The Russians at Merv and Herat
The Russians at Merv and Herat

Author: Charles Marvin

Publisher:

Published: 1883

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13:

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The Russians at Merv and Herat, and Their Power of Invading India is an account of Russian policy in Central Asia and of possible Russian intentions toward Afghanistan and India in the late 19th century, written from a British perspective. Topics covered include writings by Russian military officers on Central Asia and India; the analysis by the Russian general staff of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80); the journeys by Russian diplomat Pavel M. Lessar from Ashgabad (present-day Ashqabat, Turkmenistan) to Sarakhs (in present-day Iran) and from Sarakhs to Herat, Afghanistan; Russian railroad construction in Central Asia; Russia's buildup of naval power in the Caspian Sea; and the development of the oil industry in Baku (present-day Azerbaijan). The book predicts that in a future crisis with Great Britain, Russia, unlike in previous crises or during the Crimean War, almost certainly would strike at British India. The author, Charles Thomas Marvin (1854-90), was a writer and one-time Foreign Office staff member who had lived many years in Russia, initially with his father, who was employed in Saint Petersburg, and later as a correspondent for a British newspaper. The book draws on interviews that Marvin conducted in 1882 with leading Russian military and political leaders, and contains translations of long excerpts from relevant Russian books and reports. It includes drawings by Russian artists, which, the author asserts, "are the first illustrations of Merv and the Turcoman region that have yet appeared in this country." The book contains three appendices, including a long essay on the Russian navy that is only partly related to the main subject of the work.

The Revenge of Geography
The Revenge of Geography

Author: Robert D. Kaplan

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2013-09-10

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0812982223

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.