Cultural Geography

perhaps the very thing that needs to be done if

geographers are to exploit present intellectual

and political opportunities’ (1992: 26). Driver

was referring to the opportunities presented

(mainly) by Said’s work, and over the last 10

years there has been an explosion of interest in

how imperialism and Eurocentrism both acti-

vated and were activated by geographical imagi-

nations and practices.

In a formative collection of essays, Anne

Godlewska and Neil Smith noted that while

‘geography has always pursued a wide range of

intellectual agendas simultaneously and... not

all of these can be traced directly to the concerns

of empire,’ it is clear that ‘the very formation and

institutionalization of the discipline was intri-

cately bound up with imperialism’ (1994: 1–8).

For others, too, geographers ‘were the essential

midwives of European imperialism. They pro-

vided both the practical information necessary

for overseas conquest and colonization and the

intellectual justification for expansion through

their increasingly elaborate “theoretical” writ-

ings on geo-politics and the impact of climatic

and environmental factors on the evolution of

different races’ (Bell et al., 1995: 6).

Work on geography’s empire challenges the

self-confident and assertive narratives of explo-

ration, conquest, settlement and rule – with error

giving way to truth, science conquering myth,

modernity supplanting tradition, and civilization

being imposed on savagery – that pervade the

annals of geography and imperial historiography.

Geographical approaches to the world that were

once viewed as enlightened and disinterested are

now seen as powerful constructions that induced

and sustained imperial relationships, and stories

of triumphal and uncontested western progress

are now told as halting (and sometimes haunting)

tales of human struggle. Geographers have

shown how many of their discipline’s founding

and distinctive knowledges and practices – its

narratives of exploration and travel, maps and

resources inventories, and systems of spatial

comparison, classification and planning –

worked as tools of material and intellectual dis-

possession. They have been especially concerned

with the images of empty and undeveloped space

awaiting the transformative hand of the west that

became central to the view that geography is

about finding a certain type of order in the world.

It is now argued that this order – a Eurocentric

and Cartesian order – was made rather than given

(or there all along and waiting to be found), and

often made in ambivalent ways.

In line with many postcolonial critiques,

‘empire’ is conceived as a distorting mirror

within which the discipline of geography came to

define and champion itself. Work on geography’s

empire works as a critique of the west that is tele-

scoped through a particular set of disciplinary

lenses. A great deal of attention has been paid to

the spaces of knowledge (e.g. the field and the

study) and sites of study in which knowledges

were produced, and the physical and institutional

effort it took to draw order out of chaos (to travel,

collect, map, represent, possess and survive).

Geographers have re-examined the activities of

individuals, ranging from well-known figures in

the history of geography such as Alexander von

Humboldt and Halford Mackinder, to lesser

figures such as Eric Dutton (a geographer and

colonial administrator in Africa) and James

Rennell (who surveyed India for the British)

who, it is argued, should be included in a critical

historiography of geography and empire (see

Ryan, 1997; Myers, 1998).

Such case studies feed into wider discussions

of geo-imperial discourses, and empirical

vignettes are connected to an encompassing body

of theory. This range of work reveals how

tensions emerged between different modes of

knowledge production, how the creation of true

and trustworthy (universal and reliable)

geographical knowledge depended on the adjudi-

cation of boundaries between credible and

incredible knowledge, and how geography was

constructed from the outside in, through the

amassing of data about foreign lands and the cre-

ation of geographical categories separating ‘us’

from ‘them’ (see Heffernan, 2001; Withers,

2000). For example, in an avowedly postcolonial

reading of the ‘Africanist discourse’ of the

London-based Royal Geographical Society

(RGS) between 1831 and 1871, Clive Barnett

tries to show that

The actual conditions of cross-cultural contact upon

which the production of nineteenth-century geographi-

cal knowledge depended are retrospectively rewritten

[for metropolitan audiences] to present [‘racially

unmarked’] European subjects as the singular sources

of meaning. ... Without the use of local guides and

interpreters, the exploits of men represented as untir-

ingly persevering, independent and self-denying seek-

ers of the truth [and nothing but] would have been

impossible. But this routine practical dependence on

local knowledges and information is not accorded any

epistemological value. Local knowledge is refashioned

as a hindrance, as a barrier to the arrival of the truth ...

Indigenous geographical meanings and knowledges are

admitted into this discourse on the condition of being

stripped of any validity independent of European defin-

itions of scientific knowledge ... The knowledge of non-

European subjects is represented ... as the confusion and

noise against which European science takes shape and

secures its authority. (1998: 244–5)

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