Ian Morris
Discussion of His New Book “Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World, A 10,000-Year History”

Ian Morris | His New Book Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World A 10000-Year History

- So hi, everyone.

• [Ian] Hi.

• Welcome to tonight’s lecture. So, Ian Morris teaches at Stanford University where he has won the Dean’s Award of Excellence in Teaching and served as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences. He is also a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society for Arts, and the London School of Economics Ideas Institute and has excavated archaeological excavations in Greece, oh, sorry, Britain, Greece, and Sicily. Amazing, that was a real like wild profile. So welcome back, Ian, and hope you all have a lovely lecture. Thank you very much.

• Well, thank you. Thank you, Jess, for that very kind introduction. And thank you for Trudy and Karina for getting me here and also to all of you this morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time it is where you are. So, okay. Oh, I should say first, now I’m getting the screen share. Going. Click isn’t really that difficult, but I should make a production out of it. So I should warn you, I’ve got two big dogs in the room with me here who might go crazy at some point ‘cause we are expecting delivery at some point today. So if suddenly all hell breaks loose, it’s not my fault, it’s all the dog’s fault. So, okay. Oh, here we are. It’s a little over eight years now since the British people in their wisdom voted to leave the European Union and California where I live. We are eight hours ahead on the clock of Great Britain. So in Britain, you had to stay up, I think probably pretty late that night to realise that the results were coming out very differently from what people expected on June 23rd. But for me though, eight hours earlier, by dinner time it was pretty clear what was going to be happening. So that all happened, went off to bed, woke up the next morning and realised, I decided I was going to write a book about this. Now I’m not an obvious person to write a book about this 'cause although I am by birth a Brit, I’ve now been living in the United States for more than half my life, which, of course, could mean that I have this incredibly broad and wise perspective on what’s happening. Having lived somewhere else. Or it could mean that I’m just totally out of touch. So that was one problem.

The other problem was that by background and training, I’m not a British historian at all. I’m actually a Greek archaeologist and here, you see me background and training. I’m digging on a site in Greece when I was a graduate student. And you can see time has had its way with me just as much as it had with this archaeological site. So not an obvious guy. However, my research changed direction quite a bit in the mid-2000s. And what happened was, I got very interested in ancient Greece when I was younger. And in fact, since really the 18th century, Europeans devoted a huge amount of energy to study ancient Greece. And the idea that was that they came up with the 18th century was that Europeans are different from everybody else in the world because of the legacy they’ve inherited from the ancient Greeks. And the theory that sort of bubbled up in the 18th century was that history started anew with the ancient Greeks. Here, I love this picture, but apparently the picture is faked. The lightning was photoshopped into this picture, got widely circulated in 2010 when the Greek economy started to collapse. History started anew in ancient Greece. Some bolt from the sky struck the Greeks and turned them into a special kind of people and descent from the ancient Greeks made the west different from and better than the rest. And this idea became very popular. In the 19th century, there was quite general agreement among European educated classes that this explained why the west was now coming to rule the world. But during the 20th century, doubts began to grow about this. And particularly at the end of the 20th century, moving into our own century, there’s a strong feeling that the east was now catching up with the west. Japan, China catching up with the west.

And so if this whole theory about ancient Greece have been special since time immemorial. If that was true, how could all this be happening? So I got very interested in this and wrote a series of books, published four books in the 2010s, looking at kind of long-term global history. All of them revolving one way or another around this question and arguing that geography explains what is happening in the world and contains clues also about what’s going to happen next. So this was the thrust of the books I wrote in the 2010s. And I had a great time doing it, a lot of fun. But all the time when I was doing it, there was this sort of little nagging voice going on in my head. The sort of my proper historian voice. I had a conventional training as a historian and archaeologist where you look at one particular place in the world of a usually a quite short period of time. And this voice kept telling me, you know, “This is all very well. These books, you’re acting all very well. But history is actually made by real people living in real places in real time. And these grand geographical theories playing out across thousands of years, they’re not worth the pixels they’re written in unless you can kind of blip the telescope around, turn the thing around and scale back down to show how these theories help you to understand something actual, something specific that really happened.” So, I’ve been thinking this for a little while during the 2010s and I was thinking initially, “Well, what I should do is write a book looking at Greece,” 'cause this is what I’m supposed to know something about. Look at the Greek world over the very long run. Try to explain what’s now happening to the Greek world.

At that point, it looks like they’re about to tumble out of the European Union. Does the long-term geographical perspective help us understand that? So that was kind of what I’ve been thinking. But then I wake up on the 24th of June, 2016. I think, “A-ha!” Along comes Brexit. This is a perfect test case for these big geographical theories. Does the long-term perspective help us understand what happened on June 23rd? Now, on the face of things, the answer is obviously no. No, it certainly doesn’t. This was driven by short term forces. And in any case, how could geography explain how history works? It’s too simple. History is a very complicated thing as anybody knows who’s looked at any of it. Saying the geography explains it, that is just too simple. Well, what I kind of realised writing this series of books I did was that geography is actually not too simple to explain what happens in history, 'cause geography itself is quite complicated too. That it’s like geography drives history, but at the same time, history drives what geography means. This is back and forth going on all the time. The significance of geography changes over time. And this, I think this fundamentally, this is what Brexit was. Brexit was an argument over what does British geography currently mean? How much it has the meaning of the geography of the British Isles changed, and what does it mean for the future. So I decided this is a perfect test case. I need to write a book about this. But one thing I should say before going any further forward, this is the book I wrote, “Geography is Destiny. Britain and the World, a 10,000 Year History.”

If I were writing the book now, I actually would’ve called it, “Is Geography Destiny?” Turn it into a question, not a statement. Because the conclusion I came to is, yes, geography is destiny, but it’s always up to us to decide what to do about it. So yeah, should have had a different title. Okay, well, having decided I wanted to write a book about this, I stuck to a maxim that I found very helpful over the years. One attributed to Winston Churchill, who, of course, is as you will know, he’s a part-time historian, read a lot of historical books. Churchill is supposed to have said that, “The farther backward you can look, the further forward you are likely to see.” And I think he was absolutely right about that. In this case, to understand what has happened to Britain and what might happen next, you need to look at the whole of Britain’s 10,000 year history. Now, the reason I say 10,000 years, it’s a nice round number, but it’s not just plucked out of the thin air. 10,000 years because the British Isles were created roughly 10,000 years ago by rising waters at the end of the Ice Age. When we got it here, I love these maps. Four maps starting 13,000 BC at the top left, ending up 6,000 BC down at the bottom right. Four maps showing the progressive emergence of the British Isles from the sea, which actually sort of, yeah, funny way to put it. The emergence of the British Isles from the sea. As the sea levels rise, as the glaciers melt at the end of the Ice Age. British, what would becomes the British Isles, goes from being a large, broad plane stretching out from the northwest edge of what’s now Europe into the Atlantic Ocean, gradually becomes a set of islands. Now there are 6,390 British Isles. Not a lot of people know that. A lot of islands in Britain, although only 150 of them are inhabited.

And, of course, two of them, Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and England and then Ireland, two of them completely dominate the story. So this is the first big geographical fact about the British Isles. They are, as the name suggests, islands. Insularity is one of two geographical themes that runs through British history. The second theme always tangled up with the insularity is proximity. The British Isles are very close to the European mainland, 34 kilometres, 22 miles at the narrowest point. And the whole of this 10,000 year history has been this kind of delicate dance between insularity and proximity. As geography has driven history and history has changed the meanings of the geography, and produced this complicated back and forth between insularity and proximity. And so when you get looking at British history, a lot of stuff has gone on. A lot of complicated stories. But two dimensions of British history have been the biggest drivers, the biggest motors of these changing meanings of geography. One of them is technology and especially technology connected to transport. And the other one is organisation. The ability of people to work together to solve collective action problems. And the interaction of these things produced this complicated British history story. But I think when you look at the long run, the 10,000 years, you can break this story down. The story, the changing meanings of British geography. Break it down to just three phases that British history has gone through. So my plan in my remaining time is to talk about each of these three phases, then draw some conclusions. So, it’s a pretty simple, straightforward plan. Now, I think a lot like all the best geographical arguments, this one is best made through a series of maps.

So what I’ve got is three maps. One representing each phase of the story and then a fourth map, which this fourth map runs through the whole story. So I’m going to show you these three maps. Talk about 'em a bit, sum up at the end. So the first map, the first phase, this is by far the longest of my three phases in British history. It runs from 8,000 BCE when the isles are pretty much formed to about 1500 CE, AD. So 95% of the story is, is encompassed in this first phase. And I call this phase the Hereford Map. After this, a slightly bewildering looking object, which some of you might have seen it. It’s a map painted around about 1300, around about the year 1300. It’s a big thing. It’s like four foot, five feet across. It now hangs in a very pretty little closing on Hereford Cathedral. You can go and see it. I highly recommend a visit to go and see it. So it’s painted by this guy, Richard of Haldingham and Lafford. He signs it. And what we’re looking at here, 'cause this is a bit disconcerting to modern people used to the conventions of modern map making. It’s a circle is what. We’re looking at the circle on this, which represents the known world, the Christian world and the few other bits and the bit that matters to Richard. And it’s a bit disconcerting 'cause we’re used to the convention where we put north at the top of our maps. In the middle ages, Christians put east at the top of their maps. So north, hopefully you can see this point. So north is that direction. Oops, didn’t mean to do that. Meant to do that. East is up here. East goes at the top because this is the direction from which Jesus will come at the second coming when he returns to earth. So east always goes at the top. Second big thing with any map, Christendom is the centre of the map. So, of course, Jerusalem is the dot in centre. And everything else is organised around Jerusalem.

And so you got like where are where you got. Here’s Jerusalem. This is the Mediterranean Sea running east, west. This is Turkey here. Here’s Greece, Italy, Sicily, Spain, and these blobs down here, crammed in the bottom left corner of the map. Those are the British Isles. So this is Richard of Haldingham and Lafford’s view of the world around the year 1300. It tells us a number of important things. One of them is that the British Isles are very much part of the European stage. They’re very close to it. And proximity trumps insularity. And the reason I say that, you look again on the map here, this narrow line here. This is the English Channel and the North Sea. And you look down here at the Nile, the River Nile, the Nile, Richard represents a Nile as being wider than the English Channel. In the sense that is absolutely true at the point that he’s writing. Now the reality of the geography that people lived with was the first 95% of the British story, is that you cannot close the English Channel. The English Channel is a highway between the British Isles and Europe. Not a barrier between them. Technology is low. You don’t have ships that can sail sea any length of time. Organisations are weak. You can’t organise a fleet in any way. What this basically means is that anything that gets to the continental side of the English Channel, doesn’t matter whether it’s traders or raiders or missionaries or microbes or anything. Anything that gets up here, will automatically get over here as well 'cause the English Channel, like I say, is a highway, not a barrier. The Atlantic on the other hand out here, well, I guess you know where the Atlantic is. The Atlantic out here.

The Atlantic is a barrier, not a highway. It is simply too big to do anything with. You can’t navigate across in. 'Cause there are minor exceptions. The Viking exception. Of course, if you know about from around the year 1000, climate change briefly made it possible for Vikings to sail to the East Coast of North America. But for pretty much everybody, Britain is the edge of the world. All the people in Europe. And Britain is the edge of the world and the Roman geographer, Strabo, has this great line about Britain, written roundabout the time of the birth of Christ. He says, “Beyond Britain, there is just desolation and loneliness while the sea goes on.” That really sums it all up. So, British Isles are on the European stage, very close to it, but they’re absolutely at the edge of the stage. Britain is not front and centre on this stage. Front and centre is down here, Mediterranean, Middle East. These are the places where all the big innovations happen, all the important things happen. So pretty much anything that you think about technology, organisation, sheer numbers, wealth, power, sophistication, it’s all concentrated down here on the map. And then from there, it kind of spreads out roles out in other directions, rolls out across Europe. And Britain is basically Europe’s poor cousin. Britain is the edge of the world. All the big inventions and farming and cities to writing and empires. They all start somewhere down here, roll out to the north and west, and finally end up in the British Isles. The last place that they come to. And this process, it brings the British new technologies, new kinds of trade, foreign food, they’re very excited about that foreign wine, even more excited about that foreign culture. It brings all kinds of things that most people think are positive to the British Isles, but it also brings disasters.

And this is something we can talk about a lot better in the last 10 years because of the advances in studying ancient DNA. So we now know that around 4200 BCE, when farming is brought by immigrants to the British Isles, there is a 75% replacement of the indigenous DNA in the British Isles. 75% of the family lines go extinct after the immigrants arrive bringing farming. Around 2,400 BCE when the first metal technology, copper users, again, migrate into the British Isles in the continent. There was a 90 to 95% replacement of British genes at that point. That is absolutely shocking and extraordinary that that happens. And then again, it just carries on. Around 400 CE, end of the Roman Empire. Anglo-Saxon start moving in at least a 35% replacement of indigenous DNA. So proximity to the continent, it’s got its downsides as well as its ups. So all the benefits are sort of balanced out by the costs of it too. But people in the British isles find lots of ways to deal with these meanings of geography. So at the beginning of the story, they’re operating in nomadic hunter gatherer bands. Eventually they become a province of the Roman Empire. They end up fighting the French at Agincourt. All different ways of responding to the changing meanings of, at this point, not so much changing meanings of British geography, but whatever phase of this we’re looking at, British history is very much a branch of European history throughout. For nine and a half thousand years, the geographical facts remain basically the same. And this is the point at which I want to bring in my map number four, an internal map of the British Isles this time because the internal physical geography of the British Isles has a sort of constant effect running through the three larger phases.

Basically, if you live in the low lying south and east of the British Isles, more or less England eventually, your history is about what comes your way from the continent, dealing with what comes your way from the continent. If you live in either of the other two geographical zones, then hillier north and west of Britain or Ireland over here, your history is largely about dealing with what comes your way from England. So it’s like this gradient running down southeastern and northwest, from Mediterranean to northern Europe, to England, to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. And this structures a lot of the effects of the larger story within Britain. Okay, so this map that Richard of Haldingham and Lafford drew around 1300, this map was still good in 1485 when another Richard, King Richard III, gets killed by Henry Tudor and his French allies at the Battle of Bosworth. They’re still good in 1485, but by 1595, so roughly a century later, when Shakespeare writes his play, “Richard III,” this map is no longer good. This doesn’t accurately reflect the realities of the world. And there’s a reason why Shakespeare is the first person in the 1590s to call his homeland, “A precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands. This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Stirring stuff, Shakespeare said that in the 1590s. If Thomas Malory had said that in the 1490s, let a lone Chaucer in the 1390s, it would’ve just been ridiculous. Which is why they didn’t say it. Because for them the channel is a highway, not a barrier. It is not a moat defensive, does not serve in the office of a wall. But during the 16th century, the meaning of British geography changes.

There’s a lot of reasons why that happens, of course, but the big ones are technological and organisational. And on the technology side, one particular invention they can kind of stand in for the rest. And this is this high tech warfare, 16th century style, the galleon. The galleon is a ship that can stay at sea for weeks and weeks, well, actually months if you maintain them properly. And another single voyage. You can put together a fleet of these ships. And if you are in Britain, you can use it to blockade enemy fleets in their harbours. You can actually close the English Channel. If you’ve got the technology, which increasingly people do. And also though, if you’ve got a new form of organisation and the new organisation is governments that are actually able to pay to build enough of these ships and keep them at sea for long enough. Put together the new organisation, the new technology. This has the potential to change the meanings of British geography, to revolutionise them, 'cause for the first time, the channel can be closed, the oceans can be opened. And once this becomes possible, a new phase. My second phase of British history begins. And this I call, Mackinder’s map. And I call it after this guy, Halford Mackinder. He was an explorer, geographer, first director of the London School of Economics. And he drew this very influential map and he published it in 1902. And what this map changed is that basically the British Isles have moved from being the periphery on a European stage. They were the way they were in the hair of map, to being at the centre of a global stage, which is how you see it here. New technology means that now insularity trumps proximity. The British Isles are secure behind a moat defensive. Governments in London can unite the whole of the British Isles into a single kingdom. And having done that, they can create an intercontinental empire on which the sun never sets. Or because they can close the channel and open the oceans. And the British people, they have the option of going from being a second rank power on a European stage to being a first rank power on a global stage, if they want to.

And that if is quite a big word in that sentence. So in 1588, famous stage in British history, Spanish Armada shows up. Queen Elizabeth able to close the English Channel against the Spanish Armada. And here, you see a highly stylized version of it, even though it’s painted pretty soon after, a dozen years after. And so here, you’ve got giant naval battles going on. The kind of didn’t kind of really happen during the Spanish Armada. Over on the left, you’ve got Queen Elizabeth here, rallying the troops in her famous speeches. All these things sort of juxtaposed, thrown together. The reality was actually a lot messier and pretty much everyone at the time was conscious of this. This had not really been a great British naval battle that should have the Spaniards. It’s more to do with Spanish mistakes, geography, climate, all kinds of really foolish things the Spanish. Part of the invasion of 1588 failed. But what it did show was the potential was there for a British ruler if she had the money and the ships, you actually could close down the channel. Now, intense this new idea, this generates intense resistance. And the reason it does so is that in order to build all these ships and in order to pay for them, you’ve got to have a government strong enough to reach its hands into your pocket. It’s particularly the middle classes who are angry about this new idea initially. Reach into your pocket and take out your money. And then you’ve got to have merchants and traders able to build the ships that you need in sufficient numbers to use them so the government can hire them.

So this generates intense resistance. It means much more powerful merchants, much, much more powerful governments. And the next century is really dominated by struggles over, is this what the British Isles should be about? Is this what we want to do? And it’s all tangled up inevitably given the period. All tangled up with the religious struggles, which also sort of morph into geographical struggles. A struggle in a sort of Catholic, European identity for the British Isles or a Protestant insular identity. And hundreds of thousands of people die, particularly in Ireland over the next hundred years in conflict between these two ideas of what British geography means and what should be done with it. It only really gets resolved after 1688, a sort of bloodless coup and revolution in Britain. And the decision is taken. Britain is going to be about the globalist vision. We’re going to close the channel, open the oceans. And a grand strategic pivot unfolds that dominates British history for the next couple of centuries. So the English Channel, it’s still only 34 kilometres wide. It doesn’t matter, you know, government in Westminster can’t change that. But to Louis XV in 1759, or to Napoleon in 1805, or to Hitler in 1940, it may as well be a million kilometres wide. If the British decide to close it, they can. And then it just becomes impassable. The Atlantic is still 5,000 kilometres wide, but it now becomes a highway to the world. If the British are willing to make that their top priority and the British decide they will, and they go on to engross the trade of the world, just the expression they used in the 18th century. Instead of fighting for a role on the European continent, the way they’ve been doing before. Now what they want to do is make a downgrade Europe, create a balance of power in Europe, so that no one power dominates Europe in enough that it can build a fleet that would challenge the British. The British just change sides all the time.

Anytime one power is doing well, British switch to the other side. And this is where this expression, “Perfidious Albion,” comes from. Everybody learns you cannot trust a Brit under any circumstances. So, okay, Mackinder’s map then. This is a remarkable period in British history. A small group of islands bestride the world in a way that has never been seen before. But it is a really small part of the story. It’s about 200 years out of a 10,000 year story. It’s 1713 to 1914, a kind of good symbolic dates for this. And the problem that British run into, it’s this kind of world was created by changes in technology and organisation. Well, technology and organisation just carry on change. And so one of the things that sort of helps put the British on top of the pile in this world, migration from the British Isles. And here’s a great picture of a crowded steamer leaving Liverpool in 1913. At the top map with the numbers on it, the outflows of Britains to different parts of the world. This makes it a kind of a British planet, a British world in all kinds of important ways. But it also stops it from being a British world because it changes the balance of power between different parts of the globe. And already by the 1870s, Germany, North America, they’re beginning to heap heap up piles of wealth and power to rival what the British have got for themselves. By the 1970s, East Asians are doing the same thing as well. And what these new mountains of money do, they basically push the world off Mackinder’s map onto a new map, a third map. And this is the one, I call this the Money Map.

Now this is the Money Map. It’s another sort of disconcerting picture to look at. So what we’ve got here. Normal maps, they represent each country in the world proportionate to the amount of physical space, the surface area of that country. So the more square kilometres you’ve got, the more space you’ve got on the map. This map, in some ways, it’s a better map. It represents each country by the sheer wealth of that country. It’s gross domestic product. And so, you can see some countries have just ballooned up. I mean, like here, here’s Hong Kong and that is enormous. Others shrivel down, here’s Russia. 'Cause we’re now seeing the proportionate amount of wealth that they’ve got. Now this amount, something you see here, I mean, there’s a lot of hand-wringing. People in Britain love hand-wringing, whinging pom, the Australians call us. But Britain is still pretty big, disproportionately big. Even in 2010 or whenever it was that this map was drawn. My picture of me is over the data, but whenever it was drawn. But you see, Western Europe in particularly huge. North America, huge. East Asia, South Asia, huge, all kind of that. We’ve taken a bicycle pump and inflated these countries and this has driven the world off Mackinder’s map. Now around about 1900, British government decided the most important threat to it was the rise of Germany and Britain spends the 1910s through the 1940s defeating the German challenge to British global primacy. But the way they did that was by subordinating themselves to the North American mountain of money. No ambiguity by that. People were perfectly aware of what they were doing at the time. But that broke McKenzie’s map. And really by 1916, McKenzie’s map is decisively broken. And the last 80 years or so, for the British have been about coming to terms with the world post Mackinder map. And a lot of different theorists came up with ideas about, well, what does the world now look like?

What does geography now mean? And this is one of my favourites. I call it Churchill’s aspirational map. He described it in his speech he gave on 1948 to the conservative party faithful. And I won’t try to do the accents 'cause it’ll just make me look even more ridiculous. But what he says to the gathered tours, he says, “As I look out upon the future of our country.” I can’t help doing the hand movements though. “I feel the existence of three great circles,” he says. And these are they at the top left here, the English speaking peoples by which he basically means the United States. United Europe, 'cause countries, what a lot of people now assume, Churchill is actually quite a fan of a European union. And then the British Commonwealth and Empire, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, so on. Down here at the bottom. Well, he goes on, “We, the British, we are the only country which has a great part in every one of the three great circles. We stand, in fact, at the very point of junction. Once again, we hold the key to opening a safe and happy future to humanity.”

And as I say, this is sort of aspirational and more than realistic. And Churchill defined the three circles very much in opposition to the a fourth circle, the Soviet circle, which are the three circles are locked in a struggle with the Soviets. And to some extent at least, governments after the second World war, British governments do sort of take this map as their basic ground plan for the course they should be plotting. And this involves by the late 1950s, Britain starts pivoting back towards Europe. So, kind of reversing more than 200 years of British grand strategy, opening the channel again, trying to entangle British institutions with European ones. But doing this while keeping a special relationship with the United States, which what makes it distinctively different from anything I am before 1713. This turned out to be a very, very difficult juggling act to pull off as was keeping a good relationship with the British Commonwealth. And great line, Dean Acheson, famous American statesman. Dean Acheson gave in a speech in 1962, he said, “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.” Now that was an unkind thing to say, but it was not an untrue thing to say. And basically 60 years after Acheson, the search for the role is still going on. What is Britain? Now we’ve moved off a map of the world where Britain has this global empire and stands at the centre of the world. What is Britain now? Should the British be trying to continue just to shelter in the shadow of the American mountain of money? Is that British grand strategy or should it actually move back towards slopes below Brussels? And in spite of the 2016 referendum, should this be what the British are quietly trying to do? Or should Britain be looking instead to Beijing? Is that the shape of the British future?

Alternatively, can the British Isles somehow carve this independent path between the American and European and Asian mountains of money? There’s much talk at one point about a London becoming Singapore on Thames. This is the shape of the future. Or should the British even be collaborating with the old English speaking commonwealth to heap up a kind of fourth mountain of money of their own? Act more collectively, or kind of look in the other direction. Is the United Kingdom now obsolete? Should this enterprise just be broken up and it becomes England, Scotland, Wales, and perhaps a United Ireland once again. And basically, I would say the script for this third age of British history, the Money Map, this has still not been written. So, okay, that was my storyline. I know, yeah, I should be wrapping up now. What sort of lessons do we learn from this take on British history? Well, one lesson, I think the immediate lesson, the secret of success in international relations is always, in any age, doesn’t matter which one. The secret of success is always understand what is the size of the stage where we are acting on. Understand who are the other main actors and what are their roles? What part are they playing? Understand what direction is the action heading in. And if you understand those things better than your rivals and your allies do, you’re going to do relatively well. For what? Resources and so on geographies made available to you.

So on the Hereford map, what this meant on the Hereford map? The British stage was very much a western European stage 'cause the limits of technology. This was the part of the world it was intimately involve with. The actors on the British stage were very much internal actors within the British Isles. Until the point in the story that the Romans drag Britannia into the Roman Empire, then the crucial actor, of course, becomes a continental actor down on the Italian peninsula. Britain leaves, drops out of the Roman Empire, roundabout the year 400 CE. But often with geography, once something has been done, it cannot easily be undone. And the primary actors in the British drama after 400 continue to be Europeans, Scandinavians, North Germans, then French, Spanish, Dutch. These are the people who are kind of driving British history along British. The British are reacting to what these Continentals are doing. So that’s how these principles work out on the Hereford map. On Mackinder’s map, British stage had turned to globe, actors now are all over the world and Britain fights two world wars in the end to hold down the European, oh, sorry, I was still talking about the Mackinder’s map, aren’t I? But it’s a very much an Atlantic stage. Britain is the star of this story. Europe is relegated to a secondary position. Britain’s primary interest in Europe is just to prevent any one power dominating the continent. And then building a fleet that could challenge the British. So Europe relegated to a second position. The main action in the second act of the story is on and beyond the oceans. It’s often India, it’s often North America. Third act, the Money Map.

On this, a Britain has been sort of kicked off that top position. It fights two world wars to hold down the European, particularly German mountain of money. It subordinates itself to the American mountain of money. But at this point in the 2020s, it is Britain has still barely begun to confront the East Asian mountain of money. Now this, I think this is the big moral of the story. The East Asian mountain of money is the thing that the near future is going to be all about. And a dozen years ago, another great states from Lee Kuan Yew, long time prime minister in Singapore, one of the great strategists of the 20th century. Lee Kuan Yew tells an interviewer, “The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player, this is the biggest player in the history of the world.” And he was right about this. And this, I believe, is the main lesson of long-term history for Brexit, for the arguments about Brexit.

But in 2016, the British people faced a burning question, but it wasn’t the question that was on the ballot for them that year. The question on the ballot was, should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? The Brexit debate was just a distraction because the 21st century is going to be about Beijing, not about Brussels. The real question was where Britain, and for that matter, the rest of the west, you could tell very similar story in abstract terms, very similar story about the United States, about Australia, about Germany, about France, all the countries in the West. The big question in the 21st century, where are you going to fit best in a world where the stage is increasingly tilting eastward? So, that’s why I say geography is destiny, but it’s up to us to decide what to do about it. So, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. I will stop there. I will unshare the screen if I can figure out how to do that. There we go. And okay, I’m all done. Should I just go straight to the questions?

• [Jess] Yeah, sorry. I was going to say, can you see them or do you want me to read them out here?

Q&A and Comments:

• Oh, yeah, no, I got it. Here we go. If I can read them with my eyes. Ah, well, the very top one, I like this one very much, but Merna says, “I just finished reading your book and it’s fantastic.” So yes, we can have definitely have more questions like that. Okay, let’s have a look at what else we’ve got.

Q: Okay, here’s one from Lena, I think. It says, “Could you please repeat who was the predominant ethnic group in the British Isles before the Anglo-Saxon arrival?

A: Thank you for a very informative lecture.” Well, my pleasure. Again, dominant ethnic group within the British Isles. These things are a lot more complicated to talk about nowadays than they used to be because now we actually know something 'cause we’ve got a growing amount of ancient DNA taken directly from the ancient skeletons. So, yeah, I mentioned in the talk, there’s this huge turnover in the DNA in the British Isles around about 2400 BCE when migrants come in from the continent. And 90 to 95% of the native British DNA disappears over the next 400 years and the migrants coming in from the continent. The really interesting thing about these guys is that they are the descendants of population movements that start round about 2900 BCE and they start off in Central Asia. So you get people moving out of Central Asia, spreading across Western Europe. And, of course, their genetic material is increasingly diluted by having sex with the locals that they meet as they spread. But the origin that people who move into the British Isles around 2400 BCE and after, ultimately, it’s central Asian and the people moving in, these are almost certainly the people who spread the Indo-European languages all the way from the Ukrainian steps where they kind of get going, all the way out to Britain in our direction and then down to Northern India going the other way. So this is a phenomenally important set of population movements and migrations. But by the time the Romans show up, the immigrants, these immigrants who came around 2400 BC, they replaced almost all of the native DNA. But one thing you can’t actually tell from the DNA is how that replacement happens because it’s all kinds of possible scenarios. So one scenario is, of course, the sort of Hollywood scenario where they come riding in, and we did used to think this was associated with the spread of horses as well, but it actually wasn’t. They come riding into your country and they kill 19 out of 20 people.

So that could have happened. On the other hand, it could be much more peaceful. A small number of people move in and for whatever reasons, they are just more successful breeders than the native population. So over the course of four centuries, you can’t actually have a 95% population replacement without any violence whatsoever associated with it. So that’s like the next big question for the archaeologists is, what are the mechanisms by which these things happen? So by the Roman times, you’ve got a population that in Britain that predominantly descends from these immigrants who are ultimately Central Asian in origin. And it’s a kind of more Central Asiany type population in the south and eastern England, than it is as you head north and west into Scotland and Ireland. And as you go further north and west, you get more admixture with the sort of pre Indo-European people speaking non Indo-European languages as you head off of that way. When the Romans come, there’s not that much genetic turnover under the Roman Empire. There are definitely immigrants to the British Isles from the continent. Like I say, initially, the Roman army is almost 100% continental immigrants, mostly Germans to start off with. But then more Italians get involved later and then they start recruiting native British as well. The officer class is mostly Italian and the traders who come in to supply the Roman army, again, they are overwhelmingly continental or near Eastern, Middle Eastern people initially, but gradually, these relatively small groups get kind of absorbed into the native gene pool.

They don’t have that much impact. So the population when at the Anglo-Saxons and other continental groups start moving into the fall of the Roman Empire, it’s sort of a mixed population, genetically not that different from most of what you’re finding in Western Europe at that time. And I apologise for slightly long answer there, but this has been both the blessing and the curse of the ancient DNA evidence is that we can now definitively answer a lot of these questions, but we cannot answer them simply because one of the things that the DNA has done is show just how ridiculously oversimplified a lot of the old ideas about race were. Just a lot more going on here. So anyway, yeah, I hope that was helpful.

Other questions? We’ve got more questions here.

Q: “Where does the Middle East fit in?”

A: Yes, middle East fits into the story different ways at different points. And so, and again, it sort of depends on, I’m now going to do the really annoying thing that academics always do. You ask a really simple, straightforward, good question and the academic proceeds to get into this quibble about what the words mean and dissolve it into kind of nothingness. But it depends very much what you mean by fit in. What is fitting in in this story. So in a sense, you can say, the Middle East is really fundamental to this story from very early on. In that agriculture begins in the Middle East round about 9500 BCE. Gets started there and then agriculture spreads out largely through migration across Europe and then off into Asia, down into Africa as well. Agriculture spreads out from there. So when farmers from Northwestern Europe move into the British Isles after 4200 BCE, bringing farming with them, replacing a large part of the native population, they are ultimately Middle Easterners. And again, you’ve got to go back a long way. It’s been over 5,000 years since the initial migration started out from the Middle East, but ultimately, genetically, they are of Middle Eastern stock. So, you can say one sense of Middle East fits in and they’re a major player in the Soviet from early on. In another sense, the Middle East only begins to be a really significant player in this story quite late in the day. And this is just because of the nature of the technology available to people. And so if you say, “Well, I define fit in as meaning having like a direct input on people in the British Isles, direct effect on them.” Then yeah, it’s only quite late in the story.

You could say, to what in the later Roman Empire, as the centre of gravity within the Roman Empire is pulled eastward and Constantinople begins to replace Rome as a major city. Increasingly, it’s Middle Eastern actors who are making big decisions about the British Isles. 'Cause like the Britain becomes part of the Roman Empire. But we can’t be certain that anybody from Britain ever became a senator in the Roman Empire. It’s only in the very last days of the empire that Britain begins to produce challenges to become the emperor themselves. So Britain is very much a bit player within the Roman Empire and toward the end of the empire, you begin to get decision makers from the Middle East having an impact on what goes on in Britain. But really, you don’t really see a massive impact of the Middle East on Britain until you get to the 18th century. And the point when the British taking over India, they’re very concerned with lines of communication between the home islands and India. And the one they’ve got then, of course, goes by sea all the way around the bottom end of Africa and then up to the Indian Ocean.

People are very aware that you could make a shorter line of communication through the Middle East, a Suez Canal or something like that. And so, all of a sudden, the Middle East begins to become extremely important to British policymakers and they get very, very involved with Egypt. They prop up the Ottoman Turkish empire for the best part of a century in order to prevent any other European powers from getting into the Middle East. And then when the Suez Canal is cut fine, which I think was 1869, I think. But when that gets cut, at that point, suddenly the Middle East is all importance to Britain. And a lot of British strategists, right up into the Second World War, are still saying the Middle East is the most vulnerable kind of collapse point for the British Empire. If Rommel is able able to overrun Egypt and take the Suez Canal, this will be the biggest blow that the British Empire can possibly receive. So yeah, the Middle East, it’s sort of, dominance in British thinking is really a very, very recent thing on the 10,000 year scale. And in some ways, it’s sort of interesting if you look at very recent history and the US involvement, military involvement in the Middle East over the last 15, 20 years or whatever. Pretty much the only country in the world that has often seen eye to eye with the Americans and the need for military intervention in the Middle East has been the British. And in part, that’s because of the nature of our current relationship with the United States. But also think in part, it is this tradition going back to the late 18th century of how Britain thinks about the Middle East. So, yeah, it’s a fascinating question. And, of course, you could raise similar questions about pretty much every other part of the world as well. They’ve all got their roles in this. We’ve got a lot more questions now.

Q: Okay. Oh, here’s an interesting one from Celine. So I actually haven’t read to the end of it yet, so I hope there’s no nasty surprises for me when I get to the end. But she says, “The Japanese have a proximal island but never had an international empire the size of the British Empire. Why? Was it the traditional obligatory social duty, the social rule to remain home to care for elders, parents as often portrayed in their stories, which is not done as much in the West?”

A: It would be great if that were true, but sadly, that is not true. Japanese history is not that nice. The Japanese, twice in Japanese history, they have had a serious go at making a major Japanese empire. And it’s a really interesting to talk about why it didn’t happen earlier, but the first time is in the 16th century when the Ming dynasty, China is going through difficult period, all kinds of civil wars, and things are kind of going to pieces a little bit. And so there’s a leadership group in Japan that says, “This is our opportunity to basically take over the whole of China. It wouldn’t take much. We’ve got to defeat the Ming in a serious war, humiliate the Ming Dynasty, put our guy in.” It’s not like they’re going to occupy China. “Put our guy in the top, we will dominate China.” And so in the late 16th century, they invade Korea and there was this terrible, terrible war fought through the 1590s in Korea. And at the end of that war, it sort of fought to a standstill. The Japanese don’t lose the war, but the end of that war, it’s like quietly without anybody explicitly saying this, 'cause we don’t have any documents saying this. It’s like the leaders in Japan, China, Korea, several other groups, they quietly agree among themselves, “We’re not going to do that anymore. We could fight wars to see who is the dominant power in northeastern Asia, but we’ve got kind of an equilibrium.

It’s been established here. We are not going to do this anymore because the odds of somebody actually winning and the payoff from winning a three cornered war, Japan, Korea, China, the payoff from winning that is probably less than the cost of waging it. So we’re going to implicitly agree, we’re not going to treat each other as military rivals and we’re going to down the military stuff.” And in Japan, it goes to these extraordinary lengths, remarkable lengths that the Japanese government basically disarms the entire population of Japan and the Japanese hadn’t had guns until Europeans show up there in the 16th century. Then the Japanese very quickly learn how to make their own guns, make guns that in many ways are superior to the ones Europeans are making. And in the 1590s, Japan is one of the great military powers in the world, but they decide this is not the way to go. There’s much more payoff for the government in not building up a big army and having an unarmed population that can’t challenge it through civil war and rebellion. And so when American ships show up in Japan in the 1850s, they find basically a disarmed society. Now this is great for the western powers 'cause it means it’s really easy for the British who then push their way in to say, “You’ve got to give us all this stuff and make these trade deals with it.” It’s not so great for the Japanese, but many benefits from being disarmed. But when a stronger military power shows up, all of a sudden being disarmed is really, really bad. And the Japanese recognise this, they re-arm in a flash.

And so the Americans show up in the 1850s. By the 1880s, the Japanese have already committed to rebuilding a military empire in East Asia. And this time, their military successes are enormous. They annexed Korea, they annexed Taiwan, they take over very, very large parts of China. Their leadership, I was going to say, 100% committed. It actually isn’t. They argue bitterly. But the dominant groups tend to be committed to building up this major global scale empire. They’re going to turn the whole of East Asia into a greater co-prosperity sphere as they call it, which was a brutal, racist, violent empire. And this, of course, gets defeated in World War II, and it’s that that makes Japanese leaders say, “Not our social duty.” The devastation of their defeat in World War II makes them say, “Never again.” 'Cause the devastation that the, US in particular, meeting out to the Japanese, this kind of makes what happened to Germany look like child’s play. I mean, it really was astounding devastation. And not just the atom bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of them killed as many people as the single, the first night of the American fire bomb raid of conventional weapons on Tokyo in 1945, over a hundred thousand dead. And neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki got to that level. So, the shock to Japan was just devastating. And the Japanese commit that the pacifism is written into their constitution. They may be being forced to change that now by new geopolitical developments. But yeah, I mean this is one of the things, looking at global history, looking on the big scale, it does make you very cynical about things. So yeah, the Japanese story is not a happy story. It’s one that, in some ways, parallels the British one very much, but ends with these devastating military defeats.

Let’s see if we have any happier questions on the list here. Okay, yeah. Again, I haven’t read it all the way through, but this one looks like it might be happier too. Oh, wait a second. I’m back on the one I was on before. Oh, I’m not quite sure how that. Oh, okay, yeah.

Q: This one is from Francine says, “Are you suggesting that,” oh. Anyone that begins, “Are you suggesting,” this normally means somebody is about to completely debunk me, “But are you suggesting that aggrandisement of land for power and money overrides the uprising of oppressed people against the more powerful countries, Africa, as well as stopping the murderous actions of the various fascist governments?”

A: Well, yeah, I mean, violence. Violence is a complicated thing in world history. I wrote a whole book at one point about the role of war and violence in world history. Violence is a tool available to people to do the things they want, which is a rather scary way to put it. But this is very much the way biologists think about it. The biologists look at animals and they say, “Almost every species of animal, above a certain level of complexity, has evolved to be capable of using violence to get what it wants in the world.” And each species has evolved what they call, there’s an evolutionarily stable equilibrium. So I think that’s it. Where they use a certain amount of violence in certain ways, and that is the right amount of violence in a sense. Right in terms of maximising the likelihood of that animal passing its genetic material onto the next generation, which is, of course, how an evolutionary biologists define success or failure. And so, like if you are a lion, you’ve got a particularly evolutionarily stable strategy. You kill a lot of things 'cause you’re a carnivore, you’ve got to kill a lot of stuff. But there are limits. And like if you are a lion who sees every interaction as something to solve by violence, you are less likely to pass your genes on than a lion who sees just the right number of interactions as one way you use violence. 'Cause the more times you use violence, the more likely you are to get injured, infected, and die and not pass your genes on.

So every species, including us, we’ve got a kind of evolutionarily stable system for using violence. We evolve to be able to use violence. But one of the weird things about humans is because of the big brains we develop, we have actually changed the amount of violence we use. We actually use much less violence now than we used to do 10,000 years ago. But that was also the building up say, I think the way to think about your question, about role of uprisings of oppressive people or murderous government, murderous fascist governments, and the role of violence in both these stories is, yeah, violence is one of the tools available to, say, colonise peoples in Africa who want to resist the British or the French Empire, or two people in Europe who want to resist fascism. It’s a tool available to them just as it is a tool also available to the British Empire or a tool available to Hitler. And everybody, consciously or not, we all go through these sort of negotiations. I got this problem, I want to solve this problem. I got all these means at my disposal. I can negotiate, I can try to bribe people, give 'em stuff. I can use violence against some. If so, how much violence? These internal debates are going on in all of us all the time. And so like with the decolonization of Africa after World War II, primarily right after World War II, what happens there is, it’s really interesting, fascinating period of world history that you get a certain amount of violence. In some places, like say in the Mau Mau apprising in Kenya, there is a lot of violence getting used there on both sides.

You get a certain amount of violence being used. But a lot of the time there actually isn’t all that much violence. And the way the more thoughtful of the anti-colonial resistance leaders, the way they’re thinking and writing about this is saying, you know, “We are opposed to violence. So violence made us a part of this foreign empire that we want to leave. So by principle, we’re a host of violence, but we do see that using violence is one of the techniques that will get us to a better place. But we don’t think that violence is the only technique here.” So all of them combine violence with other things that they’re doing. And the most sophisticated of them understand that for the British, the Empire is, it’s basically a cost benefit analysis. The British create this empire because it gets some things they want, it gets 'em this dominant position in global trade. It makes the country richer, gives them military power. A lot of good things for the British flow from this. There’s always been costs to the British, right from when they first start building an empire. There’s costs as well as benefits. And anytime the costs seem to be beginning to outweigh the benefits, the British have always been absolutely ruthless about this. And say, “Hey, keeping India now costs us more than we’re getting from it. We walk away.” And I picked the Indian example 'cause that was one where the British did it, particularly shamelessly. Right after World War II, they’re in no position to try to hold India together. They just turn on the heels and walk away, leading to this massive population displacement, horrendous death toll, millions of people die in this 'cause the British handled the walking away badly.

And the anti-colonial rebels in Africa, other parts of the world, they understand this and they say, “What we want to do is raise the pain level for the British, either pain because we’re killing their soldiers, or pain because we’re making Britain look so bad on the international stage.” At a time when Britain really wants to look good to the Americans, we’re just going to raise the pain threshold to the point that the British say, “We’re not going to pay it anymore.” And late 1940s through late 1950s, you get this cascade of the British walking away from their empire. So they realise, “We just don’t or can’t pay this pain threshold anymore.” So it’s the violence, it’s always the violence is always wrapped up in these other kinds of things. And the same in World War II except World War II is actually sort of interestingly different because Churchill and Roosevelt make this sort of off the cuff announcement that the war aim is unconditional surrender. And that was, in a way, that was a real stupid thing to do, 'cause once you do that, you take every tool off the table for the Germans except violence. You told them, “There’s nothing you can do to negotiate with us at this point. We are going to destroy you until you say that the pain of the military attacks is so great. We absolutely surrender. We give you everything. Do what you like with us.” So that was sort of a weird thing to do because the Allies were in a position to enforce that. So yeah, I think writing a story like the one I did about Britain’s place on the world stage, there is simply no way you can write this story without a lot of it being about violence 'cause inevitably, a lot of it is about violence. And I think going forward in the 21st century, thinking about the relationships of the west and the east, a lot of it is going to be about violence and how we control the potential violence in this relationship.

Okay. All right, Jerry asked a question about the genetic makeup of the 90 to 95% of locals who are supplanted by Anglo. But I think we sort of talked about this a little bit already. What else have we got? Oh, gosh. We had a lot of people saying very nice things, which is very kind of you. So, actually, well, I see it’s 9:59 my time. One minute to the hour. So maybe I should just take one more of the questions we’ve got here. Oh, actually, yeah.

Q: So we got one here from Yuri. He says, “In your fascinating take, you did not much discuss the role of ideology, democracy versus dictatorship, British versus French Revolution, et cetera, and culture. How do they fit into your deterministic worldview?”

A: Yeah, that’s a great question and I’ll try not to talk on and on about this or, well, I guess if I do, you can always just go. I can’t make you stay here. You’re not in my classroom now. So yeah, this is a really good question 'cause this is something that comes up all the time in all of these books that I’ve written in the last 15 years. 'Cause I’ve come to the conclusion, very much of the big picture is driven by these sort of fundamental forces, geography, biology, these sorts of things. But saying it’s driven by them is not the same thing as saying it is totally written by the fundamental forces, which is why “Geography is Destiny” was actually the wrong title for my book. It really should be “Is Geography Destiny?” There’s, I think, you know, pretty much anybody, unless you really are kind of got your head buried in the sand, pretty much anybody’s going to say, “Well, yes, of course, values and ideas and institutions have a role in what’s going on.” The big argument is really what is the balance between the ideas and values and the the fundamental material forces. And in the British case, in this particular British story, it was really hard because I’m summarising a book in like 45 minutes or so. Got to strip out a lot of stuff just to get down to the basics of what I was saying. In the book, I spent a lot more time talking about the role of ideas 'cause one of the things we see right from the point when the Romans take over Britannia 2000 years ago, one of the things we see is the intensity of the debates over what does geography mean? And not just what does geography mean, but also what do we want it to mean? We can maybe sometimes we see where it seems to be driving us, but we don’t want to go there.

And so when the Romans come in, we don’t have much of anything written by the Britains themselves, but we do have this great short book by the Roman writer, “Tacitus.” It was a biography of his father-in-Law who had been the general-in-charge of the army’s conquering Britain. And Tacitus spends a lot of time thinking about what the British were thinking. And so, it’s complicated source 'cause you don’t know, is this just some rich guy in Rome speculating, using the British as a kind of a mirror to say what he wants to say about the Roman Empire? Or is this actually what the British are saying? But the interesting thing is how, like the debates over Brexit, the debates that Tacitus says were going on in Britain 2000 years ago are, so they would argue about exactly the same things. And some people are saying, “Well, the Romans are coming, but that’s actually great because Rome will bring us into a bigger, more sophisticated, more glamorous world with better wine, better food, a lot more money.” A lot of wealthy British people are saying, “This is good. We want to be part of this bigger cosmopolitan world.” Whereas a lot of the regular British peasantry told us, saying, “This is terrible. We do not want to be a part of this world. This world of sophistication. Everything, yeah, this is great for the top guys. It’s terrible for us. We’re now going to be taxed more heavily to pay for Roman emperors to have all of their concubines and all that emperor stuff that they have. This is terrible.”

And so it’s like there’s a, in a sense, a civil war going on within Britain about the Roman conquest of Britain. And then again, when we get to the point of the big switch from the Hereford map to Mackinder’s map to Britain becoming, closing the channel, opening the oceans, becoming the centre of the world. Intense debates within the British Isles, going back really to the 16th century, over a hundred years of debate. But there’s this major shakedown within the British political elite over just this question. And it actually corresponds very much to party politics. This is the point around 1700 when some of the modern British parties are beginning to be formed. And so the conservative party, of course, goes back to the Tory part at that point over this issue of the relationship to Europe. And the Tories are the ones who initially, they’re the ones who are pushing the balance of power arguments, saying, “Get Britain away from the continent.” The Tories are saying, “Who cares about all these religious debates going on in the continent? The only religious debate that really matters is the one in Britain between the Church of England and the extreme Protestants. We basically could not give a stuff about the Catholics. They don’t matter anymore.” And then you get, against them, you get what’s initially called a Whig Party, which ultimately becomes the liberal party later on, saying, “No, no, we are much more interested in the Cosmopolitan Britain part of the European continent.”

And so yeah, these debates go on throughout the story. And I mean, as you can probably tell, I love talking about that 'cause that’s where it gets people do the weirdest things and say the weirdest stuff in these debates. But yeah, sadly, if I were going to talk about that, it would have to be a whole series of lectures. I don’t think anybody’s got the patience for that, but, so okay. Well, I see now is four minutes past the hour, so I’m sure you’ve all got better things to do than listen to me going on and on. So, well, I should thank you for listening to me and hand back over to the organisers to say good morning or good afternoon or good evening, or whatever the heck it is where you are.

• Hi, I’m jumping in, Karina. Hi, Anne, it’s Wendy. I just wanted to say thank you.

• Hi.

• Brilliant.

• Thank you so much.

• Thank you for coming back.

• Oh, my pleasure.

• Yeah, thank you. Thank you very, very much. We would love to have more of you. So, a million thanks.

• Thank you.

• Yeah, so, yeah. Yeah, I’d love to, yeah. There are other things that I would love to ask you about, but we are past the hour, so I will take it offline. Thank you very, very much. Thanks, Karina.

• Okay.

• Well, thank you.

• Thanks, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thanks. Bye bye.

• Thank you so much. Lovely to meet you, Ian.