Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to understand world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture. To understand Putin's actions, for example, it is essential to consider that, to be a world power, Russia must have a navy. And if its ports freeze for six months each year then it must have access to a warm water port - hence, the annexation of Crimea was the only option for Putin. To understand the Middle East, it is crucial to know that geography is the reason why countries have logically been shaped as they are - and this is why invented countries (e.g. Syria, Iraq, Libya) will not survive as nation states. Spread over ten chapters (covering Russia; China; the USA; Latin America; the Middle East; Africa; India and Pakistan; Europe; Japan and Korea; and Greenland and the Arctic), using maps, essays and occasionally the personal experiences of the widely traveled author, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past, present and future to offer an essential guide to one of the major determining factors in world history.

Tim Marshall paints with broad brush strokes the overwhelming influence of geography on nation building, trade, security and conflict in the international arena. Sometimes, he does overemphasize the geographical limitations and tends to underemphasize how geography works within feedback loops of culture and ethnicity- which results in a bleaker picture than is necessary of global conflict. However he should get credit for succinctly morphing a “intro to geopolitics 101” lecture into a handy book.

Woulb be a fiver but for the prose and the too short chapter on Siuth America (Read Chile). Must be read to get a better understanding of the big players in global politics.

(2.5, rounded up to 3)
This was supposed to be a primer on maps and geography first, and how it relates to history later. What should have been a compelling read is reduced to short paragraphs of text which look like they have been lifted straight from Wikipedia, which is not a compliment.

Two glaring flaws jump at you once you finish this book. The first being that Marshall's treatment is superficial at best and unconvincing at worst - I sometimes felt that even the author wasn't convinced that rivers and mountains have influenced history to the extent that he describes. Secondly, Marshall is an unabashed neoliberal - his beliefs are that Latin America is in dire straits because they had socialism, colonialism happened and we should all get over it, and trust for American hegemony is very much implicit within the text.

All in all, the book is a decent introductory read if you are a novice on geopolitics, but if one is already aware of what is going on in the world and wanted to know the ground reality, as I did, then this book is not a good starting point. There are some good things to be said about the book but the consistently glossing over details and the pretending that Australia doesn't exist does it no favours.

The final chapter, where Marshall states that humanity is so divided that we cannot contemplate travelling the universe as representatives of mankind but will still think of ourselves as Indians, Americans, Russians or Chinese – is a sobering one. This is the only place where he made me believe in the prisoners of geography argument – and better late than never, I suppose.