2B RED: On the matter of maps🍋

Learning from your atlas

The central theme of this edition of 2B RED is what one can learn about history, economics and geopolitics from one’s atlas. It turns out the answer is a surprising amount. And as a bonus, I’ve included four other books about maps.

First up is Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (10th anniversary edition, Elliott & Thompson, 2025). The book’s central thesis is that the geography of a country is a determining factor shaping its political and economic evolution and, above all, its international relations. For example, Russia’s lack of a warm-water port and the narrow window to the west across the northern European plain are key elements that underpin subsequent events.

Maungamahue, Ruahine Forest Park. Dave Heatley

Whenever presented with a seemingly simple hypothesis that is claimed to have wide predictive powers, the reader has a right to be, initially at least, a tad sceptical. Is the supporting evidence drawn from selected examples that happens to fit the argument, or is it closer to a “universal truth”? The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is richly endowed with natural resources, has navigable rivers and access to the Atlantic. Landlocked Botswana has none of these. Today the DRC is amongst the ten poorest countries in the world. Botswana, a stable democracy with solid macroeconomic policies, has a GDP per capita more than 10 times that of the DRC. This does lead one to suspect that there is more than just geography at play.

But do not let that detract from a fascinating book which manages in the space of a chapter each to take the major countries or regions of the world and build a compelling case that geography matters and can provide a perspective on many historical, political and economic events. The tenth anniversary edition updates the original 2015 publication and brings the narrative right up to current events such as the invasion of Ukraine and the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Tim Marshall has also written Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in 12 Simple Maps, an illustrated and simplified version of his book suitable for younger audiences. I’m told it’s terrific.

Will globalism trump geography?

Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” in his 2000 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (Random House, 2000), argued that countries with enough economic development to support a McDonald’s franchise would not engage in war, as they are too focused on economic growth and global integration.

Robert D. Kaplan debunks the argument that globalism will trump geography in The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House Group, 2013). He traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. These historical insights are then applied to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. Remarkably, he makes the case that the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties; conflicts arise between nation states over claims to resources, water being a prime example. In short, the book is an examination of geopolitics; i.e., it views politics through the lens of geography.

China in 10 words

China is the third largest country in the world (after Russia and Canada), with the second largest population (being only a smidge behind India), and the second largest nominal GDP (behind the US). Furthermore, it was one of the top three ranked countries for most years from the 1500s to the mid-nineteenth century. The following video shows a highly effective dynamic graph of GDP rankings over time.

The “geography shapes everything” hypothesis finds some credible evidence in the case of China; in particular see the chapter on China in the book by Tim Marshall detailed above. However arguably the social, political and economic dimensions and complexities of this extraordinary country demand a broader canvas. To recognise that need, 2B RED recommends Yu Hua, China in 10 Words (Duckworth, 2023). There is no better way to summarise this highly readable volume with its exceptional insights than in the author’s own words in the closing paragraph of the Introduction:

“My goal, then, is to compress the endless chatter of China today into ten simple words; to bring together observation, analysis, and personal anecdote in a narrative that roams freely across time and space; and finally to clear a path through the social complexities and staggering contrasts of contemporary China.”

The ten simple words are the titles of the ten chapters: People, Leader, Reading, Writing, Lu Xun, Revolution, Disparity, Grassroots, Copycat, and Bamboozle. Perhaps the only one that needs a word of explanation is Lu Xun, a Chinese author whose works were among the very few books (in addition to the thoughts of Chairman Mao) permitted during the Cultural Revolution. Lu Xun’s fiction and especially his satirical essays were promoted as models of resistance, ideological combat, and proletarian service, conforming to Maoist views of class struggle.

Making maps

From 1737 to 1744 a team of French scientists trekked from Ecuador across the Andes to the Amazon River. They wanted to map the river, but their principal objective was to accurately measure the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator, and in so doing they hoped to answer questions about the curvature of the Earth and help resolve a debate between the Newtonians and Cartesians about the physics that governs the universe. Newtonians predicted the Earth would be flattened at the poles due to centrifugal force, while Cartesians believed it would be elongated at the poles like an egg.

Their scientific expedition provided evidence to support Newton’s “flat-pole” prediction, effectively ending the Cartesian dominance in European physics. By drawing on journals of members of the expedition and historical French documents, Robert Whitaker constructs a fascinating story: The Mapmaker’s Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon (Bantam Books, 2005).

There is no easy way to depict the three-dimensional spherical globe of the Earth on a flat two-dimensional surface. In order to represent all countries of the world without placing any single nation at the centre, the United Nations logo and flag use an azimuthal equidistant projection of the globe centred on the North Pole and orientated to the International Date Line. This is in contrast to the widely used Mercator projection. Nicholas Crane has written a rewarding biography of Gerard Mercator — Mercator: The Man who Mapped the Planet (Phoenix, 2003). This is a story of a cobbler’s son born in 1512 on a muddy plain in Northern Europe. What is truly remarkable is that Mercator’s projection is widely used today in the exact form he developed. He survived the plague and was imprisoned by the Inquisition but emerged as the world’s first scientific mapmaker and instrument maker to an emperor. He is also remembered for coining the term “atlas”.

On the Map: Why the world looks the way it does (Profile Books, 2012) by Simon Garfield is a comprehensive, colourful history of mapmaking from the ancient philosophers to Google Maps. On the Map is peppered with compelling and bizarre anecdotes, some to do with recurring cartographic howlers (because mapmakers, like cookery writers, copy one another). In 1622, a Spanish map depicted California as a big island off the west coast of North America. The mistake was repeated for decades, on maps entitled things like “A New and Most Exact Map of America”.

For those readers who enjoy historical fiction, The Mapmaker’s Daughter (Avon, 2022) by Clare Marchant would be a good choice. The plot involves the lives of two women from different times and alternates between 1569 and 2022. One finds a map and traces its origins, while the other uses her mapmaking skills including in the service of Queen Elizabeth I during England’s wars with Spain.

Coda

Trade wars, like military conflicts, are never just lines on a spreadsheet; they redraw the economic map.

Given the state of the world economy and the associated crumbling of global institutions, it is almost obligatory for 2B RED to include at least one “Trumpian” entry; and so this edition concludes with Richard Baldwin’s The Great Trade Hack: How Trump’s Trade War Fails and the World Moves On (CEPR Press, 2025). Baldwin has had a distinguished academic career in international economics. His PhD was supervised by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

Baldwin debunks any notion that the 2025 tariffs were a rational element of trade policy; rather he claims they were based simply on grievance and revenge against countries which had “benefited” at the expense of the US by running trade surpluses. He argues that tariffs fail on all counts. They can’t correct the US trade deficit (which mainly reflects government fiscal deficits); they cannot boost the manufacturing sector (they have the opposite effect through uncertainty, disrupted supply chains and raised input costs); and they cannot make workers better off (only about 8% of employees are in the protected goods sector — the rest are in service sectors and face higher tariff-induced living costs).

Baldwin argues that eventually tariffs will collapse as the costs rise both domestically and internationally, but in the meantime they persist as they provide symbolic relief, project toughness and shift the blame to other countries.

By Grant Scobie

»»»» Previous issues of 2B RED.

Franz Josef Glacier, Westland National Park. Dave Heatley