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.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's 1997 classic non-fiction book is a study of history, geography, anthropology, and other scientific disciplines. It is a readable, highly informative work that won a Pulitzer Prize and has proven very popular in its field over the past twenty years.


Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, attempts to answer the question of why the European powers, or rather the Western World, came to power rather than Asian, African, or South American societies. He suggests this notion was brought to him by a New Guinean friend who asked why it was the European nations who conquered and colonized, and not, for example, Oceanic civilizations. "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Elsewhere he asks why Spain invaded South America instead of the Mayans invading Spain.

His central theory is this: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." He painstakingly makes the point that societies took different paths for four reasons:

1. The native crops and animals in each region.
2. The orientation of continental axis, which hinders or promotes the diffusion of agriculture.
3. Transfer of knowledge.
4. Population density.

While it is true that European historians have often attempted to use racist theories to explain Western hegemony, at times Diamond seems to go to the opposite extreme. At the beginning of his book he seems eager to explain himself as different from previous generations and free from their racial prejudice. Throughout the book, he pours on the political correctness, which is at times excruciating. He makes outrageous racist statements about white people which are as bad as what you might expect to find in a more traditional "whites are superior and that's all you need to know" sort of study.

It is easy to see why this book earned so much respect. It is incredibly well-researched and does offer a fantastic explanation for why different societies took different paths. I've heard from an anthropologist friend that political correctness is a curse throughout all anthropology these days, so I suppose you just have to suffer through that and accept it for what it is.