Geography and Empire

Geography has engaged in the study of empire since its early days as an academic discipline. Few disciplines have such a clear complicity with this political formation, that feeds on territorial growth through military power, and that limits political sovereignty in the peripheries. In fact, a temporal correspondence exists between the birth of modern geography and the emergence of a new phase of capitalist imperialism during the 1870s. Viewed as the queen of the imperial sciences over a century ago, geographies of empire have changed throughout time, reflecting the modifications in the discipline and the transformation in the nature of empires. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and under environmental determinism, geographical knowledge produced by the likes of Frederich Ratzel or Alfred Mackinder lent scientific credibility to ideologies of imperialism while, at the same time, they legitimized the scientific claims of geography as an academic discipline. Climatic and acclimatization studies and prerogatives were pivotal to construct moralistic considerations of both people and places. During the first half of the 20th century, geographies of empire were dominated, in part, by the regional tradition of French geographic inquiry, which cultivated a regional, zonal approach, while work with a focus on empire had a global and zonal tropicality architecture. Quantitative and neopositivist geography approaches in the second half of the 20th century had a less marked influence. Since the late 1980s, a concern for “empire” has returned to geography, and various subdisciplines have focused on the imperial genealogy of the discipline, the links between geography and empire, and the consequences of those links. A more critical engagement with the history of geography has provided contextual histories of global spatial practice and discourse over the past two centuries. The reconsideration of imperialism in view of postcolonial theory, tackling “historical amnesia,” has also promoted a new wave of studies. In a broad way we can be tempted today to make a division between geographical research, which participated in imperial development and maintenance, and geographical research “after Empire,” which aims to study and understand the past and present spatialities of empire.