Tom Bilyeu

At their height, they literally controlled all of global trade.

They controlled the open sea, the shipping lanes, the choke points, the ports.

If you wanted to move goods or armies, you had to put them on a boat.

And if you put them on a boat, you had to deal with the British Navy.

But railroads...

were going to change everything and they knew it.

For the first time in human history, you could move enormous quantities of goods and soldiers across land faster than ships could carry them by sea.

And that meant that whoever could unite the great Eurasian landmass, the stretch of territory running from Eastern Europe through Russia,

through the middle east all the way to china would have access to a combined pool of energy manufacturing capacity and population that no navy in the world could blockade or stop now mckinder knew

England's an island, so it's gotta have some solution.

Mackinder called this territory the Heartland, and his warning was blunt.

If any power ever manages to unite it, the game is over for whoever controls the seas.

The seas just won't matter anymore.

Britain's response was to make sure that nobody ever united the heartland by any means necessary.

Fund wars, back opposing factions, keep Europe and Asia divided and at each other's throats, force commerce back onto the water where the British Navy could control it.

The Napoleonic Wars, which most people think of as a story just about French ambition,

It's that, but in large part, it was about Britain spending enormous amounts of blood and treasure to make sure France didn't unify continental Europe.

Same with Russia's attempts to push towards warm water ports.

Same with backing the Ottoman Empire to keep Russia contained.

Every major British geopolitical move for 150 years was a variation on that same theme.