MAN-10265 MAGAZINE.indd - Mansfield College - University of Oxford

instance, is ‘the morning star of youthful environmentalism’.
There are innumerable nuggets of wisdom: in discussion
of religious faiths, for example, the notion of an earth
with neatly defi ned belief systems is dismissed in favour
of more refi ned ‘geographical expression of the nuances
and ambiguities within belief and commitment’; arms
controllers are ‘always striving to prevent the last war’;
space reconnaissance ought to have allowed more measured
assessment of Iraq’s possession or otherwise of Weapons
of Mass Destruction. There are also sweeping, confi dent
generalisations: ‘the Mongols were never inclined to tarry
long, individually and collectively, in alien taiga landscapes’;
the ‘resilient toughness of East Asia’ has benefi ted from ‘the
absence of Church-versus-state dichotomies’.
Much attention is paid throughout to environmental
infl uences on human action, sometimes explicitly, as when
refl ecting on Karl Wittfogel’s ‘hydraulic despotisms’ or the
infl uence of climatic changes on the Mongols, but often
without warning: thus Orgerd, a fourteenth-century Grand
Duke of Lithuania, is driven back from two advances ‘along
the great morainic ridge’, Israeli forward defence against
Syria in 1973 rested on fourteen telal (small hills of volcanic
origin), and the Arab world lacks ‘the geographical strength
in depth’ of Europe, Russia or China. Surprising linkages
sometimes appear, as when the original sites of Rome and
Stockholm are compared. The author’s meteorological
experience enables him to discourse knowledgeably about
carburettor icing on aircraft or radiation fog on runways.
Throughout the book there is a remarkable combination of
inter-disciplinary breadth and empirical grasp across time
and place, whether the Miocene, the Vikings, Vietnam, the
Cold War or ‘the highest frontier’ (space). The text skips
nimbly across time and place in a manner that is exciting
if intermittently bewildering: the direction and structure
of the argument might sometimes be clearer, but interest,
excitement and sheer surprise are consistently maintained.
Where else would one learn in the same volume the origin
of the term ‘fi fth column’ (Franco’s military strategy in 1939
Madrid), that silver was mined in the uplands of the Abbasid
caliphate in ninth century Mesopotamia and that half of
Nazi Germany’s production of ball and roller bearings
came from Schweinfurt, Bavaria? Where else might one
be invited to compare the ‘strategic revolutions’ ushered in
by Martin Luther and Mikhail Gorbachev, fundamentally
transforming the complexion and structure of Christendom?
A single chapter on ‘Peripheral Wars’ spans the Greek civil
wars of 1944-9, the defeat of the Kuomintang by Chinese
Communists, the Korean war, the Indo-China wars of 1946-
75 and early Israel-Palestine confl ict including the Suez war
of 1956, each treatment rich in empirical information as
well as informed judgements. Later, the penultimate chapter
returns to a detailed discussion of Israel and Palestine, whose
confl ict is rightly seen as playing a central role in potential
planetary confl ict.
Inevitably in a work of such scope, specialists in particular
disciplines, periods or regions will fi nd assertions to dispute,
judgements to contradict, and no doubt small factual errors
to correct. As a southern Africanist I would question the
description of overcrowding of the tribal reserves as ‘one
determinant of the South African situation’, regarding it
rather as an outcome of white colonial, segregation and
apartheid policies. As an Oxford geographer throughout
I have a rather more positive take on Mackinder’s
geopolitics. But such quibbles should not detract from
the magisterial nature of such a survey, and the sheer
fascination of the subject matter. It is also ‘geographical’ in
the broadest traditional sense of that term, uniting concerns
of environment, space and place in the earth as the home of
humankind. Not since Isaiah Bowman’s 1921 classic,
The New World, has a political geographer aspired to
a global survey within the terms of his or her own
geographical discipline. Neville Brown’s book does
something similar but goes far beyond the confi nes of a
single discipline and with far greater sense of history. Such
breadth is deeply unfashionable in our fragmented academy,
and will no doubt be assaulted from many directions.
It is however deeply refreshing, an intellectual adventure
which will surely challenge the reader to fi nd out more
about some, at least, of its myriad strands and to ponder the
challenges posed by human confl ict and survival in present
and future generations. ●
The Geography of Human Confl ict: Approaches to Survival,
Neville Brown
Hardback £55/$75 , ISBN: 978-1-84519-169-6
Paperback £17.50/$32.50, ISBN: 978-1-84519-170-2
FELLOWS’ ARTICLES 12