Geography Concepts: A Personal View

  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by  John Perkins I’ve been reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man . It’s a story about how progress got weaponized. John Perkins describes the 1970s—when he flew from one “developing” country to another, briefcase in hand, selling prosperity at 10 percent interest. Power plants. Dams. Highways. Airports. All paid for with loans so large they could never be repaid. He calls himself an economic hit man , but the real weapon wasn’t a gun. It was compound interest . Every loan came wrapped in the promise of modernization. And hidden in the fine print: dependency . Countries took the money. American firms got the contracts. And decades later, the debts remain—still quietly shaping who gets schools, who gets medicine, and who gets told to privatize their water. Often the leaders who agreed to these loans are long dead or discredited, often dictators who only ruled for themselves and their cronies with no interest in the future of ...

Picture this. A teenager in Minnesota, 2025, scrolling TikTok, maybe sipping bubble tea. She’s Hmong-American, her parents born in the Twin Cities, her grandparents across the Pacific in the mountains of Laos. When she asks her grandmother why she came to America, she gets a quiet smile and an answer that sounds less like history than like a wound:  “Because we helped America.” Now, follow that thread backward. In the 1950s, the world looked like a chessboard. The United States and the Soviet Union were playing a global game of dominoes—each country that turned communist was imagined to knock down the next. Vietnam, a strip of jungle and rice paddies, became the table’s edge. If Vietnam “fell,” Washington feared, so would Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. And then? The whole of Southeast Asia, gone. So America fought—not directly against an invading army, but against an idea. And that’s always dangerous. The war spread like spilled fuel. Laos, officially neutral, became the target of a...

  Right, so picture this. The year is 1947. The war’s over, the highways are spreading like veins, and Americans are beginning to discover that they can all watch the same television show, eat the same brand of cereal, and—if they like—call their soft drink whatever everyone else calls it. But not yet. In that year, you could still draw a linguistic border across the country as clearly as a front line on a map. In the North, from Minnesota clear across to Washington, the drink in your hand was “pop.” It’s a word that snaps when you say it. Short, bright, cheerful—like the sound it names. It comes from the British “popwater,” the hiss and bang of a cork leaving a bottle, a bit of linguistic onomatopoeia that immigrants brought over and never quite let go. And in those northern towns—many of them Scandinavian, German, British in heritage—the word took root. It was what you drank at the church picnic, at the corner store, after mowing the lawn. “Pop” belonged to the language of smal...

 Capitalism has a dirty little habit. It makes too much, too fast. Goods pile up, money stagnates, and suddenly the whole machine threatens to seize. That’s the crisis. And the escape hatch? Geography. When Manchester’s mills glutted local markets in the 19th century, they didn’t slow down production—they exported their surplus to India and, while they were at it, dismantled India’s own textile industries. The contradiction at home was “fixed”… by making life worse somewhere else. The same logic drove European voyages across the Atlantic. Merchants drowning in debt conjured a solution out of stolen land, enslaved labor, and rivers of silver ripped from the Americas. One society’s “growth” was another’s catastrophe. Harvey calls this the spatial fix : capitalism avoids imploding by dumping its crises on someone else’s doorstep. Infrastructure serves the same function—railroads in colonies, highways across America, server farms in deserts—all built as sponges for surplus capital, ...

 Lines in the Sand: How Rulers Broke the World You Live on a Map Drawn by a Drunk Victorian (How straight lines on paper created crooked futures on the ground) Take a map of Africa. Spread it out. Now. What do you see? Lines. Straight ones. Unnaturally straight. They cut through deserts, forests, rivers, mountain ranges… entire cultures. As if people, languages, histories were as pliable as ink. That’s not geography. That’s geometry. Done by a Victorian civil servant with a ruler and too much port. And the astonishing bit? Those lines still decide who lives, who dies, and who goes to war. The Day the Rulers Came Out Berlin. A dozen or so European statesmen—none of them African, none of them invited by Africans—gathered around a table. On the agenda? Africa. All of it. The Berlin Conference, chaired by Otto von Bismarck. Officially, a diplomatic discussion. In practice? A cartographic land-grab. The game wasn’t to build nations. It was to strip the continent for ivory, rubber, m...

 Picture it. The 1970s. Bell-bottoms, disco, and a peculiar economic riddle called stagflation. Economists had long believed that inflation and unemployment moved like opposite ends of a seesaw: if one went up, the other went down. Then came the oil shocks, the hangover from Vietnam spending, and a central bank reluctant to squeeze the brakes. Suddenly, the seesaw broke. Prices soared. Jobs vanished. And the public, squeezed in the middle, discovered that wages bought less every week. Now, it’s one thing to fight inflation on its own—raise interest rates, tighten credit, sit back and wait. It’s another to fight unemployment—lower rates, spend more, try to kick-start growth. But when you’ve got both together? Every tool you reach for makes the other problem worse. It took Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve, and the political nerve to withstand years of pain, to wrestle inflation into submission by jacking up rates to levels that made mortgages unaffordable and sent businesses to t...

Begin at the end, 1994, when Nelson Mandela lifts his hand to swear an oath and the world sighs with relief as apartheid collapses without the civil war so many expected. Unspool the thread backwards and you find the story began with something almost trivial—a pit stop. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company planted a refreshment station at the Cape for ships bound to and from Asia. From that small commercial convenience grew farms that needed labor, so enslaved people were brought from Africa and Asia. With that decision the colony’s operating system was set: land seized cheaply, labor kept cheaper. By 1806 the British had taken the Cape and imported a very British set of rules, including abolition of slavery in 1834. For many Boer farmers, descendants of those early Dutch settlers, it was not just a moral lecture from London but an economic wrecking ball. So thousands of Boers loaded their lives into ox wagons and set off on the Great Trek, away from British courts and toward the int...