ABSTRACT
All history, strategic and other kinds, is geographical (Gray, 1999a), but so what? Strategic history is also necessarily political and technological, among the contextual factors specified in Chapter 1. It is a challenge to the historian to give the influence of geography its due, while avoiding the error of according it more than that. Just as strategic history has occurred in the context of history as a whole, so geographical influence on strategic history needs to be regarded in the entire context of that particular history. Indeed, strategic history must be geographical, but surely in no lesser measure it is also pervasively human. If language is used carelessly, journalists and even scholars can slip into commission of the pathetic fallacy: that is, they attribute purposeful motives to inanimate and unintelligent physical realities. For example, wide horizons cannot ‘beckon enticingly’, mountains cannot ‘menace’and distances cannot ‘forbid’. Human agency is required. However, there is a physical reality to geography that provides discipline to strategic endeavours (Winters, 1998). Geography commands respect in strategic practice regardless of the strategist’s intentions, much as war’s ‘grammar’can override and thwart its policy ‘logic’ (Clausewitz, 1976: 605).
