Working primarily in a political geographical
register, he goes on to provide a dense com-
pendium of the different types of contempo-
rary internal colonialisms and transnational
imperialisms and multiple postcolonialisms. It
is both useful and necessary for this kind of
diversity to be brought into view.This is espe-
cially so when one thinks of the uneven way
postcolonial theory has been taken up by
anglophonic geography – often in the histori-
cal mode, and often in relation to British
imperialism. In the context of such diversity it
is necessary to think of postcolonialism as a
diffusely expressed and ongoing set of effects
that come into being alongside of, and in rela-
tion to, imperialisms of various kinds (be they
new or old, territorially defined or diffuse).
That there is the need to offer such clarifica-
tion around the term ‘postcolonialism’ is, of
course, a symptom of the term’s ‘elasticity’
and, subsequently, its limits as an analytic tool
(Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 11), a set of issues
comprehensively accounted for by Anthony
King’s chapter in this section.CULTURES OF IMPERIALISMDavid Scott (1999: 11) usefully defines the
‘problem space’ of postcolonial studies to be
the epistemological assumptions upon which
anti-colonial struggles of various kinds depend.
This is why, he argues (1999: 18), ‘culture’
comes so centrally into the critical frame of
postcolonial theory. Within the discipline
of geography the interest in the ‘cultures of
imperialism’ was largely taken up in response
to the analytical template provided by Edward
Said (1978) in his study of orientalism. Said’s
concept of ‘culture’ is quite precisely defined
in the opening pages of Culture and
Imperialism, where he uses it to refer to ‘all
those practices, like the arts of description,
communication, and representation, that have
relative autonomy from the economic, social,
and political realms and that often exist in aes-
thetic forms’ (1993: xii–xiii). He goes on to
specify that this includes popular ‘lore’ as well
as specialized knowledges about distant parts
of the world, a definition of direct relevance
to traditional understandings of geography.
There is much we might quibble about inrelation to Said’s definition of culture, not
least its supposed ‘autonomy’ from politics
and economy, or its emphasis on what, by
implication, is ‘high’ culture. We might also
note the way in which Said avoided obviously
anthropological definitions of culture, presum-
ably because he saw that disciplinary field to
be complicit in the fabrication of orientalism.
It was a version of Said’s concept of culture
that influenced a specific strand of geographical
scholarship concerned with rethinking imperi-
alism, and specifically the European imperi-
alisms that drew to a close in the middle years
of the twentieth century.
Said’s historical (and Foucauldian) approach
fell on the fertile ground of the sub-disciplinary
area of historical geography (for a range of
examples, see Graham and Nash, 2000). Dan
Clayton’s chapter to follow provides a careful
account of this influence and how it was con-
solidated by Said’s spatial sensibilities.
Enlivened by this critical framework, historical
geographers have investigated the imaginaries,
logics and practices of imperialism, diagnosing
their racisms, charting their parts in the
enframing of difference, and revealing their
role in the deployment of imperial power.
Most significantly, this scholarship tackled the
‘historical amnesia’ (Gandhi, 1998: 7) of the
discipline of geography. It did this by investi-
gating the European geographical knowledges
that both gave sense to, and made sense of,
imperial expansions: the speculative geogra-
phies of explorers, the making of maps, the
scientific theories of climate and race, and the
pragmatic spatialities of colonial governance
and settlement.
What emerges from these historical
approaches is a peculiar sense of the ways in
which heterogeneous and often contradictory
cultural logics cohered to produce quite
emphatic and seemingly singular empire
effects.^4 As Driver noted, to suppress such
‘divergences’ is to do ‘a violence ... to the
history of the colonial encounter’ (1992: 34).
Consequently, geographical research on the
history of imperialism has assiduously set about
the task of producing accounts that attest to its
complexities and contradictions. The landmark
collection by Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith
(1994) showcased the diverse range of themes
taken up in this scholarship. Nowhere has the
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