Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall

I’ve recently powered through this fantastic book during my rare downtime studying a CELTA course in Thailand. I’m usually quite a slow reader, but Prisoners of Geography is so engaging that I reached the end in no time and was left wishing there was more of the world to cover.

The premise of Tim Marshall’s new book is simple: our world is governed by geography more than we know. Perhaps that seems obvious; perhaps it seems an overstatement. Yet Marshall makes a good case that our present geopolitical situation is dictated by largely the same forces that ancient nations abided.

Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

He goes from Russia to China to the USA, visiting India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, and even the Arctic, explaining why our world is shaped the way it is. References are made, fittingly, to Jared Diamond’s work, which I reviewed here last month. His observations on politics and history are astute, and his descriptions of planet’s geographical features are wonderful.

Often Marshall acknowledges the absurdity of the nation state, which is fundamentally a prison of its own, applied forcefully to the world by the European powers, and which chokes us and causes untold destruction today. One passage I loved from this book illuminates that point:

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

Marshall seems pre-occupied with the potential for cataclysmic global war and points out numerous places on the globe where it could happen, although he does end on a more hopeful note, looking off into space – where we are finally free of our geographic prison.