for countries issues. Iran is not the way it is solely due to mountains – wars, poor governmental organisation and varying Islamic opinions created the issues we see clearly in Iran today. Not just the mountains. Another example of this “Mexico is destined to live in the United States’ shadow and as such will always play the subservient role in bilateral relations” (299). The fact that Marshall believes Mexico’s current poor political situation is due to the US massively better land is absurd and fails to take into account of the Mexican inferior organisational government and lack of money and 1000s of other political factors.
Another weakness of this book was a lack of geopolitical analysis. There was some but it was clouded with pages and pages of raw facts and historical background. Evidence and facts are crucial to a sound argument however with too much fact, reading at times became tedious, boring and repetitive which is not what you want from a book that should interest you into the geographical impact on global politics; it’s like a burger with too much lettuce and sauce; both of which are necessary to have a good burger but too much of it can mask the meat of the burger (the geopolitical analysis). Nonetheless, the actual analysis of the book is very detailed and interesting; it just takes a while to get there. Overall, the book is well structured with clear global based chapters, with a map and explaining how that affects the political situation of that country/continent, ranging from Africa to the Arctic with everything in-between including Korea, India / Pakistan, USA, Europe to East Asia and Russia.
In summary, I would rate this book a 7/10; it is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in global politics or geography. The language is accessible, it flows well and has brilliant analysis despite the fact it’s quite fact heavy and has a slightly limited view on the reasons behind global political decisions. It is a great addition to geopolitical literature – after reading this book, I believe more strongly that “the geographical factors that have helped determine our history will mostly continue to determine our future” (435).