GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY
Britain and the World, a 10,000 Year History By IAN MORRIS Profile Books
Ian Morris writes big books full of big ideas about big history. A dozen years ago, his Why the West Rules – For Now took the race between East and West back 15 millennia to explain the divided world we know today, while 2014’s War! What is it Good For? argued that for millennia, war has been a crucial aspect of human development that actually makes the world safer and wealthier.
Geography is Destiny employs a similarly vast canvas in seeking to explain the outcome of the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and what it says about the world today, insisting that to understand the result, we have to go right back to the inundation of the English Channel and Britain’s physical separation from the rest of Europe.
This erudite and highly entertaining exploration is based around three world maps. First up is the Hereford Map of the early 14th century, with Jerusalem at its centre and Britain on the fringes at a time when ‘the Channel and the North Sea were highways, not barriers’. Next comes a 1902 map by pioneer of geopolitics Halford Mackinder on which Britain is firmly at the centre. The Atlantic is the significant highway, writes Morris, but the Royal Navy ensures that ‘insularity would trump proximity’.
The third map, from 2018, depicts the countries of the world in proportion to how much wealth they create, with North America, Western Europe and East Asia disproportionately huge, as if we’re viewing the traditional global map in a hall of mirrors. It’s to this Dali-esque depiction that Morris ultimately leads us. Brexit, he argues, for all its polarising dominance of the discourse, is but a frustrating distraction from the bigger picture – and that picture is of China. The 21st century, he writes, ‘will be about Beijing, not Brussels’.
While he makes a convincing case, the true strength of Geography is Destiny lies in its wide-ranging and beautifully written rampage through British history. Pacy without ever being breathless, this is everything good history writing should be.