From land-grabs to a competition over routes and resources

On all kinds of international affairs, the notes write, Tim Marshall explains, by geographic reasons, why the disputes now happening in each country are happening. Why China holds to the sea even to the point of raising a sovereignty dispute; why Russia holds to the Crimean Peninsula, and what geographic advantages made it a great power; why, in a recent situation the writer felt they could now understand, the United States and China quarrel over the placement of THAAD in Korea; why India’s growth is faster than Pakistan’s; why the Middle East and Africa keep fighting one another; and why the world seeks to develop toward the Arctic, not the Antarctic — all of this, they write, he explains lightly by the author’s reasons, and they found it hard not to be interested.

Wars in the past, they write, were quite literally wars to widen a state’s own territory, bloody enough to be called a game of taking land. Britain, France, and other Western powers made colonies by their own strength, and tried to widen the ground their states could influence, and this also led on to world wars, because enlarging the land itself was thought to make a state rich and strong. In the present, they say, only a very few countries still raise a bloody war in order to widen land, and yet the land-grab has not wholly disappeared. In the twenty-first century a new age of competition for hegemony has opened, they write, over territory and over resources, by economic and other means. Human life itself, they add, cannot take root or form a force without the land a person holds, and so war, power, and politics have all been made chiefly around land.

Four thousand years on land, and a July 2016 ruling

The writer had thought disputes came from differences of ideology, and then saw that countries of the same ideology can still quarrel, and that different systems can also cooperate. Disputes, in the book’s view as they take it, come more from geographic advantages and limits than from ideology. China, they write, spent some four thousand years concentrating on widening its hold on land, and had no need to turn its eyes to the sea. Once a global age arrived, and a country that holds an advantage at sea was better placed, China, in this reading, began to raise disputes in the East and South China Seas and over the Senkaku Islands. If sea lanes are blocked, imports and exports of gas and crude oil stop, and the country is isolated — that, they interpret, is why it holds so hard to the sea.

In July 2016, they add, a permanent court of arbitration found that there was insufficient legal basis to claim historic rights along the nine-dash line in the South China Sea; China did not accept the ruling. That finding is left in the window of that month and year, as the notes record it, not recast as a later official total or a later political outcome the notes do not give.

The United States, Japan, Britain, and a closing thought for Korea

The United States, they write, is a country with wide land, secured sea routes, and a blessing of climate and geography together. Its territory runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in a position hard for an outsider to invade. It bought Louisiana and secured the Mississippi region, obtained Florida and was joined through to the Pacific, as the notes put that sequence, and in Alaska gained wealth from gold mines and oil fields. Japan, they interpret, is an island country short of a supporting base, and so raises disputes in order to reach out toward other countries. The reason Britain could push off from Europe is also, they write, explained by geography.

In the close, they say that the process by which Russia became a great power in a cold climate, the fiscal weakness of southern Europe and the Greek crisis, and the growth of the United States can all be understood through geography. One should study geography more, they add, and one should also think about why China cannot cut off aid to North Korea, and about the geographic advantages Korea itself may have in facing great powers. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, with the July 2016 ruling left in its window.

Last updated: 15 November 2026