Geography and empire

Abstract

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.