Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

On the evening of Monday, 31 January 1887, Halford Mackinder delivered a now famous address to London's Royal Geographical Society. In his lecture – entitled ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ – he explained how and why geography should take its place alongside other disciplines within the academic division of labour. His strategy, at once simple and audacious, was to call that division of labour into question. Geography, Mackinder (1887) argued, can ‘bridge one of the greatest of all gaps’: namely, that separating ‘the natural sciences and the study of humanity’ (p. 145). He was not alone in defining geography as ‘the science whose main function is to trace the interaction of man [sic.] in society and so much of his environment as varies locally’. At points east and west, others were doing much the same, such as William Morris Davis in America and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. The three men soon occupied important university positions and were followed by similarly vigorous prosleytisers who quickly built on the foundations their forebears had laid.So began geography's career as a university subject and what historian of geographical thought David Livingstone (1992, p. 177) called ‘the geographical experiment’. A century on that experiment continues. Although space and region have since joined human-environment relations as central organising concepts for the discipline, many ... log in or subscribe to read full text