The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Chapter III

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HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS
During the middle to latter twentieth century, when Hans Morgenthau taught in
the political science department at the University of Chicago, two other
professors were also forging prodigious academic paths in the history
department: William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson. The university
was bursting with rigor and talent, and by concentrating on these three
professors, I do not mean to slight others. Whereas Morgenthau defined realism
for the present age, McNeill quite literally did so for the history of the world and
Hodgson for the history of Islam, in massive works of Herodotean scope, in
which geography is rarely far out of reach. The very audacity that McNeill and
Hodgson showed in the choice of their subjects is to be admired in this current
academic era, with its emphasis on narrow specialization—in truth, a necessity
as the mass of knowledge steadily accumulates. But to read McNeill and
Hodgson is almost to be wistful for a time not that long ago when scholars’
horizons were seemingly limitless. Specialization has brought its own unique
sort of flowering, but the academy could use more of what these two University
of Chicago professors represent. Geography, they demonstrate, is in and of itself
a means of thinking broadly.
William Hardy McNeill, born in British Columbia, was in his mid-forties when
in 1963 he published 
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
,
a book which runs well over eight hundred pages. The overarching theme is to
challenge the viewpoint of British historian Arnold Toynbee and German
historian Oswald Spengler that separate civilizations pursued their destinies
independently. Instead, McNeill argues that cultures and civilizations continually
interacted, and it has been this interaction that has forged the core drama of
world history. If the book is about anything, it is about the vast movements of
peoples across the map.
To wit: a northerly movement brought the so-called Danubian cultivators into
central and western Europe between 4500 and 4000 
B.C
. Meanwhile, a southerly
movement of pioneer herders and farmers crossed North Africa unto the Strait of
Gibraltar, “to meet and mingle with the Danubian flood.” But the older hunting
populations of Europe were not destroyed, McNeill writes; instead, there was a
mixing of populations and cultures.
1
 Thus, the heart of the book commences.
Both these population movements, north and south of the Mediterranean,
originated from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, where political instability was

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largely a function of geography. “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the
routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-
angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man,” writes the late British
travel writer Freya Stark.
2
Indeed, as McNeill indicates, Mesopotamia cut across
one of history’s bloodiest migration routes. “As soon as the cities of the plain
had been made to flourish,” the result of a gently sloping landscape in the lower