Tim Marshall's argument is that mountains, rivers, coastlines and the flat ground in between still decide what a country's leaders can and cannot do, whatever their ideology. Ten chapters, one country or region each, trace the same idea from Moscow to the Arctic: Russia's need for a warm-water port explains Crimea more than any single leader's ambition does; the vast, flat Russian plain that let Napoleon and Hitler march in explains why Russia has always wanted a buffer of neighbouring states between itself and Europe; China's hold on Tibet secures the source of its three great rivers and denies India high ground on its border; and colonial borders drawn in straight lines across the Middle East, ignoring tribe, sect and terrain, explain much of the region's instability today.
Marshall was a foreign correspondent for the BBC and Sky News for over 25 years, reporting from more than thirty countries, and the book reads as dispatches from that reporting turned into an argument: that anyone trying to understand a conflict or a leader's choices without a map is missing the part of the picture that changes slowest.
First published in the UK in 2015 as Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, it became a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller.