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    The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World
    The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World
    The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World

    Written by Tim Marshall

    Narrated by Tim Marshall

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the author of the New York Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography, a fascinating, “refreshing, and very useful” (The Washington Post) follow-up that uses ten maps to explain the challenges to today’s world powers and how they presage a volatile future.

    Tim Marshall’s global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a “fresh way of looking at maps” (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation’s choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and walls. Since then, the geography hasn’t changed, but the world has.

    Now, in this “wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity” (Mirror, UK), Marshall takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe’s next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space.

    Innovative, compelling, and delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is “an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs” (Publishers Weekly).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateNov 9, 2021
    ISBN9781797134079
    Author

    Tim Marshall

    Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than thirty years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News and before that worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography, The Age of Walls, A Flag Worth Dying For, The Power of Geography, and The Future of Geography.

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    Reviews for The Power of Geography

    4.5/5

    53 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Very fascinating and insightful examination of history and geography with, again, a blind spot to the repercussions of persecution of Catholics. Other persecution of people of other faiths and regions are rightfully explored, even in detail; while the brutal oppression, dispossession, and murder of Catholics in England and Spain are barely given a nod.
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity. The book takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe’s next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space.
    • 4/5
      Interesting but it does get very surface level at times
    • 5/5
      This kind of books expands mind and way of thinking.

      The Power of Geography is the much-anticipated sequel to Prisoners of Geography, a book that illustrated that a countries choices are constrained by both its landscape and climate. In this follow-up Tim Marshall examines another ten countries of geopolitical interest; this time in terms of the importance they hold for the future, Marshall emphasises how crucial geography is to an understanding of global politics - and how surprising it is that this fact often gets ignored. The book explores different states and regions that are increasingly relevant to our current times and our future: a country’s story begins from its location, and what lies within and near its borders. Which way do its rivers flow and are they conducive to navigation and internal and external trade? Do the mountains on its borders limit its ability to expand, or protect it from a potentially hostile larger neighbour? Does the climate, topography and soil allow the growth of a large population as in the USA or, as in the case of Greece and Australia, limit it? This is a solid foundation upon which to layer history and current events to not only understand why events are happening, but to predict a country’s likely future behaviour. Maps reveal as much about a government’s strategy as any high-powered summit or overly blown rhetorical speech. If you want to go somewhere, you can only start from where you are.

      That may sound obvious, perhaps trite, but a government or a leader forgets it at their peril. They must understand exactly where they are and how much fuel they have in the tank – Napoleon was not the first or last to forget that lesson and he was taught a harsh one in the Russian winter of 1812. An example in the book is Saudi Arabia. The tribal character of the country was forged in the heat of its deserts, and its place in the world is founded on its key resource underneath the sand. But when the oil was found the population was about 2 million. Now it is 34 million. If the world weans itself off oil, what sustains 34 million people in a country with limited agricultural land? The decisions the House of Saud is now making to diversify its economy are based on geography. Since the end of the Second World War, putting geography front and centre in international relations has been regarded with suspicion due to its alleged ‘determinism’, and has been eclipsed by hard economics and technology. The high priests of foreign policy, more in academia than in government, came to see it as poor thinking akin to fatalism. That, however, is in itself poor thinking and flies in the face of common sense. Russia’s President Putin did not take a keen interest in the 2020 election in Belarus due to its potential consumer market for Russian goods or as an emerging high-tech nation.

      Every Russian leader involves themselves in the immediate territories west of Moscow because it is mostly flat land through which Russia has been invaded, or through which Russian power projects westward. In the case of Belarus it is also linked with the Suwalki Gap, connecting to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. It’s also the pathway to the Smolensk Gate – territory into which military forces are channelled during conflicts, recent examples being the Germans into Russia in 1941, and then the Russians into Poland and on to Germany two years later. What happens in Belarus is of huge interest to Washington DC, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Russia and others, and that interest is overwhelmingly based on the continuity of geography. When we see the news of pro-democracy demonstrations in Minsk, we are looking at people’s aspirations about freedom and economic wellbeing, but we are also looking at geographic insecurities. Words can tell you the ‘what’; maps can help you understand the ‘why’. Rivers, mountains, deserts, islands and the seas are determining factors in history. Leaders, ideas and economics are crucial, but they are temporary, and geography is ever present. As the Dutch-American geopolitical writer Nicholas Spykman said: ‘Geography does not argue. It simply is’. This is an accessible, fascinating and information-rich read filled with up to the minute facts and statistics about our would, its geography and the story that can be foretold from the way things are currently. Highly recommended.