Geography Is Destiny: Britain And The World: A 10,000-Year History, by Ian Morris

While it is hard to think of this now, for the vast majority of human history, the British Isles were a peripheral area that was at the tail end of human advancement and development occurring in areas like the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin that arrived–often violently–after a lag of hundreds or even thousands of years, and that just as the islands were catching up with the last set of changes and getting their feet under them, some other development came and swept them under again. How that changed, and how England looks right now, is at the heart of this very interesting and thoughtful book. Given the fact that this is a one-volume work with a monumental scope, it is obvious that the book takes a bird’s eye view of history and looks at large trends without getting caught up too much in the details, but for those who enjoy such an account and have read the relevant and more detailed histories that this book uses for its source material, it makes for a worthwhile and thought-provoking read. Even if one may not agree with everything in this book, the book can at least start a conversation about the long-term tangled involvement or lack thereof of the British Isles with Europe and the ambiguity of those interactions as well as the role of England within the isles as well as with Europe and the wider world.

In terms of its contents, this book is almost 400 pages of text and is divided into three parts based on different maps that England has had to work through. After an introduction, the author spends five chapters writing about England’s situation under the Hereford Map from about 6000BC to 1497AD, when England was a peripheral region of Eurasia and was the last place where developments came that spread from more central areas. This includes chapters about Thatcher’s law from 6000-4000BC when England was first being made as the seas rose and separated it from mainland Europe (1), England’s place as the poor cousin of Europe subject to repeated foreign incursions and invasions from 4000BC to 55BC (2), England’s place in the Roman Empire (3), the Original European Union of Christian nations that England was a peripheral part of from 410-973 (4), and the United Kingdoms and the struggle for dominance within the British Isles as well as the place of Britain with regards to Scandinavia and France (5). The second part of the book contains four chapters that look at Mackinder’s map of English centrality to the world, discussing Englexit (6), from 1497-1713 when England separated from the rest of Europe, the pivot between England as a peripheral state to a central imperial one (7) from 1713 to 1815, the wider span of English world dominance from 1815-65 (8), and the growing power and wealth of the New World, especially the United States, from 1865 to 1945 (9). The book then contains three chapters about the money map that the United States and Soviet Union created during the Cold War and that continues to drive how the world works, with chapters on the junction between the UK and Europe after World War II (10), the growing struggle over Britain’s ambiguous place in Europe (11), and a look at the aftermath of Brexit (12). The book then ends with acknowledgments, notes, references, a list of illustrations, and an index.

One of the remarkable aspects of this book is the evenhandedness of it. The author recognizes that a certain ambivalence about the place of England within Europe is a longstanding issue, from before England was, well, England. There have always been questions about whether prosperity, which came from lowering barriers to trade and transportation, or security, which required strong walls and a vigilant defense against hostile outsiders, was more important. The British Isles have suffered repeatedly from foreign invasions until they were strong enough to become the imperialists themselves instead of being massacred in wave after wave of conquests up to 1066. This book puts English concern about their security, and the ambivalence of other areas in being ruled by England, in a large context that allows for multiple perspectives on the historical events themselves, and a recognition of the fundamental ambivalence of England’s place within Europe, and the place of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in a set of islands that has often been dominated by England. The author reflects on choices that have been made in history and the way that geography represents facts on the ground that have to be taken into account even as people do choose how to deal with those facts. It would be interesting to see this approach taken to other areas as well. It is my belief that the author is too sanguine about China’s own power and the problems it has in trying to project power abroad given its own internal difficulties, but we will see whether pundits and would-be prophets are right or wrong in extrapolating Chinese power improvements to the level that they do, or whether the future offers something else.