The RGS was particularly concerned with the haphazard nature of international mapmaking, especially in Africa. As late as 1901 Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, a former surveyor of the Indian frontier and future president of the society, could publish an article in the society’s journal bluntly entitled ‘How Are We to Get Maps of Africa?’20 Holdich complained that ‘various surveys have been commenced in different parts of Africa under local administrations, which are unconnected with each other and have apparently no common basis of technical system or scale, from which it will be difficult eventually to compile a satisfactory and homogeneous first map of our African possessions’. He encouraged the adoption of more systematic mapping techniques such as common scales and base measurements, as well as the use of information gathered from local communities, or what he called ‘native agency’. The map of Africa appended to Holdich’s paper illustrated the problem: 6.75 million square kilometres of territory officially under British imperial control were still unmapped, and this figure excluded areas controlled by other European powers that still awaited survey. The map shows coastal areas of northern, eastern, western and southern Africa ‘surveyed in detail’, but the grey ‘unexplored’ regions overwhelmingly define the map, in stark contrast to the tiny red areas where ‘a detailed survey based upon triangulation has been made’. Although political maps of the world might show nearly a quarter of its surface marked in British imperial red, physical maps of these regions told a far less convincing story of colonial mastery and domination.
Into this confused situation stepped an English academic named Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), who would almost singlehandedly both transform the study of geography in England, and create a whole new way of understanding and using the subject: geopolitics. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Mackinder was one of the most influential figures in British academic and political life: one of the founders of the London School of Economics (1895), he was a Scottish Unionist Party Member of Parliament (1910–22), the British High Commissioner in Southern Russia (1919–20), and a keen amateur explorer, being the first European to climb Mount Kenya (1899). In 1920 he was knighted for his services as an MP, and in 1923 he became full professor in geography at the LSE.
Mackinder was born and educated in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, where his interest in geography and politics began at an early age. Looking back over his life in 1943 at the age of 82, Mackinder recalled that ‘my earliest memory of public affairs goes back to the day in September 1870 when, as a small boy who had just begun attendance at the local grammar school, I took home the news, which I had learned from a telegram affixed to the post office door, that Napoleon III and his whole army had surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan’.21 At 9, Mackinder was already ‘writing a history of the war in a notebook’, as well as reading an account of Captain Cook’s voyages, and delivering speeches to his family on geography, including one on Australia, which his father praised as ‘delivery good, reception excellent’.22 Such interests did not always endear him to his teachers. He later recalled that he ‘had been caned at school for drawing maps instead of writing Latin prose’.23 His boyhood games included being king of an island on which he ‘civilised its usually backward inhabitants’, and his adolescence coincided with the rise of British imperialism: in 1868 the Royal Colonial Society was founded, and in 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.
By the time he reached Oxford University in 1880, the belief in imperialism as a providential vocation was beginning to offer a viable alternative to the pursuit of organized religion, still reeling from the challenge of a variety of writers, most significantly the publication of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). As an Oxford undergraduate, Mackinder joined the Oxford Kriegspiel (or ‘War Games’) Society, which provided its members with training in military drill, manoeuvres and marksmanship. He also joined the Oxford Union, becoming its president in 1883, where he befriended some of the students who would formulate Britain’s subsequent imperial policy. They included George Curzon (1859–1925), the future viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, and Alfred Milner (1854–1925), who subsequently became High Commissioner for South Africa during the Boer War. Mackinder studied history and physical sciences, in the last of which he was influenced by Henry Moseley (1844–91), the Linacre Chair of Comparative Anatomy. Moseley had participated in the Challenger expedition (1872–6), an RGS-sponsored study of marine science that coined the term ‘oceanography’, and which discovered 4,717 new species on its 127,600 kilometre voyage around the world. Having been advised by Darwin, Moseley was a firm believer in evolutionary theory, but he also taught Mackinder the importance of geographical distribution: how geography affects biology in shaping the evolution of species.24 This was a new kind of environmental determinism, which Darwin called ‘that grand subject, that almost keystone of the laws of creation, Geographical Distribution’.25
Mackinder initially prepared to study international law at London’s Inner Temple, and at the same time he also began to teach for the Oxford University Extension movement for adult education, aimed at widening educational access to those without the means to study at any of the established universities. Throughout the academic year 1886–7 Mackinder travelled hundreds of kilometres up and down the country, delivering lectures under the provocative series title ‘The New Geography’ in town halls and working institutes. He later recalled that he saw his task as that of ‘gradually familiarising intelligent people throughout the country with the idea that geography consisted neither of lists of names nor of travellers’ tales’.26
Having tirelessly championed the teaching of geography first in Oxford and then throughout the country, he went on to collaborate in the foundation of the Geographical Association in 1893, which was intended to address the absence of the study of human geography in schools. Just two years later his interest in reforming the study of geography alongside politics and economics led to his involvement in the birth of the London School of Economics, acting first as part-time lecturer in economic geography with the task of lecturing on ‘Applications of Geography to Definite Economic and Political Problems’, and then as the school’s director from 1903 to 1908. Mackinder claimed that he was drawn to the school because it advocated ‘the tearing to pieces of the old fashioned classical a priori political economy and the foundation of a group of specialists aimed at ascertaining the facts in the first place and then a generalisation from them in a really scientific spirit’.27 He was appointed professor there in 1923 before his retirement in 1925. During this time he was also involved in setting up Reading University, acting as its principal from 1892 until it received university college status in 1903.
Mackinder also retained his affiliation with Oxford University, where his increasingly visible work represented a challenge to its dons. Mackinder knew that they were sceptical of the discipline of geography because of its novelty and its apparent lack of scientific rigour. These objections coalesced around the fact that rival universities in Paris and Berlin offered courses in geography, where its most famous proponents were Karl Ritter, the first professor of geography in Berlin, and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the great explorer and author of the enormously influential five-volume study Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (published part-posthumously between 1845 and 1862). Humboldt’s book singlehandedly redefined the possibilities of geography as a method of scientific enquiry, and its volumes offered no less than a complete account of the natural world and the physical universe.28 As a result, Mackinder’s lectures stressed the physical elements of geography, explaining how landscape, climate and environment acted upon and shaped human life. Today this approach to geography sounds obvious, even banal, but in the 1880s it was pioneering, and represented a bold attempt to convince the university authorities of the respectability of the subject as a science.
His lectures proved so successfu
l that in 1887 the Royal Geographical Society invited Mackinder to present his ideas on geography to its Fellows. On 31 January, aged 25, Mackinder presented his first paper to the society. It was entitled ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography’, a manifesto of Mackinder’s new geography, although it took so long to deliver that the ensuing discussion was adjourned to the next meeting a fortnight later. The response to the talk was mixed, to say the least. Mackinder recalled that ‘a worthy Admiral, a member of Council, who sat in the front row, kept on muttering “damn cheek” throughout the lecture’.29
Mackinder’s opening question reflected the directness for which he was by then well known. ‘What is geography?’ he asked. He argued that there were two reasons for posing such a question. The first concerned ‘the educational battle’ being fought to enshrine the discipline within ‘the curriculum of our schools and Universities’, a battle which was, of course, being led by Mackinder. His second reason for posing the question was a direct challenge to the society. Geography was changing. ‘For half a century,’ he contended, ‘several societies, and most of all our own, have been active in promoting the exploration of the world.’ He continued, ‘the natural result is that we are now near the end of the roll of great discoveries. The Polar regions are the only large blanks remaining on our maps. A Stanley can never again reveal a Congo to the delighted world.’ Mackinder warned that ‘as tales of adventure grow fewer and fewer, as their place is more and more taken by the details of Ordnance Surveys, even Fellows of Geographical Societies will despondently ask, “What is geography?”’ In a cheeky swipe that probably incurred the wrath of the admiral in the front row, Mackinder conjured up the spectre of the society’s closure unless it reformed, comparing it to ‘a corporate Alexander weeping because it has no more worlds to conquer’.30
In the rest of his talk, Mackinder made a passionate call for geography, which he defined as ‘the science whose main function is to trace the interaction of man in society and so much of his environment as varies locally’, to be placed at the heart of English public and educational life. In attempting to unite physical geography with human (or what he called political) geography, Mackinder acknowledged the rival claims of history and the now wildly popular study of geology. ‘Physical geography’, he argued, ‘has usually been undertaken by those already burdened with geology, political geography by those laden with history. We have yet to see the man who taking up the central, the geographical position, shall look equally on such parts of science and such parts of history as are pertinent to his inquiry.’31 In pushing geography’s case even further, Mackinder argued brusquely that ‘the geologist looks at the present that he may interpret the past; the geographer looks at the past that he may interpret the present’.
What followed was an almost cosmographical survey of the earth’s surface, starting with ‘a geography of South-eastern England’, and its chalk landscape, before swooping outwards even further to offer a god-like perspective across the entire surface of the earth. ‘Imagine our globe in a landless condition,’ Mackinder asked his audience, ‘composed that is of three great concentric spheroids – atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere [the outer shell of the earth].’ At each turn he argued for the social and political development of a people, a nation, even a city, based upon its geographical environment. Building up his layers of geographically informed analysis, Mackinder insisted that ‘everywhere political questions will depend on the results of the physical enquiry’. In concluding, Mackinder was clear about his ambitions for geography. ‘I believe’, he said, ‘that on lines such as I have sketched a geography may be worked out which shall satisfy at once the practical requirements of the statesman and the merchant, the theoretical requirements of the historian and the scientist, and the intellectual requirements of the teacher.’ It was a unification of what Mackinder called the scientific and the practical, and which, in one final claim that probably upset the admiral, he even suggested that geography might represent a ‘substitute’ for the study of the classics, and become ‘the common element in the culture of all men, a ground on which the specialists could meet’.32
One of the society’s councillors, the distinguished explorer and pioneering eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, responded with concerns about Mackinder’s attempt to claim geography as a science. Nevertheless, he was sympathetic to the moves to adopt geography as an academic discipline, and remarked that, whatever the limitations of his paper, he was sure Mackinder ‘was destined to leave his mark on geographical education’.33 Galton knew more than he admitted: he was already in talks with the authorities at both Oxford and Cambridge universities to appoint an RGS-funded reader in the subject, a society aspiration that stretched back to the early 1870s, and had stage-managed Mackinder’s invitation so that he would emerge as the most obvious candidate for any new post. On 24 May 1887, less than four months after Mackinder’s talk, Oxford University agreed to establish a five-year Readership in Geography, supported by RGS funds. The following month Mackinder was formally appointed, on a yearly salary of £300.34
The creation of the new post was a huge coup for the RGS, which found a new mission to pursue, and a personal triumph for Mackinder. But the sceptics at Oxford were not so easily defeated. The subject was still not granted full degree status, and students attending Mackinder’s lectures could only study for a one-year diploma. The results were predictable enough: after speaking around the country to halls of hundreds of people, Mackinder found that his first lecture at Oxford was not quite as popular. ‘There was an attendance of three,’ he recalled, ‘one a Don, who told me that he knew the geography of Switzerland because he had just read Baedeker through from cover to cover, and the other two being ladies who brought their knitting, which was not usual at lectures at that time.’35 Nevertheless, he struggled on, reporting back to the RGS at the end of his first year that he had delivered forty-two lectures on two courses. The scientific course, with its lectures on ‘Principles of Geography’, was less popular than the historical course, with its focus on ‘The Influence of Physical Features on Man’s Movements and Settlements’.36 When in 1892 Mackinder came towards the end of his tenure and the Oxford authorities showed little interest in creating a full degree course in geography, he took up a post at the London School of Economics, where his interests turned increasingly towards politics and imperial adventure.
In September 1895, Mackinder gave a presidential address to the Geographical Association. His talk was entitled ‘Modern Geography, German and English’, and it provides a fascinating insight into his understanding of the evolution of geography and mapmaking throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Mackinder set out his case with typical fortrightness. ‘As a nation,’ he asserted, ‘we may justly claim that for several generations we have been foremost in the work of the pioneer; nor need we view with dissatisfaction our contributions to precise survey, to hydrography, to climatology, and to biogeography.’ Nevertheless, he continued, it ‘is rather on the synthetic and philosophical, and therefore on the educational, side of our subject that we fall so markedly below the foreign and especially the German standard’. Mackinder’s concern was that, unlike German geographers, their English counterparts were unable to synthesize the practicalities of geographical research within an overarching theory of the discipline. ‘What made the eighteenth century a transition age of such importance to geography’, he believed, ‘was the realization of new problems, which both Antiquity and the Renascence had either neglected or utterly failed to solve.’ The great German geographers like Humboldt and Ritter had managed to overcome the age-old problem of seeing geography ‘either as a discipline, or as a field of research’. The German philosophical tradition gave a very different perspective on the possibilities offered by the study of geography. Immanuel Kant’s philosophical pursuit of a universal science, combined with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schelling’s (1775–1854) idealistic beliefs in a transcendental coordinating principle
to explain nature, enabled Humboldt to celebrate geography as the greatest of all sciences, capable of synthesizing everything. The result was a school of geography that combined the scientific study of nature with an emotional response to its grandeur and beauty. In this tradition, August Heinrich Petermann (1822–78) established himself as one of Europe’s most innovative cartographers, publishing a journal on new geographical studies, Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen (‘Petermann’s Geographical Communications’, or ‘PGM’); and Oscar Peschel (1826–75) and Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) pioneered geomorphology, the study of the form and evolution of the earth’s surface. These German initiatives represented for Mackinder an ‘exhaustive attempt to relate causally relief, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the various human activities’ under the singular title of ‘geography’.37
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 43
