A Map Animation of the Atomic Age

Via Boing Boing and The New Yorker, a map animation that shows every detonation of a nuclear bomb until 1998, by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto:



Says The New Yorker:

It is the sort of set of pictures that makes you want to read—to learn more, for example, about how it came to be that France exploded more than a tenth of those bombs (two hundred and ten); China blew up forty-five. Not that anyone was taking cover in Provence: if you don’t watch the icons above and below the map, you might think that Algeria, and not France, was the world’s fourth nuclear-armed power (and that Australia, not Britain, was the third). The Gerboise Bleue explosion, of a seventy-kiloton device, took place in 1960, in the Sahara desert, in the midst of the Algerian war; several others followed. (Later, after Algeria gained its independence, France’s tests moved to French Polynesia; its last one was in 1996.)

It's a wonder Nevada's even still habitable - though I guess you could make an argument that it's not, really...

Maoists in India

The New York Times has an article about the escalating fight against Maoist rebels in India. It includes this map:



Says the Times:

India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

The rebels claim to represent many of India's impoerished people, especially among its indigenous tribal groups. Despite their violent tactics, they have some support among intellectuals in India, including the writer Arundhati Roy. They're not to be confused with the above-ground Communist Party, which is a force in Indian politics.

The New Old-Time Geography of Conflict

Robert D. Kaplan has a fascinating article in the new issue of Foreign Policy in which he makes the case for the preeminence of geography in determining the patterns of conquest and conflict throughout the world. He sees this view as a revival of a classical approach to world affairs which had taken a backseat in recent decades. The 20th Century had inaugurated a period of narratives of world affairs driven by broad ideologies - Communism! Fascism! Democracy! - rather than the literal global landscape; but Kaplan argues for returning geography to its erstwhile pride of place in describing world affairs:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

Kaplan describes a number of thinkers who had perceived the significance of geography in shaping global affairs. One was the French historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949, which portrayed the ancient expansions of the Greek and Roman empires as a consequence of the marginal soils of the Mediterranean region. Another was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US Naval Captain who "saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia." Yet another was the prescient Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman, who foresaw the necessity of America's protection of Japan and the rise of China before he died in 1943.

But Kaplan focuses particularly on Sir Halford J. Mackinder who, writing 1904, saw the global order as the inevitable product of the relations established across the vast expanses of Eurasia:

His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the “pivot” around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the “heartland” in a later book. Surrounding it are four “marginal” regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two “monsoon lands”: one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa” and for the most part “thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is).

Europe's history, in the context of this landscape, is the story of an appendage to the great Eurasian landmass, despite the anomalous "Columbian epoch" of European discovery and colonialism. And the history of Russia, in particular, can be read as the history of a nation thoroughly traumatized by its invasion by Mongol hordes, and a consequent obsession with territorial acquisitiveness. This would later lead, during the Cold War, to a recapitulation of the struggle for control over the marginal areas of Eurasia, with a US containment policy of Communism that "depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean."

Kaplan sees the geostrategically most important regions of the world as spreading through the same arc of lands - from the Middle East through South Asia and East Asia - that Mackinder described as the marginal regions of Eurasia. But unlike in previous centuries, these areas are deeply integrated with each other - rubbing shoulders, thanks to technological change, rather than being separate by natural geographical buffers as they had been in the past. (For example, countries from Israel through Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea form a contiguous overlapping region in which one country's ballistic missile range infringes on that of its neighbors.) Within this zone of potential geopolitical turbulence, Kaplan describes four "shatter zones" that may be particularly prone to instability and conflict in the decades ahead.

One shatter zone is the Indian subcontinent, where Nepal and Bangladesh constitute alarmingly weak states and are home to tens of millions of people; but they are paragons of stability compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan’s raison d’être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

The Pashtuns occupy a swathe of land that sprawls across portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Pakistan falls apart, "Pashtunistan" would likely arise to partially take its place, which in turn would lead to the total dissolution of Afghanistan.

A second shatter zone is the Arabian peninsula. Interestingly, Kaplan describes the threat in this region not as arising within the Saudi Kingdom itself, but across the porous Saudi border with Yemen. Kaplan describes Yemen, a chaotic country in the southwestern corner of the peninsula that has almost as many people as Saudi Arabia itself, as "crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible...Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two." Yemen, by the way, has one of the highest birth rates in the world.

A third shatter zone is in the area of the Fertile Crescent. In this case, it is due to the fact that the state borders of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are almost totally divorced from the realities of natural geography that the potential for conflict exists. This is particularly true in the case of Iraq. Since there is nothing "natural" about the borders of Iraq - either in terms of natural borders or the distribution of ethnic and religious groups - a succession of strongmen has arisen in the country to hold the disparate pieces of the national fabric together. Saddam Hussein was the most recent, though not necessarily the last, of these. Some American intelligence experts tried to envision a more "rational" ordering of states in the Middle East - one that would reflect the realities of physical and cultural geography in the region:



(Though just a thought experiment, this map, which was posted at Strange Maps, caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Middle East, where some people, understandably suspicious of American intentions in the region, saw it as arrogant and colonialist; of course, it was colonialism that led to the capricious carving of borders in the Middle East in the first place.)

The Persian Core, stretching from the Persian Gulf through the interior of Iran to the Caspian Sea, constitutes a final shatter zone. This region contains a huge amount of oil and natural gas wealth, both in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, and Iran has a hand in each of those regions. And Iran controls most of the Persian Gulf, including its entrance to the Indian Ocean at the Strait of Hormuz. According to Kaplan, its not accidental that Persia has played a prominent role throughout history. Unlike the other nations of the Middle East, its territorial borders follow the patterns of its natural geography.

Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

The threat in Iran is not, as in the other shatter zones, in its potential for dissolution; rather, its that a geographically unified and strong Persian state might erupt out of its own borders to create instability in the surrounding regions.

Kaplan concludes by noting that "we all must learn to think like Victorians." That is, we have to be open to the insights of geographical determinism: the view that geography and climate, more than ideology, will drive the important events and conflicts of the next century. Kaplan uses another word to describe this attitude - a word that had lost some of its currency in the years after September 11th, but which now is enjoying something of a revival: realism.

UPDATE: For an interesting and skeptical take on Kaplan's article, go here.

Wealth II

Here's more on wealth since 1500, from Visualizing Economics:



You can pretty clearly see that the story of the global economy from like 1750 to 1950 was really all about a redistribution of wealth from India and China to Western Europe and the US. Other regions of the world just didn't change that much one way or the other.

But it's also interesting how many trends have reversed themselves since ca. 1950. The dominance of the US and Western Europe has receded somewhat. Japan has about doubled its historical share of global wealth. China and India have halted their long slides (though they still have a long way to go to recoup their historical norms).

We'll check in in another 500 years and see how things are coming along.

UPDATE: I am told that - this being The Map Scroll rather than The Chart Scroll - good form demands that this post include a map. So, here is a moderately relevant map animation showing the changing map of Europe from 1519 CE to the present.

Buddhist Geography

Here's another one from the Library of Congress. This is a 19th Century Burmese Buddhist depiction of the universe.



Interestingly, it shows the world as being constituted by the same sort of concentric ring-shaped continents and oceans as the Jain world map. But see those fish and turtles and other creatures around the terrestrial rings? Those represent a cosmic ocean, an element not present in the Jain depiction (though the Jains had some very particular opinions about the structure of the cosmos, to be sure).

It makes sense that there'd be some commonality between the geographies of the two religions, as many of the ideas of Buddhism derive from the same Indian metaphysical milieu. For instance, Buddhists also believed Mount Meru to be the center of the world, and as the axis at which the four major continents met. (By the way: yes, I am equivocating like crazy when I talk about "Buddhists" believing this or that; there are a bunch of major branches of the religion, some of which have been around for thousands of years, so it's not possible to speak of any one definitive Buddhist view of the world. But mostly I'm talking about early Buddhism, when it was still based primarily in India.)

But so anyway, here, from Wikipedia, is a description of the Buddhist view of Manusyaloka, "the world of humans and human-like beings who live on the surface of the earth":

The mountain-rings that engird Sumeru are surrounded by a vast ocean, which fills most of the world. The ocean is in turn surrounded by a circular mountain wall called Cakravāḍa (Pāli: Cakkavāḷa) which marks the horizontal limit of the world. In this ocean there are four continents which are, relatively speaking, small islands in it. Because of the immenseness of the ocean, they cannot be reached from each other by ordinary sailing vessels, although in the past, when the cakravartin kings ruled, communication between the continents was possible by means of the treasure called the cakraratna (Pāli cakkaratana), which a cakravartin and his retinue could use to fly through the air between the continents.

As in the Jain worldview, Jambudvipa is to the south of Mount Meru (or Sumeru) and is the home of regular old folks like us (or like Indians, at any rate). It's tough to tell from the map above which, if any, of the outer continents depicted are meant to be Jambudvipa. Here are the descriptions of the four continents, at any rate; draw your own conclusions about the map above.

o Jambudvīpa or Jambudīpa is located in the south and is the dwelling of ordinary human beings. It is said to be shaped "like a cart", or rather a blunt-nosed triangle with the point facing south. (This description probably echoes the shape of the coastline of southern India.) It is 10,000 yojanas in extent (Vibhajyavāda tradition) or has a perimeter of 6,000 yojanas (Sarvāstivāda tradition) to which can be added the southern coast of only 3 1⁄2 yojanas' length. The continent takes its name from a giant Jambu tree (Syzygium cumini), 100 yojanas tall, which grows in the middle of the continent. Every continent has one of these giant trees. All Buddhas appear in Jambudvīpa. The people here are five to six feet tall and their length of life varies between 80,000 and 10 years.

o Pūrvavideha or Pubbavideha is located in the east, and is shaped like a semicircle with the flat side pointing westward (i.e., towards Sumeru). It is 7,000 yojanas in extent (Vibhajyavāda tradition) or has a perimeter of 6,350 yojanas of which the flat side is 2,000 yojanas long (Sarvāstivāda tradition). Its tree is the acacia. The people here are about 12 feet (3.7 m) tall and they live for 250 years.

o Aparagodānīya or Aparagoyāna is located in the west, and is shaped like a circle with a circumference of about 7,500 yojanas (Sarvāstivāda tradition). The tree of this continent is a giant Kadamba tree. The human inhabitants of this continent do not live in houses but sleep on the ground. They are about 24 feet (7.3 m) tall and they live for 500 years.

o Uttarakuru is located in the north, and is shaped like a square. It has a perimter of 8,000 yojanas, being 2,000 yojanas on each side. This continent's tree is called a kalpavṛkṣa (Pāli: kapparukkha) or kalpa-tree, because it lasts for the entire kalpa. The inhabitants of Uttarakuru are said to be extraordinarily wealthy. They do not need to labor for a living, as their food grows by itself, and they have no private property. They have cities built in the air. They are about 48 feet (15 m) tall and live for 1,000 years, and they are under the protection of Vaiśravaṇa.

Bear in mind, though, that for all its specificity, this geography and cosmology is not meant as a literal description of the world as it appears to humans; rather, it was likey meant as a description of the way it appears to the "divine eye" through which a Buddha might perceive it. Or perhaps it was simply an allegorical description of the nature of the universe. Regardless, the Buddhist and Jain cosmologies are striking for the incredible scale on which their portrait of the universe is painted - and believe me, there are worlds upon worlds in those cosmologies beyond what I've briefly sketched here. The universe is much vaster and more incomprehensible in these accounts than it is in anything the West ever produced.

Until the 20th Century. See, that's the thing: with their fantastical descriptions and supererogatory scales of time and space, they've actually come much closer to the findings of modern science than anything in the Western tradition. That's not to say that they nailed it in every respect - they didn't foresee the organization of matter in the universe in the form of galaxies and galaxy clusters, for instance. But on this one profoundly significant fact, the ancient Indian cosmologies and modern astronomy agree: a human life is, by the temporal and spatial measure of the universe, a very, very small thing.

Yet More on Megaregions: Asia, This Time

Here's more from the Florida, et al. paper (PDF) on megaregions. This shows the megaregions of Asia. They are:

1) Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic output: the world's largest megaregion.

2) Osaka-Nagoya, to the south of Greater Tokyo on Japan's largest island of Honshu. It has 36 million people, and contributes another $1.4 trillion to the global economy.

3) Fuku-Kyushu straddles the three mjor Japanese islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, and is home to another 18.5 million people.

4) Sapporo, the last of Japan's four megaregions - and it's smallest - is Sapporo, which covers much of the northern island of Hokkaido. (Note that the authors of the paper observe that the boundaries between Japan's four regions are themselves beginning to blur, and that they may be in the process of becoming an integrated "super-megaregion.")

5) Seoul-Busan covers most of the nation of South Korea; it's population is 46 million.

6) Singapore, the city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, is home to 6 million, a third of whom actually live across the border in Malaysia.

7) The megaregion around Bangkok has a population of 19 million, and an economic output of $100 billion.

8) The Hong-Zhen megaregion in Southeast China incorporates Hong Kong and the rapidly growing industrial cities of Guangdong province. It has a population of about 45 million.

9) Shanghai anchors a megaregion of 66 million people, though being entirely contained within an emerging economy, it produces only $130 billion in economic output (as of 2007).

10) Beijing anchors China's third megaregion, which is home to 43 million people. (The authors note that per capita economic output is fully 360% higher in these three megaregions thn it is in the rest of China.)

11) Delhi-Lahore is home to a whopping 121 million people: the largest megaregion by population in the world. (The authors also mention that Bangalore-Madras, with 72 million people, and Mumbai-Poona, with 62 million, are likely to become megaregions in the near future, though as yet they don't meet the criterion of having an economic output of at least $100 billion. Interestingly, the near-megaregions of India actually have a lower per cepita GDP than other areas in the country, in contrast to China's disproportionately wealthy megaregions.)

There are three further megaregions beyond those in North America, Europe and Asia. Mexico City, with a population of 45 million and an output of $290 billion, is the largest of these; Rio de Janeiro-Sau Paulo is home to 43 million; and the Middle Eastern conurbation formed by Tel Aviv, Israel, Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon has a population of 31 million.

Together, the 40 megaregions of the world count for less than 18% of global population; yet they produce fully 2/3 of the world's economic activity. The authors make the compelling case that these megaregions - rather than cities or nations - provide the best level of economic and social analysis, and that this is the level at which economic development meaningfully occurs. In other words, the rise of the developing economies is not so much a story of the rise of China, India, Brazil, etc.; it's the story of the rise of Hong-Zhen, Delhi-Lahore, and Rio-Paulo. And it's the future of those megaregions which will define the future of the world.

UPDATE: And let's not forget Taipei: 21.8 million souls , all the way up and down the western side of the island of Taiwan.