Arctic Passages
Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World
Arctic Passages is Kieran Mulvaney’s comprehensive study of one of the world’s most mysterious and significant geopolitical flashpoints.
Taking a nonlinear approach to the human history of the Arctic, the book dedicates as much attention to the region’s myth-making power as it does to its more material role in nation-building. From the time of the ancient Greek mariner Pytheas, the Arctic typified the lethal, seductive prospect of untapped riches in the European imagination. Inhospitable, resource-rich, and crawling with the world’s largest land predators, the Arctic’s complicated allure shows forth in the book’s pages. It traces the region’s development in the popular imagination through the imperial ambitions of the British, Russians, Swedes, and Finns, up to the tense treaty-making of the nuclear era. Throughout, the Arctic’s precipitous warming is studied not only for its devastating ecological implications but for global superpowers’ maneuvers to capitalize on possible new trade opportunities.
Profiles of the legends and heroes of the region appear, too, as with the doomed voyages of the Franklin Expedition, which are treated with a fresh sense of dread and mystery. Different national perspectives are given careful weight via analyses of trade-based navigation, with special attention devoted to the Northwest and Northeast Passages and accompanying research about specific cargo freighters, obscure routes through the Arctic passes, and the varying economic trade-offs involved. While climate data is a consistent throughline, the book’s most in-depth extrapolations of this data come late and risk being overshadowed by the book’s more near-term geopolitical examinations.
Arctic Passages is a historical and political study of one of the world’s least explored, most contested, and most vulnerable regions.
Reviewed by
Isaac Randel
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