A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Mackinder’s argument had not just aspired to transform the status of geography as an academic discipline: he had effectively defined a whole new field of study in the English-speaking world – geopolitics, although the 1904 lecture never actually used the term. Variously defined as ‘an attempt to draw attention to the importance of certain geographical patterns in history’, ‘a theory of spatial relationships and historical causation’ and ‘the study of international relations from a spatial or geographical perspective’,71 geopolitics has now become a ubiquitous part of our political vocabulary. The first person to use the term was the Swedish politician and social scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), who in 1899 defined it as ‘the theory of the state as a geographical organism or phenomenon in space’.72 In the United States, the naval strategist Alfred Mahan (1840–1914) was also developing a similar geopolitical vocabulary. In his book The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Mahan advocated ‘the use and control of the sea’ in response to what he regarded as the threats faced by the United States’ ‘weakest frontier, the Pacific’.73 In 1902 he also coined the term the ‘Middle East’ in a paper on the ‘Persian Gulf and International Relations’.74 In Germany, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was also developing a geopolitical theory based on the expansion of the German state. In his Political Geography (1897), Ratzel argued that the struggle for human existence was a perpetual fight for geographical space. The ‘conflicts of nations’ he wrote, ‘are in great part only struggles for territory’.75 In his 1895 lecture on ‘Modern Geography’, Mackinder greatly admired Ratzel’s ‘anthropogeography’, but it was also based on the superiority of the German race. Ratzel would extend his arguments into the theory of national struggles for ‘living space’, or Lebensraum, which Hitler believed provided the justification for much of his foreign policy throughout the 1930s, and which ultimately led to the outbreak of war in 1939.76

  Each of these writers, Mahan and Ratzel in particular, developed a theory of geopolitics justifying the apparent inevitability of global warfare. They all had an effect upon their native country’s foreign policy, but it was Mackinder’s formulation of geopolitics that would have the greatest impact. And at the heart of his theory sat a world map, endlessly reproduced by subsequent geographers and politicians, giving a graphic shape and form to the idea of geopolitics. The terms Mackinder’s associates and their followers contrived – ‘heartlands’, ‘Middle East’, ‘iron curtain’, ‘third world’, and the more recent ‘evil empire’ and ‘axis of evil’ – are all examples of the ideologically loaded language of geopolitics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, such ideas were still only implicit in either geography or politics. It was Mackinder’s great achievement to change all that, and in the process to play a part in establishing both modern geography and mapmaking’s relationship to politics and empire. To judge from the volume of recent academic publications on both Mackinder and the geopolitical research he inspired, it is a legacy with which geography is still coming to terms today.77

  • • •

  In April 1944, as Allied forces made preparations for the invasion of Normandy, Mackinder, then aged 83, was awarded the Charles P. Daly Medal for services to geography at the American Embassy in London. Delivering an address to the ambassador, he reflected on the extraordinary influence of his talk on ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’:

  I am grateful to you, in the first place, for the testimony you have borne to my loyalty to democracy, since absurd as it may seem I have been criticised in certain quarters as having helped to lay the foundations of Nazi militarism. It has, I am told, been rumoured that I inspired [Karl] Haushofer, who inspired Hess, who in turn suggested to Hitler while he was dictating Mein Kampf certain geo-political ideas which are said to have originated with me. Those are three links in a chain, but of the second and third I know nothing. This however I do know from the evidence of his own pen that whatever Haushofer adapted from me he took from an address I gave before the Royal Geographical Society just forty years ago, long before there was any question of a Nazi Party.78

  Mackinder was understandably horrified at the implication that his geopolitical ideas influenced the rise of Nazism and Europe’s descent into world war. The connection was not inevitable – but it is understandable. Mackinder’s ultimate legacy was to ensure that during his lifetime the study of geography was established as what has been called ‘the science of imperialism par excellence’,79 and out of this marriage of geography and imperialism geopolitics was born. In contrast to Nazi or Soviet ideologues, Mackinder never incited conflict or open warfare in his writings, but they were based on the inevitability of imperial conflict over terrestrial space and the need to exert force in the maintenance of political authority or, to use his own language, ‘the winning of the peace’.

  Mackinder’s 1904 map represented the ultimate version of a globe seemingly bereft of collective agency, where the messy reality of the world is reduced to enduring warfare between cultures for ever determined by their physical location and quest for increasingly scarce resources. It was an indispensable part of Mackinder’s extraordinarily successful mission to elevate the study of geography to a hitherto unknown stature, and situate it within the cartographic imagination of international political relations. But it was a double-edged legacy. The impact of decolonization after the Second World War has slowly led geographers and mapmakers to question the ease with which their discipline surrendered to the established political powers. Although many reaped the benefits of Mackinder’s legacy, others became deeply uncomfortable about the enhanced authority of geography.

  The world view of Mackinder’s map continues to influence foreign policy across the globe. In an article written for the US Army War College’s journal Parameters in the summer of 2000 entitled ‘Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics and Policymaking in the 21st Century’, Christopher Fettweis argued that ‘Eurasia, the “World Island” to Mackinder, is still central to Amercian foreign policy and will likely continue to be so for some time’. Today, as Fettweis points out, the ‘heart of the Heartland is floating on top of a sea of oil’.80 The first Gulf War of 1990–91 is already regarded by many political observers as the first of a series of ‘resource wars’ launched to ensure US control over global oil supplies. Writing in the Guardian newspaper in June 2004, Paul Kennedy, a distinguished professor of history at Yale University and an expert on Mackinder, wrote that ‘[r]ight now, with hundreds of thousands of US troops in the Eurasian rimlands and with an administration constantly explaining why it has to stay the course, it looks as if Washington is taking seriously Mackinder’s injunction to ensure control of “the geographical pivot of history”’.81 It is a disturbing fulfilment of Mackinder’s original predictions, and current US involvement in the Gulf shows it will not be the last international conflict over increasingly scarce physical resources. It is a sobering reminder that, although Mackinder’s world map is virtually obsolete, the world view that it expressed continues to affect people’s lives right across the globe.

  11

  Equality

  The Peters Projection, 1973

  India, 17 August 1947

  In June 1947 the British Government commissioned Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer and former Director-General of the Ministry of Information, to travel to India for the first time in his life to produce a report partitioning the subcontinent. His mission was to divide the country along religious lines, separating Hindus from Muslims in the creation of India and Pakistan. Over just three months the Radcliffe Boundary Commission was required to create a 6,000 kilometre geographical boundary dividing 90 million people living in a region covering over 400,000 square kilometres. Without any experience of India, and with no inclination to commission updated geographic surveys or revised boundary demarcations, Radcliffe set about using outdated census reports in partitioning the country to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertain
ing the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’.1 His so-called Award was published on 17 August 1947, just two days after the official declaration of the independent states of India and Pakistan. The Indian artist Staish Gurjal remembered the chaos involved in communicating news of the partition. ‘Curiously,’ he recalled, ‘the news of such magnitude was conveyed to us not by newspapers (which had ceased publication) but by posters pasted on the walls.’2 The consequences of Radcliffe’s map of partition were swift and disastrous. It sparked the largest migration in history, with between 10 and 12 million people moving across the newly established borders of Punjab and Bengal. The new border areas descended into bloody violence, with as many as a million people murdered in communal massacres.3

  Radcliffe’s Award satisfied nobody. The mainly Islamic Kashmir joined India, while Muslim minorities remained, and by late 1947 India and Pakistan were at war over the contested borders. Further wars followed in 1965 and 1971, and the tensions between the two states continue to this day, although now with the added threat of nuclear confrontation. Never before had the drawing of a line on a map led to such terrible human consequences.

  The catastrophic geographical partition of India was a logical, if not necessarily inevitable, consequence of the ambitious but incomplete mapping projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and their preoccupations of nation-building and imperial expansion. In France, as we have seen, several generations of the Cassini family had created ambitious but imperfect mapping techniques that played a part in shaping a distinctly French national consciousness. Their cartographic methods were soon adopted throughout Europe as the political geography of the continent slowly evolved from a group of disparate empires and monarchies into a series of sovereign nation states. In England, the gulf between the claims to cartographic practice and their reality in the administration of Britain’s imperial dominions in Africa, India, South Asia and the Middle East meant that any partition of a country like India would inevitably lead to conflict. The legacy of Mackinder’s geopolitical version of a world order, underpinned by imperialism and vividly illustrated by his infamous 1904 world map, showed how mapmaking could be appropriated by a range of political ideologies with little interest in its claims to scientific objectivity and impartiality.

  The ease with which political power used cartographic expertise is a recurrent theme of twentieth-century history. As the century progressed and Europe descended into global conflict, maps became more explicitly politicized than ever before, and in some cases transformed into servants of what is now very familiar political propaganda. Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazis had grasped the power of maps to convey their political message. An infamous map of 1934 purports to show the danger posed to German sovereignty by Czechoslovakia, a manufactured threat that would ultimately provide the pretext for the Nazi invasion in March 1939. Lacking a proper scale or toponymy, the image hardly qualifies as a map in a technical sense, but its use of light and shade creates a contrast between the passive, blank space of Germany and the more menacing outline of Czechoslovakia. The crude approximation of a fan-shaped graticule suggests the threat of airborne bombing (despite the minute size of the Czech air force). As one commentator wrote during the Second World War, in propaganda maps such as these, ‘geography as a science and cartography as a technique become subservient to the demands of effective symbol manipulation’.4 Although crude in its execution and message, this map exemplified the systematic political distortion of German maps and geographical textbooks throughout the 1930s, as the racial and ethnic message of Nazism appropriated the supposedly objective and scientific methodology of geography.5

  Fig. 34 ‘A small state threatens Germany!’ Propaganda map, Germany, 1934.

  The process of cartographic manipulation reached new and tragic heights during the Second World War, when the Nazis used maps in the pursuit of their ‘Final Solution’, the systematic mass murder of European Jews. In 1941 Nazi officials drew up an ethnic map of the puppet state of Slovakia based on official statistics of population distribution based on ethnicity. The map is a highly accurate representation of Slovakia, but its clusters of black circles betray its more sinister function: they depict the location of Jewish (‘Juden’) and Gypsy (‘Zigeuner’) communities. Labelled ‘For official use only’, this map was used with the support of the sympathetic Slovak authorities to round up Jews and Gypsies the following year, who were deported to extermination camps, where most met their death.

  Fig. 35 Ethnic map of Slovakia, 1941.

  The appropriation of maps throughout the Second World War quickly translated into the political brinksmanship of the Cold War, exemplified by Time magazine’s map of ‘Red China’ published in 1955. The illustration suggests the global stakes of the post-war military confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, with its depiction of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, with American possessions in the Pacific vulnerably positioned in the foreground. It mimics cartographic ‘accuracy’ in implying a geopolitical subtext which Mackinder would undoubtedly have understood: the fear of the spread of ‘Red’ Communism throughout South-east Asia and the threat to American interests in the Pacific.

  As Cold War strategists on both sides of the ideological divide used ‘persuasive cartography’ to play on the anxieties of their fearful publics, geography also inevitably found itself tracing the collapse of European imperial dominion in Africa and South Asia. Having imposed arbitrary cartographic lines dividing ethnic, linguistic and tribal groups across entire continents like Africa in the nineteenth century, the former colonial powers were required to unravel these prescriptive cartographies in the post-war period of decolonization. The results, as in India’s case, were rarely convincing, and often fatal for those who found themselves, literally, on the wrong side of a line.

  The impact of political influence and manipulation on mapmaking also led to new developments to its medium, which could sometimes lead to different, more positive perspectives on the world. One of the most momentous shifts in twentieth-century perceptions of the earth began on 7 December 1972, when the three astronauts on board NASA’s Apollo 17 spacecraft took a series of photographs of the earth with a handheld camera. One of the photos, taken at more than 33,500 kilometres above the earth’s surface, was released by NASA following the safe return of the mission on Christmas Day. It became one of the most iconic images of not only a new age of space travel and exploration, but also of the earth itself. Since the time of Ptolemy, earthbound mapmakers had speculated and projected imaginative visions of the appearance of the world as seen from space. Historically, most map projections adopted such a perspective. But implicit in such projections was the assumption that no human would ever actually witness the earth from such a position. Now, for the first time, the whole earth, the subject of the study of geography since its inception, was finally captured for all to see, not on a map or through the skills of a mapmaker, but by a photograph taken by an astronaut.6

  The Apollo 17 photograph, in its depiction of both the sublime grandeur and exquisite beauty of a singular blue world floating in the dark abyss of empty, inhospitable space, inspired wonder and also indignation at the state of ‘our’ world. The language of religious awe that accompanied the photograph’s reception was quickly superseded by political and environmental reflections on the fragility of a world that united all its inhabitants, regardless of creed, colour or political orientation. The impact of the image found its way into ‘The Brandt Report’, a commission chaired by the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, which was published in 1980 to address the problems of economic development between the northern developed world and the southern developing nations. The report’s authors wrote that ‘from space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery and soils. Humanity’s inability to fit its doings into that pattern is changing planetary sys
tems fundamentally.’7 Indeed, the whole-earth photograph had a significant influence on the growth of thinking about environmentalism and climate change. As this is the only world we possess, reasoned this new strand of ecological thinking, we had better look after it, and transcend our petty, earth-bound disputes in favour of a more holistic approach to the environment. It also had an impact on James Lovelock, who was developing his ‘Gaia’ hypothesis of the earth as a self-sustaining organism when he worked for NASA in the 1960s (but did not publish it until 1979), and gave new impetus to the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan’s invention of the idea of a ‘global village’ in the early 1960s. Such sentiments echoed the transcendent global image that ran throughout the history of mapmaking, from Ptolemy through Macrobius to Mercator, although now with an added political urgency.

  A further consequence of the Apollo earth photographs was their impact on global cartography. If it was now possible to photograph the whole earth rather than produce partial maps of its surface based on unsatisfactory projections, who needed mapmaking at all? One answer was of course that photographs from space were still limited to showing the earth as a disc, not a globe or a map on a plane surface (and the Apollo 17 photograph was centred on eastern Africa and the Persian Gulf, with no sign of the Americas or the Pacific Ocean). Another would be provided by the rapid improvement of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which merged aerial and satellite photographic imagery with electronic database technologies to begin the rise of online mapping, examined in the final chapter.