Like so many of Stratfor's contributors, I spend a lot of time thinking about geography. In the past, I have even suggested that geography has been the main force determining the different fates of each part of the planet for the past 20,000 years. The way this works is that geography drives social development, determining what it is possible for the members of each society to do, but at the same time social development drives geography, determining what the space around us means.
Geography is the reason Northwest Europe was, through most of history, a backward periphery. It was a long way away from the real cores of development, and it was sealed off from the rest of the world by an ocean that was too big and too wild to master. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, when people began building reliable oceangoing ships, the meaning of Northwest Europe's...
