And when they arrived, they strove to dominate this expansive South East Asian trade network by capturing key features of the geography of the seas: naval chokepoints. But to illustrate the historical importance of these features we’ll turn first to ancient Greece.
BOTTLENECKS
As we saw earlier, the rugged landscape of Greece makes for a coastline with many inlets, bays and channels for natural harbours and so nurtured vigorous trade by sea. In fact, this mountainous geography is believed to have been influential in maintaining the Ancient Greek city states as autonomous entities. Steep-sided ridges running down to the coastline physically separated them from each other, and prevented any one state gaining complete dominance to build an empire. The result was a world of many independent city states both sharing a common culture and language and competing with each other in a constantly shifting pattern of allegiances and conflicts.44 fn10 But at the same time, the paucity of coastal plains restricted the area available for productive agriculture. Unlike Mesopotamia or Egypt, Greece is not blessed with alluvial plains of deep, rich soil, and whilst there are fertile valleys inland, there’s not a great many of them. Greece’s mountainous terrain generally offers only a thin, light soil, which is mostly dry because of scant and unreliable rainfall, and there are too few large rivers to make widespread irrigation possible. Indeed, except for the Rhone on the western extremity of the Alps, the major rivers of Europe are blocked from flowing towards the Mediterranean by the chains of mountains thrown up by the continental collision.
These combined environmental factors mean that historically the peninsula has struggled to grow adequate grain as a staple to feed its population, and many of the Greek city states lived with the constant threat of food shortage and famine. The Greek climate, however, is well suited for producing olive oil and wine, as well as for rearing flocks of goats and sheep, all of which could be traded for wheat and barley grown overseas.46
Around the same time that some of the Greek city states were developing the first democracies in the world, early in the first millennium BC, their populations began to outgrow the home-grown food supply provided by their surrounding environment. Thus the Greeks looked to other lands around the Mediterranean to source the vital grain they needed to feed themselves. Sparta, Corinth, Megara and their allies sent their ships west to bring back grain. Sicily was colonised to reap the benefits of the rich, volcanic soils around Mt Etna.fn11 A second set of allied Greek city states around the Aegean Sea, including the flourishing city of Athens, established colonies in the fabulously fertile valleys of the Dnieper and Bug rivers along the north shores of the Black Sea, the westernmost extension of the Eurasian steppe grasslands (we’ll return to this region in Chapter 7).47 To get there, Greek ships had to sail through two exceedingly narrow straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea: first they had to negotiate the Hellespont, or the ‘Bridge of the Greeks’ (now called the Dardanelles) into the small Sea of Marmara, and then the even tighter Bosphorus into the Black Sea.fn12
As Greece grew ever more populous, fed on grain imported from its overseas breadbaskets, the rivalry between the two alliances of city states, led by Athens on one side and Sparta on the other, grew increasingly fractious. Eventually, in 431 BC this erupted into the devastating Peloponnesian War. It ground on for almost thirty years, with both sides attempting to take control of the seas, but ultimately it was Athens’ dependence on grain imported along the sea lanes from the Black Sea that proved her fatal weakness. The Spartans realised that they didn’t need to attack Athens directly but merely sever her lifeline. They gathered their naval forces in 405 BC and waited until midsummer to strike, when the greatest number of Athenian grain ships were preparing to sail from the Black Sea with their precious cargo before autumn drew in and closed the shipping route with its stormy seas and overcast skies.fn13 Falling upon the Athenian navy at the Battle of Aegospotami, right in the narrow strait of the Hellespont, the Spartans utterly destroyed it – over 150 ships were sunk or seized. Having taken control of this vital chokepoint on the sea route from the Black Sea, the Spartans did not even attempt a final assault on Athens: they knew the cold spear of starvation would be far more devastatingly effective than those wielded by its hoplite army. Athens had no option but to sue for peace under humbling terms, losing the rest of her fleet and her overseas territories.
The Peloponnesian War is a good illustration of the central importance of the geography of the seas and the vulnerability of vital maritime routes at narrow straits. Commanding such naval chokepoints, and thus a rival’s access to overseas resources, is often as important as controlling territory on land, and can determine the outcome of wars and the fate of civilisations. Alongside the bottlenecks at the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, the Strait of Gibraltar – the thin tongue of sea between the Iberian peninsula and the Tangier coast – has played an important role in controlling the naval traffic between the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and provided the setting for the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 between the Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and the Spanish.
Other straits around the globe have proved as critical to world history. When European sailors reached the Indian Ocean from the early fifteenth century – first the Portuguese, and then the Spanish, Dutch and British – they attempted to command a whole set of chokepoints to exert control over an entire region of the Earth’s oceanic surface.
As we saw earlier, for millennia two main sea routes carried trade between Egypt and the Middle East, and India: the passage along the Red Sea and that down the Persian Gulf. Both are linked to the open Indian Ocean through the narrow straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and Hormuz. And from India, the trade route to the major entrepôt ports on the islands of the East Indies threaded through the Strait of Malacca. For the merchants who had sailed around South East Asia for centuries the seas were an open commons, a vast region of free trade for all. Duties were levied at ports, and pirates were a rumbling concern, but no navies harassed foreign ships on the open seas. But the Europeans had a very different mindset, born of their heritage of naval warfare around the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. These colonial powers were bent on dominating the trade networks to establish a monopoly for themselves. To achieve this, they built fortresses to protect key ports and patrolled the waters with their warships to aggressively suppress competitors. Most crucially, they attempted to capture the naval chokepoints of Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz and Malacca to seal off the maritime routes to all but their own shipping, controlling trade across the whole reach of the Indian Ocean by commanding just a few critical locations in the geography of the seas.fn14
And naval chokepoints are just as strategically crucial today. It is no longer the spice trade that gives them acute geopolitical importance but the transport of another resource of global significance. Oil today occupies almost half of the total shipping tonnage around the world,49 and its continued unrestricted flow is critical to the current global economy.
BLACK ARTERIES
Oil not only fuels our modern world, but lubricates machinery, coats our roads, provides plastic and pharmaceuticals, and is used in the production of artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides that help produce the food we need. Over half of the global oil supply is delivered by tankers moving along the worldwide network of sea lanes,50 and thus passing through natural straits. As we have seen, the straits of the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) and the Bosphorus have been strategically critical since the time of the Peloponnesian War. Ukrainian grain is still exported across the Black Sea, but now around 2.5 million barrels of oil are also carried every day by tankers through this pair of Turkish straits to supply Southern and Western Europe with fossil fuel from Russia and the Caspian Sea region. The Bosphorus, less than a kilometre wide, is the narrowest strait being navigated by major vessels in the world.51
We have also constructed artificial chokepoints with our canals that link seas to create more direct shipping routes, such as the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal. When the Sue
z Crisis in 1956 closed the canal for six months and forced shipping to re-route around southern Africa, the result was fuel shortages across Europe.52 Yet by far the most strategically critical strait in this present age of oil is Hormuz.53
We’ll see in Chapter 9 how oil was created by our planet, and why so much of it can be found in the Middle East. The Persian Gulf produces about a third of the global oil supply and Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates must all ship their oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz; only Saudi Arabia and Iran are able to make use of alternative maritime links to the ocean shipping lanes.54 As a result the strait is frenetically busy with tanker traffic, transporting 19 million barrels every day – one-fifth of the world’s supply.55 But it also means that this artery carrying the black blood to fuel the world is exceedingly vulnerable as it passes through the straits. It has been calculated that over the forty years since the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the United States has spent over $7 trillion on its military presence in the Gulf to secure the steady flow of oil for the global markets.56 While piracy and terrorist attacks are concerns, the greatest fear is that international relations with a state like Iran might sour to such a point that they slam shut this vital chokepoint and put a stranglehold on world oil supplies.57
About 10 per cent of the oil produced around the Persian Gulf is shipped round the Cape of Good Hope to the United States, with a smaller portion being sent through Bab-el-Mandeb, up the Red Sea, and through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean. But the lion’s share travels the millennia-old shipping route round India to East Asia, threading through the narrow bottleneck of the Strait of Malacca. About a quarter of all oil transported by sea – roughly 16 million barrels a day – passes through this strait in tankers, and then on to feed the economies of China and Japan, as well as South Korea, Indonesia and Australia.58
While the nature of the major commodities may have changed through history – from grain to spices to oil – the role played by the geography of the seas and the strategic importance of naval chokepoints has remained ever critical. Before the advent of railways, automobiles and air travel it was the seas that facilitated long-distance trade. Even today 90 per cent of world trade is still carried by shipping.
But the role of the oceans consists of more than just providing maritime highways for long-distance trade and chokepoints that define much of the current geopolitical landscape. Let’s explore now how the geography of the seas can also shape the economics and politics of a nation.
BLACK BELT
When the American colonies declared their independence from British rule in 1776, and fought and won the Revolutionary War, their population was still almost entirely huddled along the Eastern Seaboard. Over the following decades the United States underwent a prodigious expansion, encouraging settlers to head west and acquiring huge areas of territory in a series of purchases and annexations. Within a century of its birth as a nation, the United States had quadrupled in size, and stretched from sea to shining sea across the entire breadth of the continental landmass. The USA had become a de facto island nation, shielded on the east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, whilst also enjoying access to maritime trade with Europe on one side and Asia on the other. America was able to accomplish economic success and champion ideals of liberty precisely because of this safety from external threats, born of its geographical circumstances. While European nations continued to jostle with each other on their crowded continent, America’s territorial security engendered an isolationist stance in its foreign policy for almost two centuries.fn15
But there’s another way that the sea has left its imprint on American politics, with roots reaching much further back in our planet’s history.
In the November 2016 US elections the Republican nominee Donald Trump beat his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. A map of the results shows the blue Democrat-voting states of the north-east and up the Western Seaboard, along with Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Illinois, whereas huge areas in the centre of the country are coloured Republican red. The states in the south-east also voted Republican overall, including Florida, which tipped to the Republicans in this election. But a look at a finer-resolution map of the voting behaviour, showing individual counties, reveals something very curious.
The pattern of Democrat-voting counties (dark) within the sea of Republicans in the south-eastern US (top) follows the Mississipi and the arc of 75-million-year-old Cretaceous rocks (bottom).
Running through the wide expanse of red in the south-east, there is a very distinct blue line of counties that voted strongly Democrat, curving through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and then down the banks of the Mississippi river. And this blue ridge isn’t just a quirk of the most recent presidential election. It is also apparent in the 2008 and 2012 elections won by the Democrats under Barack Obama, as well as the preceding terms of George W. Bush. In fact, this voting feature recurs through time right back to the reconstruction of the United States after the Civil War. What could be the underlying cause of this pattern in the south-eastern states that has endured for so long in something as variable and fluid as presidential politics and elections through history?
The astonishing fact is that this clearly defined band of Democrat-voting areas is the result of an ancient ocean, tens of millions of years old.
If you look at a geological map of the US you’ll notice that the pattern of blue counties follows along a curved band of surface rocks that were laid down during the late Cretaceous Period in Earth’s history, between 86 and 66 million years ago. This relatively narrow band of exposed Cretaceous rocks curves around older rocks further inland to the north, including the high relief of the Appalachian Mountains, and disappears underground to the south where it is overlaid by more recent rock deposits.
During the Cretaceous Period, when the climate was hot and sea levels far higher than they are now, much of what is today the United States was flooded. The sea protruded right up through the middle of the US as the Western Interior Seaway, and lapped at the toes of the Appalachian Mountains along the eastern side of the continent. Material eroded out of the Appalachians and carried by rivers into this shallow sea was deposited as clays on the seabed. In time, these seafloor clays turned into a layer of shale rock. As sea levels fell again, the outline of the US that we would recognise today emerged, and erosion re-exposed a strip of these ancient seafloor sediments on the coastal plain. Soils derived from this band of shale bedrock are dark and rich in nutrients originally eroded from the mountains. The term ‘Black Belt’ initially referred to this stripe of distinctively coloured and agriculturally productive soils through Alabama and Mississippi.
These dark, rich soils derived from the Cretaceous shale were perfect for growing crops, and in particular the cultivation of cotton. With the Industrial Revolution gathering pace and accelerating the processing of cotton into clothing – brought about by the mechanisation that rapidly separated the cotton fibres from their seeds, spinning them into thread and then weaving finished textiles – demand for cotton surged, making it a key cash crop. But the cultivation of cotton was deeply labour-intensive. Unlike cereal crops where the desired grain can be simply shaken from the plant stalks by a threshing machine, early cotton cultivation needed nimble human fingers to pluck each fluffy boll individually from the shrub. And from the late eighteenth century in the southern states these were provided by slaves.
By 1830, slavery had become solidly established in South Carolina and along the Mississippi, and by 1860 it had spread up from the Gulf coast of Alabama and through Georgia. By the height of slave-tended cotton plantations, the term ‘Black Belt’ had come to take on a different meaning, describing the populations found in the Deep South – a dense concentration of African-Americans along the banks of the Mississippi and around the curve of the Cretaceous rock belt underlying the soils.59
Even after the Confederacy lost the American Civil War in 1865 and
slavery was abolished across the southern states, there was no sudden change in the demographics or indeed in the economic focus of this region. The former slaves continued to work on the same cotton plantations, but now they were sharecropping as freedmen. But the economic fortunes of the Deep South began to slump with falling cotton prices followed by the infestation of the cotton-growing areas with the boll weevil in the 1920s. Several million African-Americans migrated from rural areas in the southern states to the major industrial cities of the north-eastern and midwestern United States, especially after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet the largest populations of African-Americans remained in the regions where they had the greatest initial density: the historical ‘Black Belt’ of fertile soils.
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