Political Geography in Historical Context

This account of political geography shows how it coemerged with modern geography in the era of inter-imperial rivalries (1870-1945) within a longer historical perspective. Geography was then a unitary, synthetic knowledge, encompassing the natural world and human history. Although Darwinian notions of struggle for survival applied to world politics influenced the naturalized ideas of pioneers of political geography such as Ratzel and Mackinder, as well as French and American geography, these traditions evolved differently in the interwar period. While the field was temporarily eclipsed after World War II, its Cold War revival shifted political geography’s focus from environmental determinism to the relationship between power and knowledge, and later between power and representations. Contemporary geopolitics points to a continued need for an effective planetary governance, and the cultural changes it may require asks for greater imagination based in historical understanding.