Where should we map next?

Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter uncovering the deep roots of a turbulent world. For the full map of posts, see here.

The Art of Painting (detail) — Johannes Vermeer (c. 1668)

After a bit of a breather, I think it’s time for another civilisational deep dive.

Our recent series on Iran was undoubtedly the most popular thing I’ve yet written on Cosmographia. After receiving so much positive feedback I hinted at series close the idea of doing something similar for other great civilisational centres of history, and since then I’ve had a number of readers requesting various places to focus on next.

There’s a number of civilisations I’d love to write about, but how to choose? Well, it occurred to me that I don’t have to, I could let you choose instead.

As with the Iran series, the goal will be to explore the philosophy, history, and culture of another civilisation in an attempt to better understand how its modern incarnation makes sense of itself, its place in the world, and what it makes of us here in the West. With that in mind here are five candidates.

China — The Dragon has in the last few decades awoken from its long slumber, and looks set to dominate the next century of world geopolitics. But how many of us outside the Sinosphere truly understand its motivations, its grievances, the philosophical and historical forces shaping the decisions of its leaders and people?

Russia — The great northern Bear has always defied categorisation — half-European, half-Asiatic, never quite at home in either; a civilisation that has for a thousand years been unable to decide if Europe is friend, model, or enemy. From the Kievan Rus to the war in Ukraine, the answer keeps changing.

Arabia — How a few desert tribes bequeathed a theological and cultural inheritance that today encompasses 411 million Arabic speakers, 22 countries, and 2 billion believers, and how that inheritance still shapes the politics of half the world.

Turkey — Another civilisation that can’t quite decide what it is: European or Asian? Secular or Islamist? NATO ally or Eastern power? Few parts of the world have seen so many empires grace its soils: Hittites, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans; few parts of the world have reinvented itself quite so many times.

Japan — The archipelago at the eastern edge of the world is today at something of a crossroads. For much of its early history it looked to China as its cultural and political lodestar, before eventually forging its own path; in more recent years it has cast its eyes eastwards towards North America and Europe beyond. But with the recent rise of modern China, it once again has something of a decision to make, pivot westwards once more or try somehow to remain outside the orbit of its behemoth neighbour.

I’ve set the poll to close at the end of the weekend, so get your votes in quickly. I’ll likely need at least a couple of weeks of research before I can kick off the new series, so in the meantime, I’ll post some other standalone pieces on various topics.