First, geographers’ interest in geography’s
empire is tied to broader analytical concerns –
with, for example, representation, abstraction,
visualization and embodiment – that inevitably
reposition how the term ‘geography’ is viewed
both historically and epistemologically. In a
string of books and articles, Gregory has
explored ‘colonizing productions of nature and
space’ and what he calls ‘topographicali-
zation’ (the spatial modalities through which
imperial/colonial encounters, practices and rep-
resentations worked). For a start, he argues, the
modern discipline of geography was not simply
‘a constitutively European science’ propelled by
reason, as some have claimed, but also a ‘pro-
foundly Eurocentric science’ (cf. Livingstone
and Withers, 1999). Moreover, Eurocentrism is
imbued with ‘a system of geo-graphs [or modes
of earth-writing] that order its representations’ –
geo-graphs that absolutize space, objectify the
world, normalize the subject, and abstract nature
and culture in imperialist terms (Gregory, 1998:
3–40, 60–7). He has also explored the formative
spaces – or ‘topo-logies/graphies’ – that are
carried withintexts and modalities of travel: spaces
with no centre (‘rhizomatic space’), complex
spaces with a centre (‘labyrinthine space’) and
ordered, linear spaces (‘striated space’) that
shaped how cultural meanings were made and
remade through travel (Gregory, 2000b).
Gregory tries to tease out the conceptual
orders that imbued the empirical work under-
taken by geography’s imperial/colonial agents.
To borrow Foucault’s terminology, he starts to
provide an archaeology of the geographies of
imperialism and colonialism that underwrites the
genealogies produced by students of geography’s
empire. He does so with an eclectic body of
theory, and shows how imperial access and colo-
nial control revolved around the creation of
material and discursive vantage points (or
‘spaces of constructed visibility’). He has
focused on western travellers in Egypt, but has
recently become interested – as have many
others – in the colonial production of nature (see
Gregory, 2001b).
Others have contributed to debates about the
spatiality of colonial discourse by focusing on
representations of nature and space. Consider
David Livingstone’s thesis that geographical
texts and contexts are ‘reciprocally constituted in
the midst of the messy contingencies of history’
(1991: 414), and Richard Phillips’ argument that
the nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton
treated ‘geography’ as a starting point for
explorations of sexuality ‘in which all is fluid
and boundaries are set up only to be crossed’
(1999: 73). Livingstone discusses how westernscientists (including geographers) devised ‘moral
geographies’ of racial superiority that revolved
around scientific observations and truth claims
about the links between climate, virtue and social
development. Climate, particularly, ‘became an
exploitable hermeneutic resource to make sense
of cultural difference and to project moral cate-
gories onto global space’, with the temperate
world being exalted over the tropical world
(Livingstone, 2000b: 93). Scientists ‘helped [to]
produce in the minds of the Victorian public an
imagined region – the tropics – which was, at
once, a place of parasites and pathology, a space
inviting colonial occupation and management, a
laboratory for natural selection and racial strug-
gle and a site of moral jeopardy and trial’
(Livingstone, 1999: 109). Phillips, by contrast,
shows how, in Burton’s mind, ‘travel, transla-
tion, geography and sexology were intimately
related’, and how this explorer produced
dynamic, ambivalent and travelling ‘sexual
geographies’ that both exposed and subverted the
dominant heterosexism of the imperial centre –
England. Both Livingstone and Phillips read
‘geography’ as an imperial discourse– as a way
of delimiting and encoding knowledge, produc-
ing a colonial other, and inciting power and
desire – but their projects of historical retrieval
and critical revision invest discourse with very
different textual and contextual meanings.
Second, there are specialist literatures on
particular geo-imperial/colonial knowledge prac-
tices. The map has a special place in geogra-
phers’ critical deliberations and postcolonial
studies. It now seems obvious that cartography
played a crucial role in the imperialists’ self-
legitimizing construction of space as universal,
measurable and divisible. And as Graham
Burnett notes, the history of cartography has pro-
vided ‘an exemplary arena for exploring how the
representational production of empire... [cre-
ated] a stage for dramatic imperial gestures’
(2000: 6). Scholars have followed the critical
lead of the late Brian Harley, who started to
explore the connections between maps, knowl-
edge and power in the 1980s, and there is now an
enormous literature on the intertwined histories
of empire and cartography (see Jacob, 1992).
Much of this literature emphasizes the power of
maps. Matthew Edney, for example, explores
how the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India
(started in 1817) helped the British ‘to reduce
India’s immense diversity to a rational and ulti-
mately controllable structure’ (1997: 14–35).
Surveying and mapmaking were central to the
creation of ‘a conceptual image that consciously
set the Europeans apart from the Indians they
ruled ... [and] a cartographic image of the360 AFTER EMPIRE3029-ch18.qxd 03-10-02 10:57 AM Page 360