This book is one of the best histories, not just military, that I have read. A critic is right who wrote that Atkinson is to historical writing what Sinatra is to singing. He combines a gifted level of fluency with an equally soaring level of research to create a revision of our Revolution that I am sure will be the new standard. Now, it is ChatGPT’s turn …

1. Myth vs. Reality: The True Nature of the War

Atkinson dismantles the romanticized narrative of the American Revolution as a clean, idealistic uprising by a few determined patriots against a distracted empire. Instead, he presents it as a brutal, protracted, and chaotic war of attrition between a populous, increasingly radicalized insurgency and an overstretched, faction-ridden imperial force.

• Brutality on the Ground: One-third of all wartime deaths came from bayonets—signaling vicious, close-quarters combat. Muskets were largely ineffective (1% accuracy), and supply lines were excruciating, exacerbating British vulnerability.

• Psychological and Political Toll: Like Vietnam for the U.S., the British lost not just on the battlefield but in public perception and political will. They failed to win over the American populace, and their military efforts were continually undercut by bad intelligence, poor strategy, and demoralization at home.

2. Strategic Failures and Delusions

• Philadelphia and Howe’s Blunder: The British capture of Philadelphia was both tactically hollow and strategically disastrous. It gave a false sense of Loyalist support—especially in cities like Philadelphia, which misled British command into overestimating their popular base.

• The Tory Illusion: Loyalist support never exceeded 20% of the white population and was shrinking fast. Many fled to Canada or the West Indies. The war’s political center of gravity remained with the Patriots, despite their internal dysfunction.

3. Scale and Stakes of the Conflict

• Not a Colonial Skirmish, but a Global War: By 1778, after Saratoga, France entered the war—partly spurred by early British peace overtures. Spain followed. This transformed the Revolution into a world war.

• Naval Arms Race & Global Theater: The Royal Navy, the largest organization in the world at the time, played a central role. Each ship-of-the-line required massive resources (e.g., 6,000 oak trees, 32 miles of rope), illustrating the industrial and ecological cost of maintaining empire.

• John Paul Jones and Naval Heroics: American privateering and iconic battles like that between Bonhomme Richard and Serapis showed that the revolutionaries could challenge Britain even on the seas.

• Unwinnable War: Britain lost a quarter of its merchant marine to privateers. It was economically and logistically unfeasible to both defend the sugar islands, protect home waters from invasion, and subdue the American colonies simultaneously.

4. Disease, Death, and the West Indies

• King Sugar’s Dark Cost: Britain’s obsession with its Caribbean sugar colonies drained resources. Entire regiments sent to Jamaica perished from disease without firing a shot—e.g., 18 survivors out of 1,000.

• Warships as Floating Tombs: Naval warfare in the 18th century was defined more by disease than by battle, with life aboard ships often amounting to a death sentence.

5. Collapse and Radicalization

• Southern Theater and British Atrocities: As the British campaign shifted South, their tactics became increasingly barbaric. Yet these actions only hardened American resistance.

• Currency Collapse & Internal Decay: Late-war America was full of hardship—worthless currency, unreliable French support, opportunism—but the prolonged struggle forged a deeper identity and attachment to independence.

• Washington’s Endurance: Despite everything, Washington’s leadership remained a pillar of stability. The drawn-out war, rather than disillusioning Americans, forged national unity through shared suffering.

6. Home Front Unrest and British Instability

• Gordon Riots in London (1780): Domestic chaos in Britain—like the week-long anti-Catholic riots in London—revealed the fractures at home. Imperial overreach was not just unsustainable overseas, but destabilizing internally.

Conclusion

Atkinson’s work transforms the Revolution from a clean tale of liberty into a grim epic of survival, brutality, and global entanglements. It reframes the war as:

• A civil war complicated by international geopolitics.

• A protracted insurgency resisted by an empire unwilling to adapt.

• A war of myths, where sanitized patriotism overshadows the brutal, sprawling reality.

Atkinson, in this view, composes not just a revision but an orchestration—replacing the genteel string quartet of textbook history with a full symphonic clash, complete with “drums and all.”

There you have it …

I need to “process” this. I realize it came from my NOTES; however, I would have been stretched to organize them in such a good and accurate fashion.

Would appreciate any comments …

Thank you

· Charlemagne’s empire in 800 AD was the First Reich in the historical narrative of the German peoples. The myth of Charlemagne is rooted in the dream of German unification - a close relative to nationalism. Her post-Charlemagne history is the story of all the forces that kept her divided. While France, England, Spain and even Russia developed various versions of political structures that fed their national character, Germany was in a constant state of flux. When England was violently stitched together by the Norman invasion of 1066, the First Reich of Charlemagne had become a distant memory and the collection of wholly independent princely states known as the Holy Roman Empire was taking shape and ensuring political fragmentation for 800 years. When Spain was consolidated by Ferdinand & Isabel in 1492, Germany was a diplomatic and religious playing ground that would have its horrifying expression in one of the world’s most violent struggles, the Thirty Years War. From 1618 to 1648, up to 40% of the German population would die as the various princely states of the Empire would either fight each other or be used as proxies most directly by the Spanish and French but even by Sweden, Britain and the Ottoman Empire. The closest Germany came to unification was when the newly minted Napoleonic empire occupied her many regions and implemented a benevolent campaign of reform that led to many Germans hoping that Napoleon would remain. As the modern world began to take shape in the 19^th century, the remaining states of Germany, dominated now by Prussia, would still be a minority partner in the power games of the maturing empires in France, Russia, Austria and England. Though Bismark would almost single-handedly create a German state by defeating Austria then France while reluctantly absorbing the hated Catholic provinces of southern Germany, his national version of a unified Germany was, in fact, nothing more than a pan- PRUSSIAN state (see below). It would be that Prussian state that would lead the German people into the tragedy of WWI. The fact is that the first man to truly unify ALL of Germany was Hitler. Germany’s dark place at the heart of two terrible world wars and the horrors triggered by each, was, in no small part, the apocalyptic culmination of an 1100-year search for unification. The ironies only continue as her 20^th century world war sins led to her further bifurcation during the Cold War. Today, within the embrace of a 21^st century version of Charlemagne’s empire (the European Union), she finally stands, albeit a bit shakenly, united.

· Once again, geography is … fate, history, destiny … take your choice. The Northern European Plain that runs from the Low Countries to the Urals has irresistibly shaped the histories of the countries that lie within it: the north of France, central and northern Germany, all of Poland, Ukraine and the vastness of western Russia. Without a great mountain range or expansive sea to block their advances, the hordes from the steppes of Asia ranging from the Hun to the Mongols swept unimpeded through much of the Plain. Russian history is nearly unintelligible without understanding the Golden Hordes terrorizing her in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Poland’s long history contains barely 200 years of independence as the Germans, Russians, Austrians and Swedes take turns dividing up her boundary free expanse. Ukraine, despite a late 20^th century flirtation with geographic independence was always being carved up by her powerful neighbors as so tragically evidenced by the most recent example. For Germany, the EAST was Catholic Poland and the huge presence of the ever-expanding Russia and her millions of Slavs. For almost 1200 years, the river Elbe, where pointedly the Soviet and American troops met at the end of WWII, was the great divide between the Germans and her eastern neighbors. The great plain running from the Elbe to the Urals via Poland, Ukraine and western Russia was, in many respects, for Germans what the West was for Americans – a vast land occupied by, in their mind, inferior but threatening people. Hitler’s popularity was rooted in several tenants ranging from German unification to racial purity; however, the idea of the eastern plains being the Lebensraum destined for German occupation and settlement was the most compelling and romantic. This Germanic version of our agrarian myth provided not only the emotional justification for his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union but was a central thesis in Hitler’s Mein Kampf written 16 years before Operation Barbarossa. As he confessed in his infamous book, America’s ruthless expansion West, her Manifest Destiny, was his model for a greater Germany.

· Modern Germany’s Founding Father was Otto Von Bismark. A tall, imposing and ruthless Prussian, Bismark would stitch together the outlines of modern Germany through war and diplomacy. Such is the traditional narrative. James Hawes’ history draws a very different and revealing conclusion. Bismark never wanted a unified Germany that combined his beloved Prussian north with the Catholic south. His goal was a greater Prussian state with secure borders, a military culture and a low wage, highly productive industrial base. Most importantly, he sought the Prussian ideal of an authoritarian Protestant only state with the hated Catholics of the south (e.g. Bavaria) with their Austrian sympathies and the equally despised Catholic and Slav peoples of Poland and the East all kept at arm’s length. His diplomatic brilliance fell short of this goal, and he was eventually forced to incorporate the despised Catholics and even go so far as to sign a treaty with Austria to secure his new Germany. This was a compromise that upset all parties. This was not the celebratory unification of the long-fragmented Germany. Instead, it was newly emerged modern state dominated by a militaristic Prussian minority that would lay the foundations for Germany’s role in WWI. The Kaiser was from a Prussian royal family. The military was run by Prussians. The large corporations were run by Prussians. The German juggernaut of 1900 was very much the product of a Prussian minority.

The role of the organized minority in modern history is both instructive and disturbing. While our Founding Fathers were fearful of tyranny from either the Executive Branch or from the rule of the majority, they clearly did not foresee the ability of an organized minority, like the Slave Power South, to consolidate power at the expense of the majority. A tiny minority of Bolsheviks would seize control of Russia and rewrite history. Though he would eventually receive the support of most Germans, Hitler’s Nazi party origins were that of an extreme minority amidst the great political confusion of the Weimar Republic. Arguably, a conservative minority has controlled Israel for over two decades. In our backyard, there is MAGA, a minority of no more than 30% of Americans, that is threatening America and the world with its toxic agenda. Even in an era of unlimited access to information and opinion, the greatest political threat is too often the vulnerability of a distracted, indifferent or fragmented majority to the concentrated, single-minded will of a determined or threatened minority.

NOTE: these minorities usually require another minority group to operate as the scapegoat to fuel their ferocious loyalties. When Bismark cut his deal with the German south and latter Austria, he lost his very effective Catholic scapegoat. He and his ultra-Protestant (mostly Lutheran) Prussian cohort immediately substituted the Jews for the Catholics, igniting an antisemitism that would forever scar Germany.

· The largest employer in the world in 1913 was the German (Prussian) railroad system. The German industrial worker worked the longest hours in Europe for low wages in return for health care and job security. Though not at all the same, the similarities with China’s 21^st century model are striking.

· In 1914, it was clear that Germany would surpass Britain industrially. Her steel provided the armor for the Royal Navy and her technology was cutting edge. Britain both feared and profited from Germany’s growing economic might and this paradox (a version of Thucydides trap) mirrors America’s current relationship with China.

· World War One did not end on November 11^th, 1918. Whole divisions of Prussian led soldiers continued fighting the despised Poles for months after the Armistice and their veteran remnants would form the core of the first ultra-right party in post war Germany. Poland was despised not only for its Catholicism but, in the minds of the Prussians, as the “womb” of Europe’s Jews. Several years after the Versailles Treaty, Prussian militarists would skirt the armament restrictions by developing an arms industry in the Soviet Union. This cooperation with the dreaded Slavs would lay the groundwork for Hitler’s notorious 1939 pact with the Soviet Union that gave him the green light to conquer, destroy and depopulate Poland … the goal of Germany since the Teutonic Knights in 1410.

· It was hard not to compare the long-standing split between the eastern Germany of strict Lutheran Protestants, the Teutonic Knights, Prussia, the Kaiser and the post WWII GDR and the western Germany with its Roman roots, its Catholic and religious diversity and its French influence with the split between much of America and the South. With the rise of a Vance supported hard right, Germany today remains haunted by its two halves. MAGA is, likewise, the modern crude return of the Anti-Federalists, the reincarnation of the Civil War without the obvious spark of slavery, and the dangerous overreach of anti-communism. In the case of America, our vast and protected geography absorbed our terrible differences until technology began to erase space. Geography, however, only exasperated Germany’s differences allowing for external and internal trafficking of conflicting ideas and peoples. Clearly, much of this is a bit of a stretch, but the fun of a book like this is that it provokes such comparisons. It allows you to conjure up the rhymes of history

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• England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland … islands of Celts until the Romans arrived. The Celt world would vanish in England but would linger in Ireland and Wales. Gaelic Ireland is a hybrid of the original Celtic world. The Welsh and Irish languages today reflect that. England is the true mutt of the group.

• Caesar failed in his first attempt. The island would not be truly “Roman” until Hadrian. Latin left only a minor legacy in the language of the English … soon to be overwhelmed by Germanic tongues and then French. Rome never conquered Wales or Scotland and intentionally stayed far away from the Irish.

• After Rome, the invasions began … mostly Saxons and Angles from the north and northwest coasts of Europe. Chaos ruled with the Arthurian legend arising from the efforts to resist the invaders and bring peace.

• The Danes (Vikings) would overwhelm England and Ireland. It was, for a moment, the tenuous makings of a Scandinavian empire with England at its center.

• Alfred the Great, however, would organize the Saxons … he was the great Saxon king. The Danegeld (property tax) would stay in place and pay for a “modern fleet” and an organized army. The baronial council called the Witan elected Alfred - no dynastic kings yet. England then was a Christian but entirely illiterate society. All through this period of invasion and Saxon resistance, Wales and, to a lesser extent, Scotland would be separate from the affairs of England.

• The Danes return in part due to a Norwegian Viking separatist revolt from Denmark. They would violently reconquer England. The Dane Canute takes over and evolves into an enlightened king embracing much of Alfred’s Saxon world in order.

• After Canute, Edward the Confessor takes over. Deeply pious and more a monk than a king, Edward, without an heir, promises England to everyone ranging from his brother-in-law Harold to the Danes to William the Bastard in Normandy. He also builds the first version of Westminster Abbey. Throughout the early history of England, clear up to the Tudors, no matter the violence or disruption, churches and, later universities, were being built.

• William the Conqueror from Normandy fills Edward’s vacuum. He, like is clan, is in lineage an ex-Danish Viking who quickly and deeply assimilated a French Norman identity. A similar Norman crew with a similar knack for violence and assimilation would conquer Sicily at the same William invaded England. The Norman influence on Western civilization is one of the most overlooked of stories in part because of their gifts of assimilation and leadership.

• William had to defeat another claimant to the throne, the hapless Harold. Harold would be the first to make a break for the throne. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the whole story of his ill-fated effort: his capture by William, his oath to William, his breaking the oath … then William building a fleet, hiring mercenary knights (by promising land in England) and defeating Harold at Hastings in 1066. This victory was far from a given. Harold’s formidable soldiers were exhausted from just thwarting a Danish invasion in the North a month earlier.

• William’s success was a military one - he conquered England (not Scotland & Wales). He made himself king based on pure power and distributed to his knights and supporters the many manors of England. He rearranged ownership and privilege and laid a firm foundation for both his kingship and the future aristocracy of England. He took control of the Church. There was no separation of Church and State. Most importantly, Rome did not, from the beginning, have as much influence with the English monarch as it did in the rest of Europe. William built both citadels and cathedrals and had firm control of both the military and the courts.

• French was the language of the court, but English was going through a 300-year assimilation with both the French language, the people’s own use of it and the many strains of the Old Saxon English. Its Germanic origins were gradually smoothed away by the people creating a dynamic, poetic language that contained an extraordinary number of simple words.

• William’s son Rufus takes over and is no William, but things hang together. This would be the beginning of the rise of feudalism in England. Like life on the Continent, feudal England was organized around a manor that the king gave a vassal in return for knights. The peasant is only marginally free with no markets to sell the fruits of his labor to except his lord.  Yet, and this matters, he is secure in his place. This hierarchical world will lay the groundwork for monarchical kingdoms and the divine right that buttressed them. The biggest issue was the Conflict of Investiture. A bishop serves two “Gods” - the Pope and the King. The first invests him with spiritual power while the later supplies land, a congregation, a church, and money. Thus, who invests the bishop? If the former, then the Church is separate from the king. If the latter, the king is defacto the spiritual font of the church. Endlessly difficult … one can trace it to Henry VIII in the 16^th century all the way to the increasingly controversial tax free status of American churches. Norman kings seize up to a third of England’s forests for royal hunts. Almost half of all serious criminal cases for hundreds of years will involve trespassing or poaching on these grounds … penalties often included death.

• Henry I will grab power from his absent brother Richard when Rufus dies. His will be a long and peaceful reign. The whole concept and ideal known as “the King’s Peace” would begin here. Henry replaced feudal courts with royal courts and accelerates the use of a jury which originated with the Franks and was later embraced by those extraordinary Normans.

• Henry’s death will trigger 15 years of anarchy that will be unsteadily settled by a tentative King Stephen who will seek legitimacy by anointing the future Henry II from Anjou as king. Henry II, born of ferocious stock, will be a great English king who spent the vast amount of his long reign in France rather than England. He spoke French and preferred all that was French. His famous marriage to his equally fierce wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (eight years his senior) at age 19, created the Angevin Empire with England occupying more of France than the then French king, Louis. This brief “empire” took shape around 1200 and was doomed from the start. For it to be successful England would have to eventually subordinate itself to the much larger, more populous, and richer France. That and the thorny issue of the English Channel made certain that that was never going to happen. It would take 250 years and a One Hundred Year War to set things straight.

• The Thomas Becket affair is shrouded in mythic history. Becket himself chose to be a spiritual leader only after Henry II made him Archbishop despite Becket not being ordained. He did so because Becket was his confidant, his Henry Kissinger, and his brutal warrior, leading his chosen armies into battle. Becket’s spiritual conversion was apparently sincere as was his conviction that the Church had the final say in judicial matters – a position utterly untenable for a sovereign. It was another version of the battle mentioned earlier (Conflict of Investiture) that would plague English history. His storied death was a product of Henry’s wrath but the specifics remain a mystery. Henry’s repentance was profound, but the people never forgave him. Thus, an instructive story about the power of martyrdom in the body politic of a people.

• Henry II was the first Plantagenet king. His reign was long and by the standards of the day, peaceful. He reconfigured the feudal justice system, introducing the concept of a grand jury and the position of a circuit judge. The latter went from town to town making rulings along the way without a written code, blending local usage of the law with royal decrees and ecclesiastical precedents in a “circuitous” process that slowly created what is now referred to as Common Law. The relative stability of England during the Middle Ages can be ascribed to geography, a high degree of homogeneity (a still independent Wales & Scotland aside!), a Church not controlled by the Pope and, possibly the most important, a system of justice well beyond her contemporaries.

• Henry’s 35-year reign ends in 1189 in chaos – his three sons plotting to get the throne. In the end it was Richard the “Lion Hearted”, the oldest, who would rule from afar – either from is beloved Normandy or on a “crusade”. As romantic as his father was a realist, Richard joined Philip of France in organizing the Third Crusade, paying for it through the first round of non-land related taxes in English history. It is a long story that ended with imprisonment, release, and death. He was both a complete failure and the stuff of legend. His awful brother, John, would take over but a quick note before that. England came late to the Crusades but would benefit from them the same as the rest of Europe. Despite the religious fervor, the slaughter, the little known but genocidal pogroms, and the rampant pillaging, the exposure of the Europeans to the more developed and cultural world of Islam would be one of the triggers for the Renaissance. The Islamic Empire, though fragmented, was the center of the world at this time and had been for hundreds of years and was as brightly lit as Europe was dark. For many Europeans, a glimpse into the Islamic world was like opening the door to Narnia. Once the door was opened, city states like Venice and Genoa rose to imperial heights trafficking the riches of one world to another.

• Meanwhile, the despotic King John was king. Despised by the French, John would lose all the English holdings in France. Hated by the barons, John was unable to raise the money to fight France. Ever the popular guy. John was soon excommunicated by the Pope. John sought Papal and baronial forgiveness and getting a little room for maneuver, attacked France, and lost again, badly. To keep his job, he agreed to the Magna Carta in 1215. This document took on much more significance in the last 400 years that it did in its first 400 years. It was only translated into English in the 16^th century. It would be utterly dismissed under the Tudors when the “divine right” of kings was at its apogee.

• What the Magna Carta did do was drawn the line in the sand when it came to royal prerogatives. While Henry II was maybe as ruthless as his son John, he respected the power of the barons. The Magna Carta documented the feudal rights of the barons and opened the door, albeit barely, to the concept of a Parliament. (NOTE: Feudalism was more than serf and lord. It was an early model of separation of powers … the king, the barons, and the church operated in their own spheres of influence. Representative government is much more a by-product of feudalism than the monarchical systems that replaced it.) The Magna Carta did NOT usher in habeus corpus and only vaguely endorsed “English liberties”. These have been projected onto it over the years as the Magna Carta became a primary source for the slow emergence of representative government and individual protections.

• King John died from a lunch of too many peaches and too much cider.  England then stumble through the thirty-year reign of a religious but simple Henry III. The Magna Carta received annual lip service while the barons viewed with deep suspicion Henry’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Vatican. It reached a breaking point when the Vatican “gave” Henry’s son Sicily – that is, if he could conquer it. Simon de Montfort led a rebellion against the King, captured him and called England’s first de facto “Parliament” – a sociopolitical concept derived from the use of “communes” in French society … later translated in England to “commons” … taking shape eventually in the House of Commons. Montfort was ahead of his time, and his representative experiment would have to wait. The soon to be king, Edward, rallied supporters, slew Montfort, and awaited Henry’s death.

• The England that Edward I would inherit and dramatically alter was deeply religious and entirely Catholic. It was shaped by a devotion that embraced the Crusades and would, in 1290, expel the Jews. The Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops were part of the Rome’s Papal order: however, England distinguished itself from the rest of Europe with its relentless tug-a-war with clerical authority. This was shared by the people themselves who preferred a “mixed” authority in their lives. Nonetheless, God was in the air they breathed and the beer they drank (only the poor drank water). The monasteries and abbeys were the centerpieces of communities where towns were tiny and stores as we know them utterly non-existent. The wealthy and often corrupt monk had been replaced by the pious and tireless friar of the recently organized Franciscan and Dominican orders. It would take many generations before these orders too would succumb to the corruption that discredited their monastic predecessors. While the church’s nemesis, humanism, was still a couple of hundred years away, its birthplaces were taking shape all over Europe and nowhere more than in England. Oxford and latter Cambridge grew as a training ground for learned “clerks” who could serve as administrators for both church and state in a deeply illiterate England. The university “student” (not at all a product of wealth) and his teachers, were now players in an evolving feudal world. The other players who would accelerate the secular changes that lay on the horizon would be the mythic knight and the prosaic burgess.

• Edward II was ineffective and very likely gay and utterly uninterested in governing. His wife would try to put her lover, Roger of Mortimer, in power but was later rebuffed by her son Edward III. Edward II was forced by Mortimer to abdicate and was murdered by Tower guards. Having reached maturity, Edward III showed his future mettle by removing and killing Mortimer, much to the relief of most of England.

• Edward III and later his son, the Black Prince, would start and prosecute the inevitable Hundred Years War with France. Inevitable because the two countries were so intertwined in every sense ranging from language to commerce to royalty. The kings and queens were often related and only recently was the despised French language losing its grip on England. English wool, the first great “imperial” product of Britain, was sold to French Flanders and was central to the English economy thus making a secure English Channel a priority. Only 150 years earlier, the English occupied, however speciously or unrealistically, most of France.

• The war would begin with the Welsh longbow defeating the glorious, knighted cavalry of France at Crecy and later Poitiers. The longbow legend of Agincourt – fought later – is real. The bow was a Welsh creation and Edward III required all households in Wales with males to have one ready for service. The humiliated French retreated into strongholds and remained in them as the English, with no knowledge of siege warfare, plundered France, infuriating the once friendly locals, hauling real treasure back to their homeland while settling for a modest ceasefire where they took Calais and Aquitaine. They will expel all the French from Calais, a vital port in the wool trade, and repopulate it with Englishman and the city will remain in Britain’s hands for over 200 years.

• Edward III was a tough nut who worshiped the culture of chivalry unless, like all the knights themselves, it interfered with his self-interest. While there were efforts to restore the mythic Roundtable, what did take firm root was the bubonic plague. Having begun in the steppes of Mongolia ten years earlier, the plague arrived in Britain with a particular vengeance killing up to 50% of the population. Britain with its huge black rat population and no real hot weather, was a perfect place for the plague and it would haunt her as well as much of the world for almost 300 more years. Those who survived, prospered. Desperate lords gave their serfs land in exchange for rent. This monumentally important transition from serf to landowner created the first “farmers” of the Middle Ages – the word farming coming from the word “firm” which was how this new arrangement felt to the peasant. The Black Death in its horror released prosperity and capital and the resultant explosion of trade with the continent can be called the first hint of future empire. Trade, control of the seas on which it relies, and the start of a more worldly mindset all came from surviving these dark times

  

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Rough timeline leading up to the Armada:

1492 – Spain’s rush of empire … across two continents and the silver and the gold to pay for it.

1543 - first year of two annual treasure ship convoys (not including Manila treasure ship convoy and the trade with China) … no silver & gold, no empire.

1548 - Netherlands (northern Low Country provinces) declares independence … start of 60 year war between the emerging Dutch Republic and her fickle Protestant allies and the Spanish Empire … Spain’s Vietnam.

1554 - Queen Mary marries Philip II affirming her Catholic ardor (thus Bloody Mary) and edging Spain closer to long anticipated control of England (and the seas). Utterly loveless marriage but underscores both Spain’s ambitions and England’s fears.

1555 - Charles V (King of Spain, Low Countries, the Spanish New World, Hapsburg Empire, Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples) abdicates … the empire to be run by his less formidable son, Philip II.

1558 – Queen (Bloody) Mary dies leaving no direct heir. Door open for the future Elizabeth I – the right person at the right time.

1573 - the Battle of Lepanto … massive Ottoman fleet defeated by Christian coalition in Adriatic … Spain temporarily free of Ottoman encroachment both via the Balkans and, most importantly, in most of the Mediterranean.

1575 - first Spanish bankruptcy … creditors were Italian city states and the Papacy … war in Netherlands a primary reason among many others. Spain another example of a resource rich country (silver & gold from the New World) unable to manage its affairs – like many oil states today.

1580 - Spain conquers Portugal … now in control of Iberian Peninsula, the spectacular harbor of Lisbon, the huge fleet and ship building industry of her rival empire

1582 - Spain seizes Portuguese Azores against remnant resistance from Portugal lightly supported by the Dutch & England … his empire at its peak, Philip now begins to shape “Enterprise England”.

1585 - Drake attacks Galicia … most blatant example of long running naval war between the Spanish fleet, in particular the biannual treasury fleets from the Spanish Main in the New World and the state sanctioned and legendary pirates of England (e.g. Drake and Hawkins) … the building of the Armada begins in earnest.

1587 - Elizabeth executes Mary Queen of Scots sealing England’s Protestant commitment and further fueling monarchical insecurity everywhere.

The following are rough notes written as I read:

English warships were superior in design as were her guns … the English abandoned boarding as a tactic and opted for shooting with better guns and faster ships from a distance … the Spanish ships were heavily armed but slow ships that carried soldiers prepared for boarding … the English royal fleet was outnumbered by English armed merchants (part of the emerging public/private nature of the British Empire) … the privateering was a huge practice that was protected and helped finance Elizabeth’s England … Mary Queen of Scots, cousin of Elizabeth, married the future French king (who died) and led a pathetic revolt against QE1 … MQS was all about France first and foremost … Mary and the constant but very real Spanish intrigue left Elizabeth’s position a vulnerable one … Spain and England were, previous to Bloody Mary and the “pirates”, great allies against France but religion, intrigue, Ireland, pirating and particularly the Dutch revolt separated them … Spain’s conquest of Portugal was a game changer: the huge Atlantic worthy Portuguese fleet, the overseas territories, Lisbon harbor and bloody occupation of the Azores culminated in the first empire where the Sun never set and, of course, the hubris that came with it … always - particularly in Philip’s mind - there was the sincere and fanatical belief that they were being led by their Catholic God —- HUGE part of the actions of the empire particularly from its leaders … Philip co-opted Alexander the Great’s legend “The World Is Not Enough” as the logo for his empire … Elizabeth had already unleashed Drake’s Famous Voyage in 1580 to Pacific treasure port in Panama that returned plunder equivalent to 5X the government’s annual revenue … the privateering clearly foreshadowing British East India Company & other such government supported private adventures (the Virginia Company) that would drive the imperial machine until the late 19th century - many of the royal navy warships were privately owned by Drake, Howard, Hawkins and even the Queen.

Elizabeth picked the fight with Drake attacking Galicia and terrorizing the Spanish on all fronts, encouraging full-out piracy and sending thousands of soldiers to fight Spain in the Netherlands … England had become an imperial threat because of her naval reach … the planning for the Armada took three years and was the 16th century equivalent of Normandy … Philip II chose the worst of three options - the Grand (his) Design … quite possible the Armada may have succeeded based on either Admiral Santa Cruz’s (he would die before the Armada – aserious blow) or the Duke of Palma’s plan … the centralization of power around the king remains in many respects the fatal flaw of Philip’s empire … shades of Napoleon & Hitler.

Wider context … France distracted by religious turmoil with Elizabeth supporting the Protestant Huguenots led by Henry of Navarre (future Henry IV after Henry III assassinated in 1589)… an engaged France might have nixed the Armada … plots and assassinations everywhere in Europe … Elizabeth in constant and real danger … Ottomans in prolonged fight with Persians after failure at Lepanto leaving Spain free to act … renewed funding coming from Vatican & Florence greased the skids …the execution of Mary in 1587 … a regicide - a big deal everywhere … Mary caught in her third plot … made sense in terms of security and safety but even QE terrified of ramifications.

Philip’s micromanaging versus Elizabeth’s trust in her captains (Howard & Drake in particular) the key difference … also: 1). English guns and gunnery superior 2). English did not need to board to win 3) English ships faster and more agile 4). English sailors all sailors and spoke one language versus inexperienced UN collection on Spanish ships 5). English fleet not really outnumbered 6). Fought on home t(s)urf.

The legendary and fatal storms were most likely a product of an extreme El Niño … the Armada’s northern escape might have been successful otherwise … they should have turned around and attacked an English fleet that had run out of ammunition but little could they know in their desperate state … the English troops in Ireland abetted by pillaging axe wielding Irish slaughtered the ship wreck survivors partly in fear of the Armada restaging in Ireland but mostly for pillage … thousands were slaughtered … 33 Spanish ships lost … 20,000 dead Spanish … half of all the English who fought died within a year - mostly from disease … Admiral John Howard was the true hero of England while soon forgotten was a Queen who ignored the dying sailors and soldiers … the heartless, cheap England that always lay under her imperial glory …

There were English counterattacks over several years … Phillip’s belief in his sacred place still influenced him … Bankruptcy was declared a second time … Phillip II and later Elizabeth die … his son settles affairs with the new English king, James I … James stops supporting the Dutch … full reset … easily forgotten that despite Philip’s ambitions and hubris, Elizabeth picked this fight with her open embrace of piracy, support of the Dutch and the building of a fleet …

1588 used like Lincoln’s bloody shirt as a rallying cry for the Protestant elite when threatened throughout the endless, historically under the radar, religious civil war in England … the scapegoats of Spain (the Empire never fully recovered): #1 the Admiral - Medina Sidonia … #2 the General in Spanish Netherlands preparing to invade England – the Duke of Parma … #3 Philip II … the fatal flaws of the Grand Design were Philip’s first and foremost … in the end, it was two of the great forces of history – HUBRIS and FORTUNE – that carried the day in the shape of a fatal underestimating of the English, religious grandiosity, Mother Nature and an endless series of bad tactical decisions.

The Armada

The Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance in 1588

Colin Martin & Geoffrey Parker

2023 762 pages

NOTE: there is a catch … this very relevant book was written in 2015. My discussion of it was mostly composed shortly after its publication. The book certainly might feel different given the existential challenges of the last five years: climate change acceleration, the rise of authoritarianism, and the pandemic. To qualify all his observations given these three serious international developments would detract from the real purpose of the book. Geography is fate in many people’s eyes. Climate change can be looked at the same way; however, it is first and foremost the environmental by-product of how we have chosen to live within our geographic parameters. Though the many tensions explained in this book, particularly the role of water, have to be refreshed given the very evident acceleration the world is now experiencing and finally acknowledging, it is also instructive to read about our world without the drumbeat of climate change – particularly given the great immutability of a country’s relationship with its footprint on this earth. Marshall’s central thesis about the US and China, the great geographic lotto winners, remains valid though the international leadership potential of both nations have been brought into question by authoritarian shifts and mounting suspicions. The pandemic’s place in this book is uncertain though the poorer nations’ difficulties with the crisis are surely rooted in their geographic handicaps. Back to the book …

Marshall divides the book into geographic regions of the world with supporting maps. There is no surprise in his choices though there are wide variations of analysis and interpretation in each. The following is an effort to highlight what caught my attention in each section. This summary should, I hope, reveal both how illuminating the book is and how irresistible a role geography has played and will continue to play in all our lives and the lives of our children.

1. CHINA

Marshall’s treatment of China warrants a bullet point review before moving onto China’s role in the book’s overarching thesis. While I admit that the bullets may reveal more my own ignorance about China as opposed to Marshall’s capacity for insight, I felt China come more into focus with each one.

• China’s huge population is 90% Han and the not so gradual expansion of this massive population into non-Han territories ranging from Tibet to Xinjiang serves so many social, economic and political purposes that it may represent China’s most potent long term weapon.

• The annexation of Tibet in 1951 was the culmination of a long term desire of China to secure her border with India using the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Mountains as impenetrable boundaries and nothing the Dali Lama, the world press or India does will reverse a geographic imperative as vital to China as the two oceans are to the United States.

• The Chinese have been building huge projects for a very long time. The Great Wall is the most famous but less known is the world’s largest inland waterway, the Grand Canal, connecting its two great rivers and the southern and northern coastal regions. Both projects took centuries. The Chinese are comfortable with the idea of long-term investments. As Marshall points out in the sections on Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, the world is being restitched together in a Chinese quilt of infrastructure investment every bit as massive and patient as the work done on its wall and its Canal years ago.

• Xinjiang is a huge part of western China with a large Muslim population that is undergoing the same Han dilution that Tibet is experiencing. Of course, this “dilution” is being accompanied by widespread violation of the rights of the Muslim Uighurs who represent over 40% of the population of Xinjiang, This is all part of a long cherished, long term plan of securing her borders – borders that had been a violent source of unrest throughout China’s 3000 year history. While it is no excuse for genocidal behavior, it puts thing in historical perspective. Like Tibet, a couple of hundred years later, Xinjiang was incorporated into China despite serious domestic issues arising from a less than compliant Muslim population because Beijing wanted a physical buffer between it and the larger Muslim world. With a compliant Mongolia in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Tibet in the South, the only real vulnerability for China lies in its sea-lanes.

• China is building a huge Blue Navy to secure those very sea-lanes and project Chinese power around a world that will be increasingly bound together by Chinese financed infrastructure and trade. The Blue Navy will sail between islands recently claimed and even built by China and will refuel in Chinese built ports around the world. Though increasingly a geopolitical long shot, her fleet might be able to bypass the US built and protected Panama Canal by utilizing the planned canal in Nicaragua. The US and China are in a long dance where one template of economic, political and military power is gradually being laid on top of the other. There are as many good reasons for China’s neighbors to stay close to the American Pacific Fleet as there are for them to make room for the new Blue Navy of China. The same duet will be played out across the world. It will be the most important diplomatic dance of the 21st century, two hugely influential countries radiating out from rock solid geographic bases.

• Two things to think about as China builds its navy and consolidates its stranglehold on Tibet: firstly, 80% of its oil passes through the narrow Strait of Malacca and most of China’s water comes from its “water tower” in Tibet where its three major rivers originate.

• Finally, 40% of China’s arable land is no longer productive and a similar number exists when it comes to the quality of her drinking water. There are over 500 serious protests a day. One must always keep in mind that her economic miracle and the relentless migration of her Han population are also desperate attempts to avoid social and economic upheaval.

2. THE UNITED STATES

Marshall’s opens the section with the accurate observation that no nation drew a better lot than the US in the great geographical lotto. After a breezy summary of our expansion into our vast, secure continent, Marshall addresses his persuasive thesis that due to our mix of political and economic success, secured by our physical place in the world, the United States will not be going into the geopolitical twilight anytime soon unless we choose to do so.

His point about the great geographic benefits of our continent is as powerful as it is obvious. Protected on either side by two massive oceans, the United States was able to spend its first three hundred years moving west without the fear of outside aggression. This massive colonization allowed it to grow into its political and economic potential with the only mortal threat coming from within in the form of the Civil War. There might be economic panics, social disruptions and political intrigue; however, there never existed a Mongol Horde or a Napoleon on the horizon. This enormous incubation period may in fact be the only real example of American exceptionalism. Granted, it is important that the people who settled this land did so on the back of the liberal principles of private property and individual rights and freedoms. Granted, the country was blessed with a founding generation with the foresight and genius to protect those principles within the Constitution and a balance of power shared between the states and the federal government that provided the political and social resilience to absorb the many shocks of great growth and change. However, much of this came in direct and indirect ways from our English heritage and without the precedents and example of the English form of government, it is hard to imagine that the American Experiment from 1607 till now would have been so fruitful and dynamic – so much so that most every part of the developed world has mimicked some part of it. To reiterate, the fact that this country could grow for so long without a mortal external threat may have been the most exceptional gift ever offered to any peoples.

Even today, in a world with international terrorists, a nuclear threat, intercontinental missiles, and a global infrastructure making all of this terrifyingly accessible, these oceans remain the greatest early warning system any nation could ask for. The northern border with Canada is not only the longest shared border in the world, it is also the most peaceful. America not only has a neighbor whose differences are greatly outweighed by what we have in common, but it is a neighbor with a vast amount of land that is pretty much uninhabitable and, as such, serves as another great early warning system. The southern border with Mexico is permeable, dangerous and the constant source of real and imagined dangers. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society imagined hundreds of thousands of Chinese communist soldiers amassing in the vast Mexican desert awaiting orders to invade America. This border has and will continue to be a mother lode for apocalyptic thinking and populist paranoia in a nation prone to paranoid fantasies – fantasies rooted in the anxiety of its good fortune … its good geographic fortune. The reality of Mexico is very different. A nation constantly crippled by inept and corrupt governance with no real military heritage, separated from the United States by a vast and utterly hostile desert poses a threat only in so far as we allow it to. Our own inconsistent immigration policies, our desire for cheap labor and, most fatally, our addiction to drugs, are each responsible for creating a “national security” threat where there isn’t one.

Unless we undermine our success with domestic dysfunction, Marshall’s book makes a good case that our lotto winnings will continue to reap success and influence around the world. The great American Experiment is only ours to destroy.

3. EUROPE

Marshall is in his element as he describes Europe as a product of geographical diversity, its many nations nestled within natural borders, its vulnerability being the same wide plain that has so terrorized Russia. It is best to stick with the geography itself and within it is the story of much of Europe’s unique history.

• THE GULF STREAM provides the northern half of the continent with temperate seasons, enough sun and rain to grow crops and enough wintry weather to discourage the bugs and diseases faced by much of the world. Without this remarkable watery gift from the Atlantic, much of Northern Europe would face the challenges of the long cold winters of her Russian neighbors.

• The RIVERS of Europe are the arteries that connect and separate. They are numerous and almost entirely navigable. With her generous climate and good soil, surplus crops are easily shipped from one sector to another. The rivers often end in huge, natural harbors and the infrastructure for a trading continent is naturally in place. The Danube’s place in history cannot be overstated. It presently serves as a natural boundary for 18 countries and back in ancient times was the dividing line between the cultural birthplace of Europe, Rome, and the wild tribes beyond it. France is blessed with rivers crossing her latitudinally and longitudinally with splendid harbors at each terminus. Germany’s two great rivers are the natural interstates between her northern and southern halves while providing some desperately needed natural boundaries.

• The MOUNTAINS of Europe are as numerous as they are modest, protecting smaller states from the neighbors and, in the case of the Pyrenees, allowing large states like France and Spain to coexist with minimal friction. The Balkan mess may be a product of too many mountain ranges, allowing a plethora of small states to emerge without anyone assuming primacy. The Austria-Hungary Empire can be seen as an effort to override the natural confederate geography of this infamously unstable region of the world.

• Europe’s many SEAS and OCEANS and the straights and channels that come with them have facilitated endless opportunities for trade and invasion. On one hand your have the Vikings navigating their way through every conceivable waterway to terrorize much of Europe and on the other hand you have the formation of the Hanseatic League over a thousand years ago along the continent’s northern coast. The greatest European beneficiary of the earth’s waters, however, must be Great Britain. With its temperate climate and healthy air, entirely a product of the Gulf Stream, this island spent over a thousand years since the Norman Conquest enjoying enough geopolitical immunity to nurture its political and economic systems to the point where it would one day control a sixth of the world. While there is so much that went into the British Empire, it is hard to refute that without its geographic advantages, England may never had joined the ranks of Rome in the annals of empire-building.

4. AFRICA

Marshall draws a compelling geographic explanation for much of the dysfunction of Africa – a dysfunction made only exponentially worse by the colonial powers, the Cold War and the destructive people left in charge of this vast and problematic continent. It is too large a story for any kind of summary, but a few, by now familiar, hallmarks of the geographic game of fortune are a good place to start.

• The world’s largest desert, the Sahara, and the hard scrabble Sahel region below it incorporate a third of the continent and have separated Africa from the two thousand years of economic growth enjoyed by the lands north of it.

• Except for the Nile in the northeastern corner of this continent, most every river in Africa resists efficient navigation, thereby, discouraging internal trade growth.

• With the exception of the Mediterranean (cut off by the Sahara from any substantial north south trade) and South Africa (at the very tip of this vast continent), Africa’s huge north south coastlines have few harbors and mostly inaccessible interiors.

• Africa had the wrong animals and the wrong crops from the start. Partly due to its forbidding array of ecosystems, Africa was never home to the types of livestock and grains that through the advantages of scale can sustain and nurture both the local populations and trade.

• The geographic immensity combined with the lack of any natural ways to interact and trade led to the development of a complex web of mostly autonomous tribes each with its own language and customs.

The geographic isolation within the continent itself and it isolation from the world around it, made it tragically vulnerable to Western colonialism and economic exploitation. This is a tragic story already told many times. The net result is a quilt of 56 countries with borders mostly drawn by the exiting Western powers, few of which actually reflect the intricate web of peoples that they contain. The results are the horrors of modern Africa: endless wars, failed states, crippling corruption and suffering on a massive scale. While China may succeed through its massive infrastructure investments to connect a previously unconnected continent as she seeks to secure the resources needed to sustain her growth, one wonders if the failed states of Libya and the Congo are actually horribly violent efforts to return parts of Africa back to its more natural, highly fragmented self. The western ideal of the nation state may not fit in a country handicapped by geography and ravaged by history. She may be trying in an anarchic way to reconstitute herself into a postmodern blend of traditional distinctions connected by the combination of Chinese infrastructure and digital technology.

5. THE MIDDLE EAST

This chapter is a terrific primer in both Middle East history and today’s geopolitical chaos. Marshall’s narrative does not condense well and should be read in its entirety. Much of it is all too sadly familiar. What I left it with are the following:

• With the exceptions of Iran, one of the oldest and most successful civilizations in world history, and Turkey, also on the perimeter of the boundary less Middle East, pretty much each and every state in the present day Middle East has almost no reason to be there. Without oil, the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, would most likely be part of either something much bigger or would be forgotten principalities on the world map. Syria and Iraq are falling apart because without extreme tyranny, they are not meant to be in their present configuration. Lebanon was a French daydream turned nightmare. It is a miracle that Jordan still exists and, given the chaos that surrounds it, the same thing might be said of Israel at the end of the century.

• There are people in the Middle East willing to fight for generations to reshape the boundaries of their world. The Kurds might qualify as the most organized ethnic group in the world without a country. In the meantime, they will make life miserable for the three countries that they form a significant part of. The Sunni’s might represent 85% of the Muslim world, but the great majority of that number live outside the Middle East. People ask where the Muslim moderates are as increasingly radical versions of Islam terrorize the Middle East and the world. The answer is simple and obvious and disheartening – they are not in the Middle East. Instead the increasingly failed states drawn up by Western cartographers and oil companies are pretty much evenly split between two factions of Islam that cannot seem to find middle ground. Marshall, like many others, seems pretty resigned to reality of a 21st century version of the Thirty Years War being played out in lands that for centuries lay hidden beneath the cloak of the Ottoman Empire with oil fields not yet needed nor discovered.

  • Like Africa, the Middle East may not be able to resurrect itself on the back of the traditional nation state model. Just as Africa’s long relative obscurity prepared the way for its terrible colonial ordeal and the artificial boundaries that came with it, the Middle East’s history of being one empire’s sandbox after another (Persian & Ottoman to name just two) and a similar pattern of exploitation and artificially constructed order seem to beg the question what kind of order, certainly any familiar variant, can come from the unfolding chaos we are witness to.

6. RUSSIA

There are no surprises here to any student of Russian history. The country’s reliance on buffer zones like Siberia, Eastern Europe and the “Stans” are all part of the historical reality of being “born” on the Northern European Plain that runs from France to the Urals and from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian and Caucasus Mountains. This plain has been a two-way expressway for invasion reaching back to the Mongol Golden Hordes from the East and the Teutonic nights, the Swedes, Napoleon and Hitler from the West (to name a few). Seizing Siberia was part of securing her eastern flank so the more important business of keeping the West at bay could be achieved. Beginning with Ivan the Great, the Russian Empire incorporated land the size of the state of Maryland every year for well over 200 years. There were many motives behind the growth of the massive Russian Empire but acquiring huge a geographic buffer was likely at the top of the list. This fear of entrapment and invasion is more than justified by history and in the eyes of today’s Russian leaders, evident in the encroachment of the EU and NATO on its western flanks. While this story, the story of seeking warm water ports (Crimea & invasion of Afghanistan), the story of a European bias amidst a geographically mostly Asian nation might ring familiar bells, the actual snapshot of this vast country, two huge flat plains divided by the Ural Mountains in the middle, provides a startling visual treatment of national anxiety. With no natural border, the Chinese are gradually changing the actual “face” of Siberia through the steady migration of people north – a natural consequence of a overcrowded nation abutting a vast almost depopulated space. There are no natural boundaries separating Russia from her many Muslim neighbors and the very real threats Islamic radicalism presents to Orthodox Russia. There are no natural boundaries separating a historically very untrustworthy West from destabilizing and chipping away at the buffer zones so desperately needed by Moscow. Geography is Big Picture if it is nothing else and looking at Russia through that lens makes it clear that one can argue that her great geographical vulnerabilities, validated by centuries of war, may be the biggest geopolitical threat to world order in the 21st century.

7. INDIA & PAKISTAN

India is blessed with geography – mostly. Pakistan is cursed by geography – entirely.

India’s advantages in its region are legion. Protected by ocean on its flanks and the Himalayas to the north, the only real vulnerability is to Pakistan on its western border. It has nuclear weapons and the world’s second largest standing army to deal with that. Bangladesh is not a threat except for the fact that this densely populated and terribly poor nation is slowing vanishing under the seas that surround it. Where will its people go? India, of course …

No … the real purpose of this chapter is not the relative advantages of India but the unresolvable disadvantages of Pakistan. It is a sobering list and leaves one wondering whether Pakistan is as much as an illusion as the name itself – ‘the pure land”.

• The country borders are utterly artificial and porous. The northwest, where the Pashtun Taliban lives in an effectively self-governing jurisdiction, should be part of Afghanistan. The northeast is filled with a Muslim Punjab population that in a more harmonious religious environment would be a part of a larger Hindi Punjab population that abuts it in India. Her northern border bumps into India held Kashmir and remains one of the flash points of the world with constant high altitude military exchanges always threatening another war between these two nuclear powers. Just like so many parts of the ex-colonial world, Pakistan is an artificial geographic nightmare trying to coexist with its senseless borders and an utterly suspicious, hostile neighbor.

• Kashmir will never be solved. The Indus River that flows through India controlled Kashmir is the source of two thirds of Pakistan’s desperately needed water. India will hold onto Kashmir to prevent any further encroachment by China through her growing investment in Pakistan. Both nations have a wolf by the ears.

• Pakistan’s 2000-mile border with India is both vast and mostly flat leading to invasion scenarios as terrible as they are plausible. Much of the border can be seen from space, its thin straight line of barbed wire and guard towers illuminated by an endless string of klieg lights. Not unlike NATO living with the specter of the massive Soviet army during the Cold War, Pakistan wields its nuclear capacity as a final solution against an invasion by the million man Indian army.

• Pakistan may never assimilate or even manage whole parts of its country. Another British line in the “sand”, the Durand Line, created the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan with millions of Taliban sympathizing Pashtuns living in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier whose clear allegiance is with their actual brethren in Afghanistan. Peshawar, the center of this area, is a military machine for the Taliban in both countries. In many respects, Osama Bin Laden never really left Afghanistan. There is no mystery behind the corrupt deals Pakistani intelligence must cut to keep a country together that maybe should not be there.

China is taking advantage of Pakistan’s flirtation with “failed state” status to build ports, highways and pipelines in order to secure a trade route that will lessen her reliance on the Strait of Malacca. This will provide money for Pakistan, secure China’s fortunes and frighten India whose long term strategic foe is not the mess that is Pakistan but China, whose navy will soon patrol the Indian Sea and whose Han population will continue to absorb Tibet, further solidifying her presence along their 1652 mile shared border. India, meanwhile, will continue to grow and prosper and her reliance on the US as a shield to Chinese encroachments will serve as solid strategic insurance. Pakistan, meanwhile, will only remain the most dangerous and the largest nuclear-armed “failed state” in the world. The tragedy is that she never really had a chance. If geography is part of the hardwired DNA of a nation, Pakistan was born a cripple.

8. JAPAN & KOREA

The fact that Korea is divided along a geographically senseless border is fitting. Korea as a whole is a stillborn nation. She was always used as either a shield or a route to somewhere else whether by the Mongols, the Chinese, the Russians or the Japanese. South Korea has probably never had it better despite the fact that her utterly cut-off, clinically insane neighbor has 10,000 pieces of artillery aimed at her capital city, has tunnels running underneath her borders ready to dispatch shock troops whenever instructed and, finally, has some sort of nuclear capacity with some sort of deliverability that just might hit a target 100 miles away. China will not allow North Korea to fail. She wants the buffer between her and American protected Japan. She does not want the 25 million crazy North Koreans infecting her as they flee over the Yalu River. It is hard to imagine that South Korea would want reconciliation with her northern brethren. It might be the demographic equivalent of importing the smallpox virus. Japan also, for historical and strategic reasons, would most likely want things to stay just the way they are. The geography, for what it is, suggests that the Alice in Wonderland world of Korea is a frightening situation in a permanent state of mutual checkmate. In a strange way, the utterly bizarre world of North Korea may be just what the world needed in that historically contested peninsula. Its very toxicity and strangeness acts as a DMZ of sorts, keeping in check even more strategically frightening scenarios involving the competing interests of China, Japan, Russia, the United States and, almost as a geopolitical footnote, South Korea itself.

The geography of Japan is bipolar. Surrounded by water, it afforded centuries of isolation. With a large, protected and homogenous population, its mountainous islands would nurture, first, military conquest, and then, later, an economic miracle. It has no real threat from the East except actual tsunamis and imagined Godzillas. Its fear of China in the West, however, is both real and visceral. Trade between the two is growing as quickly as the mutual suspicion. This ancient rivalry exacerbated by the horrors of the 20th century, ensures a long-term strategic purpose for America’s Pacific Fleet and her huge military presence in Okinawa – an island sitting smack in the middle of China’s access to the Pacific.

In fact, this leads us to reiterate one of Marshall’s key points. After his discussions on the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East, it is very evident that America’s role in preventing the Chinese control of trade routes and the very existence of several vital democracies ranging from Israel to India to Japan and South Korea, guarantees that, unless domestic dysfunction makes it unavailable, the world will continue to require a large and powerful American presence to ensure whatever stability, prosperity and ideals it presently enjoys.

9. LATIN AMERICA

There are mostly only sad stories in this section. While geography really matters in the fate of all these countries, the story Marshall tells is more about human failure than anything else. It is hard to embrace this section without thinking what was and what might have been. Pre-Columbian Latin America was home to great empires with civilizations every bit comparable to their European and Asian counterparts. European disease and conquest would forever remove whatever geopolitical advantage this part of the world once enjoyed. Now, the countries, big and small, remain trapped in the amber of their histories, their grudges, their corruption and, of course, their geography.

Like her most famous literary genre, magical realism, there is a surreal quality to the vast string of countries that make up the Latin American chain. Beginning in the north, Mexico’s terrible northern desert has always been an arid incubator of chaos, protecting rebels and cartels, separating the country from its prosperous northern neighbor, ensuring, in a way, that its own terrible civic corruption and violence will remain maybe its most enduring human legacy. Geography affords few favors in the rest of Central America as these tiny nations try to secure themselves amidst natural disasters, foreign interventions and borders so porous that wars can ignite over the result of a soccer match. Panama found refuge in the American built canal and its possible Nicaragua will do the same with China. Costa Rica is the jewel in the necklace and achieved this by being everything but an official state of the United States. Things get bigger but not necessarily better as we enter the huge South American continent.

Brazil is held captive to an unrelenting geography shaped by water on both sides. The Amazon and its vastness is an opportunity that, like the land itself when cleared, vanishes when grasped. The coastline is long but cutoff leaving her trading centers as isolated from the rest of the country as the 25% of her population that continues to live her infamous “favela” slums. Argentina was once one of the richest nations in the world. Today she is famous for relentless inflation and sovereign defaults. Bolivia is isolated and angry. Chile is prosperous and alone.

It is a lonely continent. Marshall argues that people are still betting on its moment in the sun. Maybe Brazil will harness the Amazon and Argentina will finally clean up its act and successfully manage its great natural bounty. By the end of his discussion, though, what comes to mind is his statement that despite the promises of the modern world, the challenges and opportunities of geography, if “you get the politics wrong”, no good can come of it. (America, take note)

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Some final thoughts on this book:

• The China Century is a very real economic and geopolitical thing and she will likely succeed in sewing together, investment-by-investment, an alternative world order of sorts to the one established by the United States in the 20th century. It will NOT supplant Pax Americana; rather, it will go where America has failed (e.g. Africa & Latin America) while shadowing it in the rest of the world. As long as things don’t get dangerously political, another web of infrastructure in the world can only be a good thing.

• Likewise, the rise of China only reinforces the importance of America on the world stage. Marshall’s book does an excellent job of underscoring, in particular, the vital role of America’s navy in the world. Without the glue of empire or competing world ideologies, the world will clearly to continue to reshape itself along lines that have nothing to do with existing geographic boundaries. This reshaping will often be violent and disruptive and will require any and all nations and organizations, ranging from the United Nations to the IMF to China to the US and the EU, that have world stability as either their mission or as a key to their own self-interest, fully engaged in the messy work of managing the geopolitical reality of our world.

• When the 19th century collapsed in the infernos of the two world wars of the 20th century, much was revealed to the world ranging from colonial exploitation and manipulation to the extraordinary diversity and confusion that lay under these imperial blankets. The Ottoman Empire hid the world from the latent conflicts that are now so apparent in the Middle East. The Austrian-Hungarian empire did the same for the Balkans. The British, Russian (later Soviet) and other European Empires all contained cultural and political complexities sublimated by the many imperatives of colonial control. The failed states of today are very much the unresolved, often centuries old conflicts that were, in effect, “liberated” by the loss of an overarching world order at the end of the 20th century. This historical inevitability, however, is made even more tragic by the fact that geography has offered few natural restraints within which the emerging peoples could nurture this fragile independence. While there are so many other equally if not more compelling reasons for a failed state, Marshall’s book makes a persuasive case that a bit of geographic good fortune goes a long way.

• We have all heard the warnings. Water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th. While, like most dire futuristic predictions, it may be a bit premature, it feels pretty unavoidable after reading this book. Egypt cannot live without the Nile but Ethiopia controls is largest source and is beginning to dam that up. Pakistan gets two thirds of its precious water from the Indus that must pass through India controlled Kashmir before it can slake that arid, desperate country’s thirst. As the countries of Southeast Asia have been starkly reminded of recently, the Mekong, their primary river and lifeline, begins on the Chinese controlled Tibetan water tower where the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers also originate. Throw in the increasing extremes of global climate change and the ravages of massive population and industrial growth, it seems inevitable that the geography of water will soon contribute to the geopolitical confusion of our world.

• In the end, I am left humbled by this book. Geography is impersonal. It is impersonal in the deeply sublime way one feels when looking at the vastness of Hubble’s pictures of an incomprehensibly huge universe or when trying to conceive of life being nothing more than the tiny, chaotic world of quantum physics. Our geography, like the laws and customs of our societies, may be a test of sorts. The instructions are there, in the winding course of the rivers, the relative impenetrability of the mountains, the emptiness of the deserts and the vast depths of our oceans. Maybe, like the Europeans trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, our real challenge in the 21st century is to access and fully take in the instructions inscribed within the physical world around us.

Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

2015 240 pages (hardback)

(incredibly, the book was short of really good maps)

1320 Mikhail

Osman, leader of the Turks dies …

The Turks or Ottomans are at the doorstep of the Byzantine Empire.

It has been a 700 year migration from the steppes of today’s northern China.

The Ottomans speak a unique language whose roots are shared by Koreans.

By 1453, the Ottomans under Mehmet II capture Constantinople –

the shot heard round the world … end of the 1050 year Byzantine Empire …

The empire had served as a buffer between a comparatively much weaker

Europe and the vast and more powerful empires of the Middle and Near East …

1492 Mikhail

The “historical caesura” … the moment when the old gave way to the new.

The Ottoman Empire straddled and taxed the eastern trade for Europeans.

Columbus set off to find alternative trade routes … to end-run the Ottomans.

Columbus believed also that a Christian Khan awaited him in “India”.

An alliance with this mythic Khan would allow Europe to surround the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire and Islam as the trigger for the Age of Exploration.

1273 Mikhail

The Persian poet Rumi dies …

Rumi inspired and gave words to the Sufi religious cult of Islam.

Part of the splintering of Islam …

Later the Sufis would merge via the Safavids of Persia into

an imperial Shiite empire – the most dangerous rival to the Sunni Ottomans.

1492 Mikhail

Spain expels both the Moors and the Jews and lays the seeds for empire …

Spain embraced the religious extremes of the Inquisition to unify Iberia …

Spain expels the Moors who had dominated Iberia for over 700 years …

Moorish Iberia was Muslim but independent of the Ottoman Empire …

Moorish cities (Cordoba) were among the world’s most beautiful and sophisticated .

The Jews would form the great Sephardic diaspora and drain Spain of talent.

The Ottoman Empire in the 16th century had the largest concentrations

of Jews and Christians in the world … they thrived.

638 Mikhail

The emerging Muslim Empire occupies Jerusalem …

Would remain in almost entirely in Muslim hands for over 1200 years ...

Crusades in different forms were a part of that entire period …

1275 Mikhail

The Mongol emperor of China recognizes a Christian bishop in China …

The spark behind the Christian Khan myth …

Part of the mosaic behind Western expansion …

The hope to “surround” the Ottoman’s and occupy (finally) Jerusalem.

Reinforced when the new Ming dynasty (1368) sent envoys to Rome.

The stubborn myth of a Christian ally emerging from the East …

An irresistible part of the Northwest Passage fantasy …

1485 Mikhail

Henry VII ends the War of the Roses and the Tudor dynasty begins …

Arguably the beginning of the rise of England …

The Great Fire of 1212 and the Black Death beginning in 1348 were behind them.

London would boom … finally expand beyond her Roman center …

The city turned into a religious and commercial quilt with a diverse population:

Wood Street, Milk Street, Cheapside, Carmelite Street, White Friars Street …

1513 Mikhail

Spanish Crown promulgates the Requerimento …

Distributed to all soldiers and subjects … recited before any battle with “natives” …

It claims the Catholic Church as the only church and insists that natives convert

or be subject to slavery and “all the evil and damages” due to one who

does not obey the Lord.

1519 Mikhail

Charles V named Holy Roman Emperor …

The merging of the Spanish Empire with the Holy Roman Empire …

Creating the first partially unified Europe since Rome.

The Ottomans, meanwhile, with an arguably vaster empire, thought

of themselves as the next Rome …

The ROME phenomena:

Rome itself … Byzantine Empire (Second Rome) … Ottomans …

Holy Roman Empire … the Russian Empire (the Third Rome) …

the term “Reich” has Roman connotations … Pax Americana …

1514 Mikhail

Selim secures a fatwa to invade the Safavid Empire in Iraq/Iran ….

Required a fatwa in order for one Muslim to kill another …

The Shiites were a true existential threat to the Sunni Ottomans …

The two religions had coexisted uncomfortably for hundreds of years …

The Safavid Empire (Persia and later Iran) gave the Shiites a powerful platform.

Selim would slaughter Shiites (40,000+) on his way to defeating the Safavids.

Ironically the defeat opened the door the Straights of Hormuz to the Portuguese.

NOTE: the Sephardic Jews very much directed the modernization of Selim’s army.

1516 Mikhail

Selim defeats the vast but bankrupt Mamluk Empire centered in Cairo …

Selim occupies Syria on the way to Egypt … one of several great Syrian cities

including Damascus, the oldest city in the world, and beautiful Alleppo.

Selim will take Mecca & Medina from the Mamluk’s and will create

the Ottoman caliphate with him as “God’s shadow”.

1517 Mikhail

Selim occupies Yemen …

Yemen had been at the heart of the trading world for over 1500 years …

Yemen’s province, Mocha, controlled 90% of the emerging coffee trade …

The Ottomans would make coffee addiction widespread …

By 1750, the coffee trade was centered in Dutch controlled Java …

By 1850, it had shifted to Latin America where it remains …

Today, coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world

- behind oil.

is utterly remarkable for many reasons. It is also a book I suspect very few people will ever begin, let alone finish. It is 500 pages of names, places, diplomacy, war, horror and arranged marriages. I suspect it (or the war itself) is the origin of Game of Thrones. There is no way Martin composed his hit series of books without first dipping into the Thirty Years War. Albeit, there are no dragons and the millions who died in greater Germany were killed by the very real consequences of anarchy, disease and unchecked mercenary armies. Regardless, the HBO fantasy series mirrors the intrigue, selfishness and butchery that marked these thirty years.

The author is CV Wedgewood – a woman who eventually received all the highest awards an historian can earn over her many years writing about terribly complex times long ago in prose that has been compared to Edward Gibbon for its elegance and clarity. She slowly untangles a spider web of knots and gives structure and coherence to maybe the most anarchic and tortured thirty years in European history. The book is a marvel. Even more marvelous – she wrote it when she was in her late twenties. It was published in 1938 and remains THE definitive treatment of this war. She would later bring her considerable skills to bear on equally dense subjects like the emergence of the Dutch Republic and the English Civil War. I am so happy to have “met” her.

The story serves as a disturbing dotted line metaphor for today. The war was fought in a cloud of disease. Various horrors already dotted the viral landscape of central Europe prior to the war. Add marauding, pillaging armies, peasant revolts and famine and you get disease run rampant culminating in another outbreak of the bubonic plague. Life proceeds despite these horsemen of the apocalypse suggesting that the presence of pandemic level diseases was more the ordinary course of daily life than not. It is a sobering historical fact as we stare into our environmentally challenged future and struggle with our Covid present. It also is a warning on just how unhinged things can get when it comes to unbridled and amoral leadership run amuck, especially if draped in the shroud of religious fervor. One does not read it marking Trump in the margins but one does read it thinking of the many dystopia scenarios that clutter our collective cultural imagination.

The war itself is an exercise in human hubris and madness. It is a world without a coherence that comes with the presence of superpowers or some semblance of a balance of power let alone organizations like the United Nations. The catalyst for the war was religion. The war was the final or ultimate bloodletting of the Protestant Reformation. The participants started along the lines of their religious affiliations with the Lutheran Swedes allying with protestant German princes and a rebellious religiously tolerant Dutch Republic, all lined up against the Catholic Hapsburg and Spanish empires and the Catholic German princes. Throw in a protestant England, a duplicitous and ruthlessly effective Cardinal Richelieu led France, a Catholic Poland and a Lutheran Denmark and you have the beginning of the war. Soon the religious motivations get lost amidst dynastic intrigue and personal ambition and, in the end, all is subsumed by the demands of massive mercenary armies. Henry Kissinger and many of his school believe that the Treaty of Westphalia (again … way more complex than a single treaty) restored order and a balance of power that would not end European wars but would prevent future wholesale chaos and destruction on the scale of 1618-1648. They argue that the Treaty established the framework of sovereignty (independent of religion) required for the rise of the modern nation state and the relative stability that came with it. I have to believe that this is stretching things a bit and I suspect CV Wedgewood might agree with me. The Treaty of Westphalia mostly just ended the war – all parties exhausted and millions dead and displaced. The religious fervor that stoked the war at the start was spent and that might be the most important consequence, not the political realignment that feels to this reader as terribly close to what was there when the whole thing began.

Reading this book may sound like an exercise in despair and given what happened – it is. The treat is Wedgewood herself and her ability to bring coherence, even elegance, to madness.

The Thirty Years War

CV Wedgewood

504 pages

1938

, not only rewrites the American story but provides us with a vivid analogy of the cost and trade-offs that come with empire – an analogy that provides a non-partisan, detached insight into post World War II America in a way only history can produce.

The title suggests a lot. The British never got over “losing” America as evidenced by Parliamentary inquiries, court-martials and a never-ending battle of memoirs all contributing to this “hot potato” of imperial shame. The fact that they could not get over “losing” America suggests that they could have won it to begin with. This is not very different from America’s wars after World War II – a war won so thoroughly by the United States that all wars are measured against its success. This is not entirely unlike Britain’s predicament at the time of the American Revolution. She had just won the world’s first “world war”, the Seven Years War, against France and had dominion over Canada, India, the Caribbean and much more. Her huge empire of the 19th century where the sun never set and one out six of the world’s citizens woke up to the Union Jack had just begun to take shape. Though the Seven Years War barely marked the midpoint of her great eighty-year struggle with France, by 1763 her empire had begun to rapidly fall into place. An empire secured by a vast fleet, a modest but lethal army, rapacious and highly leveraged independent trading companies and an emerging but often precarious financial powerhouse in the City of London. To lose her American colonies, settled and populated by English citizens, operating under the rule of law grafted from England and prospering mightily within the benevolent system of imperial mercantilism seemed unimaginable for a whole host of reasons. These reasons are the stuff of misguided wars and imperial delusion. These reasons are the stuff of imperial hubris and overreach. These reasons should be all too familiar for any American old enough to have lived through Vietnam and Iraq.

Today there exists the feeling that America has lost her grip, that America needs to be “made great again.” From a military perspective, many see a nation unable to “win” a real war, starting with Korea, most viscerally embodied in Vietnam and reawakened in Iraq and its on-going legacy of violence. There is little solace in the almost pathetic patriotic outburst when we ran over the island of Grenada, or when we bombed the Balkan War to its still uncertain conclusion or, in the first Gulf War, when we turned our one week torching of Saddam’s paper tiger of an army into a post modern Normandy. None of those Top Gun moments could alleviate the doubts, stop the finger wagging and the huge social divide begun by Vietnam and renewed by Iraq. We forget that after Vietnam we won the Cold War. We forget that despite the horrors of the Middle East and the determination of a few to strike down the American Satan, our country’s democratic model and her devotion to capitalism in all its forms, good and bad, have reshaped the world in less than two generations. We may have “lost” Vietnam but we “won” the world. Similarly, after losing the war of American Independence, the British would throw out their government and spin into years of self-incrimination only to defeat Napoleon, resist the revolutions of the 19th century and create an empire under Victoria that in scope and grandeur only ancient Rome could match. Vietnam remains a terrible mental block on the American imagination and our ability to see our true position in the world and in history. The mistakes of Vietnam were repeated in Iraq and now that war contributes to this terrible distortion of our place in the world. The true success, power and influence of modern America, of her very real but informal empire, have been falsely diminished by these “lost” wars. Though alleviated by her titanic struggle with Napoleon, Britain herself struggled to see the reality of her situation in the War of Independence sharing insecurity and confusion not dissimilar to that experienced by the United States almost two hundred years later and, in fact, to this very day. Delving into the lives and times of these 18th century British white males provides not only valuable historical perspective but also the warmth of insight that can give one comfort amidst the dire warnings and gloomy evaluations of the present.

Just as the United States fought a war in Vietnam within the greater context of a Cold War the British tried to win the war in America within an imperial context much greater than her colonies alone. All the while the British fought the colonists, they had two international priorities that singly, let alone together, trumped the importance of winning the war in America. Firstly, our revolution took place in the midst of a century long war with France and, to a lesser extent, Spain. From 1735 to 1815 there would be four wars with France, including the epic twenty-year struggle with Napoleon. Like the World Wars and the Cold War in the 20th century, these were world wars within the historical context of their times. Just as world order was at stake for the United States in World War I, World War II and the Cold War, imperial success or failure was at stake for 18th century Britain. The shots fired in Lexington were heard round a world that had quite suddenly become English. Canada, India, the West Indies, Ireland and innumerable ports and islands throughout the world were being stitched into the vast British Empire, all held intact by a large, vigilant but sorely extended and very expensive Royal Navy. The fortunes derived from the mother country’s investments in her rapidly growing web of colonial labor and resources were only as secure as the sea-lanes through which this mercantile empire coursed. Her long war with France was over this very concrete reality. The Royal Navy and the British military always had her empire as a first priority and France, not the colonies, was the greatest threat to that. As such, despite enormous effort and expenditure, she, like the United States in Vietnam and later Iraq, always had a one military arm tied behind her back while waging a frighteningly unfamiliar guerilla war. The United States refused to “invade the North” in Vietnam for fear of igniting a greater Cold War threat and, as such, committed herself to a “limited” war that played into every strategic and tactical strength of her foe. While Iraq had no Cold War to prevent a full-scale invasion, the critics are unanimous that our “limited war” strategy guaranteed the chaos and terror that would shortly follow. Among the many competing contextual restraints of that “limited war” was the international priority placed on America as the world’s only superpower, an enlightened superpower that may “liberate” a country but certainly would not “occupy” one.

To make things even more problematic, the priorities of empire didn’t end with the wars with France. There was the issue of money. Our revolution was fought just north of the single greatest source of British wealth – the sugar producing islands of the West Indies and the enormous capital investment of slavery that made it all happen. What oil was to the United States in the 20th century, the profits from the West Indies were to Britain at the time of our revolution. London was never going to commit the naval resources, in particular, and military resources, in general, required to defeat the Americans if it meant leaving her West Indian possessions vulnerable to the French. It can be summed up most succinctly when France offered to withdraw her all-important support of the American colonists in return for just one of the sugar producing islands owned and operated by the British. London flatly refused the offer. Like LBJ balancing the ideals of his Great Society and the demands of a war on the other side of the globe, the British could only commit so much treasure to winning what seemed to be an increasingly unwinnable war.

The British commitment to the war was further handicapped by domestic discord. Though the pro-war faction, led most enthusiastically by the King and his party of political appointees and Tory “hawks”, never lost control of Parliament until after the events of Yorktown sealed the British fate, there was a steady opposition to the war from its very beginning. Elements of both parties spoke openly against the war, consistently doubting whether it could be won on any of its fronts ranging from the military reality of controlling a continent thousands of miles away to the political reality of subduing fellow Englishmen with a set of very familiar and very English gripes. This political discord was reflected in the British public who, while never abandoning wholesale the King’s efforts, never got comfortable with the idea of fighting fellow Englishmen. The King’s ministers would send tens of thousands of Hessians to fight this war not just because of an overstretched imperial army but because the average British citizen was not keen on fighting this battle. The fact that such reluctance never surfaced in that terrible long war with Napoleon only underscores the depth of the doubts. An unpopular war was a dangerous thing to meddle with in late 18th century England. The social and economic strains that would tear France apart only five years after this war were evident in England itself. The Gordon Riots of 1780 required thousands of British troops to quell as angry mobs surrounded Parliament and torched parts of the city. England was not such a paragon of social stability that she could afford the strain of fully committing to a less than popular war. Clearly the same can be said for both Vietnam and Iraq. The first war was fought with a scandalous college deferment “out” for the affluent while the latter was prosecuted by a professional army mostly recruited from America’s working and rural classes. Neither war would have survived the “all-in” reality of World War II. America, like England fighting her colonists while keeping an eye on the French and a restive domestic citizenry, tried to win each of these terrible wars on “the cheap”, so to speak.

O’Shaunnessy’s book then becomes a gripping study on how a nation convinces itself that it can win a war it is not prepared to commit itself wholly to. Much of what follows should sound all too familiar for any American born after World War II. Led by a dogged George III, his cabal of ministers and a decent majority of House Members and Lords, the British public and Parliament would be reassured of eventual victory because of each of the following arguments:

• the British soldier is the finest fighting machine on the globe and is the equal to half a dozen of the colonials in any ‘organized” flight. This assumption colored the British strategy from day one and it was from day one that many in the military knew it to be so much “hogwash”. That day one, of course, was the terrible Battle of Bunker Hill where they embraced a pyrrhic victory at the cost of thousands of men – all of whom died because these untrained, weak willed, ineffective colonials shot and killed with an accuracy that would haunt the British throughout the war. They also held up against the vaunted bayonet charge the British infantry were famous for, waiting, in fact, to see the “white” of the British eyes before inflicting the greatest one day loss of infantry the British Empire had yet to experience. While there would be days and battles that more than underscored British contempt for the colonial soldier, her leading officers soon realized that this was nothing if not an even fight. Over time, this comforting but lethal bias would withstand bloody first-hand evidence of numerous American victories and constant British frustration. Even the arrival of French arms, a French fleet, European officers and discipline and massive loans from France and the Dutch wasn’t persuasive enough to prevent Cornwallis’ fateful and fatal march through Virginia and into the British Dien Bien Phu of the war, Yorktown.

• the British would win the “hearts and minds” of the Americans based on the assumption that the majority of colonists were loyal to the Crown and considered it a privilege to be an English “subject”. This is, of course, the true elixir of Western expansion in all its forms ranging from the civilizing influences of Victorian England to the idealism of Pax Americana. The British “hawks” were always waiting for the Americans to return to the fold, to stop being intimidated by the rebellious mob and come home to comfort and security of the Mother Country. They underestimated American disgust and anger from the first march to Lexington to the lethal but failed effort to secure the South. At the outbreak of the war, only one in ten Americans had ever had any contact with a British official or soldier. Americans had been self-governed for well over 100 years. The British were as dispensable and troublesome in most American eyes as they were indispensable and appreciated in their own. It was the fatal delusion that kept on persuading. Being nothing more than an article of faith, it like any such article, can be waved in the face of reality. Its shelf life would extend into the War of 1812 and would even suffer a brief renaissance in the Civil War as the Anglophile Confederacy courted her aid in her fight to defend her vision of a civilized world. Just like in Vietnam and Iraq, this latent support among the native population had no real basis in truth to begin with. By most measurements, Tory sympathizers never approached more than a quarter of the population with any future conversions being dissuaded daily by the horrendous behavior of occupying British soldiers to a citizenry that was quickly dehumanized by a frustrated, frightened and increasingly cynical occupier. Like the Americans in Vietnam, the potent fallacy of a “hearts and minds” delusion quickly curdles into violent resentment for those, the soldiers, who have to experience the more frightening and disconcerting reality.

• With the help of the previous two articles of faith, the superior British soldier and the latent support of the native population, this war, fought across the ocean on a vast and mostly unchartered continent, could be won “on the cheap.” Whether it is the “guns and butter” of Vietnam or the “shock and awe” of Iraq or even the conviction of a splendidly brief victory for “all” parties in World War I, the illusion of the quick war is the siren call to tragedy. With a supportive colonial population relieved to be rid of the rebellious minority, her Majesty’s military would be able to forage, purchase and requisition ample stores and supplies to maintain her ever expanding strategic occupation of her colony. Given the local support, her navy would be free to protect her vital interests elsewhere and an already strapped sovereign balance sheet can avoid further “taxing” a reluctant and potentially volatile home front. The facts would prove to be so very different. The British Army lost a significant percentage of its troops on dangerous and mostly unsuccessful foraging missions into a local population that was at best indifferent and more likely hostile. The Royal Navy would have to supply every item of sustenance and support for the army further weakening imperial control elsewhere, further undermining the imperial commitment to the War of American Independence. At this point, it all comes full circle – in a hangman’s noose. The strategic imperatives of empire, the limited domestic support, the fiscal realities combine with the hubris of everything British and you get a savage “unwinnable” war. Substitute “American” for “British” in the previous sentence and you have the by-line of our recent long and terribly costly “unwinnable” wars. This is a book of colorful personal narratives that in the end instruct us that history, of course, repeats and that much of the myth-making and shared narratives that we pass on from generation to generation only serves to obscure this truth. A truthful rendering of our War of Independence, one more focused on British folly than on American heroism (as real as it was), might have required sacrificing a bit of “exceptionalism” for real insight but, in the process, in terrible places like Iraq and Vietnam, might have helped save us from ourselves.

The Men Who Lost America

Andrew O’Shaughnessy

361 pages (UK edition)

2013

• WALLS … Our President’s obsession with his “Wall” is nothing new in history. The Great Wall of China is only one of many walls built by emperors around their cities and along their insecure frontiers. Constantinople remained the center of two empires (Byzantine & Ottoman) for 1600 years. Her walls were breached only once – in 1453 as one empire replaced another. City after city, ranging from ancient Damascus to medieval Paris, assumes its place in the list of great cities only after building a wall. Today the rich buy homes and surround them with walls and gates. Affluence around the world is retreating into the world of gated communities. Schools are building walls to make students and teachers feel safer. As the digital world breaks down and shrinks the old world, walls increasingly mark the emerging new world. Britain voted to step within its own walls, retreating from the open office landscape of the EU. Israel is walling off her Palestinian neighbors. Eastern Europe is replacing the Iron Curtain with a circle of walls to keep out both real and imagined immigrants. The history of our cities, of our empires and city-states, is a history of walls.

• WATER … of the 65 cities covered in this book, only ONE, Samarkand, was built inland away from the coast or a principle waterway. And even Samarkand arose because not only of Tamerlane’s obsession and wealth but its location on the original Silk Road. For the other 64 cities, water brought people, prosperity, invaders, plague and change. No wonder that 40% of today’s population live within 40 miles of a sea or an ocean. If one throws in rivers and lakes, that number gets close to 70%. It made sense during 3000 years of environmental stability. With oceans predicted to rise at least three to four feet by 2100 (far from a worst case), our relationship with the remaining great cities of the world will likely change as radically in 100 years as it did over the previous 3000 years. Recorded history began with man harnessing water to build agricultural empires. Ironically, recorded history’s next greatest and most terrifying chapter may be about man once again trying to harness water in order to survive.

• THE MASTER BUILDER … so often a great city was the inspiration of one man. Justinian turned Constantinople into an imperial city and finished the great walls that Constantine had begun 200 years earlier. Later, as the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent would build the mosques and markets that define Istanbul skyline to this day. Augustus built most of ancient Rome and set the precedent for imperial architectural grandeur. Yongle the great emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) laid the foundations of todays Beijing and began building its Imperial City. Herod rebuilt much of ancient Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Tamerlane built Samarkand within his lifetime while nobody was more responsible for a great city than Peter the Great. St. Petersburg would rise from the swamps, consume thousands of lives in its construction and would remain for 400 years Russia’s gateway to the West. Christopher Wren led a society of England’s best and brightest after the fire of 1651 to layout the glories of today’s Central London. The list is long and is an interesting footnote to the “great man” theory of history.

• MELTING POTS… While walls were built to keep people out, the most dynamic cities were melting pots of wildly different peoples. The more diverse the population, the more successful the city. America has been just another, though on a grand scale, version of the melting pot. The ancient cities of Damascus, Cordoba, Baghdad, Constantinople and Alexandria are only a few examples of the commercial and cultural explosion that comes with open gates and tolerant policies. That very same diversity, unfortunately, too often becomes a magnate for violent reactionary forces. The wasting away of a great city once the society begins shunning immigrants, expelling the Jews or other vital minorities, is a pattern repeated throughout this book. Krakow disappeared as a cultural center of Europe once the Jews were expelled. London’s reemergence after the Great Fire of 1651 was, in no small part, the result of Cromwell encouraging the Jews to return. Cordoba and Lisbon’s brief golden ages ended after the Moors and Jews were driven out of Iberia. Given the fact that no great American city grew without the circulatory rush of immigrants only underscores this historical truth.

• EMPIRES … this is a politically inflammatory word in today’s world. It smacks of white privilege, minority exploitation and economic violence – all true, by the way. However, the world was built on the back of empires. Within the broad expanse of an empire is the security required for the proliferation of trade and ideas. Within an empire’s reach are its great cities. Some of the lesser know facts of empire jump out at you as you read this book. The Polish Empire (1330-1550) was the real thing. It was a cultural and economic powerhouse covering much of Eastern Europe as remains a lost golden age in the collective Polish imagination. While we all know bits and pieces about the great Venetian city state, the stunning fact is that it remained an unconquered Italian city for 1000 years. The Arab or Muslim Empire (circa 650 – 1258) came out of nowhere in 610 AD and within 100 years stretched from Egypt to Spain to Turkey to India and even the steppes of China. While it would slowly splinter into separate caliphates, it (and China) were the cultural and economic center of the world until the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. This 600-year empire goes a long way toward understanding Islam’s resistance to the Eurocentric world that replaced it. Persia or rather today’s Iran has been the center of THREE empires. The modern American Empire has lasted less than half as long as Persia’s shortest lived version. No wonder they have so little respect for our presence in their world. Empires can be havens for tolerance and peace even with the burdens of taxation and war. The Ottoman Empire contained multitudes living in relative harmony. Baghdad and Damascus had huge thriving Jewish sectors while Jewish advisors ran much of the sprawling empire’s bureaucracy. Today, most everything within its now shattered boundaries has been ravaged by internecine warfare. The relatively small but wealthy Byzantine Empire (330-1453) centered in Constantinople remained a barrier behind which the backward remains of Roman Europe could slowly assimilate immigrants and consolidate into the aggressive city states and nations that would dominate the world for 500 years. Without the protective hinge of the Byzantine Empire, the vast armies of the East may have written a different history for Europe and, by extension, the Americas.

As a final ode to this informative book, here is a LIST of today’s countries that have been at the center of at least one empire during the course of human history. This list is from this book only and therefore is not exhaustive. It is illuminating however. Empires leave a people with a sense of lost glory and are often a part of what defines a people and binds them – for good and for bad reasons. They are a critical part of a society’s shared DNA.

Egypt ... Syria ... Peru ... France

Iran ... China ... Spain ... Britain

Iraq ... Sudan ... Portugal ... Sweden

Tunisia ... Palestine ... Turkey ... Poland

Sicily ... Italy ... Cambodia ... Nigeria

Greece ... Mexico ... Uzbekistan ... Mali

India ... Japan ... Russia ... Germany

Austria ... Hungary ... Netherlands

United States

The Great Cities in History

John Jules Norwich

341 pages

2009

• Henry Huntington chartered the Huntington Library

• William Clark funded the LA Philharmonic

• UCLA was founded

• United Artists was started by Charlie Chaplin, Nancy Pickford, D.W. Griffith & Douglas Fairbanks.

• the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, develops the first of many “suburban” communities in LA – Tarzana

While a few of these are more the stuff of LA lore, certainly the Huntington, UCLA and the LA Phil marked the founding of world-class institutions. Why 1919?

On my Wall, my reading preferences and my choice of books shape the density of the notes first and foremost. That might be 80% of its shape. I think, however, that the other 20% might be the time itself. My book notes cluster like stars around 1517 or 1588. Later, it is 1848 or 1900 that create small constellations of historic activity. Single dates morph into decades and centuries as you get farther back in history; however, the phenomena holds, the clusters take shape. On the modern side of the wall’s chronology, no date has such a density of activity as 1919. In fact, it is the black hole of big years. The following is an abridged inventory of book notes with that date on them:

• The Treaty of Versailles … enough can never be said. It guarantees World War II. Its League of Nations is vetoed by the US. It reshapes the Middle East into the mess that it is today. It virtually ignores whole parts of the world seeking freedom under the ideals of Wilson’s 14 points. It isolated the USSR. It was the closest to a template for a century as you can find. (see Margaret MacMillan’s extraordinary Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World)

• The Red Scare begins in America triggering 1st Amendment violations, deportations and the return of isolationism and religious conservatism.

• Prohibition is launched. Quite likely the greatest legislative failure in US history. Its legacy ranging from increased per capita consumption of alcohol to the rise of organized crime. It was the undertow of the Roaring Twenties. (see William Leuchtenburg’s The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932)

• Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is proven. Enough said.

• Indians are massacred by British troops in Amritsar signaling the beginning of the end of the Raj … the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.

• The Reds will defeat the Whites in Russia, securing Bolshevik control, ravaging the country and sending the nation into the first of many famines killing untold millions.

• Fascism emerges in Italy … will surge through Europe and find another home in Germany. Over 60% of Europe’s Jews will be exterminated under the fascist flag.

After 1919, nothing will be the same. The USSR will create both an international communist movement (first meeting of the Cominterm was in1919) and a totalitarian killing machine. The US will swing to the right, rush into a debt fueled economic and cultural binge as it embraces “normalcy” and international myopia. Europe will flirt with communism; replace imperialism with fascism and reignite. Meanwhile, cars will proliferate, night will be lit and entertainment and leisure will become entitlements. Not all this happened in 1919, of course, but it was the starting block. Just as UCLA, Tarzana, the Huntington and United Artists served as starting blocks for the debut of what will become one of the world’s great cities.

These years require hindsight in order to be identified and discussed. Everything seems pretty urgent the closer it is to the present. However, it is hard to avoid 1945 - the Bomb and Pax Americana. How about 1968 with its riots, assassinations, Vietnam and the rise of the “silent majority”? The Fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989? Some might toss 2001 into the ring or 2008 with the financial panic and the election of a black man as President of the United States. Some might even peg the launching of the first true smartphone in 2007 and all that has tumbled after it. Not a few will be pointing to 2020 …

The Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times”, is … interesting. I used to wonder why it is even a curse. Isn’t it a good thing to live in interesting times? We certainly try to make our lives as interesting as possible and seem terribly interested in what we perceive to be the interesting lives of others. Maybe, however, the Wall does reveal the truth in the curse. The dates that collect the book notes are not necessarily the years, decades or even centuries you might choose to live a whole life in. They make good history and they shape the Wall; however, they might be best appreciated from a distance.

The Sixties, in particular, seem to attract this type of structure with a myriad of books employing 1968 as their epicenter. There was nothing nice about 1968. It was certainly the year to read about but maybe not to have fully felt. However, history is chaotic and disturbing and no more so than in the Sixties of America. Keeping it organized around 1968 is comforting. It gives structure to a terribly difficult and almost inchoate story. It was, remember, a terrible year. Things seemed to have concentrated. The counterculture got lost in its commercial success and the swelling anger over the war. Personal liberation merged into student and racial radicalism. The right responded as it always does. It organized politically, brought in hate speech, the “silent majority” of Richard Nixon and the 16% vote for George Wallace. The alternative voices of Robert Kennedy and MLK lay silent and dead. The Vietnam War, that will forever be the first Peloponnesian moment in the American “Century”, felt unwinnable at the very moment we could have won it – if such a victory was really possible or sustainable. The cities burned. Crime was reaching all-time highs. Cops were pigs and mass domestic murders were beginning to become part of our life. The Great Society was invisibly importing the oil and the inflation that would end the Seventies and the great postwar boom. Our cars sucked, our rivers burned and LA averaged over 150 killer smog alerts a year. 1968 witnessed all of this in one form or another. Let’s use the date. It is a way to remember. It pops the “yellow submarine” balloon of flower power nostalgia. It makes the past more viscerally real and by doing so makes our present day more worthy of our respect and care.

NOTE: I am tempted to throw in 2008 only based on the fact that contemporary history (see Crashed by Adam Tooze) suggests the date will be the starting gun for much of what has followed both domestically and internationally - Brexit, Trump, authoritarian superpowers, populist nationalism. The stage is vast and we are in the middle of it so identifying dates as long term historical markers is premature and a bit facile. Instead, I am more comfortable cheating a bit and throwing 2007 and 2008 together. It is irresistible. The financial tsunami is coming ashore while the smartphone begins changing how we are wired. A black man will be leading an only recently racially “liberated” superpower while the Tea Party responds with fake news and gun hording. The world will collect a whole new set of economic and social resentments at the very moment the technology arrives that can disseminate and propagate them with consequences we are only beginning to feel. The events concentrate and so do the people. 2007 is the first year in human history that more people live inside a city than outside it. The two years feel tectonic and they are only ten years ago. Everything in our lives is accelerating, why not history. Those big years may no longer be separated by decades. Too bad.

The example centered around 450 BC embraces a primitive world as a whole discovering metaphysics – the search for meaning that is not tethered to our physical needs and accessories. In each case, the individual is provoked to ask why they are here on this earth. With Confucius it might be to respect the structure of family throughout the increasingly complex society being developed in China. In India it might be the search for a complete understanding and peace of mind that comes with separating from desire and the temptations of life. In Greece, it is the promise of the individual to imagine a life and to use one’s mind not only to realize it but to understand it. Finally, in the Middle East, it is the arrival of the first great monotheistic God and a set of principles meant to organize and bring meaning as well as identity. We take all this for granted today because in one form or another we all, in each part of the world, are a product of some blend of this most profound of axial moments. It is a true axial moment because we cannot imagine humanity – even at its worst and most anarchic – not being influenced by the ideas released over those 500 years. This is the true test of an axial moment.

It is hard to identify the parameters of an axial age without hundreds or thousands of years of historical perspective. If one chooses the Renaissance and its intellectual, spiritual and artistic empowerment of the individual, do we know where to end it? Does it include the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of science and the rights of man? How can you not throw in the Reformation and its release of the individual from hundreds of years of social and religious hierarchy? Where do we put the French Revolution? Though either apocryphal or misrepresented, Communist China leader Chou En Lai’s apparent reply in 1972 that “it was too early too tell” about the consequences of the French Revolution might be the right way to think about the social earthquake of 1789. Certainly, the Industrial Revolution seems less and less like a signature of man’s progress as we begin to ignite and destroy the planet we utterly rely on. History is like a play with an uncertain number of acts, its central characters and events evolving and changing as each newly written act unfolds.

1900 and the fifty odd years around it, however, is a particularly seductive mark to work with. Darwin is linking man to nature with an overarching theory of creation and evolution. Einstein is bringing not only the stars into alignment but time itself while Freud suggests that our daily life and the decision making that shapes it may, at some level, not be under our conscious control. The speed of the locomotive has created time zones and the electric light bulb has redefined night & day. Many parts of this brave new world, so simply reduced by only using these examples, have been hotly contested as to both their validity and relative importance; however, while there may be qualifications and new discoveries that have left some of the original ideas of that era compromised or even discarded, except for the true ostriches in our ranks, there is no going back before all that “1900” revealed.

As for today, in the early half of the 21st century, it certainly feels like we are living through an arresting pivot in history. Communication is instantaneous. Goods of all types are literally at your fingertips. If you own a phone, somebody somewhere will always know where you are. They will know what you buy. One can barely tell the difference between an automated voice and a human being. Almost 90% of the world’s population no longer experience real darkness at night. There are over 100,000 planes flights a day. Robots built your car and it will soon be driven by one. We traffic a space – cyberspace – that 99% of us have virtually no wy to define or describe. Does this and so much more qualify as an axial age? Have we reached a point of no return? Is there no going back? Just as the rise of religion and later science changed how we think of ourselves as human beings within whatever cosmology exists, has the digital age of late transformed us in such a dramatic way? Or, in fact, are most of these shocking changes in our daily lives only skin deep?

The rumor took shape over time. It involved the arrival of a mythical figure in early medieval history – Preston John. Preston was the fabled ruler of a vast, heavenly nation in an unchartered part of the world inhabited by Amazons and the Lost Tribes of Israel – among others. His mythical kingdom was a paradise on earth – a Christian paradise – whose time had come to bring military relief and missionary fulfillment to the Fifth (and last) Crusade. Something very different, however, arrived out of the depths of Asia.

By 1241, the Mongols, under three different leaders, had conquered a substantial portion of the known world ranging from China through Russia, the entire Middle east, Persia and much of South Asia. Eastern Europe had been ravaged, Japan invaded twice, and India threatened with the occupation of most of what is today Pakistan. As we all know, none of this was pleasant. Millions died. Historians argue whether the Mongol occupations were one long, incoherent but wide-ranging version of genocide. Europe avoided this fate by the skin of its teeth. First of all, Europe was not an attractive candidate for conquest, a comparatively poor part of the world then compared to the likes of China, India and the Muslim Empire. Once on the periphery, Europe drew the luckiest of historical cards as the Mongols retreated from Hungary in 1241 after their leader, Ogodei Khan, died unexpectedly and the army had to return to their homeland to go through the complex process of selecting a new Khan. The untimely death of the Mongol leader occurred just as the Horde was about to dismember Europe and certainly qualifies as one of the most significant deaths in human history. By the time the Mongols had fully regrouped, Europe had enough breathing room to organize effective resistance to future incursions. Meanwhile, the vast Mongol empire had begun to fragment into different Khanates with internal issues and gradual assimilation slowly dissolving what had been, for a relatively brief moment, the largest empire in history. (Revisionist historians (see below) have tried to rewrite the traditional story of death & destruction and make it more about establishing a binding set of trading networks utilizing the iron hand of the Khan rulers. In other words, treating the Mongols as architects of a new round of globalization. In doing so, they soft pedal massive extermination and relocation of ethnic groups that would have made Stalin blush. The truth, of course, is somewhere in-between).

As important as the 1241 death of Ogodei Khan was, however, the most striking part of this dramatic story was the illusion that it was Preston Johns riding over the hill not the Mongols. It is a striking allegory for our capacity to deny what is happening right in front of us. I could not help but think of the rise of the Rapture movement and other such fundamentalist offshoots of evangelical Christianity. The Rapture captures one’s imagination with a Preston John sleight of hand. Rather than accept the responsibility for an increasingly hostile and toxic planet, you can believe that you have been chosen to be rescued by Christ before this troubled world meets its Days of Judgment. It is a “get out of jail free” card so irresistible to the Preston John within us all that the Rapture and similar such fanatical religious offshoots only increase in popularity as the Horde of climate change gets closer and closer.

The Preston John turned Mongol Horde story came from my current reading of The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The book, currently “On the Stack”, is a compelling retelling of history that recasts the familiar 3000-year narratives of empire, religion and commerce from its Eurocentric and Asian points of view and tells it through the many Silk Roads that connected West with East and North with South. It is as much a story about Baghdad, the steppes and the Hindu Kush as it is about European monarchs and Chinese dynasties. The book is structured around 24 “road” chapters, each describing chronologically another historical variant of The Silk Road. The Crusades was “The Road to Heaven” while the Mongols were “The Road to Hell”. Soviet and American incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq from 1979 to the present are in a chapter titled, “The Road to Catastrophe”. The “road” conceit is a bit forced and compromises the whole enterprise to some extent; however, the idea that the powers of the world have all had to traffic this vast geographic epicenter is intriguing and instructive if not entirely convincing. It is very readable and, of course, too long. I am about to leave the Ottoman Empire and wish the book had stopped here. I may change my mind as I continue to read it. While it is a book that reshapes how you think about the world, it too often feels like it is trying too hard to do so. So many “new histories” of the world, Europe, modernity – take your pick – are so obsessed with being “new” that the “history” begins to feel forced and fragile.

The Silk Roads

A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

505 pages (2015)