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

partially protected from them by virtue of geography. For Greece and India on
account of their northerly mountains were both “effectively sheltered from the
direct impact of steppe cavalry.” China was even more isolated, by inhospitable
deserts, high peaks, and sheer distance, as thousands of miles separated the
Yellow River valley, where Chinese civilization began, from the Middle East and
Indian heartlands. The result was three utterly original civilizations, particularly
that of the Chinese, that were able to develop separately from the increasingly
cultural uniformity of the Greater Desert Middle East, which stretched from
North Africa to Turkestan.
8
McNeill explains that throughout antiquity the ebb and flow of the frontiers
between Hellenic, Middle Eastern, and Indian civilizations made for a delicate

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cultural balance in Eurasia, which, later in the medieval centuries, would be
undone by the inundation of steppe peoples from the north, notably the
Mongols.
9
It is largely through the Mongols that the Silk Route flourished,
especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bringing Eurasian
civilizations from the Pacific to the Mediterranean into modest contact with one
another. Nevertheless, China formed its own separate sphere geographically
compared to the civilizations further west, with Tibet, Mongolia, Japan, and
Korea all directing their gazes toward the Middle Kingdom, each forging in
varying degrees its own civilization. And yet the severe limitations of a high
desert environment “made anything more than a protocivilization impossible in
Tibet and Mongolia,” McNeill writes. Tibetan Lamaists, “always conscious of
the Indian Buddhist origins of their faith,” in effect opposed Sinification by
appealing to the traditions of the rival civilization next door.
10
 History, according
to McNeill, is a study in fluidity, in which things only seem secure and neatly
geographically ordered: more crucially we are always in a state of smaller
transitions and cultural interchanges.
While opposing Spengler, Toynbee, and later the “Clash of Civilizations”
theory of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, in emphasizing the interaction
of civilizations rather than their separateness, McNeill’s 
The Rise of the West
,
nevertheless, engages the reader with the whole notion of civilizations formed in
large measure by geography, that rise from precisely definable landscapes,
achieve their own identity, and then interact with other civilizations, in turn
forming new hybrids. In this way, history is woven.
11
McNeill metaphorically
describes the process:
Civilizations may be likened to mountain ranges, rising through aeons
of geologic time, only to have the forces of erosion slowly but
ineluctably nibble them down to the level of their surroundings. Within
the far shorter time span of human history, civilizations, too, are liable
to erosion as the special constellation of circumstances which
provoked their rise passes away, while neighboring peoples lift
themselves to new cultural heights by borrowing from or otherwise
reacting to the civilized achievement.
12
Such erosion and borrowing terrifies the purity of the early-twentieth-century
German Oswald Spengler, who writes of the “deep soil ties” that define the best
of High Cultures: how the inner evolution of sacral practices and dogmas remain
“spellbound in the place of their birth,” since, “whatever disconnects itself from

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the land becomes rigid and hard.” High Culture, he goes on, begins in the
“preurban countryside” and culminates with a “finale of materialism” in the
“world-cities.” For this dark romantic, who can at once be turgid, hypnotic,
profound, and, frankly, at times unintelligible in English translation,
cosmopolitanism is the essence of rootlessness, because it is not tied to the
land.
13
That raises the question of the rise and eventual fate of an urban Western
civilization, morphing as we speak into a world civilization, and increasingly
divorced from the soil. That inquiry will come later in the book. Meanwhile, I
want to continue with McNeill, who, through it all, far more so than Spengler
even, and far more intelligibly, is attentive to climate and geography.
McNeill writes, for example, that the Aryans developed a different, less
warlike cultural personality in India’s Gangetic plain than they did in
Mediterranean Europe because of the influence of the subcontinent’s forests and
the monsoonal cycle, which encouraged meditation and religious knowledge. In
another example, he writes that Greek Ionia’s “precocity” was because of
proximity to, and intimate contact with, Asia Minor and the Orient. And yet
here, too, McNeill pulls back from outright determinism: for despite Greece’s
mountainous terrain, which favored the establishment of small political units,
i.e., city-states, he is careful to note that in a number of cases, “contiguous
expanses of fertile ground were broken up” into different city-states, so that
geography can only be part of the story. And above all, of course, there is the
history of the Jews, which goes against the entire logic of the geographical
continuity of major religions (particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism), and
which McNeill therefore takes pains to include: the utter destruction of the
Jewish community in Judea, the consequence of the crushing of first-and second-
century 
A.D
. revolts by the Romans, did not end Judaism, which went on
improbably to evolve and flourish in scattered cities of the western Diaspora, a
two-thousand-year-old story averse to the dictates of geography, which shows
once again how ideas and human agency matter as much as physical terrain.
14
And yet, too, there is the story of Europe, reaching back to the dawn of human
history, a story very much about the primacy of geography. As McNeill points
out, Western Europe had distinct geographical advantages which developments
in technology during the so-called Dark Ages brought into play: wide and fertile
plains, an indented coastline that allowed for many good natural harbors,
navigable rivers flowing northward across these plains and extending the reach
of commerce to a greater extent than in the Mediterranean region, and an
abundance of timber and metals.
15
Europe’s was also a harsh, cold, and wet

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climate, and as Toynbee, who, like McNeill, was, at a crucial level, not a fatalist,
nonetheless writes: “Ease is inimical to civilisation.… The greater the ease of the
environment, the weaker the stimulus toward civilisation.”
16
And thus Europe
developed because of a geography that was difficult in which to live but had
many natural nodal points of transport and commerce. For civilizations are in
many ways brave and fortitudinous reactions to natural environments. Take the
proximity of Scandinavia and the military pressure it brought to bear on Western
European seaboards, which led to the articulation of England and France as
national entities. England, moreover, being smaller than the feudal kingdoms of
the continent, and, as Toynbee writes, “possessed of better-defined frontiers
[after all, it was an island],” achieved far sooner than its neighbors a national as
opposed to a feudal existence.
17
Of course, some landscapes, the Arctic, for example, prove so difficult that
they can lead to civilizational collapse, or to an arrested civilization. What
precedes this, according to Toynbee, is a cultural tour de force—say, the
Eskimos’ ability to actually stay on the ice in winter and hunt seals. But once
having accomplished this feat of survival, they are unable to master the
environment to the extent of developing a full-fledged civilization. Toynbee, as
well as the contemporary UCLA geographer Jared Diamond, write legions about
civilizational difficulties and downfalls among the medieval cultures of the
Vikings of Greenland, the Polynesians of Easter Island, the Anasazi of the
American Southwest, and the Mayans of the Central American jungles, all of
which were connected to problems with the environment.
18
Europe, it appears,
offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants
to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern
temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe,
and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade
patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological
advancements in navigation and other spheres.
19
Witness Vasco da Gama’s
mastering of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean, which allowed for the
outer edges of Eurasia to become a focus of the world’s sea lanes under
European dominance. But in McNeill’s narrative, it is not only the material
advancement of Europe, under a challenging physical environment, that leads to
the rise of the West, but the closing, as he puts it, of the “barbarian” spaces.
20
McNeill talks of the “inexorable, if not entirely uninterrupted, encroachment
of civilizations upon barbarism”:
It was this encroachment which built up the mass and internal variety

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of the separate civilizations of the world and increased the frequency
of contact among them, preparing the way for the spectacular
unification of the globe which has occurred during the past three or
four centuries.
21
This civilizational closure of the earth’s relatively empty spaces, mainly in the
temperate zone, began in a fundamental way with the voyages of discovery:
those of da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, and others. And it continued through
the well-known stages of revolutions in industry, transport, and communications
to the globalization we experience today. In between came the final collapse of
the steppe peoples, with Russia, China, and the Habsburg Empire partitioning
the relatively empty central Eurasian plains and tablelands. There was, too, the
collapse of indigenous populations with the violent securing of the western
frontier of the North American continent, and the European colonial
encroachment on sub-Saharan Africa.
22
The world, as McNeill describes it, is
now finally united under a largely Western, increasingly urbanized culture.
Remember that communism, while an extension of the totalitarian tendencies
within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and, therefore, an affront to liberalism,
was still an ideology of the industrialized West. Nazism, too, emerged as a
pathology of an inflation-wracked, rapidly modernizing West. McNeill is not
talking about political unity, but of broad cultural, geographic, and demographic
tendencies.
While a central theme of