Eventually, whoever survived this struggle would control what Mackinder called the World Island, by which he meant Eurasia and Africa (true Victorian that he was, he regarded the United States as peripheral).

NEWYORKER: Faces, Places, Spaces

Mackinder, who was born in 1861 and died just after the Second World War, looked at the past thousand years in Europe and proposed a surprisingly simple geographic explanation for everything that had happened.

NEWYORKER: Faces, Places, Spaces

Mackinder saw history being made on the Northwest frontier of India, but the Empire bled to death on the fields of France in fear of what might happen elsewhere, and by the time it got to India it handed over that frontier, out of exhaustion and a growing reluctance to fight for a possession that did not want to be possessed.

NEWYORKER: Faces, Places, Spaces