This chapter considers geographers’ current

fascination with the imperial/colonial past and

traces the impact of postcolonialism on their

interpretive sensibilities.^1 Over the last 10 years

there has been an explosion of interest in the links

between geography and empire. Geographershave

become interested in the imperial genealogy

of their discipline, the spatiality of colonialism

and empire, and how we might revisit imperial

and colonial geographies from postcolonial

perspectives.

Some have sought to evaluate the ways in

which geography has worked as an imperial dis-

cipline and discourse, and have used their find-

ings to pluralize and politicize understanding of

what David Livingstone (1992) has called ‘the

geographical tradition’. Critical attention has

been drawn to the imperial roles played by

diverse producers and arbiters of geographical

knowledge (explorers, naturalists, cartographers,

surveyors, photographers, geographical societies,

professional geographers and so on), and to geo-

graphy’s Eurocentric moorings (see Driver,

1995). Others have posed more general questions

about the geographies of colonialism and empire.

There are fast-growing literatures on how

imperialism was shaped by spatial formations of

knowledge and power, how empire was invested

with geographical meaning through diverse cul-

tural media (e.g. travel narratives, museums and

school curricula) and how imperialism was tied

to the fabrication of insidious locational imagi-

naries such as the orient, ‘darkest Africa’ and the

tropics (see Driver and Yeoh, 2000; Duncan and

Gregory, 1999; Gregory, 2000b). Still others

have dealt more explicitly with colonial geogra-

phies and the ongoing extension of colonial

power around the world. There is a range of

work on the production and representation of

colonial space, on how colonial spaces were built

around the axes of class, race, gender and

religion, and on how different natural environ-

ments and indigenous peoples (or natures and

cultures) impacted on colonial projects and

encounters (see Butzer, 1992; Kenny, 1999).

Some of this literature also expresses a strong

postcolonial concern with how geographers

might support current anti-colonial struggles and

processes of decolonization (see Howitt, 2001).

Geographical research on imperial/colonial

issues has become very popular in Anglo-

American geography, but is less prominent in

non-English-speaking countries (though see

Bruneau and Dory, 1994; Claval, 1998; Lejeune,

1993; Siliberto, 1998). And while geographers

do not necessarily assume that all empires have

been or are western, their work on geography

and empire deals almost exclusively with the

history and consequences of modern western

colonization. There is also a heavy emphasis on

the nineteenth century, and the British empire

and its successor states.

The term ‘critical imperial and colonial

geographies’ is meant to capture geographers’

diverse interests. It covers their attempts to:

(1) show that the discipline of geography, and a

broader set of geographical discourses and prac-

tices, played a critical – or vital – role in empire;

(2) criticize these vital geographies and move the

discipline beyond their binds and conventions;

(3) treat the links between geography and empire

as symptomatic of the relations of power that

inhere in the production of geographical knowl-

edges; and (4) give geography a niche in wider

postcolonial debates about colonialism and

western dominance.

The chapter is divided into three sections and

a number of subsections that sketch (what I see

as) the key themes in this burgeoning area of

geographical inquiry, and point to some of the

18

Critical Imperial and Colonial Geographies

Daniel Clayton

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