The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Chapter III

  HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS

  During the middle to latter twentieth century, when Hans Morgenthau taught in the political science department at the University of Chicago, two other professors were also forging prodigious academic paths in the history department: William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The university was bursting with rigor and talent, and by concentrating on these three professors, I do not mean to slight others. Whereas Morgenthau defined realism for the present age, McNeill quite literally did so for the history of the world and Hodgson for the history of Islam, in massive works of Herodotean scope, in which geography is rarely far out of reach. The very audacity that McNeill and Hodgson showed in the choice of their subjects is to be admired in this current academic era, with its emphasis on narrow specialization—in truth, a necessity as the mass of knowledge steadily accumulates. But to read McNeill and Hodgson is almost to be wistful for a time not that long ago when scholars’ horizons were seemingly limitless. Specialization has brought its own unique sort of flowering, but the academy could use more of what these two University of Chicago professors represent. Geography, they demonstrate, is in and of itself a means of thinking broadly.

  William Hardy McNeill, born in British Columbia, was in his mid-forties when in 1963 he published The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, a book which runs well over eight hundred pages. The overarching theme is to challenge the viewpoint of British historian Arnold Toynbee and German historian Oswald Spengler that separate civilizations pursued their destinies independently. Instead, McNeill argues that cultures and civilizations continually interacted, and it has been this interaction that has forged the core drama of world history. If the book is about anything, it is about the vast movements of peoples across the map.

  To wit: a northerly movement brought the so-called Danubian cultivators into central and western Europe between 4500 and 4000 B.C. Meanwhile, a southerly movement of pioneer herders and farmers crossed North Africa unto the Strait of Gibraltar, “to meet and mingle with the Danubian flood.” But the older hunting populations of Europe were not destroyed, McNeill writes; instead, there was a mixing of populations and cultures.1 Thus, the heart of the book commences.

  Both these population movements, north and south of the Mediterranean, originated from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, where political instability was largely a function of geography. “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man,” writes the late British travel writer Freya Stark.2 Indeed, as McNeill indicates, Mesopotamia cut across one of history’s bloodiest migration routes. “As soon as the cities of the plain had been made to flourish,” the result of a gently sloping landscape in the lower part of the Tigris-Euphrates valley that carried irrigation water for miles, “they became tempting objects of plunder to the barbarous peoples of the country round about.” Moreover, when most of the irrigable land of Mesopotamia came under cultivation, and the fields of one community came into contact with those of another, chronic war emerged, as there was no central authority to settle boundary disputes, or to apportion water in times of shortage. In the midst of this semi-chaos, conquerors like Sargon (2400 B.C.) entered Mesopotamia from the margins of the cultivated zone. Though able to establish a centralized authority, the vanquishing soldiery, after a few generations, McNeill tells us, gave up the military life in favor of the “softer and more luxurious ways” of the towns. And so history began to repeat itself with the arrival of new conquerors.

  This is all very reminiscent of the pattern described by the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and geographer Ibn Khaldun, who notes that while luxurious living strengthens the state initially by furthering its legitimacy, in succeeding generations it leads to decadence, with the process of collapse signaled by the rise of powerful provincial leaders, who then invade and form their own dynasties.3 Ultimately, the rise of civilization in ancient Iraq led to the most suffocating of tyrannies in order to stave off the disintegration from within: thus we have Tiglath-pileser (twelfth–eleventh centuries B.C.), Ashurnasirpal II (ninth century B.C.), Sennacherib (eighth–seventh centuries B.C.), and others, famous for their cruelty, megalomania, and mass deportations carried out in their name.4 It is a pattern that culminates in Saddam Hussein: that of a region prone to invasion and fragmentation that required through much of history significant levels of tyranny. But again, one should avoid too constricted a conclusion: for example, between 1921 and 1958, Iraq experienced a modestly well-functioning parliamentary system, which might have continued under slightly altered circumstances. McNeill, Khaldun, and Stark are speaking of historical and geographical tendencies only, and thus avoid the charge of determinism.5

  Just as geography formed the basis for an extraordinary level of tyranny and bureaucracy in Mesopotamia, McNeill explains how it culminated in somewhat less oppressive rule in Egypt. “Deserts gave the land of Egypt clear-cut and easily defensible boundaries; while the Nile provided it with a natural backbone and nervous system,” so that Mesopotamian levels of oppression weren’t necessary along the Nile. “Frontier defense,” he goes on, “against outlanders was scarcely a serious problem for the king of Egypt”: indeed, because of Egypt’s favorable situation vis-à-vis migration routes compared to Mesopotamia’s, infiltration by Libyans from the west and Asiatics from the east were relatively minor issues. Egypt was shut off from the south, where there is nothing but bare desert on either side of the river; while in the north there is the Mediterranean Sea. It is probable that for four thousand years Egyptians “never saw an invading host in their midst.”6 The Nile, moreover, was easily navigable, with the flow of the river carrying boats northward, even as the winds generally blowing from north to south carried boats, with the help of sail, southward. Thus was civilization able to dawn in Egypt. “By contrast,” McNeill writes, “Mesopotamian rulers could avail themselves of no ready-made natural instrument for securing their centralized authority, but had slowly and painfully to develop [oppressive] law and bureaucratic administration as an artificial substitute for the natural articulation which geography gave to Egypt.” Mesopotamia’s heavy-handed bureaucracy had further to deal with the capricious rate of flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was not the case with the Nile, and which complexified further the organization of the irrigation system.7 Even today, both Egypt and Iraq have had dictatorial regimes for long periods, but the fact that Iraq’s have been far worse is something that, in part, we can trace to antiquity, and to geography.

  Beyond the Middle East were what McNeill calls the “peripheral” civilizations of India, Greece, and China, “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” which in the cases of the first two derived a good portion of their vitality from the cultures of the Indus River and Minoan Crete. But all three also drew from their interaction with barbarian invaders, even as they were partially protected from them by virtue of geography. For Greece and India on account of their northerly mountains were both “effectively sheltered from the direct impact of steppe cavalry.” China was even more isolated, by inhospitable deserts, high peaks, and sheer distance, as thousands of miles separated the Yellow River valley, where Chinese civilization began, from the Middle East and Indian heartlands. The result was three utterly original civilizations, particularly that of the Chinese, that were able to develop separately from the increasingly cultural uniformity of the Greater Desert Middle East, which stretched from North Africa to Turkestan.8

  McNeill explains that throughout antiquity the ebb and flow of the frontiers between Hellenic, Middle Eastern, and Indian civilizations made for a delicate cultural balance in Eurasia, which, later in the medieval centuries, would be undone by the inundation of steppe peoples from the north, notably the Mongols.9 It is largely through the Mongols that the Silk Route flourished, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bringing Eurasian civilization
s from the Pacific to the Mediterranean into modest contact with one another. Nevertheless, China formed its own separate sphere geographically compared to the civilizations further west, with Tibet, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea all directing their gazes toward the Middle Kingdom, each forging in varying degrees its own civilization. And yet the severe limitations of a high desert environment “made anything more than a protocivilization impossible in Tibet and Mongolia,” McNeill writes. Tibetan Lamaists, “always conscious of the Indian Buddhist origins of their faith,” in effect opposed Sinification by appealing to the traditions of the rival civilization next door.10 History, according to McNeill, is a study in fluidity, in which things only seem secure and neatly geographically ordered: more crucially we are always in a state of smaller transitions and cultural interchanges.

  While opposing Spengler, Toynbee, and later the “Clash of Civilizations” theory of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, in emphasizing the interaction of civilizations rather than their separateness, McNeill’s The Rise of the West, nevertheless, engages the reader with the whole notion of civilizations formed in large measure by geography, that rise from precisely definable landscapes, achieve their own identity, and then interact with other civilizations, in turn forming new hybrids. In this way, history is woven.11 McNeill metaphorically describes the process:

  Civilizations may be likened to mountain ranges, rising through aeons of geologic time, only to have the forces of erosion slowly but ineluctably nibble them down to the level of their surroundings. Within the far shorter time span of human history, civilizations, too, are liable to erosion as the special constellation of circumstances which provoked their rise passes away, while neighboring peoples lift themselves to new cultural heights by borrowing from or otherwise reacting to the civilized achievement.12

  Such erosion and borrowing terrifies the purity of the early-twentieth-century German Oswald Spengler, who writes of the “deep soil ties” that define the best of High Cultures: how the inner evolution of sacral practices and dogmas remain “spellbound in the place of their birth,” since, “whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.” High Culture, he goes on, begins in the “preurban countryside” and culminates with a “finale of materialism” in the “world-cities.” For this dark romantic, who can at once be turgid, hypnotic, profound, and, frankly, at times unintelligible in English translation, cosmopolitanism is the essence of rootlessness, because it is not tied to the land.13

  That raises the question of the rise and eventual fate of an urban Western civilization, morphing as we speak into a world civilization, and increasingly divorced from the soil. That inquiry will come later in the book. Meanwhile, I want to continue with McNeill, who, through it all, far more so than Spengler even, and far more intelligibly, is attentive to climate and geography.

  McNeill writes, for example, that the Aryans developed a different, less warlike cultural personality in India’s Gangetic plain than they did in Mediterranean Europe because of the influence of the subcontinent’s forests and the monsoonal cycle, which encouraged meditation and religious knowledge. In another example, he writes that Greek Ionia’s “precocity” was because of proximity to, and intimate contact with, Asia Minor and the Orient. And yet here, too, McNeill pulls back from outright determinism: for despite Greece’s mountainous terrain, which favored the establishment of small political units, i.e., city-states, he is careful to note that in a number of cases, “contiguous expanses of fertile ground were broken up” into different city-states, so that geography can only be part of the story. And above all, of course, there is the history of the Jews, which goes against the entire logic of the geographical continuity of major religions (particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism), and which McNeill therefore takes pains to include: the utter destruction of the Jewish community in Judea, the consequence of the crushing of first- and second-century A.D. revolts by the Romans, did not end Judaism, which went on improbably to evolve and flourish in scattered cities of the western Diaspora, a two-thousand-year-old story averse to the dictates of geography, which shows once again how ideas and human agency matter as much as physical terrain.14

  And yet, too, there is the story of Europe, reaching back to the dawn of human history, a story very much about the primacy of geography. As McNeill points out, Western Europe had distinct geographical advantages which developments in technology during the so-called Dark Ages brought into play: wide and fertile plains, an indented coastline that allowed for many good natural harbors, navigable rivers flowing northward across these plains and extending the reach of commerce to a greater extent than in the Mediterranean region, and an abundance of timber and metals.15 Europe’s was also a harsh, cold, and wet climate, and as Toynbee, who, like McNeill, was, at a crucial level, not a fatalist, nonetheless writes: “Ease is inimical to civilisation.… The greater the ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus toward civilisation.”16 And thus Europe developed because of a geography that was difficult in which to live but had many natural nodal points of transport and commerce. For civilizations are in many ways brave and fortitudinous reactions to natural environments. Take the proximity of Scandinavia and the military pressure it brought to bear on Western European seaboards, which led to the articulation of England and France as national entities. England, moreover, being smaller than the feudal kingdoms of the continent, and, as Toynbee writes, “possessed of better-defined frontiers [after all, it was an island],” achieved far sooner than its neighbors a national as opposed to a feudal existence.17

  Of course, some landscapes, the Arctic, for example, prove so difficult that they can lead to civilizational collapse, or to an arrested civilization. What precedes this, according to Toynbee, is a cultural tour de force—say, the Eskimos’ ability to actually stay on the ice in winter and hunt seals. But once having accomplished this feat of survival, they are unable to master the environment to the extent of developing a full-fledged civilization. Toynbee, as well as the contemporary UCLA geographer Jared Diamond, write legions about civilizational difficulties and downfalls among the medieval cultures of the Vikings of Greenland, the Polynesians of Easter Island, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, and the Mayans of the Central American jungles, all of which were connected to problems with the environment.18 Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.19 Witness Vasco da Gama’s mastering of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean, which allowed for the outer edges of Eurasia to become a focus of the world’s sea lanes under European dominance. But in McNeill’s narrative, it is not only the material advancement of Europe, under a challenging physical environment, that leads to the rise of the West, but the closing, as he puts it, of the “barbarian” spaces.20

  McNeill talks of the “inexorable, if not entirely uninterrupted, encroachment of civilizations upon barbarism”:

  It was this encroachment which built up the mass and internal variety of the separate civilizations of the world and increased the frequency of contact among them, preparing the way for the spectacular unification of the globe which has occurred during the past three or four centuries.21

  This civilizational closure of the earth’s relatively empty spaces, mainly in the temperate zone, began in a fundamental way with the voyages of discovery: those of da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, and others. And it continued through the well-known stages of revolutions in industry, transport, and communications to the globalization we experience today. In between came the final collapse of the steppe peoples, with Russia, China, and the Habsburg Empire partitioning the relatively empty central Eurasian plains and tablelands. There was, too, the collapse of indigenous populati
ons with the violent securing of the western frontier of the North American continent, and the European colonial encroachment on sub-Saharan Africa.22 The world, as McNeill describes it, is now finally united under a largely Western, increasingly urbanized culture. Remember that communism, while an extension of the totalitarian tendencies within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and, therefore, an affront to liberalism, was still an ideology of the industrialized West. Nazism, too, emerged as a pathology of an inflation-wracked, rapidly modernizing West. McNeill is not talking about political unity, but of broad cultural, geographic, and demographic tendencies.

  While a central theme of The Rise of the West is the closing up of empty spaces on the map, obviously this is true in a relative sense only. The fact that two rail lines coming from opposite directions meet and touch each other does not mean that there still aren’t many empty or sparsely inhabited spaces in between. Frontiers may be closed in a formal sense, but the density of human population and electronic interaction keep increasing at a steep rate. And it is this rate of increase that helps to form the political drama of the world we inhabit today. McNeill could consider as united a world where no part of the civilized earth was further than a few weeks from another part.23 But how does geopolitics change when the remotest places are separated by only a few days, or hours, as in our time? The world was, in a sense, united in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that world bears little relation in terms of demography and technology to that of the early twenty-first. The core drama of our own age, as we shall see, is the steady filling up of space, making for a truly closed geography where states and militaries have increasingly less room to hide. Whereas mechanized, early-modern armies of a century ago had to cross many miles to reach each other, now there are overlapping ranges of missiles. Geography does not disappear in this scenario, it just becomes, as we shall see, even more critical.