The English academic, politician and imperial explorer Sir Halford Mackinder almost single-handedly invented both the academic study of geography and the concept of ‘geopolitics’. Throughout the late nineteenth century he campaigned successfully for geography to be studied as a subject in its own right at Oxford University. He was also, not coincidentally, an enthusiastic supporter of English imperialism, climbing Mount Kenya in 1899 and becoming an MP in 1910. In 1904 he gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society entitled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, which was illustrated with this world map. Mackinder believed that central Asia, or what he called ‘Eurasia’, represented the pivotal area of the world’s politics, and that whoever controlled this vast, landlocked region and its resources would effectively rule the globe. The map influenced generations of thinkers and politicians, from George Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984 to the US foreign policy promoted by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.