A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  In lamenting the inadequacies of the English tradition, Mackinder produced a telling characterization of the role of maps in his new conception of geography:

  There are three correlated arts (all concerned chiefly with maps) which may be said to characterize geography – observation, cartography, and teaching. The observer obtains the material for the maps, which are constructed by the cartographer and interpreted by the teacher. It is almost needless to say that the map is here thought of as a subtle instrument of expression applicable to many orders of facts, and not the mere depository of names which still does duty in some of the most costly English atlases. Speaking generally, and apart from exceptions, we have had in England good observers, poor cartographers, and teachers perhaps a shade worse than cartographers. As a result, no small part of the raw material of geography is English, while the expression and interpretation are German.

  A map needed to offer more than just the empirical facts of observable place names: it required the expression and interpretation practised by German geographers of geomorphology, as well as ‘biogeography’ – the geography of organic communities and their environments – and ‘anthropogeography’ – the geography of men. For Mackinder, a map was not the territory it claimed to depict, but an interpretation of the geological, biological and anthropological elements which made up that territory.

  In describing his ‘ideal geographer’, Mackinder observed:

  In his cartographic art he possesses an instrument of thought of no mean power. It may or may not be that we can think without words, but certain it is that maps can save the mind an infinitude of words. A map may convey at one glance a whole series of generalizations, and the comparison of two or more maps of the same region, showing severally rainfall, soil, relief, density of population, and other such data, will not only bring out causal relations, but also reveal errors of record; for maps may be both suggestive and critical.

  Unsurprisingly, the description of the ideal geographer was male, and bore a striking resemblance to the author. ‘As a cartographer he would produce scholarly and graphic maps; as a teacher he would make maps speak; as an historian or biologist he would insist on the independent study of environment . . . and as a merchant, soldier, or politician he would exhibit trained grasp and initiative when dealing with practical space-problems on the earth’s surface.’38

  It was another tour de force by Mackinder, insisting on the need for a ‘modern geography’. Intellectual ‘centralization’ of geographical study was required in England to catch up with the German tradition, as a way of reiterating his belief that ‘the geographical is a distinct standpoint from which to view, to analyze, and to group the facts of existence, and as such entitled to rank with the theological or philosophical, the linguistic, the mathematical, the physical, and the historical standpoints’.39 It also anticipated an even more ambitious attempt to put Britain’s geographers, and its explorers, at the forefront of international affairs.

  In 1898 Mackinder hatched a plan to be the first European explorer to climb Mount Kenya in East Africa. Looking back on his decision in the 1940s, Mackinder admitted just how self-conscious his decision was to suddenly embark on a career as an explorer at the age of 37. ‘To be generally regarded as the complete geographer,’ he wrote, ‘it was still necessary at that time for me to prove that I could explore as well as teach.’40 His choice of Mount Kenya was based on a mixture of physical and political geographical considerations. Mackinder later wrote that it had become clear to him ‘that when the Uganda railway had reduced the distance from the coast to Kenya by two-thirds, it should be possible, with no great expenditure of time, to convey a well-equipped expedition in a state of European health to the foot of the mountain, and that such an expedition would have a reasonable chance of completing the revelation of its alpine secrets’.41 He wanted to get up the mountain before the railway brought other explorers, namely Germans, the great imperial rivals of the British in East Africa, and in particularly the German climber Hans Meyer, who had already scaled Mount Kilimanjaro, and announced in 1898 his intention of climbing Mount Kenya. The race was on between the two great imperial rivals in East Africa.

  On 8 June 1899 Mackinder left England for Marseilles by train, where he met his team of six European guides and porters. On 10 June he set sail for Egypt, passing down the Suez Canal to first Zanzibar and then Mombasa, before arriving in Nairobi on the recently laid railway line in mid-June 1899. Here the expedition really began: ‘we were six white men and our goods were carried on the heads of 170 natives, half of them stark naked, for at that time there were in East Africa no horses or draught oxen or mules, and of course no motor cars’. The 170 kilometre trek to the mountain was tough and delayed by various problems. ‘The temper of the natives’, according to Mackinder, ‘was suspicious and dangerous’, an accusation partly borne out by the murder of two of his Swahili guides, and the theft of most of their food just as they prepared their ascent of the mountain in late August.42 Undeterred, Mackinder continued the climb, but had to abandon the ascent when the team ran out of rations. Having secured further supplies, he and two others set off again and spent a day scaling the mountain. It proved to be ‘very steep and intensely hard’, but finally, at noon on 13 September Mackinder reached the summit. He admitted that ‘we dare, however, stay only forty minutes – time enough to make observations and to photograph’, before the threat of storms forced them to descend. Mackinder only slightly overestimated the summit at 17,200 feet, or 5,240 metres (the actual height is 5,199 metres). It was an impressive physical achievement, matched by the precision of his scientific data. Mackinder returned home with ‘a plane-table sketch of the upper part of Kenya, together with rock specimens, two route surveys along lines not previously traversed, a series of meteorological and hypsometrical observations, photographs by the ordinary and by the Ives colour processes, collections of mammals, birds, and plants, and a small collection of insects’.43 Mackinder utilized Frederick Ives’s new colour photographic techniques for the first time on a scientific expedition, and drew three beautiful maps of the mountain and his route, lithographically reproduced for his talk delivered at the RGS on 22 January 1900, two months after his return.

  Fig. 30 Halford Mackinder on the summit of Mount Kenya, 1899.

  The maps were classic examples of scientific imperial mapmaking. The first, illustrating Mackinder’s journey, includes a scale of 1:500,000, a graticule, contour lines, and the route drawn in red. But it also shows the imprint of European exploration. His calculations were obtained by using a watch, a prismatic compass and a sextant. In the north-west Mackinder has named ‘Markham Downs’ in honour of the RGS’s president, Sir Clements Markham, who co-sponsored the expedition. On the mountain itself ‘Hausburg Valley’ is named after the expedition’s other sponsor, his wife’s uncle, Campbell Hausburg. Mackinder also took the opportunity of leaving his own mark on the land: running north-east of the Hausburg Valley is ‘Mackinder Valley’.

  The news of the success of Mackinder’s expedition was received with delight in London and dismay in Berlin. Returning home at the end of 1899, Mackinder immediately began writing up his exploits for presentation to the RGS Fellows in January 1900. What Mackinder later referred to as his ‘holiday’ in Kenya was greeted with unalloyed admiration by its vice-president Sir Thomas Holdich. On the evening of 22 January he introduced Mackinder as ‘well known to all of us as a scientific geographer; tonight he comes before us as a most successful traveller, as the first man to ascend one of the principal peaks in East Africa, Mount Kenya’.44 Having established himself as a distinguished geography teacher and an intrepid explorer, Mackinder was now sufficiently respected to define his subject as an intellectual discipline in late Victorian Britain, with the science of cartography at its centre. By announcing his new vision of geography as crucial to the protection of the British Empire (which went to war with the Boers in South Africa just as Mackinder returned from
Kenya), his success was virtually assured, and his talk received none of the grumblings that met his previous efforts in the late 1880s.

  The broader imperial aspirations of Mackinder’s adventure also coincided with a decisive shift in his political views which propelled him into politics. Throughout the 1890s he still espoused a belief in international free trade, despite what he saw as the increasing threat that Germany posed to British manufacturing. But by the time he returned from Kenya, his beliefs were changing. In September 1900 Mackinder unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat in Warwickshire as a Liberal Imperialist. By 1903, increasingly swayed by the economic protectionist arguments of the Unionist Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, he renounced free trade altogether and resigned from the Liberal Party to join the Conservatives, espousing a new theory of imperial protectionism based on a powerful British navy and tariffs to promote British overseas trade.45

  But as a geographer, Mackinder’s new political arguments presented him with a problem. How could his geopolitical thesis of imperial protectionism be represented on a map? He had already commented on the limitations of maps in showing basic topographical features such as relief. How were they to show his evolving world picture of economic protectionism and imperial authority? He addressed the problem at the height of his embrace of protectionism in Britain and the British Seas, published in 1902. In it he provided a familiar argument about how physical geography shaped the social world, but now with added political urgency. Geography had ‘given to Britain a unique part in the world’s drama’, allowing it to become ‘mistress of the seas’ and develop a seaborne empire of unparalleled power and global authority.46 But the changing balance of global power at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that such authority was now under threat.

  In tracing the genealogy of Britain’s seaborne power, Mackinder turned to maps. He began by examining the location of the British Isles on the Hereford mappamundi, to suggest that, before Columbus’s voyages at the end of the fifteenth century, ‘Britain was then at the end of the world – almost out of the world’. The subsequent discovery of America and opening of the Atlantic to its north, west and south, meant that ‘Britain gradually became the central, rather than the terminal, land of the world’. But maps struggled to confirm his argument. ‘No flat chart can give a correct impression of the North Atlantic,’ he complained, as they only showed ‘the mere lie of the coasts’. In a classic piece of egocentric geography, Mackinder blithely observed that the best way to understand Britain’s new position on the globe after Columbus ‘can best be realised by turning a terrestrial globe so that Britain may be at the point nearest the eye’. His illustrations of ‘The Land Hemisphere’ show the enduring problems of mapping the globe onto a plane surface – Australasia and half of South America have disappeared. In contrast a ‘photograph’ of the globe (an obvious misnomer in an age before space flight) clinches Mackinder’s argument. On this image Britain is given a unique position, one from which ‘the five historic parts of the world are accessible from its waters’.47

  Fig. 31 ‘The Land Hemisphere’, in Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 1907.

  It was a brilliant act of global cartographic manipulation. By ignoring plane map projections of the earth and instead spinning his ‘photographic’ globe to place the British Isles at the centre, Mackinder was employing cartography in the service of a highly selective account of Britain’s rise to seaborne and imperial dominance. Positioned on his map at the intersection of the great international maritime sea routes, but not connected to any continent, Mackinder claimed that Britain was ‘possessed of two geographical qualities, complementary rather than antagonistic: insularity and universality’. It was ‘of Europe, yet not in Europe’, allowing it to draw on the resources of the sea without the distraction of bordering neighbours.48 But what made the empire great was also threatening to destroy it; without a renewed imperial drive to assimilate British colonies into a broader ideal of ‘Britishness’, its far-flung possessions risked absorption into the rising land-based empires of Russia, Germany and China. In the paternal language of so many imperialists, Mackinder ended his book by looking forward to a time when ‘the daughter nations shall have grown to maturity, and the British Navy shall have expanded into the Navy of the Britains’.49 It was an almost mystical belief in the enduring power of the British Empire, and just two years later it would culminate in Mackinder’s most famous and enduring theory.

  Fig. 32 ‘Photograph of a Globe’, in Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 1907.

  On the evening of 25 January 1904, more than seventy years since its inception, the Royal Geographical Society opened the doors to its Fellows at its premises at 1 Savile Row in central London, to listen to yet another paper read by Mackinder. The society had led the way in funding and celebrating British imperial exploration since its foundation, supporting the colonial and missionary expeditions of public figures such as Sir Clements Markham, Dr David Livingstone, Sir Henry Morton Stanley and Robert Falcon Scott, as well as Mackinder’s own adventure in Kenya. By the beginning of the twentieth century the society had turned its attention towards geography’s more philosophical and educational dimensions, an interest that had already benefited individuals like Mackinder.50 Its politically influential Fellows were also struggling with restoring the tarnished reputation of the British Empire following the disastrous Boer War (1899–1902), which had cost Britain more than £220 million, as well as the loss of 8,000 troops killed in action and a further 13,000 to disease. Of the estimated 32,000 Boers who died, the vast majority were women and children who died in British ‘concentration camps’, the first time such methods had been used in modern warfare. International condemnation had been virtually unanimous, and, in the face of Germany’s aggressive policy of colonial expansion and armament, Mackinder’s prediction of the British Empire’s growing diplomatical isolation, military vulnerability and economic decline appeared increasingly prescient: though it had generated over 25 per cent of the world’s trade in 1860, by the time Mackinder spoke the figure had dropped to just 14 per cent, with France, Germany and the United States quickly catching up.51

  As a long-standing Fellow of the society, a successful explorer and now a passionate advocate of imperial protectionism, Mackinder was guaranteed a warm reception, but neither he nor his audience could have possibly anticipated the impact of his talk. The title of his paper was ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’. It began by sketching a vast panorama of global history. He told his audience yet again that they were coming to an end of what he called ‘the Columbian epoch’, a 400-year period of intense seaborne exploration and discovery, in which ‘the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy, and even in the polar regions the voyages of Nansen and Scott have very narrowly reduced the last possibility of dramatic discoveries’. This was a shrewd topical reference to Scott’s first successful Antarctic expedition, funded by the RGS, remnants of which were struggling home even as Mackinder spoke. ‘But the opening of the twentieth century’, Mackinder continued, ‘is appropriate as the end of a great historical epoch.’ This was a moment, he believed, when ‘the world, in its remoter borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation’. Foreshadowing twenty-first-century debates over the effects of economic and political globalization, Mackinder argued: ‘Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.’52 For Mackinder, everything was connected, and the only way to trace these connections was through the society’s and his own particular field of study: geography.

  As far as Mackinder was concerned, to understand and even influence the changes which had recently come about in the world required a renewed geographical
understanding of history and politics. ‘It appears to me, therefore,’ he continued,

  that in the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history.

  He concluded: ‘If we are fortunate, that formula should have a practical value as setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.’53 This was a call not just for the importance of geography as an academic discipline that had characterized Mackinder’s public pronouncements for years: it was now a demand for the discipline’s insights to shape international diplomacy and imperial policy.

  Having established the importance of geography, Mackinder then came to his central thesis. He claimed that, contrary to prevailing British imperial ideology, it was central Asia, or what he called ‘Eurasia’, which stood as ‘the pivot of the world’s politics’. Such a claim challenged the complacent assumptions of many of his audience, and Mackinder knew it. ‘I ask you, therefore,’ he requested, ‘for a moment to look upon Europe and European history as subordinate to Asia and Asiatic history, for European civilization is, in a very real sense, the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion.’ It was a startling assertion, but one that Mackinder proceeded to defend through a vast, synoptic account of the physical geography of central Asia. It was a region, he argued, that throughout history had produced nomadic, warlike communities that repeatedly threatened the settled agricultural communities and maritime societies at the margins of the vast, landlocked plains of what he called ‘Euro-Asia’, which he described as