The book that made me ask: do I need to understand where people lived before I try to understand what they did?

Why did I pick this book?

After finishing Sapiens, I found myself with far more questions than answers. I wanted to understand not just what happened, but why civilisations developed so differently.

So I picked up A Little History of the World.

To be honest, I rushed through it. Every spare minute I had, I was reading. I wasn’t trying to memorise dates or kings. I was trying to build a mental map of how the world came to be.

What surprised me

I expected to be fascinated by humanity’s technological advances, institutions and innovations. I thought I’d be taking notes about the next great idea that changed the course of history.

By the end, none of my notes were about the causes of the French Revolution, the discoveries behind the Industrial Revolution, or the success stories of the mighty British empire. They were all about why civilisations made such different choices in the first place.

Surprisingly, I found myself spending more time on Google Maps and an atlas than on the book itself. It changed the way I looked at history.

The ideas that refused to leave my head

Gombrich wrote this as history for children — told almost like a bedtime story — which is why several millennia of human history are condensed into fewer than 300 pages. It isn’t the detail of every change; it’s the whole human journey played out before my eyes as I read.

Along the way, I filled pages with questions.

  • Was monarchy simply unfair, or was it also one of the few ways to create long-term vision and stability?
  • Why did some civilisations embrace monarchy for centuries while others rejected it quite quickly?
  • Why were some cultures far more influenced by prophecy and supernatural beliefs than others?
  • Why did China, despite extraordinary technological innovation, never expand overseas in the same way as Western Europe?
  • Why did India and China, surrounded by oceans, never become dominant naval powers?
  • How did the Jewish people preserve their identity through centuries of exile, persecution and displacement?
  • Do civilisations eventually destroy the very environmental and social conditions that allowed them to flourish?

The question that stayed with me

Then I noticed something. Every time I wrote another question…

…I kept arriving at the same answer.

Geography.

  • Mountains.
  • Rivers.
  • Climate.
  • Natural resources.
  • Access to the sea.
  • Trade routes.

Again and again, geography seemed to influence the opportunities available to civilisations long before politics or economics entered the picture.

Why that led me to my next book

I needed a book that could explain how geography constrains and shapes human societies and their advancement. So I picked Prisoners of Geography.

I wanted to explore whether geography really could explain so much of human history.

One final thought

Humanity has an extraordinary ability to preserve itself, destroy what it has built, and then rebuild again.

  • From crossing oceans to exploring space…
  • From surviving world wars to reaching the Moon…
  • From inventing the wheel to building magnetic trains…

We constantly try to overcome our limitations. But one question stayed with me.

How much of our journey is driven by human ambition — and how much is quietly shaped by geography?

Question unlocked: How did geography make and break civilisations?

Next stop: Prisoners of Geography