Mackinder's Heartland Theory

Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947), a British geographer and director of the London School of Economics, delivered the paper that founded modern geopolitics, "The Geographical Pivot of History," to the Royal Geographical Society in London on 25 January 1904. Mackinder argued that the age of maritime exploration, which had rewarded seafaring powers such as Britain, Spain, and Portugal since the 15th century, was closing, because the world's land surface had by 1900 been almost entirely mapped and partitioned among colonial empires. He proposed instead that the interior of Eurasia, a vast zone he called the "pivot area" and later renamed the "Heartland," stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic, formed the true strategic center of world power, because it was inaccessible to sea power yet increasingly traversable by railway. Mackinder pointed specifically to the Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in stages between 1891 and 1916 by the Russian Empire, as the technological development that threatened to give a land power the mobility once monopolized by ships, allowing an interior empire to project force outward toward the maritime rim of Eurasia.