It’s become a habit for many to look at maps as mere guides to where we want to go. Whether our destination is on the coast, across fields of wheat or along mountain ranges, it is easy to judge geography as irrelevant to our destinations. A GPS can take us anywhere we want to go.
This looks especially true when scoffing over the ‘border gore’ left by collapsing European empires, with straight lines that take no account of local cultures alongside scrawls that create enclaves within enclaves. Doubtless it is all the fault of some 19th-century Etonian, and reflective of nothing.
But common understanding of geopolitics often belies the raw physical constraints that have always limited human activity. It’s in acknowledgement of this that the journalist Tim Marshall has been trying to restore geography to its proper place.

This began with the foreboding Prisoners of Geography in 2015. Since then Marshall has written about walls and flags, but has returned to the hard stuff with The Power of Geography this year, exploring new territories and some locations in more depth. Appropriately, given the recent antics of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, the book also ventures into space.
The fact such books need to be written indicates how disconnected the average professional thinker is from the constraints of landscape. Before the age of mass road networks, bullet trains and aeroplanes, the difficulties posed by mountain ranges, rivers and deserts would have been much trickier to ignore.
Likewise, the ubiquity of maps (especially the Mercator projection) has made obvious points seem profound. Australia, for example, is often treated as a neighbour of China, but Beijing is as close to Warsaw in Poland as it is to Canberra, as Marshall notes.
Another trick the author pulls is rotating a map of the British Isles to put continental Europe at the top. Though it was once commonplace to put the east at the top of maps (hence the etymology of ‘orient’), it is easy to forget how much coast Great Britain has pointing towards Europe given the emphasis on our seafaring nature.
Where this is most interesting is how it informs politics. Spain’s difficulty in forming a unifying polity is linked to how mountainous its regions are. Turkey’s position on the edge of Europe has helped it leverage the migrant crisis for political gain. Australia is big, but much of it is unsuited for habitation, limiting the scope for development.
Such factors will continue to matter more than the churn of election cycles. Indeed, daily politics are frequently contingent on geography, whether it be Catalonian separatism based on historical remoteness, mineral distribution in the United States influencing Democratic votes via plantation slavery, or London’s proximity to continental Europe concentrating political power in the southeast of the British Isles.
This is even true where humans have created tools that surmount the constraints geography. And as Marshall notes, “The sky is not the limit.” Our current frontier is space.
The author hopes that whatever the spoils of space they are shared fairly, noting the tendency for Westphalian division to break down over time. The obvious rejoinder is that global governance has often met a similar fate or proved toothless, and there is no reason to think the heavens will be governed differently.
That is before worrying about climate change, a topic touched on in the book but worthy of a full volume from Marshall. Indeed, the risks posed by climate change perhaps best represent his outlook. As the refrain goes, climate change is not destroying the planet. Whatever we do, the planet will be fine.