Book Reaction Paper
The written reaction/analysis of the book should be 3-5 double-spaced pages and include the following:
A short summary of the work (less than one page)
The majority of this reaction should be your thoughts and opinions on the book and the information within it.
In addition to your thoughts and opinions on the book, you may also choose to examine concepts and/or places in the book that relate to course material.
Provide a synopsis of what you got out of completing this project – wrap up/conclusion (a paragraph or two).
Assignment 3: Book Reaction Paper
Introduction
Despite its unquestionable message, the book “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall” would bear some significance with mid-twentieth-century geographic determinists. When in doubt, extraordinarily regarded illuminating establishments like the Earth Establishment at Columbia School and extraordinary generally speaking movement affiliations like the “Joined Countries Social event on Exchange and Improvement” in a short time unflinchingly see the essential work that topography plays in money-related improvement through factors like being landlocked, climate and the geographic distribution of tropical difficulties.
The book is far-reaching beyond all comparison. Tim Marshall has tended to the fundamentally international issues confronting the world’s critical continents and regions. Talking about Oceania and Antarctica is critical. The trade-off in concentrating on profundity controls the maker to focus on a very basic level on later, continuing, or potential conflict regions. This point of view is understandable given the maker’s extensive foundation as a new feature writer who has worked in six conflict regions.
Relationship between geography and socioeconomic results
The determinist approach is the best technique for regulating the relationship between geography and socioeconomic results, which treats topography as the distinct benefit and independent variable. For instance, the author persuasively argues that England’s more significant part rules the government due to its island-like climate’s safety, which permitted it to battle against substantial man control. This way, Marshall contends that the Danube Plain and the rivers that interface it made natural boundaries and an expeditiously accessible transportation system that assisted with making several states and a flourishing economy (Marshall & Henrico, 2020). Then again, the inside of the landmass, as on account of South America, is regularly unusable, leaving it “unfilled” in terms of individuals.
The worldwide heading, neighborhood and territorial factors, and the effects on the outside world are wholly assumed in this scenario. The geographic association is frequently thought to work in the opposite way. One illustration of a topographical part that is outward-focused is the enormous “Xinjiang Space” in northwest China. This article concentrates on the outside dynamics brought about by Xinjiang’s district along the borders of eight other countries and its status as a nonconformist Space of Han-overwhelmed China rather than what topography has meant for the indigenous Muslim Uighur minority and their landscape. The book and its arguments could seem inconsistent because of the continual switching and mixing of the worldwide and determinist tracks.
Political guide representing significant regions
A static political guide of the significant regions being discussed (such as South America, China, and Russia) is displayed before everyone. Unfortunately, many maps feature administrative borders or one particular subject, and the information they offer is static and restricted (e.g., the Mississippi Basin on account of the United States). More themed maps with spatial dynamics, fluxes, and significant features would have been truly helpful on this site. These ten maps do not offer much data as they presently stand, besides contested borders, traditional assertions about influence zones, ethnic groupings, and stream basins – usually just a couple of these issues per map. An additional ten point-by-point maps of key worldwide “trouble spots” are also presented. As I should naturally suspect, these are the “Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World” that the subtitle alludes to.
“The South China Sea, Kurdistan,” the boundary district between Korea, the Northwest and Cold Passes, and other struggle-slanted regions are also portrayed on an additional eight point-by-point maps. Through maps and geographies, the story emphasizes the significance of worldwide struggle. I can envision a book with a similar structure and thesis that places more emphasis on world maps that show worldwide cash-related or social peculiarities, such as China’s “One Belt One Street,” worldwide strategy, and overseas direct investment; the worldwide association of “Superstar cities”; and the “U.S. the West Coast Amenity/Innovation Corridor’s” part in the relocation of individuals from “Africa and the Center East to Europe.” These maps may be as prosperous while possibly not more so portraying the fundamental geographic factors influencing the evolution of the globe.
Water bodies seem to fundamentally influence the construction of worldwide landscapes and the power dynamics that go with them, despite the author’s case that “nobody’s geographic part is more indispensable than some other” (p. 2).
Representation of Rivers in the World Geography
The impression that rivers may, reliant upon their qualities, be exceptionally strong catalysts for or obstacles to socioeconomic improvement is left with the peruser. The American heartland benefits from the Mississippi watershed’s abundance of traversable waterways, which exceeds that of the rest of the globe consolidated, and Europe, whose rivers don’t meet but are nonetheless unmistakably suited for exchange. While Africa’s mighty rivers, similar to the Nile and the Congo, usually contain waterfalls and are home to a great deal of illness, the west coasts of South America and Japan are distinguished by quick, irregular rivers that are seldom traversable (Marshall & Henrico, 2020). As demonstrated by Marshall, country states’ actions could be influenced by the features and paths of rivers. For instance, the strength of the port function in Buenos Aires can be attributed to Argentina’s transcendence over the mouth of the Plate.
Geographical improvement until the mid-twentieth hundred years
Stream, as opposed to Brazil’s sparse port improvement all around. The book suggests a subject that has been comprehensively inspected in unquestionable and regional geography to be unequivocal the conventional powers’ improvement of “counterfeit” nations and scopes of unmistakable quality from the early European assessment time period (late fourteenth hundred years) until the mid-twentieth hundred years (the Middle East). One event where the maker gives close thought to the Middle East is the “Sykes-Picot Line of 1916”, which picked the contemporary political geography of the district (p. 141). As displayed by the maker, to sabotage countries, the Soviet Affiliation expanded this course of progress by deliberately mixing unquestionable ethnic and social occasions inside such republics. It is unprecedented that while spreading out country states in sub-Saharan Africa, conventional rulers gave little thought to ethnicity. There is no question that political geography from the conventional stretch of time has survived. This condition is explained by the 1494 “Settlement of Tordesillas,” which established Brazil as a Portuguese-speaking country in South America. Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are leaned to war, are still separated by the Durand Line from 1893.
Landlocked state and significance of the sea
Marshall often talks about the drawbacks of having a landlocked state and emphasizes the significance of the sea as the most helpful technique for transportation. The book’s central case that their place influences a person’s destiny is demonstrated by many of the ideas today held by worldwide improvement organizations. As demonstrated by UNCTAD’s 2016 The Least Developed Nations Report, just four of the 48 least significant level countries (LDCs)- Afghanistan, Bhutan, Laos, and Nepal- are supposed to be at absolutely no point in the future be LDCs by 2025. (Section 2, pp. 56-58, Section C.1, “The Occupation of Geographical Factors on Graduation Execution”). Bolivia’s continued powerlessness to see the consummation of the Pacific Skirmish of 1879, in which it lost Chilean permission to the Pacific Sea, includes the significance of sea access. The most persevering Russian interruption of Crimea fills in as another portrayal of the fundamental worth of sea access.
Oceans suggest an outrageous responsibility to generally speaking security since they are an unconstrained “by and large open unprecedented” that loosens up past consistently tested territorial endpoints. The enormous district of the South China Sea that China claims, as guaranteed by the “Run 10 Line,” is seen as a circumstance that is and significantly disturbing (Marshall & Henrico, 2020). By coordinating that China’s inclinations toward the South China Sea match those of the U.S. toward the Caribbean Sea from the last piece of the 1800s to the farthest compasses of the Contamination War, Marshall considers what is different in the West to be Chinese antagonism.
Significance of deserts
Marshall argues that deserts are an inappropriate representation of cutting-edge society. This isn’t because mountains are unfortunate defenses; instead, the Himalayas and other mountains successfully separate strong opposing factions. South and East Asian cultures are extraordinarily diversified thanks to the enormous Indian and Chinese civilizations that flourished mostly autonomously in the Himalayas. The Gobi Desert divides China and Mongolia, the Sahara Desert divides North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa, and Saudi Arabia’s “Unfilled Quarter,” the biggest continuous sand desert in the world, divides little significance. In contrast, deserts separate performer couples who need limits. For instance, the Chihuahuan Desert all over determines the boundary between Mexico and the United States.
Despite the way that the author expeditiously covers drones, innovation is transforming geographic space in numerous ways. The utter absence of any advance notice quite a piece early almost expeditiously of cyberspace, social media, the Internet, conventional compartment freight train service among China and Germany (which eliminates the requirement for 20 days of shipment through the sea), central district scale high-speed rail, etc., appears to be an especially glaring omission. He argues that topography is not displaced despite the way that significant building initiatives and investments like the Suez and Panama Canals, as well as the proposed Nicaragua stream supported by China, frequently work on the world’s physical geology, such as by reducing ship travel distances by thousands of kilometers. The worldwide cash-related geography is occasionally adjusting due to natural forces, most outstandingly ecological change, although spatial concerns still overpower (for instance, on account of the Northwest and North Sea cold passageways, sometimes with the guide of innovation, similar to conversation starters) (Marshall & Henrico, 2020). The author concludes by stating that “ports still freeze and the Northern European plain is still level,” demonstrating his “stalwart” conviction in geographic determinism.
Chinese Coastline
I can guarantee Morrison’s assertion that the Chinese see their one coastline, the Pacific Sea’s “eastern shore,” as a significant disadvantage since I’m a visiting geography professor at the Chinese Foundation of Science (not discussed). China is spending billions on building ports and the linkages that associate them to acquire permission to access the Indian Sea and move past its physical restrictions.
Regardless of whether Marshall is reasonably accurate that China won’t challenge the United States for superpower status by the point of convergence of the century, geographic determinism needs to explain why China will not overwhelm the United States as the world’s money-related powerhouse. China’s present issues are genuinely not associated with its geographic position but rather with various evened-out structures that obstruct a smooth transition from an economy based on manufacturing (the world’s industrial office) to one focused on consumption and innovation. China has taken unprecedented steps in the land of the executives while constructing a public high-velocity rail association and a number of cutting-edge coastal ports. Some of China’s massive initiatives to change the country’s landscape, including the “Three Gorges Dam” and the country’s replumbing, which will transport water from the south toward the north, could have unanticipated negative ecological impacts.
Conclusion
No book of this sort would be finished without addressing the essential superpower struggle of the present between the United States and China. The author contends that due to its expansive Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the United States can contribute significantly to the economies of both East Asia and Europe. This mindset supports China’s essential worldwide strategy drive, “One Belt, One Street,” which aims to circumvent the “Straits of Malacca” and get sufficiently close to the Indian Sea, regardless of whether it is publicly seen. This book will undoubtedly be scrutinized by those in the arising discipline of worldwide studies who recognize that megapolitan metropolitan systems, youth cultures, mechanical cultures influenced by the worldwide innovation first class, and other variables have a more significant effect in describing the worldwide landscape than public governments (Marshall & Henrico, 2020). The publication’s success to date is an affirmation of its obvious allure as a quick-perused, educational introduction to present-day spatial dynamics from a worldwide standpoint.
Reference
Marshall, T., & Henrico, I. (2020). Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics. Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies, 48(1), 133-136.
