THINKING
Most discussions of geopolitics tend to start with Halford Mackinder, such as Hal Brands' recent piece in Foreign Policy, and an excellent survey by Jaehan Park in Texas National Security Review. Mackinder richly illustrated his books with many maps and visual arguments. The most famous visual argument was the map in his 1904 article “The Geographical Pivot of History” where he laid out his concept of the Eurasian “Pivot Area” or “Heartland.” This paper was first read at the Royal Geographical Society 120 years ago -- on January 25th, 1904 -- and subsequently published (with four other maps) in the April 1904 edition of The Geographical Journal. This simple sketch map, on an undefined cylindrical projection, uses only a few simple labels to highlight the key “crescents” surrounding the Heartland and the general barriers of the Sahara Desert and Arctic Ocean.
Karl Haushofer, the notorious intellectual force behind Nazi geopolitics, adapted Mackinder’s map in his 1935 Weltpolitik von Heute, using a Mercator projection, and added some additional annotation. Like Mackinder, Haushofer continued the east-west extent of the map to show the Eurasian heartland in the center with the Americas repeated on each edge of the map.
Richard Edes Harrison sought to update Mackinder’s map in the 1944 book Compass of the World, a compilation of chapters by leading geopolitical thinkers (Mackinder was 83 at the time and also contributed a chapter). Harrison used an Azimuthal Equidistant Projection, a projection he used regularly to emphasize global air distances in war and in international commerce. Harrison elsewhere argued that Haushofer’s many sins extended to a fixation on the Mercator projection, which was created by a German but inappropriate for many global map applications. Harrison faithfully reproduced the same labels from Mackinder’s original map and also preserved the monochrome simplicity, though he set off the ocean from the land in stark black-and-white contrast. Harrison’s map does a better job than Mackinder’s or Haushofer’s in emphasizing the centrality of the “Pivot Area” and the way that the crescents surround it on a round earth.
Mackinder’s argument, however, was about key areas and their configuration around the Pivot Area, so a slightly different azimuthal projection than that which Harrison used is most appropriate. This new adaptation, a remake of a remake, uses the Lambert Azimuthal Area Projection. Harrison did not specify the point of projection in his map: this map uses Novosibirsk, Russia, which is the third largest city in the country that dominates the Heartland and produces a similar result to Harrison’s version. Thie remake also adds landcover tints and shaded relief from the Natural Earth team to add the nuance of geography that the earlier versions could only render as simple labels like “desert” and “icy sea.”