From the archive: Are we really prisoners of geography?

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  This is The Guardian.

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  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned.

• 00:16

  But Britain would never be the same.

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  I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors,

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  we 're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire.

• 00:31

  Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Hi, I'm Daniel Imervar.

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  I'm the author of Are We Really Prisoners of Geography?

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  Which was published in 2022.

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  This article is an attempt to make sense of a rash of books that have been coming out about geopolitics and mountain ranges

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  and water tables explaining international affairs.

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  And I got really curious about why these were so popular all of a sudden,

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  and I came to feel that they were expressive of a kind of conservatism,

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  not just a political conservatism, but also a conservatism about the earth itself, that it wo n't change.

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  So I ended up writing a skeptical take on these.

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  One reason I got interested in this is that there's always two kinds of ways that international politics can go.

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  It can be an affair of ideas and trade goods and everything sort of effortlessly crossing borders,

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  or it can be an affair of defended borders and, you know, locking down the resources you have within them.

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  And it 's always kind of ping pong between the two, but it seems like we 're in the age where borders,

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  where grounds matters more, both because we 're seeing a lot of border walls being built and we 're seeing a lot of new claims

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