CHOKEPOINTS

The Grammar of Global Power

von Paolo Cappelli

202 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In March 2021, one ship turned sideways and stopped a tenth of world trade. Five years later, one country closed one strait and reached for the throat of the global economy. Both times, the world discovered too late how much hung on a narrow place almost no one had thought about.We were promised a borderless world. Distance was dead, the map was a relic, and money and information would move everywhere at once. That story was wrong in one decisive way. Globalisation did not abolish geography. It concentrated it.Today a single canal carries roughly a tenth of world trade. A single strait carries about a fifth of the world's oil. A handful of cables on the seabed carry almost all of its data, and the money that rides on it. One island makes over ninety per cent of its most advanced computer chips. Efficiency built this. Every shortest route and lowest cost pulled the world's flows toward the same few narrow places, until connection and fragility became the same thing seen from two sides.Chokepoints is a field guide to those narrow places, and to the people who fight over them. Paolo Cappelli follows the oldest strategy in the world from the pass at Thermopylae to the Strait of Hormuz, from the Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 to the sabotage of Nord Stream, from the canals dug across deserts and jungles to the invisible chokepoints of the dollar and the microchip, where a lever can be pulled with a keystroke and no coordinates at all.Along the way it hands the reader a tool: a simple test for telling a genuine chokepoint from a scenic narrow place, and for spotting the difference between a passage that wounds whoever closes it and one that can be closed for free. The second kind is the dangerous kind, and there are more of them every year.This is a book about how power actually moves in a connected age. Not through territory, but through passage. Not the ground, but the gate.For readers of Prisoners of Geography, Chip War, and Underground Empire.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798189872655
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published