Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbours, World War Two, and the Making of a Militarized Transatlantic

by Colin Flint

This innovative book tells a unique story about D-Day, one that does not concentrate on the soldiers who hit the beaches or the admirals and generals who commanded them. Instead, Colin Flint brings engineers, businessmen, and bureaucrats to center stage. Through them, he offers a different way of thinking about war, one that sees war as an ongoing set of processes in which seemingly isolated acts are part of broader historical developments. Developing the concept of geopolitical constructs to understand wars, the author connects specific events to long-term and global geopolitical arrangements.

Focusing on the construction of the Mulberry Harbours—massive artificial structures dragged across the English Channel in the immediate wake of the invading force—Flint illustrates how the process of making war links a vast array of people, institutions, and places, as well as past events and future outcomes. He argues that the people who designed and built the Harbours became geopolitical subjects by producing pieces of engineering that helped shape the course of World War Two and the Cold War that followed, which created a militarized trans-Atlantic that remains today. Using previously unpublished archival material to give voice to those who made the Mulberry Harbours and wartime strategy, this original study broadens the historical and geographical scope of how we understand war, showing how the everyday actions of individuals made, and were made by, geopolitical settings.

226 pages, Hardcover

Published September 19, 2016

Reviews

[George Siehl · Rating 1 out of 5]

A major disappointment. Perhaps I expected too much. Several years ago I read Paul Kennedy's Engineers of Victory (five stars, by me). Kennedy noted that when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca in 1943 they set three strategic imperatives for the Allies: Get the convoys through to England; Establish air superiority; and, Find a way to cross the beaches to invade Nazi occupied Europe. Knowing that the Mulberry Harbors were an important component, I hoped Flint would flesh out their achievement, with geopolitical flair, as a literal reading of his title seemed to promise.

In the paragraph describing what constitutes a geopolitical construct, however, he wrote: "Geopolitical constructs are spatially and historically unbound. They have an influence or reach that extends beyond the immediate 'here and now.' The mutuality of agent and construct produces geopolitical constructs that both enable agency and have a lasting impact that reaches across time and space. The actions in one geographic-historic setting are partially framed by those in distant spaces at previous times. Action within, and of, geopolitical constructs have lasting impacts that stretch beyond the immediate, in both spatial and historic terms. Understanding war in this way tackles the tension between approaches to geopolitics that emphasize structure over agency, and those that focus on individual actions without theorizing the setting of those actions."

Had enough? There is another, similar, sentence, but you get the idea. I made it through a chapter and a half before quitting. I expect of an author the taking of meaty bites of the topic, but not chewing on an idea like an all-day wad of bubble gum. He spent pages returning to the idea that war changes people, and people change war. I get it It's a nice thought that works at the micro and macro scale. Now, move on please. Or, another of his thoughts, that what happens in war is, in part, a consequence of what has happened in the past. Further, that action will generate consequences of its own, over time. War, apparently, doesn't happen in Las Vegas. Again, easily enough understood. Again, move on, please.

Some hard thinking and a tough editor might make a good journal article of this book, simply because the topic has such high potential interest to military history readers. This book, not so much.