The title of this book does not quite capture what Maxim Samson is doing. Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way isn’t really about shaping the earth, at least not in the way you or I might understand it, likewise neither is it about mapping in its literal sense. Samson uses “earth shaping” to mean something very specific: reshaping our world—physically, yes, but also in other ways—to make it “more interconnective,” as he sets out in the introduction.
In keeping with geography’s literal Greek meaning of ‘earth writing’, cultural geographers call attention to the notion that our planet’s various ‘cultural landscapes’, fashioned by humans onto the natural world, can be ‘read’ like story-filled texts. Earth shaping adopts the same principles, but adds to them a specific emphasis on the manifold power of geographical connections. Human history has been written in geographical connection—and when you know what to look for, these stories, both obscure and renowned, are everywhere. This book explores the reasons why we engage with our surroundings through connection, and how, through our actions, we write ourselves and a very specific history into the ground. (p. 2)
This is perhaps more theoretical than it needs to be. One could just as easily note that Samson’s first book, Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World, was about the lines that divide us; whereas Earth Shapers flips the script and explores the lines that connect us. And in Earth Shapers “lines” are just as important a word as “connect.”
Because everything in this book is a line. Each of this book’s eight chapters focuses on what is basically a connecting line or network of some sort: the Inca Empire’s Qhapaq Ñan; Mozambique’s separated colonial-era railway lines; the absolutely bonkers, 170-km planned linear city called The Line that is being built in northwestern Saudi Arabia (you can see the construction site in satellite imagery: it’s nuts); the Indigenous trails that endured after the imposition of Chicago’s regular street grid; the implications of Korea’s Baekdu-daegan for reunification.
What these lines principally have in common is scale. They’re transformative, but not necessarily in a physical sense. The Panama Canal is the obvious example of literal earth shaping, but the continent-level Great Green Wall, a project to combat desertification in the Sahel, has evolved into something a little less literal. And while the Baltic Way, as a single-day demonstration in 1989, though one that involved two million participants along a 675-km line, was ostensibly ephemeral, it was no less impactful.
It is in part the unexpected diversity of Samson’s wide-ranging examples—the connections between the connections, if that isn’t too meta—that makes Earth Shapers such an engaging read. This is the kind of book that fits in well with other books that gather geographical trivia and oddities, or islands (i.e., the sorts of books that Alastair Bonnett writes), though this one is decidedly more focused and substantive.
Earth Shapers was published in August by Profile Books in the U.K., and will come out in the U.S. from the University of Chicago Press later this month. I received an electronic advance galley from the latter.
Earth Shapers
by Maxim Samson
Profile Books, 7 Aug 2025, £22 / University of Chicago Press, 13 Oct 2025, $30
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
