Halford Mackinder and the Urgency of Geography
by Brian Timoney
Halford Mackinder, geography’s eminent Victorian, is enjoying a sort of moment on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Explorer, professor, and parliamentarian, Mackinder is most well know for his seminal article The Geographical Pivot of History that described the centrality of eastern Europe in exerting geopolitical power around the world. Frankly meditating on the power of Empire and the posthumous association of his ideas with Nazism relegated Mackinder to a dusty, slightly disreputable corner of academic geography where one referenced his work only with a ready supply of air quotes. With the recent neoconservative focus on distant threats to American power, he is once again name-checked to lend intellectual ballast to schemes for ensuring top-dog status in a uni-polar world.
But that’s not the Halford Mackinder that interests me.
Instead it’s the Mackinder that travelled 30,000 miles around the UK over three years promoting a “New Geography” as an academic pursuit at all grade levels. What he saw was geography’s unique ability to build synthesize and create context among the ever more specialized physical and social sciences. And this was 125 years ago: what would he make of the deluge of narrow facts we navigate today?
We live in a swirl of data but we understand the world around us through stories. As nature abhors a vacuum, humans will reach for whatever narrative framework is most handy, no matter how dubious, to make sense of the chaos of information that bombards them daily.
And this is the urgency: we’ve never been in more need of robust frameworks to process data into narrative, or a “persistent context”. Reflecting back on his efforts in Geography as a Pivotal Subject in Education, Mackinder admits geography never gained the hoped-for foothold. Almost 100 years later, the academic presence of geography in the US is, if anything, more feeble. But hope blossoms: with the explosion of digital mapping, both through interfaces such as Google Earth as well as in the media, geography and visual understanding are increasingly linked in the popular mind. And given the turbulence in education, there seems ample opportunity to lay a new foundation for a more prominent, analytic geography throughout the curriculum.
It’s too easy to dismiss the crusty Victorians of yesteryear, but Halford Mackinder’s deep conviction that geography is a critical component of an educated mind resonates loudly in an ever-baffling world about which we can’t stop telling stories.