Trading States, Territorial States, and Technology

The importance of Mackinder's early twentieth-century contribution to the debate on states and polities hinges on three modern discourses: on duality (land power versus sea power); on the world-system; and on the changing role of technology. Mackinder's argument that technology seriously altered the geopolitical relations between the dual state types is most important to his analysis in the Pivot paper of 1904. From the development of the maritime trading state in its modern, capitalist form in the late 1400s until the late 1800s territorial and trading states occupied mutually almost exclusive geographical spaces. The rapid acceleration of certain forms of technology in the second half of the 1800s ended that mutual exclusivity, brought the territorial and trading state types into increasing conflict, and persuaded Mackinder to propose a future geopolitical struggle based on a territorial state's rapidly increasing ability to control certain defined geographical spaces. In both his major theoretical works, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904) ¹ and, in more developed form, Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), ² Mackinder utilised duality, world-systems and technology to arrive at his model of geopolitical struggle. The model has been generally oversimplified in the literature as suggesting that land power was about to replace sea power and that whatever state ruled the area of Eurasia variously described by Mackinder as the Pivot or the Heartland would come to rule the world. He certainly claimed that the era of dominance of the world by the maritime states, which he called the Columbian epoch, seemed over. ³ My goal here is to recover the sophistication of Mackinder's argument, to embed it in the rapidly changing technology of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and to suggest what lessons it may have for geopolitics in the first part of the twenty-first century.