Prisoners of Geography – by Tim Marshall

This covers politics, history and geography, focusing on the effects on the development of a county of being a continent/island/landlocked/joined/separate/etc. 

There are lots of good stories, lots of interesting ideas and facts and it’s an interesting way to get to know more about some current conflicts in the world.

As with all books about current scenarios, there is a risk it will go out of date.  For example, it is confidently explained that while there are ongoing territorial disputes between China and India, this won’t turn into war largely because of the mountains on their shared border.  I read this only a few weeks after border skirmishes between the two armies were widely reported.

It may seem unbalanced that while Western Europe is the focus of one of the 10 chapters and Africa another, the much smaller area of ‘Korea and Japan’ also have a chapter.  This seems fair enough though, because it is not trying to be comprehensive and is aimed at the non-specialist.

It was interesting to learn more about the struggles of countries that are mentioned rarely in the news (such as Pakistan: with continuing tension with India and the north of the country essentially not under governmental control).  There is also a constant reminder of the mess that colonialism left behind it (in Africa, in Israel/Palestine, in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh).

The only negative for me was an unfortunate over-precision in numbers. We read (p221) of China “supplying 84.12 per cent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 per cent of its exports” in 2014.  While this is referenced, it would seem far more sensible to round these off to 84%.  While a minor quibble, this sort of level of precision is off-putting (particularly given that earlier on the same page it was stated, much more sensibly, that there are “almost 30,000” US troops in South Korea).