‘Geography is destiny’
This saying can be correct in many ways. Perhaps Napoleon phrased it for the first time for tactical/military reasons. Starting from mid-19th Century geography qua science mattered because it shaped the self-consciousness of a nation. Just as what is to be called an American would differ widely from today had the thirteen colonies not spread first into the Ohio Valley and across the Appalachians, so would it be true for other national identities.
• It matters for regional identities as well. Identity need not be national or supra-national. Cromwell wasn’t just an esquire who took up arms against a particular king –or as the mid-17th Century Puritan cry says ‘we fight the king to defend the King’. He could only be born and raised in that particular country and in that particular region –and time.
• Geography is fate because it determines in which way a tribe, a collection of tribes, a religious community, a nation can be. One has to acquire certain lands, keep longdistance posts, develop a naval force etc. just because geography obliges.
• Geography may not only determine the nature of trade routes, defence systems, culture, religion, even science etc. but also it means destiny, and i.e. a community faces another community for millennia. One has to build roads, bridges, buildings in a certain way because geography obliges. It is destiny encapsulated in memory and mitigated by conscience. In the words of Luther, “to go against conscience is neither true nor safe”.
• Take England in the 19th century in its relation with the Ottoman Empire. Between 1840 and 1875, the Ottoman Empire was nearly a protectorate of Britain, a protectorate so acridly tempered that the Crimean War between Russia and the Ottomans had almost gained the status of a European war. The Empire was passing through radical reforms.
• Istanbul bureaucrats had probably intended the reform to be on a par with the successful Meiji Restoration in Japan but what worked in Tokyo failed in Istanbul. After 1875, British interests focused on Egypt, eyeing on building an effective colonial bureaucracy imbued with British culture and values. That project also failed because it was an impossible mission to be carried out in such a vast and culturally diverse an empire as the Ottoman Empire. Remember geography?
• If one fails repeatedly, one has to change the way he thinks. At least he should comply with the mandates Mother Nature poses as constraints. Don’t forget that “it all depends on what you build and what you build with”. Romans knew that millennia ago.