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imperative nature of the way he urged his audience to picture the world in its unconstrained whole. Mackinder acknowledged the pre- dominance of seapower at various junctures in history, but he always sought to explain it in terms emphasizing landpower. He was able to convincingly show how seapower was fundamentally a matter of appropriate bases, kept productive and secure. To illustrate this point he gave a brief history of the “closed seas,” where in numerous instances the foundation of dominance on the water had been the action of landpower to exclude rival sea bases. He described the Ptolemaic era, when the navigable length of the Nile, although not a sea, had yet been closed to enemy vessels and rival trade by controlling its banks. Then how the Mediterranean had been successfully closed in the same manner by Rome after its victory in the Punic Wars, whereby it gained control of the shores and ushered in the empire’s greatest period of expansion. By the time of the British Raj the Indian Ocean too had effectively been closed to rival powers by denying them significant sea bases around the region. Closed seas implied closed political systems or, in other words, empires. Indeed, it was in this way that the Pax Romana and Britannica had been able to hold sway over the known worlds of their respective times.3 In 1904, citing the expeditions of Scott and Nansen in the Antarctic, Mackinder asserted that there were now no great discoveries to be made or claims to be laid out. The world had become a closed political system, meaning there was unity of world politics. From thence forward only relative gain by one or an alliance of the Great Powers was possible, meaning that one empire’s gain could only be made at the expense of the others. It was the zero-sum game of the post-Columbian age. The immediate background to the concept Mackinder enunciated beginning in 1904 centered on the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars. It was the tremen- dous feats of power projection, by sea in the case of the British in South Africa, and by land in the case of the Russians in Manchuria, that led Mackinder to compare the two forms of mobility. His historical analysis was pregnant with caution. The power that would ultimately control the seas, he predicted, would be the one based on the greater resources of landpower. Clearly drawing from Mahan Mackinder had characterized the great campaigns of the classical world as representative of the overarching struggle between landfaring and seafaring, or “peninsular” and “insu- lar,” peoples. The preeminence of the European and American insular peoples in the late Columbian era had, he suggested, distorted the true relationship between land- and seapower, and the outcome of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars had only contributed to that process. This was at a time before the Dardanelles campaign of the First World War had shown, contrary to Mahan’s assumptions, that seapower could Sir Halford Mackinder and the World Island 13