Coda: Halford Mackinder and the Empire of ‘New’ Political Geography, c.1887–1919

Abstract

Halford Mackinder is normally credited with taking a leading role in the disciplinary codification of geography in Britain, and is further seen, together with Alfred Mahan and Isaiah Bowman, as the instigator of ‘political geography’ or ‘geopolitics’ in the English-speaking world. Mackinder, then, is traditionally placed as one of the founding fathers whom histories of geographical thought and of political geography discuss in their opening chapters. By contrast, he forms a coda to this book, which is in itself a critique of simplistic notions of geography’s emergence being coupled to an independent disciplinary structure and of resultant misconceptions concerning when and how politics and geography have been linked. My purpose in this chapter is both contextual and comparative: contextual, in that I wish to place Mackinder’s geopolitical project in the historical context of the crisis of confidence in the status of Britain as a world power which affected late-Victorian and Edwardian British political discourse; and comparative in that I wish to play Mackinder’s conception of the link between politics and geography — so crucial to twentieth-century political geography — off against the humanist textual politicisation of geography books which the bulk of this study has analysed. Such a method allows for a closer scrutiny of Mackinder’s claims to have forged a ‘new’ geography, on which subject conventional histories of geography tend to have taken Mackinder at his own word, and should highlight some of the discursive disjunctions and continuities between the intertwining of geography and politics which humanist methods established and that which has become dominant under the rubric of political geography.