Isegoria

If we look at China’s modern borders, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), we see a great power now confident that it is secured by its geographical features:

The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has only seven million people and no indications of population growth.

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Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms that help keep Russia afloat, but are favorable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.

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Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China’s military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing.

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The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi’s side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.

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China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match that broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain fighting.

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Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon.

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If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.

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In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han.

It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains, and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: “The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.” The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: “That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.” But the Chinese built it. Which, perhaps, only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese president Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day.

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Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.

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Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.

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Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive “semiautonomous” Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish.

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There was, is, and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of “East Turkestan,” in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China.

Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.” The road is, oddly enough, the sea route: the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods, the belt is the “Silk Road Economic Belt,” a land-based route based on the old Silk Route that goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southward to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar in Pakistan. In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which “the belt and the road” will be connected.

Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, eighty-five miles northwest of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate—and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although official figures are difficult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity.

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In early 2016, local government officials said that deradicalization efforts had “markedly weakened” the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely.

Although 75 percent of Russia’s territory is in Asia, Tim Marshall emphasizes (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), only 22 percent of its population lives there:

Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland.

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China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long run, but this would be through Russia’s declining birthrate and Chinese immigration moving north. Already as far west as the swampy West Siberian Plain, between the Urals in the west and the Yenisei River one thousand miles to the east, you can see Chinese restaurants in most of the towns and cities. Many different businesses are coming. The empty depopulating spaces of Russia’s Far East are even more likely to come under Chinese cultural, and eventually political, control.

When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era, Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way.

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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

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This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles’ heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder the forged will of Peter the Great advises his descendants to “approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia…. Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.”

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The exception to this rule are the “stans,” such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states.

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In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans toward Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated. Of the five, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan have joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (a sort of poor man’s EU), which celebrated its first anniversary in January 2016. All, including Tajikistan, are in a military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO suffers from not having a name you can boil down to one word, and from being a watered-down Warsaw Bloc. Russia maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia.

On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and took up residence at the Tuileries:

He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer.

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From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.

Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre.

The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead.

Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.

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It was characteristic of Napoleon that he wanted value for money in all this. Concerned that the upholsterers were cheating him he asked a minister how much the ivory handle at the end of a bell-rope should cost. The minister had no idea, whereupon Napoleon cut it off, called for a valet, told him to dress in ordinary clothes and inquire the price in several shops and order a dozen. When he discovered they were one-third cheaper than billed he simply struck one-third off the charges made by all the tradesmen.

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A significant part of the pre-revolutionary French economy, especially in areas like Lyons, the centre of the European silk industry, had been dependent on luxury goods, and Napoleon was determined to revive it.

With renewed fighting against Austria and her allies looming, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon needed to replenish the near-empty Treasury:

He instructed Gaudin to borrow at least 12 million francs from the fifteen or so richest bankers in Paris. The best they would offer was 3 million francs, helpfully suggesting that a national lottery be established to raise the rest. Unimpressed, on January 27, 1800 Napoleon simply arrested Gabriel Ouvrard, the most powerful banker in France and the owner of the vast navy supply contract from which he was rumoured to have made a profit of 8 million francs over the previous four years. (It cannot have helped Ouvrard that he had refused to help finance the Brumaire coup.) Ouvrard’s experience helped loosen the purse-strings of other bankers, but Napoleon wanted to place France’s finances on a far surer footing. He could not continue, in effect, to need bankers’ and contractors’ permission before he could mobilize the army.

On February 13, Gaudin opened the doors of the Banque de France, with the First Consul as its first shareholder.

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In April 1803 the bank was granted the exclusive right to issue paper money in Paris for fifteen years, notes which in 1808 became French legal tender, supported by the state rather than just the bank’s collateral. In time the confidence that Napoleon’s support gave the bank in the financial world allowed it to double the amount of cash in circulation, discount private notes and loans, open regional branches, increase revenues and the shareholder base, lend more, and in short create a classic virtuous business circle. It was also given important government business, such as managing all state annuities and pensions.

The United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined, Peter Zeihan explains (in The Accidental Superpower):

The coast of Africa, for example, may be sixteen thousand miles long, but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction, three of which are in South Africa.

Ports also require a sufficient hinterland to support them in the first place. In this, Northern Europe faced quite a few challenges in the centuries before European dominance, as much of the coastline was marsh and mud, as is northern China’s. Brazil north of the 22nd parallel south — roughly the latitude of Rio de Janeiro — isn’t much better. South of the 22nd parallel, Brazil’s coast is all cliff, as is much of southern China’s. Australia’s coast may be accessible, but it is so arid it is almost devoid of people — as is North Africa’s coast. Russia’s coast — like most of Canada’s — is (sub) arctic. What few African locations have a friendly coast are often backed up by swamp, desert, or jungle. The entire Sub-Saharan region really only has four coastal areas capable of supporting cities of significant size (two of which are still in South Africa).

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Courtesy of those barrier islands, Texas alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more. Why not expand port capacity? Because the United States has more port possibilities than it has ever needed, despite the fact that it has been the world’s largest producer, importer, and exporter of agricultural and manufactured goods for most of its history.

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The island of Cuba and the Yucatán and Florida peninsulas limit access to the Gulf of Mexico to two straits, creatively named the Yucatán and Florida Straits. These sharply limit the ability of extrahemispheric powers to play in the Gulf of Mexico.

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That means that since the Civil War the Americans have never had to worry about fortifying anything along the Gulf Coast, even when German U-boats were sinking shipping in the millions of tons off the East Coast.

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In 1871, Canada first tried to solve the Saint Lawrence’s winter ice and the Great Lakes’ waterfalls problems with a series of locks on the river and construction of the Welland Canal. By the 1890s, however, the Canadians had proposed a partnership with Washington for a more extensive, binational waterway that would link the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes. The main selling point was that the Americans would actually benefit more than the Canadians from improving the waterways on their common border. The Canadians were indeed correct: Bringing the Great Lakes online would turn places like Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit into full-on ocean ports.

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The American government knew that the Canadians were going to build the lock system anyway, because having some sort of transport system that allowed Quebec and Ontario to interact economically was a national imperative. To do otherwise risked hardening Canada’s Anglophone-Francophone divide into something truly ugly. The Americans also knew they would be able to use the fruits of Canadian labor in an unrestricted manner regardless of whether Washington helped pay for it or not: The system would be right on the border and at least some of the canals would have to be on the American side of the line.

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In the end, the Canadians had to foot over 70 percent of the bill, pay almost all of the maintenance, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway wasn’t fully operational until 1959.

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The United States is the only country with significant populations on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with nearly 50 million people on the Pacific and twice that on the Atlantic. So only the Americans have broad-scale access to both of the world’s great trading zones.

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The Americans have sufficient infrastructure to enable their Pacific citizens to trade with Europe when Asia is in recession, or to allow their Atlantic citizens to trade with Asia when Europe is in recession. Because they can easily switch dance partners, the Americans only suffer a recession caused by international factors when the entire world goes into recession.

In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan describes America’s local buffers:

America’s southern border region is all either desert or highland or both, relatively flat on the northern side of the border, but rugged on the southern side. Aside from the border communities themselves there are only two meaningful Mexican populations within five hundred miles of the border, Chihuahua and Monterrey, and even they are five hundred mountainous miles apart from one another. As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands. In the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, the Americans took full advantage of that lack of staging areas, that thick buffer, and their superior transport to strategically outmaneuver the larger, slower, and exhausted Mexican forces — and this in an era before the Americans had battleships and jets. At the war’s conclusion, the United States seized half of Mexico’s territory (including California) — the half that was easier to get around in.

Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated. In the border’s eastern reaches mountains and thick forests so snarl transport options that infrastructure even today is thin and vulnerable. In the far west the Rockies are a great border zone in that there is nothing for hundreds of miles on either side of the border that resembles a major staging area. The sole point of potential conflict is the Strait of Georgia, the body of water between Canada’s Vancouver Island and the northwestern extremes of the U.S. state of Washington. A Canadian impingement upon the strait would block maritime access to Puget Sound, home of Seattle and Tacoma. Yet the region’s population (im)balance is heavily in the Americans’ favor: The three Pacific coast American states outpopulate British Columbia by ten to one.

In the middle portion of the border region — the Prairie provinces–Midwest border — connections are almost omnipresent. This is a bad deal not for the Americans, but rather for the Canadians. South of the border zone one encounters ever denser American populations with ever more developed land and ever better transport infrastructure, both artificial and natural. In contrast, moving north into Canada one hits an initial line of cities — Calgary, Regina, and Winnipeg — and then a whole lot of nothing. The Prairies have little choice but to be American in economic orientation and even somewhat midwestern culturally. Their physical links to both British Columbia and the core Canadian provinces of the east are weak at best and regularly disrupted every winter. Their links to the colossus to the south, however, are substantial, multimodal, multiply redundant, and almost always functional.

If the United States has one of the easiest geographies to develop, Mexico has one of the most difficult. The entirety of Mexico is in essence the southern extension of the Rocky Mountains, which is a kind way of saying that America’s worst lands are strikingly similar to Mexico’s best lands. As one would expect from a terrain that is mountain-dominated, there are no navigable rivers and no large cohesive pieces of arable land like the American Southeast or the Columbia valley, much less the Midwest. Each mountain valley is a sort of fastness where a small handful of oligarchs control local economic and political life. Mexico shouldn’t be thought of as a unified state, but instead as a collage of dozens of little Mexicos where local power brokers constantly align with and against each other (and a national government seeking — often in vain — to stitch together something more cohesive). In its regional disconnectedness Mexico is a textbook case that countries with the greatest need for capital-intensive infrastructure are typically the countries with the lowest ability to generate the capital necessary to build that infrastructure. By the time the Mexicans completed their first rail line from their sole significant (preindustrial) port at Veracruz to Mexico City in 1873, the Americans already had over fifty thousand miles of operational track.

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The one thing that Canada has going for it is that it does have a navigable waterway — the Saint Lawrence — but since that waterway merges with the Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence watercourse is shared with the United States, making most Canadian waterborne commerce subject to American proclivities. That, in fact, is the theme of Canada as a whole. It is far easier for almost all of the Canadian provinces to integrate economically with the United States than with each other.

In the fourth chapter of The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan gets to that accidental superpower:

The Mississippi is the world’s longest navigable river, some 2,100 miles long from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico to its head of navigation at the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That’s about one-third longer than the mighty Danube and triple the length of the Rhine. And the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.

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The Americans benefit from a geographic feature that exists in few other places on the planet, and nowhere else in such useful arrangements: barrier islands. Chains of these low, flat, long islands parallel the American mainland for over three-quarters of the Gulf and East Coasts. The American barrier island chain turns three thousand miles of exposed coastline into dozens of connected, shielded bays. Tidal shifts are somewhat mitigated throughout the system, and the islands do an admirable job of blocking all but the most severe weather that the oceans can throw at the land, allowing for safe navigation from the Chesapeake to the Texas-Mexican border. The net effect of this Intracoastal Waterway is the equivalent of having a bonus three-thousand-mile-long river.

The most compelling feature of the American maritime system, however, is also nearly unique among the world’s waterways — the American system is indeed a network. The Mississippi has six major navigable tributaries, most of which have several of their own. The greater Mississippi system empties into the Gulf of Mexico at a point where ships have direct access to the barrier island/Intracoastal system.

All told, this Mississippi and Intracoastal system accounts for 15,500 of the United States’ 17,600 miles of internal waterways. Even leaving out the United States’ (and North America’s) other waterways, this is still a greater length of internal waterways than the rest of the planet combined.

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In the American example this allows goods — whether Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars — to reach anywhere in the river network at near-nominal costs without having to even leave the country.

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Roads and rails do not come cheaply, so taxes need to be raised and government workforces formed. Not so in the United States. The rivers directly and indirectly eliminate many barriers to economic entry and keep development costs low. Even the early smallholders — pioneer families who owned and worked their own plots of land — found themselves able to export grain via America’s waterways within a matter of months of breaking ground.

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As of 2014, that consumer base amounts to roughly $11.5 trillion. That’s triple anyone else, larger than the consumer bases of the next six countries — Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Italy — combined, and double that of the combined BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).

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The majority of the Lower 48 is within the temperate climate zone — warm enough for people to live and crops to grow, cool enough to limit populations of deadly, disease-carrying insects. The Rockies are a very serious mountain chain, but unlike the world’s other great mountains — the Alps, Himalayas, and Andes — they have six major passes with minimal avalanche dangers (so they can be kept open year round). Three of those passes are sufficiently wide to house major metropolitan regions — Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix — within them.

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In all, roughly two-thirds (including nearly everything east of the Rocky Mountains) of the Lower 48 can be reached easily, with some 90 percent of it within 150 miles of some sort of navigable waterway.

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The greater Midwest is absolutely massive: With 139 million hectares under till, it is the largest contiguous stretch of high-quality farmland in the world. The central portions of the plain are humid yet temperate, making them perfect for corn and soybean production. The western sections are considerably drier as they lie in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, making them ideal for several varietals of wheat. In bad years the Midwest produces a billion bushels of wheat, 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans, and an astounding 9 billion bushels of corn.

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Of the United States’ 314 million people, some 250 million of them live within 150 miles of one of the country’s navigable waterways.

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The wealth of internal distribution options the United States enjoys means that for the bulk of its history American dependence upon the international trade system has been less than 15 percent of GDP.

Great Britain was better suited to leverage deepwater navigation than Iberia, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), but it was not the ultimate European geography for industrialization:

By 1850, it was Germany’s time to rise.

Berlin is perhaps the best-located city on the planet from a purely economic point of view. It sits at the junction of the Spree and Havel Rivers, both navigable tributaries of the Elbe. Berlin is only sixty miles from the Oder, and the Havel reaches so far to the east as to almost connect the two river basins. This grants Berlin access to one of the world’s very few maritime systems that taps into more than one river.

And those are just the rivers immediately proximate to Berlin. Close to the west is the Rhine, Northern Europe’s financial-industrial powerhouse, navigable all the way south to the Swiss city of Basel, and possessing tributaries and distributaries that spiderweb through German, French, and Dutch lands. Close to the east is the Vistula—the last major navigable river before the Eurasian Hordelands. Close to the south is the Danube—the longest river in Europe as a whole, one of the very few that flows southward, and the only one mighty enough to punch through the Alps and Carpathians. Any economic hub centered at Berlin is uniquely situated to reach almost anywhere in Europe where wealth can be created. Berlin’s waterways dictate that Germany emerge as the heart of a massive empire with economic links to the North, Baltic, and Black Seas, so long as Berlin is left to develop.

But Germany has almost never been left to develop.

Germany’s location saddles it with three critical weaknesses that make it an insecure — and often poor — country, despite what ostensibly seems like the geography that most peoples could only dream of.

First, Germans don’t live at the western end of the continent like the Spanish or on an island like the English; they are in the very middle of the North European Plain. While Germany’s wealth potential is massive, German lands are inherently vulnerable. To the east is a nigh indefensible border with Poland, whose own eastern border is even less defensible. Germany’s western border is similarly difficult: Opposite it is France, typically the most consolidated European power. Balkan upstarts often seethe on the other side of the Vienna Gap, while maritime powers can easily harass — and at times even hold portions of — the region’s lengthy coastline.

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Second, this man-in-the-middle position means that Germany has almost never been united. German rivers lead in different directions to different seas, making different cities look to different horizons for their economic well-being. The middle of Germany — the Harz Mountains region — is akin to having Appalachia between Boston and New York. The presence of not one but six major powers in immediate proximity long denied Berlin easy control not just of its borderlands, but large tracts of its interior as well, including most of the Rhine and Oder river systems. Unlike the English, who established a centralized government in the Thames valley as early as the tenth century, the initial German proto-state of Brandenburg didn’t start stabilizing as a country in its own right until the fifteenth century.

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The Germans lacked independent access to the ocean. Germany didn’t control even one of its major rivers’ delta cities until 1720, when it finally seized Stettin on the Oder from the Swedish Empire. Even then German ocean access was sharply circumscribed. The Danish island of Zealand is positioned perfectly to regulate traffic between the Baltic and North Seas. Germans only got their first full access to the ocean in 1871, when Berlin finally proved able to fold Hamburg, on the Elbe delta, into the German Empire.

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For the Germans industrialization changed everything.

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The endless quantities of cheap, high-quality goods decimated the Germans’ painstakingly fostered cottage and guild industries. Economic depression triggered the revolutions of 1848. Prussia only held together because of its national planning mechanisms and the strength of its military class, which derailed the revolutions and ejected vast droves of dissatisfied citizens.

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First, industrialization happened everywhere. Elsewhere in Europe, the various industrial revolutions launched from the respective capital cities. Money accrued in the capital and was spent from the capital, so road and rail networks radiated from it too, metabolizing whatever resources lay beyond in a system of diminishing returns. But the Germans, down to the most remote provincial city, were uniquely skilled in economic management and had already constructed the base road infrastructure that industrialization required to take root. Each and every one of the German cities was fertile ground for the seeds of industrialization.

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Second, industrialization happened much faster. Fractured fifteenth-century Brandenburg with no coastline or major port city was a very capital-poor country. Money had to be husbanded with ruthless efficiency. Imperial Germany of the 1870s, by contrast, controlled the bulk of Central Europe’s river networks and was awash in war booty from its recent string of military victories against Denmark, Austria, and France. Germany’s hypercompetent governments included industrialists on their cabinets, and the public-private pairing ensured that adequate funding reached each and every project that needed investment.

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The industrialization of England took nearly 150 years. The industrialization of Germany was carried out in less than forty.

Third, German industrialization had massive military applications. Most European countries’ military application of industrial technologies focused on quantity: more guns, more uniforms, more transports. Only Germany truly embraced the fundamental newness of industrial technologies to remake how it waged war. This would have been impossible had Germany not entered the industrial age with the highest level of literacy in the world, largely due to its ongoing need to maintain a qualitative edge over its quantitatively superior competitors. The most important manifestation of this superior education system was the innovation of the General Staff, a sort of military middle management designed to disseminate information up and down the chain of command. A military commission required a college degree. Fusing the expertise of local governments with academia, industry, and finance, the General Staff achieved two things: It encouraged the development of ever larger cannons that the military thinkers redesigned their strategies around, and it pioneered new logistical methods to take advantage of the German rail system.

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After three generations of fine-tuning, the world came to know the gentle German mix of technology, logistics, and force as blitzkrieg.

Finally, industrialization unified the Germans as a country and as a people to a degree unheard of elsewhere, before or since. All governments got a boost from industrialization. Industrialization brought per capita increases in wealth, health, and living standards so unprecedented that you have to go back to the domestication of animals to find a point in human history where the general populace experienced so rapid and sustained a period of improvement. With rising wealth came rising government legitimacy. For the birthplace of industrialization, England, this was merely garnish; the English were already rich from the benefits of deepwater navigation and a globe-spanning empire. In Germany, however, the legitimacy gain wasn’t so much radically different, but exponentially faster and larger.

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In a single generation, industrialization took them from being some of the North European Plain’s poorest people to some of its richest, and enabled them to impose decisive defeats in four significant conflicts with powers that had preyed upon them for centuries (Poland, Denmark, Austria, and France).

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Germanic cities that had been unassociated since the death of Charlemagne connected their rail networks together to discover a peer relationship, far different from when a sleepy country town became connected to mighty London. The effect, economically and culturally, was electric, and considering the era, that term is used both figuratively and literally. This was not simply a culture that had finally unified, this was a culture that was ecstatic with its identity and its government in a way that few other cultures have ever approached.

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It was the first country in the world to have the majority of its population urbanized — a critical development to both foster and take advantage of skilled labor in the industrial era — and by 1900 its many regional centers had grown to the point that Germany had more major industrialized cities than the rest of Europe combined. It was the first country to develop mass universities and research labs, and then to link the two directly into local governments and corporations, giving German industry the ability to source everything from loans to staff to scientific research, and giving rise to the national economic champions model of corporate organization that pervades Europe even today. And the Germans methodically and assiduously applied every new breakthrough, whether scientific or industrial, to every aspect of their national strategy, culminating in everything from engines so efficient and small that they could propel individual vehicles (via Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, and Emil Jellinek, whose daughter was the original Mercedes) and modern pharmaceuticals (Gregor Mendel, Robert Koch, Friedrich Bayer, and Paul Ehrlich), to cannons (Alfred Krupp) and blitzkrieg.

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Simply put, neither deepwater navigation nor industrialization was done diffusing. England could make better use of deepwater navigation than Iberia, and Germany could make better use of industrialization than England, but there was another geography that could make better use of both.

The Nile provided two things nearly unique on earth, Peter Zeihan explains in The Accidental Superpower:

The first was perfect agricultural inputs like reliable water and high-fertility soil. It wasn’t scant desert rainfall that gave rise to the mighty Nile, but instead the seasonal torrents from the Ethiopian highlands and overflow from the African Great Lakes. The seasonal floods washed down soil of fertility far higher than what could be obtained outside the river valley. The Nile was flush with water supplies every year in a cycle so reliable that true droughts were quite literally biblical events.

Perhaps more important was the second factor: The lower Nile was safe. One could stand on the ridges above the Nile floodplain at any point within a thousand miles of the sea, look east or west, and be met with the exact same view: an endless desert waste. With the technology of transport largely limited to what you could carry yourself, it was simply impossible for any hostile force to cross the desert.

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Copper sounds like a small thing, but once humans figured out how to smelt and cast it, they replaced their wood and stone implements with metal, generating staggering improvements in the productivity of each worker — and each farmer.

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By 3150 BC, a single government dominated all of the useful Nile territories between the Mediterranean coast and what is today the city of Aswan.

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Local deserts insulated both Mesopotamia and the Indus from multiple directions, but not all directions. Their geographies were secure enough to spawn civilizations, but outside forces were still able to reach them, and so they never had the time to consolidate as Egypt did.

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To the west, it is six hundred miles from the western edge of the Nile delta to where rain falls regularly enough to support a non-nomadic population (contemporary Benghazi, Libya).

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The Sinai Peninsula is just as inhospitable as the Bible suggests, and the three hundred miles between the delta and the Jordan River valley have proven to be a formidable barrier right up to (and even into) contemporary times.

A southerly approach seems better, and indeed following the Nile is certainly a less painful affair than trudging through desert. But as one moves upriver south, the Nile valley narrows — to a steep canyon in places, complete with the occasional rapids (locally known as cataracts) — and it is a long, winding nine-hundred-mile route before you reach a geography and climate that can support a meaningful population (contemporary Khartoum, Sudan). Establishing multiple defensive positions along this route is quite easy.

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Every patch of land within sight of the river is under cultivation, generating the most consistent food surpluses of any land throughout the history of not just the ancient world, but also the classical, medieval, and even early industrial worlds. This food surplus created the world’s densest population footprint for most of human history (the only exception being contemporary Bangladesh).

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Second, by ancient standards the interior of Egypt was remarkably easy to get around in. From Aswan downriver, the valley is flat, in the dry season turning the river into a very slow-moving lake. The lack of elevation change results in a hazy, lazy downriver ride, while Egypt’s prevailing north-to-south winds allow for fairly reliable upriver sailing. The Nile could support riverine traffic in a way that the Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus — cursed with faster currents, less reliable seasonal flows and winds, and omnipresent sandbars — never could.

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For the first millennia and a half of Egyptian history, outsiders simply could not penetrate into the Egyptian core. Yet within the Nile valley, the Egyptian government had very little trouble moving manpower, resources, the tools of governance, and even giant blocks of stone around within its riverine-based system.

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The pharaoh could — and often did — take a boat cruise down the river and visually inspect nearly all of his kingdom without setting foot on land. The current and accurate assessments enabled by such easy travel helped governmental policy to match and respond to reality — a concept that might not seem a major deal in a world of smart phones, but was revolutionary in the world before paper. Tax collection could reach every part of the valley, and such activity ensured that the government maintained a firm grip on every aspect of society. Food stores could be distributed quickly and easily to mitigate local famine; the population crashes and rebellions that plagued cultures well into the modern era were far less common in Egypt. Revolts could be quelled quickly because troops could be summoned with speed; fast military transport enabled the government to nip problems in the bud.

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A grand canal dug from a western braid of the Nile allowed for the regulated flooding of the Faiyum Depression, bringing another five hundred square miles into Egypt’s green zone, but that is the only significant expansion of Egypt’s agricultural lands until the twentieth century, and even that expansion was only about twenty miles west of the riverbed itself.

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As the Nile flows through the desert, Egypt — ancient or otherwise — lacks trees. What few were available for boat construction were largely reserved for ego projects ranging from royal barges to monument construction.

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The sheer isolation limited Egyptian knowledge of the world. It was so thin its leaders were shocked when confronted with the fact that some rivers flowed south.

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Every place that was within sight of the Nile was also a food-producing region, so there was never a pressing need to develop a nationwide food distribution system — that made the maritime transport system specifically, and transport in general, the province of the state. The military and the bureaucracy could move about (and did), but the common man could not (and did not), firmly entrenching the concept of central control.

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Theirs was a geography destined not just to generate slavery, but slavery of the masses.

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Developments in agriculture, transport, and education ended with unification. Instead of generating higher and higher food surpluses, or attempting either to advance their civilization or to expand it past the confines of the Nile, the Egyptians dedicated all spare labor to monument construction.

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New technologies developed to deal with problems that Egypt was blissfully unaffected by. Writing led to literacy. Copper led to bronze. Spears led to swords. Domesticated animals led to chariots. All of these technologies that most people associate with ancient Egypt were not actually developed there, because in Egypt there was no pressure for development past their original technologies of irrigated agriculture, basic engineering, small boats, and hieroglyphics. Even the word “pharaoh” was an import.

In time two of these “new” technologies — the domesticated camel and a sailing ship that could transport meaningful volumes of cargo — proved Egypt’s undoing. Outsiders could use these techs to breach Egypt’s desert buffers, and when they did they discovered the civilization that all had assumed was mighty and impregnable was in reality languid and backward. They also discovered that Egypt’s slave-heavy population lacked motivation to fight for their country.

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Instead of being the greatest of the civilizations, Egypt became an easily conquerable breadbasket for anyone seeking to rule the Mediterranean basin. Once the Nile was secured, the conquering power could redirect the population from pyramid building to food production. The excess food output could be diverted out of the Nile region to fuel the conquering power’s bid for Mediterranean control.

The Egyptians first lost their independence in 1620 BC to the Hyksos (commonly known in the West as natives of Canaan), and then were independent only intermittently until the Roman conquest in the first century BC.

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And after the Roman conquest, they were not independent for a single day until the collapse of the European colonial era after World War II.