 Welcome to this New America online event. We are going to discuss the new book by Ian Morris geography is destiny Britain's place in the world of 10,000 year history. In Morris is a professor of history at Stanford. He is also a professor of classics. He has written a number of books, including what war, what is it good for conflict in the progress of civilization from primates to Robert robots. And why the West rules for now, the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. So Professor Morris. Thanks for joining us and you're going to give a 20 minute presentation of the top line themes of the book and then we'll open it up for a Q&A between ourselves and I'll be accepting questions from the audience. And we'll ask in Morris questions from the audience on your behalf. So, take it away. Very well thank you thank you for those kind words of introduction and for inviting me today. So, let's see if I can get the screen to share. So hopefully hopefully you can now see my pictures. Okay, so, oops, gone wrong already. So okay, like it says on the cover geography is destiny. And I think if you have any doubts about that, just ask the Ukrainians. They're very name of their country Ukraine means borderlands they've been invaded and partitioned for 6000 years, fought over between Russian Polish Turkish empires geography drives history. But because what we also know is things get very complicated because history also drives what geography means, and geography significance changes over time. Now, if I'm right about those things and understanding the meanings of geography. This is the key, not only to understanding the past, but also to understanding and shaping the future. And I think this is a point that applies to the entire planet and whatever you live or work, the same principles apply. Now I decided to write this book that on June the 24th 2016, because it seemed to me that the British votes to leave the European Union, which had happened on the previous day. This is a perfect test case of this thesis. What I was asking myself was, does geography explain Brexit. Is it a guide to what's coming next. And the answer I came to on both points was predictably yes, otherwise I wouldn't have had a book otherwise you wouldn't now be listening to me. But I think the only way to see how geography works to drive history to to create destiny is by backing up and to look at the whole of the last 10,000 years. I'm going to say that the reason it's 10,000 years is because over the last 10,000 years, the British isles were only created beginning about 10,000 years ago by rising sea waters as the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age turned what had been this broad peninsula you see on this is great series of maps here that actually flood parts of turn it into a set of islands and this process is complete by about 6000 BCE the coasts and everything, more or less where they are now. Now, in the time since then, two big geographical facts have dominated British history. And the first of them the most obvious the British isles are islands there's actually there's something like 6,390 of them all together, of which about 150 are inhabited. The second big fact is that these islands are very close to Europe, only 22 miles away at the narrowest point and Britain's entire history has basically been a delicate dance between these two forces in solarity on the one hand proximity to Europe on the other. And the dancers gone on as geography has been driving the history forward, but the historical changes have also transformed what that geography means. And I'm thinking about building, thinking about how that relationship works, but two dimensions of historical change, I think, particularly important in changing what geography means. And one of them is technology, and especially kind of technology concerned with transport communication movement over the seas. And the second is organization, especially the kinds of organizations that organize people for collective action group decisions and activity. And it's British history, as I'm sure everybody knows, very complicated just a lot of stuff goes on, I think it was quantity and quality that the scholarship on British history and archaeology is a little bit overwhelming. And so very complicated storyline, but in the end, it all breaks down to just three broad phases that the British isles have gone through as geography changed the mean. So the plan for today is just say a few words about each of these three phases, then draw some conclusions and then I'll hand it back over to Peter. So, okay, get started and the first of these phases. And like, I would say like all the best geographical arguments. Mine is made through a series of maps, and they've got one map for each phase, and then a fourth map, which kind of runs alongside the other three and inflicts and shapes what they mean. So the first of my three phases is by far the longest. It takes us from about 8000 BC, up to about the 1500 CE AD, so 95% of the story. And I call this phase the Hereford map after this highly bewildering looking map that now hands in a very pretty little cloister on the side of Hereford Cathedral in England. And this map was painted a big thing. It's about five feet across painted around the year 1300 by a guy otherwise barely known named Richard of Halding. Now, you may well be wondering, what are we looking at here? Well, it is a slightly disconcerting map. It's painted to follow medieval conventions. The big, where's my point you got here? The big circle here dominating the map. That's the known world. The top of the map up here is not north like we conventionally do now, but top of the map is east. And for the very good reason that east is where Jesus will come from when he returns. The center of the map, an equally good reason is Jerusalem because that's the center of the Christian world. So what we're looking at here. So everything sort of tips around for what we would see. So the North Pole is up this way. This black weird thing, this is the Mediterranean Sea. That's Italy, Greece. Well, that's Turkey. This is like the Near East, Levant, Egypt, British Isles down here, this cluster of blobs, and it crammed into the bottom left corner on the map. On this map, one of the most striking things about it, I think Richard really understood how geography worked in his own time. The English Channel and the North Sea here, you see that they're painted in, they are narrower than the River Nile down here. I think Richard understood the important thing about geography in his period that proximity trumps in solarity. The British Isles are basically a part of the European continent, even though they're separated by water. Now, a lot of changes went on between 8000 BC and 1500 CE, but one thing stayed constant across the whole period. There was no way to close the English Channel. There was nothing like what we would call your command of the seas in naval strategy today. You couldn't close the English Channel. Technology is too low, ships can't stay at sea at any length of time. Organisations are weak, they can't pay for ships and organise them anyway. If you can get to the continental side of the English Channel, you can get across the channel, barring bad luck, you might sink, but you can get across the channel to the English side. The English Channel, it's a highway, not a barrier. It's open to traders, conquerors, missionaries, microbes, they all come flooding across the English Channel on a regular basis. So the channel is a highway, not a barrier. The Atlantic, on the other hand, is a barrier, not a highway. It effectively can't be crossed. Britain is the edge of the world that matters to people in Britain. And Britain, also edge of the world down here, the blobs. It's at the edge of the world. It's on the European stage, but it's in the wings, not front and centre. All front and centre are down here, the ones in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India. These are the centres of technological innovation, of organisation, of numbers, wealth, power, sophistication. Britain is Europe's poor cousin throughout this whole long first phase of the story. And all the big inventions in that nine and a half thousand years, farming, cities, writing, empires, all these sorts of things, they begin off in the southeast, down in the Middle East or even further away. Then they roll northwest until they end up in the British Isles, finally, after they've reached pretty much everybody else first. And this process is sort of evening out. This brings the British new technologies, trade, foreign food, culture, but it also brings a lot of disasters along with it as well. And over that long period, the British find a lot of different ways to deal with what geography means for them. Over the beginning of the period, they divided into nomadic hunter bands, relatively little direct contact with the continent. They go through being a province of the Roman Empire. They go to fighting the French at Agincourt, all these different ways to think about and respond to the meanings of geography. But the basic fact is that British history is a branch of European history throughout that long period. For nine and a half thousand years, the key geographical facts remain the same. And to get at these, this is why I bring in the fourth map that I mentioned that kind of runs in parallel along the three I'm going to be talking about. And the fourth map looks like this is an internal map of the British Isles. Because what basically happens is the history of the southeast, and this is a geological map showing you where the Highlands are. The East, lying nearest to the continent, what eventually becomes England. This is about dealing with what comes its way from the continent. The history of the North and West, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the West country. History of the North and West is about dealing with what comes their way from England. So it's like this gradient of influence rolling from Southeast to Northwest. So Richard's map, as I said, Richard drew this map around the year 1300, but by 1600 relatively short span of time on the scale I'm dealing with by 1600. This is just no longer a very good map of very good description of how the world works. Technology and organization have changed so much, particularly during the 16th century, that the map has changed as well. And technology, a lot of things going on, but probably the biggest of them is the Galleon new kind of ship, able to stay at sea for weeks or even months. And the new kind of organization that changes is governments that are able to pay to build big fleets of galleons and then just keep them at sea for long periods. So this combination, new, new technology, new organizations. This has the potential to revolutionize the meanings of Britain's geography. Because for the first time in history, the channel can now be closed. Hawkins besieges the Spanish fleet and it's our harbor for months at a stretch it can channel can be closed, and the oceans can be open, you can cross the Atlantic fairly reliably. The ships like these galleons can escort you to the meanings of geography change very dramatically. And this is where we shift from the first map the herford map onto the second of my maps, which I call McKinsey's map. After Halford McKinsey the famous geographer who published this map in 1902. The big thing you see on this map here obviously is a Britain has moved from being at the edge of a European stage to the center of an Atlantic and ultimately a global stage. And that's why we're talking about the proximity, Trump's proximity on this map. The British have converted the English channel into a kind of moat cutting them off from the continent. Governments in London, united at the whole of the British Isles into a single kingdom run by them, secure behind this mode, and have gone on to create an intercontinental empire, on which the sun never sets the channels been closed, the oceans have been opened. And that makes this transition basically moves to the center of the world, or at least it could do that if it wanted to. And that's the big question really starting up around the year 1600 or so. Is that what the British want to do is intense resistance to this new vision of what geography means intense resistance to governments that are able to pay for all this kind of stuff. To do that these governments have to reach into your pocket take your money away a lot of people really don't like that intense resistance to orienting things around these new kinds of ships, allowing merchants to become powerful enough to take part in government themselves. There's no enormous controversy and violence in the British Isles over whether they actually want to move from from the Hereford map to the Macintosh map. But by about 1700, the move has been made has been a grand strategic pivot one of the biggest strategic pivots in history. It's still 22 miles wide, but for Louis the 15th or Napoleon or Hitler, it might as well be a million miles, because the British have closed it against them effectively. The Atlantic is still 3000 miles wide, but it's become a highway to the world if Britain is willing to pay for what needs to be done to make it so. The British ultimately do decide to do this. The Britons then, as they said at the time the Britons then engrossed the trade of the world. And instead of fighting for a role in Europe, as they did when they lived on the Hereford map. Now they try in Europe to create a balance of power, where different powers, roughly even each other out keeping each other so busy that none can build a fleet strong to turn the English Channel back into a highway. And they do this through coalitions. This is the, the period on the idea of perfidious Albion the untrustworthy British. This is when it quite rightly gets established. Now Macintosh map is the most remarkable period of British history, a tiny little group of islands are dominating much of the planet. But the big but it is just a small part of British history. Now it really lasts no more than about 200 years was a 1713 to 1914 ballpark. During that time, technology and organization keep on changing. I mean, the kind of technology and organization you've got by the end of the period when these millions of British migrants can move all over the planet. This would have just seemed like magic back in 1713 technology and organization, keep on changing the world keeps shrinking geography keeps changing its meanings. And although these are the forces that kind of pushed Britain to the center of Macintosh map. Of course the 18th and 19th centuries they begin pushing Britain away from the center of the map once again, already by the 1870s. Germans and North Americans have heaped up great mountains of money in the 1970s, East Asians do the same kind of thing. These great mountains of money begin shoving the world off Macindosh map and onto a third map. Another very disorienting one that I like to call the money map. And this I mean some of you might have seen this map before it's a great map. This is a more realistic map of the world than the ones we normally look at. And what it does is on a normal map each country gets a number of square inches on the map proportionate to the number of square miles it occupies on the surface of the globe. On this map, you get square inches proportionate to your GDP at purchasing power parity. And so it gives you a sense of what what the real distribution of power in the world looks like. And basically the world is now dominated by these three great mountains of money North America, Western Europe and East Asia. So in the 20th century, the British succeeded in holding off two huge challenges to the kinders map that came from the European continent came from from Germany, succeeded in that between the 1910s and 1940s, but only succeeded in that by subordinating themselves to the American mountain of money. This was in fact probably complete by about 1916, the kinders map is broken by the British transition to being subordinate to the American mountain of money. So Britain then starts to pivot back toward the European continent towards something that you might say looks a bit more like the hero for now, really in the late 1950s they're reversing over 200 years of grand strategy, opening the channel, while simultaneously trying to keep their relationship with the United States special which is a very difficult balancing act. In 1962, Dean Atchison says, Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role, which I think was a rather unkind thing to say, but he was right. And the search, I would say the search is very much still on the search for the new role. Could Britain still be trying to shelter in the shadow of the American mountain? Should it be moving back to the slopes below Brussels? Should it be looking instead to Beijing? Alternatively, could it carve out an independent path between the three great peaks of money? Or could it even collaborate with the old English speaking Commonwealth to keep up a fourth hill of their own? Or is the United Kingdom, which is only about 300 years old, is United Kingdom now obsolete on this new money map? And it seems to me that the script for this third act in British history, this script is still being written. Okay, so those are my three maps, my three phases. Lessons we might draw from them. Well, I think the big one is that the secret success is always a matter of understanding the size of the stage you're acting on, who the other actors are, and where the action is heading. So on the Hereford map, Britain was part of a West European stage. The actors were continental ones until Rome, the actors were sort of internal British ones until the point the Romans drag Britain into a continentally based empire in the first century CE. The first empire collapses around 400. The main actors in the British story continue to be continental. Germans, Scandinavians, French, Spanish, Dutch. This is primarily what drives English history and English history is primarily what drives Scottish, Welsh and Irish history. On the Kinders map, Britain is acting on an Atlantic stage. Britain has the starring role in the play Europe has been relegated to a series of supporting and contending roles. The main action is on and beyond the oceans. On the money map, Britain fights two world wars to basically hold down the European mountain of money, subordinates itself to the American mountain, but I would say has barely begun to confront the East Asian mountain. Now, 10 years ago, Lee Kuan Yew, President of Singapore, told 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. I think he was right. And I think British politicians have not fully understood, at least until recently, just what is happening to the meanings of geography today. In 2016, the British did face a burning question, but it wasn't the one that was put on the referendum ballot for them that summer. The question there being, should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union. I would say that the Brexit debate was just a distraction. The question that was raised in the last century is going to be about Beijing, not about Brussels. The real question is where Britain, and for that matter, the rest of the West will fit best on a world stage just tilting East. So the moral of the story, geography is destiny, but it's up to us to decide what to do about that. So, thank you for listening. Well, thank you very much Professor Morris for a brilliant presentation. I had not seen that purchasing parody map and it's fascinating because you see that terribly thin red line on the top for Russia, which sort of speaks. And, you know, as you were talking, I guess first of all, were you surprised by the Brexit decision. Short answer. Yeah, I mean, like, like most academics, I guess I actually had sort of extreme case because you probably tell from my voice and British by origin but now lived over half my life in the United States. At least before COVID I was jumping on planes and going to fancy places and stuff. Like most people who lived in that world, I found the decision slightly incomprehensible. Although I'm almost immediate and that was kind of one of the things that made me want to write this book. What the heck has happened here. I'm supposed to be this guy gets paid to know about history know about large chunks of history. Why does this surprise me so much, but also the minute I got thinking about this and looking at the long term history, it became clear to me, you know, this is not the Brexit decision. It's not quite the way it's being represented in a lot of what some people would call the mainstream media. It's not, it's not a completely erratic, unpredictable, crazy thing that just 52% of the British have deludedly decided to do. In a lot of ways, it has quite a lot in common with the vote to elect Donald Trump the same year, which took so many academics by surprise. But once you look at the long term history you see well this is not this weird aberration. This is one side of a strategic debate that goes back at least 2000 years. I think it's a tremendous that Roman historians, the first person to write an extended literally account of the British eyes that suffice for us to read. Tassitus is already talking about these issues in his account of prayer. And if we're interpreting the archaeological record right, I think we can actually see it going back all the way 10,000 years this argument, are the people who live on these islands part of the European continent or are they something different. It did surprise me. It shouldn't have surprised me and that is a thing for me to be ashamed of, especially since most of my relatives voted to leave the European Union. I grew up in a city in the English Midlands, where it was a two to one vote in favor of leaving so it probably shouldn't surprise me quite so much. If anybody in the audience has questions, please put them in the slider and I will ask Professor Morris any questions that come from the audience. So, yeah, I remember waking up and just having a sharp intake of breath because it just seemed to be not in the economic interest writ large of the British public. I mean, it may have been in the economic interests of some but, and I think one indicator which I've always been interested in is how the pound is fed since that decision. The pound is not fair particularly well against the dollar. And there may be a bunch of reasons for that but I do think that, you know, taking a few think about the maps with Jerusalem at the center of the world and then Britain at the center of the city of London was certainly at the center of maybe that, you know, in the financial map, and in a way it took itself out of that. It just seemed to be a confirmation of Britain's long term decline. And I mean, this is a question. You know, David Cameron and Boris Johnson both, you know, basically, you know, both Eaton and Oxford, and the Bullingdon Club at Oxford as well so they come from the top echelons of British society and you know, 100 years ago, they would have been public servants that were making wise choices. But they seem to be public servants who made disastrous choices. And this is something else that struck me as I was working on the book that the impression you would get from reading the newspapers. They said, either David Cameron or Boris Johnson or both. These complete idiots who had blundered off the edge of the cliff. And the level of sort of vitriol and rage in the arguments that were going on in Britain was quite astonishing. But when you look at the history, what happened in the 2010s and this was actually pretty mild. But if you look back to 1713, the end of Britain's first phase of Britain's big wars against France and that a piece gets hashed out in 1713, which basically the arguments within Britain are won by the Tories. So the big champions are saying, we should no longer think of Britain as part of the European scene is now its own thing. We're going to create a balance of power on the continent. We don't care whether we find the French or the Spanish or the Dutch doesn't care. It doesn't matter. Now this matters. All that matters is keeping any European power from challenges and wigs back in Britain was saying, oh my God, this betrays our allies all of our loyalties our traditions our identities, the French are the enemy doesn't matter about anybody else vicious debates they are impeaching each other trying to get each other executed afterwards people are getting shot down in the streets. Because these debates go on for centuries. And compared to that, Brexit was pretty mild. And even somebody like the many people the archival and the whole thing Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's advisor, Dominic Cummings looks pretty tame when you stack himself up against somebody like say Thomas Cromwell Henry the eighth, a great political advisor. So, again, I think this very often happens when we get caught up in our own political debates, we often lose our sense of perspective on them. And I think looking at the long term history does give you some valuable perspective back. Well, people talk about the vitriolic debates in this country in the United States. I'm reminded of the fact that Representative Mo Brooks, nearly beat to death Senator Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856 and beat him almost to death. And obviously we've had, you know, our own civil war. So, here's a question from Steven Shapiro, your question about technology your point about technology being a key driver is obviously important. How do you see that playing out in the quote unquote China China debate as the West still has that edge. Yeah, yeah, I think I think Steven's absolutely right to put his finger on this issue is technology. We live in a real weird world, at least compared to to the one I grew up in. And as I'm sure many of you will be aware in nowadays, when American strategists are talking about struggles with China with Russia other countries, and they often move away from talking about sharply defined states of war and peace and talk about there being this sort of nonstop campaigning is the word loving is campaigning going on different powers positioning themselves to try to get the better of the others and technology is very, very much a part of this. This is one of the areas when Deng Xiaoping starts opening China, this is one of the areas they're very aware of the while China is so technologically backward relative to the US in particular. It's never going to have the position in the world that Chinese people tend to think it deserves. So there's been massive investment in technology in China, and attempts to lure back to China, a lot of their top engineers and scientists to study in the West. And when I first started writing about this I wrote a book that came out 12 years ago called why the West rules for now. And one of the comments I got from a bunch of people who are reading that in manuscript before it came out reading it for me, we're saying, Well, you know, there's just something about Chinese culture that means that they're never going to catch up with the West technologically they're good at imitating and adapting things that other people developed, but they're just not able for these cultural reasons just not able to have an inventive creative technological culture themselves. And well, I didn't say this to people who would kindly give up their time to read my manuscript, but I think that's one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. There's nothing about Chinese or anybody else's culture that prevents them from being technologically innovative. There is a still a glaring gap in infrastructure and institutions in China that they have to fill in this gap if they're going to provide what scientists and engineers need. And then also I think even more pressing provide the sort of context in which people are free to experiment and invest in new inventions and so on. And they are doing the technological gap has already closed dramatically in some areas, since I wrote that book that came out in 2010. So yeah, I think it's absolutely right technology is one of the areas of struggle, and it's one where the West is still ahead but not by anywhere near as much as was true a decade ago. And that raises an interesting question which is, you know, she is in many ways the most powerful man in human history, if you in terms of the numbers of people who controls and the amount of control he exercises over them. And yet, you know, with the kind of zero COVID policy, the move will kind of back to a more statist run economy. He's going to have the Congress Party Congress in November which is going to anoint him for a third term. So he will then become essentially leader for life of the most and the most powerful person that has existed in human history. Yet he's also making these mistakes which seem to be very much his mistakes so how do you, how do you score all that. Yeah, yeah, I think a lot changed in China during the 2008 2009 financial crisis and that seems to me to be a real inflection point for Chinese strategy and thinking about the world. I think you're not just on the technological front but on a whole range of fronts China's become so much more selective that the old Deng Xiaoping line of course basically being a walk softly but carry a big stick basically and don't upset the both with the Americans the Americans are running this global system, let us prosper within it and not get into direct confrontations and she has been very explicit in saying that he's moved past that and it's now time to give kind of Chinese this mold to the shape of the world. And as for whether these are a series of disastrous mistakes or not. Standard boring historian response or we're going to have to wait and see. I mean, like Don said about the French Revolution, too soon to know what significance is, if we are going to have to wait and see. I think the same with the Brexit decision this thing is this is what people said in 1713 about the position Britain took in the piece of you tracks many people said disastrous move. It turned out it was actually a very canny strategic movie it's all going to depend on how people are able to take advantage of the new meanings of geography. You're sitting in Stanford, where you're at you teach a Stanford HR McMaster, it was the lead panel on the national security strategy of the United States, which very much identifies China as the real peer competitor and kind of gives a laundry list of reasons why and Chinese kind of industrial sort of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft and etc etc etc. And this seems to be, and I'm sitting in Washington there seems to be a great deal of agreement between Republicans and Democrats who usually agree about very little about the perfect of the Chinese and the necessity of really standing up to them and look at the the Biden defense budget it's pretty large, it's really more Trump defense budget than a Obama defense budget. And so I know pretty, you know, what how do you see this playing out and what is, you know, is is the is the facilities trap, you know, a real question here in terms of rising powers, always challenging the, with the exception of the British and the Americans. Yeah, yeah I think the facilities trap is a real thing. But I think you're one thing that doesn't get enough airtime in Graham Allison's book on the facilities trap is the number of cases when the facilities trap does not lead to war. And I think his book very much it's a case of selecting confirmation bias here, looking at examples where it did lead to one yes of course there are a lot of those just like the city says, but there's also a great many cases. I think a classic facilities trap not leading to war be Britain and the United States at the end of the 19th century, the British have before 1890, which point the Germans start to become really rather disturbing after 1890 but before there's a lot of agreement in British policy circles. The US is the power that can do most harm to Britain in the world. And so this needs to be managed and the British find ways to manage it, which you might say in the long run, ends up Britain is in the position as if it had forced and lost to war, but it's like the British come to understand that there is no way to avoid this happening. There are challenges to manage the relationship with the United States in such a way that it doesn't have to lead to violence, whether the man relationship with Germany is managed less well. So I think there's nothing written in stone that US and China has to lead to a shooting war and I think there's a lot of very good reasons why it should not. And I think I would agree completely with this assessment that China has become the United States is major strategic rival, even perhaps the major strategic threat to the United States. But I think that the European Union, who, as I'm sure you know, when the European Union makes pronouncements, you've usually got to read about 45 pages of intensely involved pros to get to the point where you can actually figure out what it is the same. So it's actually been quite straightforward on this one that they see China increasingly they do see China as a threat, but also as an opportunity it's a partner as well as a rival. And of course that's what makes the relationship with China so different from the Cold War with the Soviet Union when there was no real sense in which the Soviet Union is an economic partner with the US in 1960s and 70s. You're saying on that money map. Russia is just such a skinny long little thing. So this is a very, very different relationship that the West has got with China than what it had in the past with Russia or even I would say with Germany for that matter. I end up my books are talking about where this might go, what this might mean, specifically looking at the British case but I think these are issues that apply more broadly to the Western world. And at the moment, it looks pretty clear that most of the West has sort of bandwagons with the United States to resist China to oppose China's sort of aggressive moves and rise, but there's no guarantee that that's going to last. So I say, it might sound a little extravagant and weird to suggest or maybe, maybe the European Union and China are going to get together to do down the United States, or maybe the US and China will get together to maintain. I mean like Britain got together with the US at the end of the 19th century, but much weirder things have happened. So if you look back again to the end of the 19th century, for Britain, the ancestral traditional enemies of France, and particularly Russia in the 19th century. Germany is a traditional ally you ally with Germany to encircle France, give it problems on the continent and hold it down in the space of like 1520 years. That is turned entirely on its head, and France and Russia become the allies Germany becomes the enemy, and Britain begins this long term relationship with the US. There's a pretty profound change in strategic relationships. So I guess I would say we should not be too hasty to rule out the possibility that the strategic map is going to look utterly different in 30 years time from what it does now. This is from Philip in New York City, considering the world economies have gotten so independent as readily exemplified during the COVID pandemic. What should we have learned from the past. I guess it's a question about the lessons of history and economic independence. I think, yeah, this is something of course, a lot of people talk and think about this question and one of the, one of the arguments that very often gets me is the world's economies have become so effectively interlinked that it would now be madness for any great country to go to war. And this argument, it got talked about a lot in the 1990s and 2000s as globalization was really taking off the globalization is great force for peace because it was going to deter anybody from going to war. So the people who said this knew perfectly well that exactly the same arguments have been made in the 1900s, early 1910s about the state of what people often call the first great globalization, and that the world was now so tightly nobody could possibly go to war without a crash overnight. And in 1914, when people do start going to war, their economies do start coming to pieces, but they all find ways to make it work. So in a way that argument has been sort of discredited, except that it is of course the the argument we're now mostly using against Russia to constrain the Russians in Ukraine. So some people are suggesting that it might turn out that it works so well that the old globalization argument actually is going to work in the 21st century. And this is one reason why I think the Ukraine war might turn out to be massively more important in world history than we might otherwise think. So to see this experiment to see, can economic pressures excluding Russia from the global market, can they actually succeed in changing a state's policy when its leadership sees what it's trying to do as an existential question for it. Can we actually by economic means push the Russians back to where they started from. On the other hand, of course, if this economic strategy fails, or if say Russia and China figure out and runs around building up economic blocks that are not so thoroughly integrated with the West. If the economic strategy is destroyed, then and defeated, then I think that suggests that the interconnection of world economies is not going to matter in the 21st century anymore than it did in the early 20th. I mean, I think the history of sanctions producing the outcome that you actually want is not the very long one. Yeah. From anonymous, do you believe that US took over the role of Britain as a guarantor of the liberal economic order, I think you've answered that to some degree. If the US ceases this role who will replace it. Interesting question. Yes, yes, well thank you anonymous for those questions. Obviously, you make these historical comparisons. One of the big things to remember which I think people often do forget is you'll see a lot of you might see a lot of similarities between two cases but there's always a lot of differences as well. And sometimes the differences are the more important part of it and the similarities between Britain and the US here that they're many and they're real and they're important differences though. The major difference between, say, 19th century the 19th century British order and the late 20th century American order is that the American version was just so much bigger, more pervasive, more influential. It's fascinating reading books about the 19th century British world system, because I think all of it, maybe especially people like me have grown up in Britain you've got this idea in your head of Britain bestriding the world like a colossus so sending out gunboats telling people what to do and they'll jump to it and the whole in reality the whole thing was just this incredibly rickety structure constantly seeing like the slightest breath of when the whole thing is going to fall down. It comes several times it comes to the brink of falling down. The American version of Pax Americana and this this has its rickety elements to but it's so much more than anything the British created. So the world is moving so much faster than it was in the 19th century that it's lifespan potentially a shorter to that's an interesting observation. Yeah, I think this is sort of true across the board we shouldn't be surprised that the world is moving faster than it used to do you think it one of the big forces driving technological innovation or just about everything is pure technology and when there's more people, more stuff gets done. And there's a lot more people now and they used to be there's why five, six times as many people now as they were at the beginning of the 20th century. So we should expect things to go five, six times faster. And actually because you then have to multiply that up for the stock of knowledge is already accumulated and back 100 years ago the world was already a lot smaller than it had been 100 years before that. And you could get from actions. I don't know how long it took you to get from from Bristol to New York but not very long, at least compared to what it had been in earlier centuries and now of course, you can get from England to New York in the space of a few hours on an airplane, get there instantaneously on the internet. So all these things sort of multiplied up the effectiveness of actors. So, yeah, I mean we should, we're not wrong to feel like the world is running faster than ever. But one of the kind of amusing things when you're a historian, you're looking back and you think about like say the Victorian age and we often tend to have this image of the Victorian ages, roaring fireplaces and cosy tea and crumpets and all the sort of things, all nice and stable and reliable. People at the time were in agonies of sort of anomy about how the world had speeded up the telegraph and come in the steamship. They felt very much about the way the world is changing, felt very much like people do today. And I suspect this is increasingly just a feature of the human condition. Another question from anonymous, which gives back to the themes of your book. Do you think there's going to fall apart after Brexit? I mean obviously there's this tension with Northern Ireland over the Brexit rule. Johnson's very weakened for all sorts of reasons. Yeah, British politics are never born with Boris Johnson at the forefront. But yeah, the United Kingdom, like any political organisation, it's created at a particular moment for particular purposes. And in the modern version of it, you can say it really goes back no further than 1707 when England and Scotland formed a union, and then they bolt Ireland on in a very unsatisfactory way in 1801. And it was created to solve a particular strategic problem, which is one that had been running right through the history of the British Isles but it's taken on a new form in the later 18th century. And it's strategic problems like it's an English problem. And it's one that I refer to just just in passing when I was talking that England is the place stuff comes to England from the continent, and then stuff comes to Scotland Wales and Ireland from England. And if you are in England, if you are a power broker leader in London, you worry primarily about threats coming from the continent, but you also worry about what they call the Celtic fringe the Scots, Welsh and Irish. So the Celtic fringe outflanks England, and it's in the strategic interests of people in France to form alliances of people in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And it's in the strategic interests of the Scots, Welsh and Irish to form alliances with the French or Germans or whatever else. And the way the English would often talk about this was if we have an open back door, the great fear was that the French or somebody else are going to sail up to Scotland or Ireland, land an army there. And draw supplies locally, build up a big alliance then invade England basically from the rear. So this is the big strategic anxiety about the British Isles. And it's a long running anxiety. The first time we hear about it in practice is in the year 367. The former historian, Amianis Marcellinus, says those what he calls a barbarian conspiracy, which makes it sound extremely dramatic. But people outside the borders, the empire in what we now call Ireland Scotland, which will form an understanding with people in northern Germany, and they all start raiding the province of Britannia at the same time. And the technical three sides the British defense is just collapse and the provinces overrun and looted. It's just like a very, very long time. The famous old alliance between Scotland and France are creating 1295 if you haven't seen Braveheart the movie you really showed a best guide to that. So these ideas go back a very long time but they take on new significance really from the 16th century on when England leaves what I in my book like to call the original European Union the Catholic European Church basically puts itself outside. It's a legitimate strategic alliances of most continental states, while most of the Irish population and large parts of the Scottish leadership remain Catholic and this becomes a huge problem. So the English side we got to tamp this thing down and 1707 the fight is bitter war with the French English and Scottish elites get together form form the United Kingdom of Great Britain then they add as I say add Ireland on later and they're fighting the French again. The United Kingdom proved to be a really good scene from the perspective of leaders in London at least a really good solution to a strategic problem it slammed the backdoor shot, but already by the early 20th century. It's less clear that the United Kingdom actually does much for leaders in London it's like it's an answer to a question, but the question itself is beginning to go away. And so I in, in the early 1920s even Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill not known as a founder of Irish nationalism Churchill says it would only be worth spilling a lot of blood to keep Ireland in the United Kingdom. It's a life and death issue for England, and he says it isn't it isn't walk away from the Republic of Ireland and they do. And the rest of the United Kingdom. I think that you're the Brexit vote really exposed some deep divisions and differences within the United Kingdom, because for people in Scotland and Northern Ireland. There's still there's a lot to be said for the old strategy of a lying with continental powers to keep the English tie down. So when voters in Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to stay in the European Union, they were not being stupid or they were extremely sensible and doing this. What the last thing you should want I think if you are in Scotland or Northern Ireland is to have an over mighty England that doesn't have too many problems in its French backyard. This is one of the big forces that might conceivably turn the United Kingdom apart. And it's going to be difficult to dismantle it for all kinds of reasons. Because there's a lot of good country reasons for Scotland and Northern Ireland to stay within the United Kingdom. But, yeah, there's been several polls done recently and they generally suggest that most slight majority thinks United Kingdom will break up by 2030s or so. And I would not be surprised if that's right. So when Scotland is sort of beginning to go its own way on the Brexit issue. Yeah, because we've been creeping in this direction already since long before Brexit, people in Scotland, Northern Ireland, less so in Wales. Wales I think Wales has brought under English control much earlier an independent Welsh church was absorbed by the Church of England much earlier. Wales has become much more, at least most of Wales have become much more anglicised than Scotland or Northern Ireland. But yeah, so this sort of creep away from the United Kingdom has been kind of accelerating since at least the 1960s, but I think Brexit really poured rocket fuel on it. And Wales has oil, right, so it can function as a, I mean, what the details are about how the profit sharing between Scotland and the United Kingdom are but I mean it, it would be sort of like a mini version of Norway, if it if it devolved. Yes, yeah, oil became a really, really big deal in the 1970s in the Scottish national movement. And there before the oil even even came online it was very clear, just how big of a difference this was going to make and the Scottish per capita wealth could have been significantly higher than English if Scotland had gone independent in the 1970s and successfully asserted a claim to that oil. I mean, Scotland's own opinions differ on exactly what happened, but Scotland, it seems to me only stays in the United Kingdom, rather narrowly, and because the British government just lied to people about what was going on. And then also sort of rigged the votes, gerrymandered the voting. And so it's a very close run thing could have gone very differently. Now, of course, since then the bulk of the oil has been sucked out of the North Sea it would now be a rather different proposition than it was in the 1970s. But yeah, it could be made to work if the Scots want to do this if the English agree this to happen Scotland could join the European Union. And again, your things that we've grown geographical arrangements that we've grown up with I think all of this stuff is on the table now in a way that didn't seem all that plausible, say, 30 years ago, right after the fall of the Union I think we're living through one of the great geographical geopolitical shake ups. Yeah. From Dana, how important have domestic perceptions within Britain being in driving these dynamics, do they lead or follow external changes. Yeah, great question Dana thank you yeah. When somebody speaking says that's a great question. What they mean is now this is something I wanted to talk about but didn't really have time to squeeze it into my talk and now you've given me the opportunity. So, yes. So talking into this book, obviously the title says geography is destiny, but it struck me very much you're looking at these debates that have gone on in Britain and in other countries. How little the prominent actors actually talk about geography and it's like the facilities is accounts of when Athens and Sparta went to war and 431 BC. There's stuff about what they're talking about then he says, but the reason the thing least spoken of the rise of Spartan power, the rise of Athenian power, the threat that's made to Sparta, the thing least spoken of that was what was most important. And I think that's the case here geography was the thing least spoken of always nobody so far as I can tell was talking much about geography. What they were talking about it's all about five other things Nigel Farage the leader of the UK independence party. He was saying right from the beginning there are five things that matter here, and he was absolutely right about them. And these five things there identity, identity, mobility, prosperity, security and sovereignty. These are the five things that everybody talked about. And what Farage saw and was very explicit about he said, and these are not factual questions of who are the British, who should be moving around. The British are the British how secure the British, who holds British sovereignty, they look factual questions. These are questions about values these are normative questions who shuds the British, who should be moving in and out of the British Isles, who should have the prosperity, the normative questions and he was absolutely right this is what the debates were about. And what and he was actually who's writer than he knew he look all the way back to Tacitus 2000 years ago. And these are the five things people talking about 2000 years ago. So, I'm writing this book and I think to myself well, so has everybody for at least 2000 years been really stupid, and they haven't seen this great truth that the great me has seen that geography is destiny, or perhaps, am I really stupid and I'm failing to see what really matters. But I think the explanation is actually pretty obvious that the five forces of identity, mobility, prosperity, security and these are the ways that the underlying force of geography impacts our actual lives. So, of course, these are things we talk about we don't wake up in the morning thinking Oh, at least more most of us don't maybe new America people to thinking oh my God, what is happening to the geopolitical balance today I'm sure you guys do think that you're most of us wake up worrying about your much more mundane things like about our identities and prosperity and so on. And that is the these are the five things that everybody was talking about they are, because intimately connected to the larger geographical question of what does the geography now mean. But I do think that I mean like Thucydides says about Athens a smarter unless you dig down to the thing Lee spoke about the underlying question and bring it up to the surface. You might win a referendum but you're never going to actually solve the problem. That's the final question in the three minutes we have left. You know, the books that you've done geographies destiny Britain's place in the world the 10,000 year history, you know why the West rules for now, or what is it good for I mean they're almost precisely opposite of what academic historians are doing, which is I mean really narrow questions about, I don't know the, the world view of Dutch cheesemakers in 1756 or whatever it is but so what I mean. Good question broad question. In just to finish us off here what do you I mean you take on these very big topics, which obviously require a lot of reading and thinking. Why, why, yes, why, good. I've often asked myself this and several of my colleagues have asked it rather forcefully too. I think partly it's a personality thing. I mean, you're in universities we have this tenure system where you get to a certain point you establish yourself they can't fire you anymore unless you get really out of control. And on the whole tenure is a really bad idea. I was a department chair and a dean I know tenure is a bad idea, but it does do one really good thing which is that it frees you up by taking away your main worry as an academic which is that somebody will fire you for saying what you believe, which is really bad because basically we are unemployable if we're not academic says nothing else we can do so we cannot lose these jobs, we take that off the table, and it frees you up to do what you think are the things that matter and are interesting and the things that suit you I realized quite early on in my career that my great strength is that I'm really a very superficial person. I'm interested in the broad things but in a rather shallow way. And if you write a book about although I'm writing this new book now as a kind of global history of the ancient world but defining ancient is going all the way back to the origins of humanity, at least 300,000 years ago, arguably quite a bit more than but if you write a book on the topic like that, nobody can seriously expect you to know anything about anything that you write about. That's fine, it would be ridiculous to think that the author of a book like that has to have personally investigated every archaeological artifact ever dug up and read everything that exists in the archives on every topic, just unimaginable. A lot of historians find don't like that sort of history because it cuts you off from the foundations you're having to act more like a social scientist or strategist and take on trust. The word of people who you think have done high quality research before you because you can't possibly check it all. And I guess I this I do this because it suits me and I like doing it. But I wouldn't for a moment, say that this is what all historians should be doing is I mean the sort of stuff I'm doing. I think if we don't have some people doing that. It would be a great loss of the profession because we would all be doing the Dutch cheese make the thing. And then it's like, what's the point. But on the other hand, if you don't also have the bulk of professional historians doing what in a certain sense you could say is the really scientific history where you get to the absolute bottom on the issue you're investigating and if it turns out Dutch cheese makers in 1567 is too sort of a topic, then you'll do cheese makers in Groningen in 1567. You'll keep narrowing it down, which makes it sort of comical in a way, but you narrow it down until you can get to the absolute bottom and say I have read everything conceivably relevant to this topic and I can tell you in a way that nobody else can. This is what's going on here. And I think the kind of history I do depends on having a huge professional that doing exactly that kind of work because because the only way you can test these things is by confronting them all the time with the shock of reality what actually happened. And so, yeah, no, I do I do what I do because I like it, and fortunately for me some other people seem to like it too. Well congratulations on the book. And thank you for talking with us today and thanks to the audience for tuning in. And we'll do a virtual thank you very much. Thank you very much Professor Mars. Thank you. Thank you.