1. See Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” republished as an additional paper in Democratic Ideals and Reality (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, n.d.; originally published in 1919), pp. 175–93. “The Geographical Pivot of History” was first presented as a paper to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904.

2. As Mackinder notes, “Each century has its own geographical perspective. Men still living, though past the age of military service, were taught from a map of the world on which nearly all the interior of Africa was a blank.… The geographical perspective of the twentieth century differs, however, from that of all the previous centuries in more than mere extension. In outline our geographical knowledge is now complete.” Democratic Ideals and Reality, pp. 21–22.

3. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” pp. 175–6.

4. The great advantages of the Pivot/Heartland, Mackinder surmised, were its enormous resources and inaccessibility to seapower. As Brian W. Blouet explains, “Mackinder argued that in the heartland of Eurasia there was a pivotal region that lay beyond the reach of sea power.… When the railways were built this vast interior region would produce increased quantities of wheat, cotton, fuels, and metals while remaining apart from oceanic commerce.” Geopolitics and Globalization (London: Reaktion, 2001), p. 27. Mackinder's notion of the parameters of the Pivot/Heartland changed over the roughly four decades from when he first proposed the idea to when he last wrote on it, but he always argued that the Pivot/Heartland's character and military potential made it a critical region of the world.

5. Nevertheless, German near-success in the Second World War and the Soviet Union's imperial gains during and after that conflict demonstrated convincingly that a powerful Heartland polity could provide a potent challenge to the political autonomy of the Western Europe states.

6. For a very compelling defense of Mackinder, see Colin S. Gray, “In Defense of the Heartland: Sir Halford Mackinder and His Critics a Hundred Years On,” Comparative Strategy 23:1 (January–March 2004), 9–26.

7. On the nature of RMAs, see Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History, Strategy and History series (London: Frank Cass, 2002).

8. On this episode see J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (New York: Da Capo Press, n.d.; originally published 1960), p. 130; Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 172 and 181; and Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander the Great (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 186.

9. For an excellent discussion of Philip II of Spain's global politics see Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

10. For a brief summary of the importance of the empire to Portugal's economy and the crown's efforts to secure a monopoly of lucrative businesses such as the spice trade, see Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 139–41. Also see Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Emipire, 1415–1580, Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion series, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), esp. pp. 407–415.

11. One arguably could include other regional centers of power, such as India/South Asia. In any case, India's substantial population and economic vitality during much of the Columbian epoch should be noted.

12. It is, for example, very difficult to explain the British and American bombing campaign in the Second World War without reference to this fact. There was nothing in the broad Anglo-American culture, which made a very clear distinction between combatants and civilians, to justify the mass death of noncombatant civilians in the notoriously imprecise and quite ruthless bombing campaigns conducted against Germany and Japan. However, given the technical and practical limitations then prevailing—inaccurate guidance of munitions, the utility of flying high when faced with defensive fighters and anti-aircraft artillery, and so forth—and the military benefits that it was believed would flow from a comprehensive bombing campaign—both London and Washington chose to conduct massive bombing campaigns against their enemies.

13. For example, the United States today certainly has a interest in the world price of oil, and if plausibly threatened with a seemingly permanent increase in the world price band to, say, $80–100 per barrel, would certainly take action, including military action if necessary, to prevent this price increase from occurring. However, no American administration would consider simply seizing the Saudi and Kuwati oilfields, declaring the area U.S. territory, and leveraging control of fields to manipulate the world price downward. Such a course would almost certainly have the desired strategic goal (although it would likely also have other very undesirable effects strategically), because such an action would be unthinkable to a twenty-first century American policymaker. Militarily such a course would be plausible, but American strategic culture would not permit it. However, sixteenth century European policymakers faced with a similar problem probably would not consider such a course of action at all outrageous and, so long as they believed military success to be likely, a colonial endeavor probably would be the course of action that they would choose.

14. A history of these fascinating voyages is offered in Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–33 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). For short accounts see Bailey and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, pp. 66–67; Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2^nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 398–402.

15. Thomas M. Kane succinctly discusses some of the factors influencing China's decision to reject sea power: “In the mid-1400s … China's bid for seapower fell victim to court politics. The Confucian scholars who ran China's bureaucracy were traditionally hostile to seafaring, both because Confucius himself had depicted merchants as social parasites and because the court eu nuchs who controlled the fleet were their political rivals.… Maritime trade declined in economic importance as well. China's currency collapsed during the mid-1400s, forcing Chinese merchants to pay for their goods in gold and silver. Officials who might once have seen trade as a valuable source of revenue began to perceive it as a dangerous drain on China's reserves of precious metals. The Ming Dynasty constructed a series of canals which made inland water transport cheaper and safer than coastal shipping. Meanwhile, invasions from Central Asia distracted officials from maritime affairs.” Chinese Grand Strategy and Maritime Power (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 28.

16. As Steven Mosher notes, “For more than two thousand years the Chinese considered themselves the geographical, and geopolitical, center of the world. From their earlier incarnation as an empire they spoke of China as Zhong Guo, ‘The Middle Kingdom,’ or even more revealingly, as Tian Xia, ‘Everything Under Heaven.’ They believed their emperor to be the only legitimate political authority in their known world and viewed themselves as the highest expression of civilized humanity.” Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World (San Francisco: Encounter, 2000), p. 2.

17. Given its cosmopolitan perspective, it is unsurprising that the most powerful Western religious institution, the Roman Catholic Church, took an active interest over centuries in the worldwide spread of Catholicism. Moreover, the major West European Catholic powers were generally friendly to the Church's missionary activity in their empires and, at least formally, considered the propagation of the Faith to be an important state activity. The effects speak for themselves: today there are far more active Catholics in the former colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal than there are in Europe itself.

18. At least terms of political theory, this obligation perhaps weighed especially heavily on Muslim leaders, as the notion of a secular state was alien to classical Islamic thought. Although Western thinkers generally endorsed the division of secular and religious authority, Islamic thought inextricably intertwined state and religious authority. As Roger Scruton argues, even today “Islamic jurisprudence does not recognize secular, still less territorial, jurisdiction as a genuine source of law. It proposes a universal law that is the single path (shari') to salvation. And the shari'a is not understood as setting limits to what can be commanded, but rather as a fully comprehensive system of commands—which can serve a military just as well as a civilian function. Nor does Islam recognize the state as an independent object of loyalty.… Nor is there any trace in Islamic law of the secular conception of government that Christianity inherited (via St. Paul) from Roman law.” The West and the Rest: Globalization the Terrorist Threat (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002), p. 66. It should be noted, however, that there are examples of Western European states blurring the distinction between secular and church institutions; most notably, King Henry VIII took on an unusual role that mixed secular and religious authority by breaking from Rome and making himself the head of a separate Church of England.

19. Philip II was a particularly striking figure in this respect. Noting several statements by Philip, Geoffrey Parker argues that they contained multiple layers of “messianic vision.” “First, Philip believed that God had chosen him to rule expressly to achieve His purpose for the world. Second, he was equally convinced that God held him under special protection, to enable him to achieve these goals (although the process might prove neither obvious nor easy). Third, he felt certain that, if necessary, God would intervene directly in order to help him succeed.” Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 30.

20. Overall, the Catholic powers, with Spain being the archetypal example, perhaps were rather more reliant on religious justifications for imperial expansion than were Protestant states such the Netherlands and Great Britain. However, in the post-Westphalian era of modern states most European powers moved away somewhat—although not entirely—from attempting to justify expansion in religious terms.

21. Moreover, this was despite the fact that in the early sixteenth century Ottoman sultans also began to use the title of caliph, thus at least theoretically accepting the duty to see the spiritual health of Islam and to its further propagation over the earth.

22. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003), p, 11.

23. See Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 301–22.

24. For a brief history of this critical engagement, see J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Vol. I: From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto (New York: Da Capo, n.d.; originally published 1954), pp. 559–78.

25. See Parker, The Military Revolution, pp. 105–6.

26. Bernard Lewis makes the interesting point that the Ottoman elite remained quite uninterested in the New World for centuries: “A Turkish version of Columbus's own (now lost) map, prepared in 1513, survives in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, where it remained, unconsulted and unknown, until it was discovered by a German scholar in 1929. A Turkish book on the New World was written in the late sixteenth century, and was translated from a variety of European sources—oral rather than written. It describes the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of the New World, and, of course, expresses the hope that this blessed land would in due course be illuminated by the light of Islam and added to the sultan's realms. This too remained unknown until it was printed in Istanbul in 1729.” What Went Wrong? pp. 37 and 39.

27. On Spanish imperial overextension, see Anthony Pagden, “Heeding Heraclides: Empire and Its Discontents, 1619–1812,” in Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 316–333.

28. For an overview of the progress in these fields and predictions on how they will shape the future, see Damien Broderick, The Spike: How Our Lives are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies (New York: Forge, 2001); Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2003); William Kristol and Eric Cohen, eds., The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Jonathan Margolis, A Brief History of Tomorrow: The Future, Past and Present (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000); Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnum, 1998); and Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).