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Ian Morris Dialogue | Munk Debates

June 14, 2022

Ian Morris Dialogue

Is Geography Destiny?

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Ian Morris
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About this episode

In 2016, the UK stunned the rest of Europe by voting to leave the European Union. The split was close, 48 per cent of people voted to stay but 52 per cent voted to leave the geopolitical and trade alliance. In his book, Geography is Destiny, Ian Morris argues Brexit should not have come as a surprise. Instead, he says, this has been playing out for 10,000 years, when the landmass now known as Britain first became an island. Morris argues that Britain is uniquely positioned due to its proximity to Europe while able to stay insular thanks to the English Channel. This wasn’t always the case. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were bit players on the edge of the European stage. But by 1500 CE, advancement of ships and governments of the day turned Britain into a worldwide power. By 1900, Britain was beginning to see the sun set on its empire thanks to rapid globalization. Now Morris says, the great question facing Britain now is how to keep up with Beijing and is it “chaps or maps” that make a country great.

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Ian Morris

“The title of the book is “Geography is Destiny.” That’s because nothing that was said or done during the Brexit debate was in any way new. It was like it was the latest round in an 10,000-year-old argument that we can trace back to the history and archaeology about “what do insularity and proximity mean” and “what do we do with them?”

Ian Morris

“The title of the book is “Geography is Destiny.” That’s because nothing that was said or done during the Brexit debate was in any way new. It was like it was the latest round in an 10,000-year-old argument that we can trace back to the history and archaeology about “what do insularity and proximity mean” and “what do we do with them?”

Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and a Fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University. He has published fourteen books, many of them focusing on the big patterns in world history and possible future trends, and he has directed archaeological excavations in Greece and Italy. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his 2010 work Why the West Rules—For Now won literary awards in the United States, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and China as well as being named as a book of the year by the New York Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Nature, and the London Evening Standard. His latest work is called Geography is Destiny. Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History. 

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