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one giant interconnected ocean. This is the World Island—the single Great Continent, as distinct from Australasia, Antarctica, and the Americas, or more colloquially, the Old World as distinct from the New. To fully appreciate it is to view the world from above and imagine the absence of the north polar ice so as to make it possible to sail right around the Giant Continent of the World Island. This could be done on the interconnected oceans of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific, which together make up the Great Ocean enveloping the World Island. The peripheral nations of the World Island include Germany, Austria, Turkey, and India, together forming an inner or marginal crescent. At varying distances from the World Island in the Great Ocean are the islands of Britain, Japan, the Americas, and Australasia, which together form an outer or insular crescent. Though numerous and large in some cases, these lands yet pale into insignificance next to the vastness and population of the World Island. Come the beginning of the twentieth century man had explored and laid claim to all the land of the World Island together with what lay over the oceans in the so-called New World. All that remained unclaimed was at the poles, but even that was known if not owned. Thus it was not so long ago that the world finally became a closed political system in which territorial expansion could only be achieved in a zero-sum struggle among the great powers. Such was the distribution of those great powers and antipathy between them that one could point to a particular region at which the fulcrum of world power was and had historically been poised. This was the Heartland, that closed land space, inaccessible to ships, that began in Eastern Europe and stretched eastwards almost but not quite to the Pacific forests of the Far East. From north to south the region extended from the Arctic Circle to the South Asian deserts and mountain ranges. Thus together with the core area occupied for the most part by Russia, at its greatest extent the Heartland took in the Baltic and Black seas, as well as the navigable Middle and Lower Danube, Asia Minor, Armenia, northern Persia, Tibet, and Mongolia. At the western boundary was the crucial 800-mile isthmus between the Black and Baltic seas, which constituted the eastern approach to European civilization. Mighty Europe thus occupied only a slight proportion in an isolated peninsula of the vast Eurasian continent and was dwarfed by the size of the Heartland to the east. Yet Europeans from the Renaissance onwards had typically claimed for “their” continent the land all the way up to the rather arbitrary boundary of the Ural Mountains, deep in the Heartland. As set against one another, the relationship between the real Europe in its peninsular area and the Heartland was characterized by the precariously indefensible eastern approach to the former through that broad gap between the seas—and through which for centuries the nomadic peoples of the Heartland had surged, wreaking havoc amongst the civilizations 4 The World Island