A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring 21 million square miles, or more than three times the area of North America, whose centre and north, measuring some 9 million square miles, or more than twice the area of Europe, have no available water-ways to the ocean, but, on the other hand, except in the subarctic forest, are very generally favourable to the mobility of horsemen and camelmen.54

  Moving towards the present, Mackinder asked: ‘is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?’ By this point, Mackinder was explicit about the kind of imperial map of the world he envisaged. ‘Russia replaces the Mongol Empire,’ he warned, and its 9,000 kilometres of railway from Wirballen in the west to Vladivostok in the east created the conditions for the mobilization and deployment of a vast military and economic machine that drew on such extensive landlocked natural resources that it would eclipse the seaborne power of maritime empires like the British. This, he predicted, ‘would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight’. In a direct address to current British foreign policy, he warned that this might happen ‘if Germany were to ally herself with Russia’.55 These two great empires would effectively control the geographical pivot area of the entire world, stretching from western Europe to the Chinese Pacific coast and reaching as far south as central Persia and the borders of India. It was a timely observation. As Mackinder spoke, Japan was mobilizing its armies in response to Russia’s imperial claims to Korea and Manchuria. Russian expansion in the Far East threatened British imperial interests in Hong Kong, Burma and even India. Two weeks after Mackinder delivered his paper, on 8 February, war broke out.56

  Mackinder demonstrated his new world order by illustrating his talk with maps on lantern slides. After some regional maps of Eastern Europe and Asia, the later sections of the paper included a world map that provided a graphic explanation of Mackinder’s argument, and which would come to be regarded as ‘the most famous map in the geopolitical tradition’.57 Entitled ‘The Natural Seats of Power’, the map shows three distinct zones. The first, the dotted pivot zone, covers most of Russia and central Asia and is exclusively landlocked (Mackinder makes the point by marking its northern extremes as abutting onto what he labels ‘Icy Sea’). Beyond this zone are two concentric crescents. The first, labelled the inner or marginal crescent, is shown as partly continental, partly oceanic, and is composed of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India and part of China. The outer or insular crescent, which was predominantly oceanic, included Japan, Australia, Canada, the Americas, South Africa and Britain.

  Fig. 33 Halford Mackinder, ‘The Natural Seats of Power’, world map, in Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, 1904.

  Acknowledging the unfamiliar appearance of southern and northern America on the map’s eastern and western borders, Mackinder argued that ‘the United States has recently become an eastern power, affecting the European balance not directly, but through Russia, and she will construct the Panama Canal to make her Mississippi and Atlantic resources available in the Pacific [the United States had just been granted rights to begin work on the canal, which began four months later in May 1904]. From this point of view the real divide between east and west is to be found in the Atlantic Ocean.’58 To an audience used to looking at a world map that placed the Americas in the western hemisphere, and which usually regarded the cultural and geographical division between east and west as falling somewhere in today’s Middle East, Mackinder’s map and the argument it supported was a shocking revelation, as was its implication for the military threat to the future of the British Empire.

  Mackinder’s remarks reflected his ambitions for the place of geography in political life. ‘I have spoken as a geographer,’ he said. But in what followed he suggested a new role for his academic profession in line with his changed political beliefs.

  The actual balance of political power at any given time is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples. In proportion as these quantities are accurately estimated are we likely to adjust differences without the crude resort to arms. And the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human. Hence we should expect to find our formula apply equally to past history and to present politics.59

  For Mackinder, geography was the only discipline able to measure and predict the shifting balance of international politics. His ‘formula’ for understanding the geographical pivot of history was all that could limit what he regarded as the inevitable military confrontations or ‘crude resort to arms’ that would result from any significant shift in the balance of global power.

  The audience’s response to his paper was on this occasion decidedly mixed. The society’s Fellows were not used to such sweeping conceptual arguments (which they tended to regard as the preserve of foreigners) and certainly not ones which, despite the prevailing political climate, suggested the British Empire was in imminent peril. His first respondent, Mr Spencer Wilkinson, lamented the absence of Cabinet ministers among the audience. They could learn, he suggested, from Mackinder’s explanation that ‘whereas only half a century ago statesmen played on a few squares of a chess-board of which the remainder was vacant, in the present day the world is an enclosed chess-board, and every movement of the statesman must take account of all the squares in it’. His scepticism towards ‘some of Mr Mackinder’s historical analogies or precedents’ was shared by many other Fellows, who refuted his suggestion that the British Empire was under threat, insisting as Wilkinson did that ‘an island state like our own can, if it maintains its naval power, hold the balance between the divided forces which work on the continental area’.60 Surely, they thought, whatever the brilliance of Mackinder’s argument, the empire’s naval might was unassailable?

  Wilkinson also worried about Mackinder’s world map, ‘because it was a map on Mercator’s projection, which exaggerated the British Empire, with the exception of India’.61 It was indeed an odd map, but made absolute sense when compared with Mackinder’s previous cartographic efforts. Alongside his Kenyan map presented to the RGS almost exactly four years earlier, the world map illustrated the transformations in geography and mapmaking that took place throughout the course of the nineteenth century. There are obvious differences between these two maps, but their overall approach to mapping and imperial policy is the same. The Kenyan map is a straightforward example of chorography – regional mapping – using standard cartographic conventions and symbols to chart the territory depicted and lay claim to it.

  In contrast, the geographical pivot world map operates at a global level, and is extremely simplistic. After the great surveys of Cassini and the Ordnance Survey, Mackinder’s map is noticeably bereft of the established attributes of regional or global cartography. Unlike the regional Kenyan map, there is no scale or graticule of latitude and longitude. It lacks even a basic toponymy: the oceans, countries, even continents are unlabelled, and for a map that sustains such an overtly political thesis, it is strange to see absolutely no divisions of territory along national, imperial, ethnic or religious lines. Even its peculiar oval shape was obsolete, having been all but abandoned by cartographers since the sixteenth century. Although it drew on the shape of world maps like Mollweide’s, which challenged Mercator, Mackinder still chose to use the 1569 projection, even though the oval frame only amplifies the distortion which Mercator admitted affected his world map.

  The world map also represented the culmination of the arguments rehearsed in Britain and the British Seas. The image Mackinder designed was in effect a thematic map, using highly charged political ‘data’ he had b
uilt up over the previous two decades as a teacher, explorer and politician. It drew on the physical and moral thematic maps that dominated so much nineteenth-century mapmaking to produce the foundational image of geopolitics, a compelling but ideologically loaded map of the world as a giant imperial chessboard. Some geographers would question its status as a map: it certainly stretched the definition of thematic mapping, using no verifiable data to argue its case. But its moralizing force was unquestionable, even though virtually every phrase on it was purely interpretative. Apart from its description of ‘desert’ and ‘icy sea’, Mackinder’s image was composed of ‘pivots’ and ‘crescents’ that bore no relationship to any previous geographical language.

  Like the images used in Britain and the British Seas that struggled to make his case for England’s global position, Mackinder pushed the parameters of the ‘map’ as far as he could to give his thesis maximum graphic power and authority. Like Spencer Wilkinson, he knew the limitations of Mercator’s projection. Nevertheless, he chose to use it because of its iconicity, and because it emphasized the eastern and western hemispheres in such a way that suited his imperial mentality: like Mercator, Mackinder had no interest in the North and South poles, which in Mercator are mapped to infinity, and in Mackinder’s map are not even shown. By plotting the projection within an oval frame he could stretch his continents to show the range of his outer insular crescent, and present an image of a mutually interconnected world. This also allowed him to overcome the awkward plane maps and global ‘photographs’ created just two years earlier. The map which resulted looked both strikingly modern and strangely archaic. Though its argument was emblematic of a new geopolitical world order, the image itself is purely geometric, evoking the emblematic lines of imperial partition drawn across early sixteenth-century maps and globes as Spain and Portugal claimed to split the world in two, even though their influence stretched over only a fraction of the known earth. An even stronger visual and intellectual predecessor is a medieval map like the Hereford mappamundi, which Mackinder used as the first illustration in Britain and the British Seas. It was an image that Mackinder would return to in 1919, as he outlined his theory of the ‘heartland’ in Democratic Ideals and Reality. He described the Hereford mappamundi as ‘a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades’, on which ‘Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical centre, the navel, of the world’. ‘If our study of the geographical realities, as we now know them in their completeness, is leading us to right conclusions, the medieval ecclesiastics were not far wrong.’ He concluded that ‘[i]f the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe . . . then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world realities not differing essentially from its ideal perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt’.62

  To Mackinder, the Hereford mappamundi was defined not by theology, but by the geopolitics of the Crusades and the westward shift of empire from Babylon to Jerusalem. Mappaemundi were therefore simply an early confirmation of his central thesis: the enduring conflict between empires for control of a heartland. With the benefit of historical distance, we can see that Mackinder’s 1904 map is in fact a manifestation of the same kind of ideological geometry that inspired the Hereford mappamundi: the providential mission of empire had replaced the pursuit of organized religion, but both of them sought to reduce the plurality and complexity of the world to a series of timeless truths. The belief now was that geography could disclose an ultimate reality upon which its creators could predict the political future. The two maps, made 700 years apart, look very different, but they were both inspired by the imperative to create a particular image of the world based on a prescriptive ideological geometry.

  • • •

  Throughout his life Mackinder returned to the geographical pivot thesis, revising it in response to the First and Second World Wars. In 1919 he published Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction, written in the aftermath of the Armistice of the previous year and intended to influence the peace negotiations in Versailles. It modified the ‘pivot’ theory into an enlarged ‘heartland’, stretching from eastern Europe across central Asia. Mackinder warned against any diplomatic resolutions that allowed either Germany or Russia to take control of the ‘heartland’, and by implication the space he termed the ‘World-Island’, the conjoined space connecting Europe with Asia and North Africa. He summarized his argument in what would become one of the most infamous slogans of modern geopolitical thinking:

  Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:

  Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:

  Who rules the World-Island commands the World.63

  Following the outbreak of the Second World War, as the geopolitical world map changed once more, Mackinder had to amend his theory again. In July 1943, as the tide of the war turned in favour of the Allies, Mackinder published an article entitled ‘The Round World and the Winning of the Peace’. His enduring fear of an alliance between Germany and Russia had finally happened in 1939 with the Nazi–Soviet Pact, although neither state ultimately dominated the ‘pivot’ or ‘heartland’. Hitler’s invasion of the Russian ‘heartland’ in 1941 was a further confirmation of Mackinder’s thesis; its failure provided Mackinder with the basis of his plans for ‘winning the peace’ once the conflict ended. The creation of a strong naval presence in the Atlantic and a dominant military power in central Asia would confront ‘the German mind with an enduring certainty that any war fought by Germany must be a war on two unshakable fronts’.64 It was a brilliant restatement of the strategic importance of the ‘heartland’ and a remarkably prescient account of the post-war geopolitical world of NATO and the Soviet Bloc that proposed a model of geopolitical checks and ‘balances’ in containing the inevitable post-war influence of the Soviet Union.

  Anticipating the creation of NATO, Mackinder argued for the importance of a new transatlantic military alliance across the North Atlantic, or what he called ‘the Midland Ocean’. It would involve ‘a bridgehead in France, a moated aerodrome in Britain, and a reserve of trained manpower, agriculture and industries in the eastern United States and Canada’. On Mackinder’s post-war world map, geopolitics would be reduced to an abstract geometrical ideal, in which a ‘balanced globe of human beings’ would be ‘happy, because balanced and thus free’.65 It was perhaps idealistic, but it prefigured the Anglo-American Cold War rhetoric that would come to dominate international politics for most of the second half of the century, and would influence subsequent US foreign policy towards what it regarded as the containment of the Soviet Union and South-east Asia. According to the political theorist Colin Gray, ‘the most influential geopolitical concept for Anglo-American statecraft has been the idea of a Eurasian “heartland”, and then the complementary idea-as-policy of containing the heartland power of the day within, not to, Eurasia. From Harry S Truman to George Bush, the overarching vision of US national security was explicitly geopolitical and directly traceable to the heartland theory of Mackinder’. Gray believes that ‘Mackinder’s relevance to the containment of a heartland-occupying Soviet Union in the cold war was so apparent as to approach the status of a cliché’.66

  Although it is always difficult to identify precisely how ideas translate into direct policy, the pronouncements of a range of statesmen throughout the 1990s show the pervasiveness of Mackinder’s thinking. In 1994 Henry Kissinger, the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, wrote that ‘Russia regardless of who governs it, sits astride what Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and is the heir to one of the most potent imperial traditions’. As late as 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski, another former National Security Advisor, argued that ‘Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent’, situated at the heart of a ‘geopolitical chessboard’. He concluded that a ‘glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant i
n Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa’.67 Ostensibly, Mackinder’s political geography was based on a stated desire to keep the peace. In reality, it was predicated on perpetual military conflict and international warfare, as the various pieces on his global chessboard vied with each other for increasingly scant resources. It also contributed to a post-war American geopolitical strategy that pursued military intervention both covertly and openly on nearly every continent across the globe.

  Looking back in 1942 on the reception of Mackinder’s original 1904 talk, the German political scientist Hans Weigert wrote that it must have ‘seemed shocking and fantastic’ to many Englishmen. However, by the time of his death in 1947 Mackinder’s argument was firmly established as one of the most influential political theories of its time. Some of the most famous (and reviled) politicians of the twentieth century drew on his ideas, from George Curzon and Winston Churchill to Benito Mussolini. The German academic Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) adopted Mackinder’s ideas in the development of the Nazi theory of geopolitics, which he regarded as ‘geography in the service of world-wide warfare’.68 Haushofer was a close friend of Rudolf Hess, deputy leader of the Nazi Party; Hitler’s speeches throughout the 1930s on the Russian threat to Germany repeatedly used the language of Mackinder.69 The geographical pivot even resonated throughout George Orwell’s 1948 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its world divided into three great military powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, perpetually at war with one another in an attempt to resolve the enduring conflict described by Mackinder between oceanic and landlocked states. By 1954, seven years after Mackinder’s death, the prominent American geographer Richard Hartshorne argued that Mackinder’s original model was ‘a thesis of world power analysis and prognosis which for better or worse has become the most famous contribution of modern geography to man’s view of his political world’. Coming from the founder of the geography division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), this was praise indeed.70