The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World

by Tim Marshall

Overview

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography, a fascinating, “refreshing, and very useful” (The Washington Post) follow-up that uses ten maps to explain the challenges to today’s world powers and how they presage a volatile future.

Tim Marshall’s global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a “fresh way of looking at maps” (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation’s choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and walls. Since then, the geography hasn’t changed, but the world has.

Now, in this “wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity” (Mirror, UK), Marshall takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe’s next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space.

Innovative, compelling, and delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is “an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs” (Publishers Weekly).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982178642
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Series:	Politics of Place , #4
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	192,851
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than thirty years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News and before that worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography, The Age of Walls, A Flag Worth Dying For, The Power of Geography, and The Future of Geography.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Australia 11

2 Iran 37

3 Saudi Arabia 65

4 The United Kingdom 91

5 Greece 117

6 Turkey 139

7 The Sahel 163

8 Ethiopia 191

9 Spain 213

10 Space 241

Afterword 261

Acknowledgments 265

Bibliography 267

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

10/04/2021

Mountains, deserts, and distances still leave a deep mark on national character and international relations, according to this fascinating exploration of geopolitics. Journalist Marshall (Prisoners of Geography) spotlights nine places, including Africa’s Sahel region, Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, whose locale, terrain, and climate shape their destinies. A dominant theme is how mountains weaken national stability by nurturing minority cultures and separatist movements in places like Scotland, Spain’s Basque region, and Turkey’s Kurdish areas. Deserts play a similarly disruptive role: the arid northern reaches of nations in the Sahel are incubating tribal Islamist movements that could tear them apart, and dry, thirsty Egypt has threatened war over Ethiopia’s damming of the Nile’s headwaters. Sheer proximity remains a perennial source of friction, as Australia frets about China’s encroaching naval presence and Greece and Turkey bicker over Aegean islands and their surrounding undersea gas fields. Marshall also examines superpower rivalry in space, which threatens the world’s indispensable satellite systems. Sprinkling the text with his own entertaining picaresques—precariously riding a camel, getting assaulted by cops at an Iranian street protest—Marshall offers an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs. Maps. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"A wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace and clarity. I can’t imagine reading a better book this year." —Mirror (UK)

“Refreshing and very useful.” —Washington Post

"An insightful and comprehensive (but digestible) overview of the key regions whose trajectory will shape global politics." —Globe and Mail

"A sharp and concise evaluation of today’s geopolitics." —Geographical (UK)

"Clear and concise and sprinkled with wry observations." —Booklist (starred review)

"Another outstanding guide to the modern world. Marshall is a master at explaining what you need to know and why." —Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford University and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

From the Publisher

06/01/2021

Diplomatic editor at Sky News and author of the Sunday Times best-selling Prisoners of Geography, Marshall wields ten maps of crucial regions worldwide to explore geopolitics today—especially with regard to the strategies of world powers—and the consequences for tomorrow. The regions he considers: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain, and Space. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2021-08-18
The author of Prisoners of Geography (2015) follows up with an elucidating survey of 10 regions whose demographics, economics, and politics will affect the future of the planet.

Geography is not necessarily fate, but it is more important, insists Marshall, than individual politicians. Consider Australia, he writes in the first chapter: It sits 5,000 miles from Africa, more than 7,000 miles from South America, and more than 2,500 miles from its supposed neighbor, New Zealand. The isolation of the island continent once allowed it to maintain a small White settler population and conduct genocidal wars on Indigenes largely unseen. Today, connected by air and sea routes and communication lines, it is “a territorially huge, Western-oriented, advanced democracy” that sits next door to China, “the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship.” This makes Australia a bulwark. What of Iran? Will it ever become a world power, as it was in the days of Darius and Xerxes? Hemmed in by mountains, “Iran’s main centers of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved.” This dispersal favors ethnic and cultural diversity, and Iran’s overwhelmingly young population is beginning to resist a fundamentalist ideology “more in tune with the sixteenth century than the twenty-first.” Regional rival Saudi Arabia contains vast resources of oil, a commodity that is increasingly less important than before, so much so that much of the vast sandy peninsula remains unexplored. The U.K. is another region that, Marshall projects, will become less important in world affairs as the U.S. looks to the Pacific rather than Europe. The author also considers the secondary effects of the movement for Scottish independence and, of course, China, with designs everywhere around the world, especially in a developing Sahel—and, significantly, in space, where it is vying with Russia to be the first to build lunar bases.

Geopolitics wonks will find Marshall’s prognostications to be reasonable, believable, and capably rendered.

Kirkus Reviews