Prisoners of Geography

The argument is that whoever happens to be in charge, and whatever they claim to believe, a country is largely stuck with its rivers, mountains and coastline. Russia keeps behaving the way it does partly because the North European Plain is flat and wide open and it has almost no warm water port worth the name. America ended up with the best land on the planet and two oceans to keep everybody else off it. Africa has thousands of miles of coast, very few natural harbours, and rivers that don’t connect to anywhere useful. Ten regions, ten chapters, and it’s blunt to the point of being reductive, which Marshall more or less admits himself. Once you’ve read it, BBC World News seems different.