Carving Up The Globe: An Atlas Of Diplomacy, by Malise Ruthven, General Editor

When we think of the saying: “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we normally think of this statement as meaning that we should not think poorly of a book that has a less than stellar cover. In this case, though, the opposite is the case, as this book has a lovely cover that promises a book that is graphically excellent and professional in its appearance. This is not what we get. I do not know what precisely is the cause for this book’s failings, whether the publishers of this book ran out of money when it came to quality control and good copy editing for its maps, or even to print the book in an acceptable and professional way, or whether the project was rushed in order to get it out in the hope that it could make enough money to recoup expenses despite its manifest imperfections, but something clearly failed here. This is a great shame, because the book itself has a wonderful subject and could, if properly fixed in a future edition, be a useful resource for those looking for information about a wide variety of diplomatic efforts throughout world history up to the present day.

It is perhaps coincidental but also revealing that the technical problems of the printing of this book begin in the same area where the diplomatic ventures themselves move from the understandable edicts and treaties that served to provide a temporary or more lasting peace between and within regimes and related to trade and territorial negotiations, which was the predominant use of diplomacy in earlier periods, to the use of diplomacy as a means of providing the illusion of collective security with a wide amount of nations who use such treaties as virtue signaling without any intent to actually follow such restrictions when it is inconvenient to their own interests. Given the state of the world, it is hard to take arms control treaties and environmental treaties seriously, especially those which do not have targets for the largest nations of the developing world who are responsible for so much of the world’s pollution at present. It is rather intriguing, therefore, that just as the treaties become impossible to take seriously that the editors of the book stopped taking the graphic design and printing of the book seriously, and the physical and informational quality of the material runs out at roughly the same time within the narrative of world diplomatic history. That said, before, this point, the book is a very informative and worthwhile one, which could stand to be cleaned up but is not without value.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 250 large-sized pages in length and is organized in a chronological fashion. The book begins with an introduction and the vast majority of the book consists of treaties and agreements by date. More than two millennia of history go by in the book’s first pages, and before the book is even 30 pages in we have gotten all the way to 1000AD in terms of known treaties and agreements. It takes another eighteen pages to get through the next 400 years until we see the world in 1400, and another seventy pages or so before we get to 1800. The book is not really divided into chapters, so what one sees is a list of (occasionally erroneous) lists of dates and treaties and agreements organized in a chronological fashion spilling over pages with some of the more important treaties given special treatment, like the Thirty Years’ Peace in 445 BC among the Greek powers, the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the treaties of Utrecht in 1713-14, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the treaty of Bern in 1874, the Berlin Conference of 1885, the Convention of Calcutta in 1980, the British Gulf Treaties of 1900, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Versailles relating to World War I, and so on. Indeed, about 50 pages are devoted to treaties in the 19th century and more than 60 pages to treaties in the 20th century, showing a glut of bad deals that have been increasingly worthless as time has gone on. If this book was as excellent in execution as it is in conception, it would have been a pretty great book, but its ambition is far more than its achievement, alas.