La formation de la géographie à l’époque des empires: déterminisme, hiérarchie et ambivalence

This paper considers the role that empire played in the beginnings of
academic geography in Europe and North America between the 1880s and 1920s.
Revisionist and critical work on this period and problem asserts that geography
should be viewed as an imperial discipline: that by the 1920s ideas and practices that had become integral to how the discipline was being defined by geographers and was regarded by the public - especially exploration, mapping and surveying, environmental determinism, regional analysis and geo-politics - were deeply implicated in war, colonialism and Western dominance. This paper advocates a more nuanced approach, and tracks themes of determinism, hierarchy and ambivalence in the relations between geography and empire. It ends with the suggestion that in the light of geography’s current (renewed and on-going) entanglement with war and militarism, the question of ‘geography and empire’ is not simply a historical (bygone) or analytical question, but also a profoundly political and moral one.