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Here is a list of six eminent geographers of the world: 1. L. S. Bhatt of India 2. Alfred Hettner of Germany 3. Vidal de la Blache of France 4. Halford J. Mackinder of Great Britain 5. Petre Petrovich Semenov of Russia 6. Isaiah Bowman of America.
Geographers of the World
- L. S. Bhatt of India
- Alfred Hettner of Germany
- Vidal de la Blache of France
- Halford J. Mackinder of Great Britain
- Petre Petrovich Semenov of Russia
- Isaiah Bowman of America
Geographer # 1. L. S. Bhatt of India:
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L. S. Bhatt, a Indian geographer who have greatly contributed to the field of regional planning, and to the study of inequality. As an extension of the study of regional geography to planning, an attempt was made for the first time by C. D. Deshpande in 1948 to identify a scheme of planning region of former Bombay Province and to identify the problems in planning. The anomaly between regional and administrative boundaries was noted. A hierarchic scheme of regions of India (macro, meso and minor) was evolved by O. H. K. Spate in 1957 as a part of the study of regional geography of India.
Since the 1950s, there have been attempts in the delineation of planning regions of different scale—National, State and District level. These studies emphasised the regional and spatial approach to planning, using the concept of regional and locational hierarchy.
The pilot regional survey of Mysore State (re-named Karnataka) conducted at the Indian Statistical Institute was a milestone in a systematic evaluation of the natural environment, resource base, population, patterns of urbanization and industrialisation. Geographers have done some pioneering works in this field. The late V. L. S. P. Rao may be considered as a pioneer in the field of regional planning in India.
Emphasis on minimisation of regional disparities in development in the context of the natural perspectives of economic development elaborated in the Third Five Year Plan served to re-orient their approach to regional studies conducted by Indian geographers. They have attempted delineation of major resource regions and sub-regions of the country using secondary data at the district level and the maps of natural resources prepared by departments of forestry, minerals and others.
Agricultural regions were delineated identifying the core and peripheries of major crop associations. Geographers have attempted delineation of economic region by grouping linguistic states on the basis of complementarity in their economic regions and the resultant spatial organisation of economic activities within sub- region of such state as was assumed to serve the purpose of spatial integration of the economy and reduction of regional inequalities in development.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
While regional differentiation and characterisation of regions have a bearing upon the problems of regional disparities in development, the problem of measuring the extent of regional disparities is a complex exercise of interdisciplinary nature. Indian geographers in collaboration with statisticians and economists have contributed to measuring variations in level of development and in providing regional interpretation of the observed patterns.
The contributions of Indian geographers to the problem of inequality present the fundamental view of geography as a spatial discipline, merits and limitation of the approach to the problem starting from descriptive account of regions, to delineation by quantitative mapping techniques and the application of quantitative techniques for measurement of association among several phenomena and regional differentiation.
This has enabled geography to focus its attention on spatial dimensions in national development planning in a multiregional framework comprising different tiers of political-administrative work through which the planning process operates.
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The number of case studies conducted by geographers on district and block level planning is large and increasing, but the evaluation of such studies brings out the inadequacy of micro-regional surveys which ought to have preceded the studies on district and block level planning.
A normative physical spatial development framework is required to be developed for identifying a shelf of development programmes that could create both durable assets and employment in the rural areas. The resource inventory which is considered basic to the District Development Plan is not adequately prepared using large-scale topographical maps and other information. With access to more sophisticated and latest information through satellite imageries and computer, it should be possible to interpret these data in their spatial context.
Dichotomy between rural and urban components of Indian social and cultural and economic structure needs to be understood in a regional framework. While geographical studies focus on spatial patterns there is a need to evaluate the interrelationship in hierarchies system of spatial interactions.
Geographer # 2. Alfred Hettner of Germany:
Much of the present German geography owes its indebtedness to Alfred Hettner, who by his methodological innovations in geography, created considerable stirs in the professional circles of Germany of his time. And even after the Second World War, German geography tended to show a natural orientation towards the heritage and tradition which was long established by Hettner.
Hettner was one of the most influential figures in Germany in the development of geography. He was the first professor in a German University after Cad Ritter (to be) trained as a geographer. He also studied contemporary philosophy and had the opportunity to come in contact with Kirchhoff who introduced him to geography.
He worked with Theobald, Fisher and Richthofen, who infused in him the concept of chorology. He did his doctorate dissertation on the climate of Chile and Patagonia at the University of Strasburg with Professor Gerland.
He submitted a thesis on the geomorphology of the Saxon Highland for the ‘habitation’ at Leipzig under Ratzel. He made extensive field studies in Germany and in the Andes of Columbia that led to a multitude of publications in geomorphology.
He became a professor of geography at Tubingen in 1897. However, in 1899 he was appointed professor at Heidelberg where he remained till his retirement in 1928. Though he came much closer to Ratzel at Leipzig, yet he was not influenced by Ratzel’s approach to the geography of humans, but emphasised on the physical basis in geography.
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Hettner made significant contributions in publications of geographical materials. His first publication entitled Travels in the Columbian Andes (1888) was based on his field observations of the region. In 1895, he started his own periodical, the Geographische Zeitschrift of which he was the editor till 1935. It usually dealt with various discussions on the methodological exposition.
The periodical was the forerunner of modern German geographical heritage and tradition. In 1907, Hettner published a large volume on the regional geography of Europe and in 1924 published the continuation of the earlier work on extra-European states. These two books on regional geography later came to be known as Foundations of Regional Geography. In 1933-35, he published Comparative Regional Geography in four volumes.
His other important books were on Russia (1905), England’s World Domination and the War (1915), Surface Forms of the Continents (1921 and 1928) and The Spread of Culture over the Earth (1928 and 1929). His Handbuch der Geographischen Wissenschaft contained many ideas on the contemporary regional geography. The work was published in 11 volumes and it was a monumental work in geographic literature.
Alfred Hettner’s essays on the concepts, paradigms and methods of geography, published between 1895 and 1905, including additional section, were published in a single book entitled Geography – Its History, Character and Methods (1927).
However, some of his works were published posthumously which included – A Geography of Man (3 vols); Transport Geography, Economic Geography. These works of Hettner gave contemporary geography a firm philosophical and scientific basis.
Concepts and methods of geography:
Hettner defined geography as the chorological science of the Earth’s surface. It is concerned mainly with the interplay between human and nature, an evaluation of spatial (Raum) relation. Its aim is primarily to study areas or regions. Such a study should contain description and explanation derived either analytically or synthetically.
Or, in other words, geography is the study of the Earth (Erdkunde) according to the causally related differences—the science of areal differentiation of the Earth’s surface. Though Hettner criticised Richthofen for not being entirely successful in finding the sharp methodological expression for his chorological concept, yet he attempted to elaborate Richthofen’s concept of chorology.
It is also a fact that Alfred Hettner did his utmost to redevelop and elaborate Kant’s thought. He admitted that for a long time he had not paid sufficient attention to Kant’s exposition of geography, but had later rejoiced to discover a close correspondence between himself and Kant.
It has been rightly observed that Hettner in his writings had revived the Kantian definition of geography, and within this framework welded the systematic studies of Humboldt, Peschel, Ratzel and the regional studies as defined by Ritter, Marthe and Richthofen into a coherent whole. However, Doring concluded that in Hettner’s synthesis of the geographic thought of the two founders of modern geography, Humboldt stands not beside but before Ritter.
Hettner considered that the biggest difference between history and geography does not lie in that geography sets out to study a given time (namely, the present), but that in geography the time aspect recedes into the background.
Geography does not study development in time as such, although this particular methodological rule is often broken and geographers cut through reality at a distinct point in time and only consider historical developments in so far as they are necessary to explain the situation at that chosen point of time.
Hartshorne outlines Hettner’s concept of chorology as presented in 1927:
‘The goal of the chorological point of view is to know the character of region and places through comprehension of the existence together and interrelation among the different realms of reality and their varied manifestations, and to comprehend the Earth’s surface as a whole in its actual arrangement in continents, larger and smaller regions and places’.
According to Hartshorne, he had traced the repeated appearance of the concept of chorology in the place of geography among the field of learning in the writings of different scholars since the eighteenth century.
In considering the logical position of geography among the sciences, Hettner, like both Kant and Humboldt before him, proceeds not from the consideration of particular branches of science, but from a view of the whole field of objective knowledge. He has developed the concept most fully as compared to Kant and Humboldt.
It is clear from the following excerpts from Hettner’s book published in 1927:
Reality is simultaneously a three-dimensional space, which we must examine from three different points of view in order to comprehend the whole; examination from but one of these points of view alone are one-sided and does not exhaust the whole. From one point of view we see the relations of similar things, from the second the development in time, from the third the arrangement and division in space.
Reality as a whole cannot be encompassed entirely in the systematic sciences, sciences defined by the objects they study, as many students still think. Other writers have effectively based the justification for historical sciences on the necessity of a special conception of development in time. But this leaves science still two dimensional; we do not perceive it completely unless we also consider it from the third point of view, the division and arrangement in space.
The systematic sciences ignore the temporal and spatial relationships and find their unity in the objective likeness or similarity of the subjects with which they are concerned. With the same justification as the development in time, the arrangement of things in space demands special study.
Together with the systematic or material, and the chronological or historical or time-sciences, there must develop chorological or space sciences. There must be two of these – one has to do with the arrangement of things in the universe; that is astronomy, the other is the science of the spatial arrangement on the Earth, or since we do not know the interior of the Earth, we can say on the surface of the Earth.
Geography as the second chorological science is the study of the spatial arrangement on the surface of the Earth. If no causal relation existed between the different places on the Earth, and if the different phenomena at one and the same place on the Earth were independent of each other, no special chorological conception would be needed; since, however, such relationships do exist, which, by the systematic and historical sciences, are comprehended only incidentally or not at all, we need a special chorological science of the Earth or of the Earth surfaces.
Alfred Hettner seemed to have been opposed to Otto Schluter’s conception of ‘landscape morphology’ which was a form of regional geography, developed in Germany in the inter-war period. Schluter asserted as early as 1906 that geographers should consider the form and spatial structure created by visible phenomena on the surface of the Earth as their unifying theme. Hettner was basically concerned with the uniqueness of areas, whether this uniqueness was evident in the visible landscape or not.
He recognised the focal interest of landscape, but ‘refused to recognize the limits set by it on the study of the human facts in space. In spite of this disagreement, landscape morphology can be seen as an attempt to study regions on the basis of Hettner’s principles.
The supporters of the landscape morphology agreed with Hettner on the main philosophical issue that geography is a chorological science which should focus on regional synthesis and only delve into historical developments to the extent necessary in order to explain the contemporary situation’.
Because of his strong inclination towards the concept of chorological science, Hettner came out strongly against environmental determinism. He was of the opinion that a geographical synthesis is distorted when nature is regarded dominant and human as subsidiary, that the unity of geography could only be maintained through the concept of a chorological science, i.e. a subject which studies things which are mutually coordinated, not subordinated in space. Thus, Hettner appeared to be a significant contributor to further the development of Possibilism.
Hettner made a distinction between ‘systematic geography’ which seeks to formulate empirical generalisations or laws, and the study of the unique in ‘regional geography’, whereby generalisations are tested so that subsequent theories may be improved.
In other words, the general geography follows systematically the distribution of the various geographic phenomena over the Earth’s surface, and special or regional geography (Landerkunde) elicits the concept of geographic region.
It is mainly due to Hettner that dualism, which so long hampered geography, has been successfully overcome. He rejected the view that geography could be either idiographic or nomothetic but not both. He attempted to make it clear that geography is both idiographic and nomothetic, as indeed almost all other fields of learning must be. Both Hettner and Hartshorne made this view of geography very clear.
However, some writers have accused Hettner of defining geography as essentially idiographic, thereby obscuring the underlying continuity of geographic thought. Both Hettner and Hartshorne considered region to be a functional unit —an organism which was more than the sum of its parts.
Functionalism affected much geographical research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and philosophy was strongly interwoven with method. Hartshorne emphasised the need for a functional approach to political geography.
Hettner is often accused of giving more emphasis on physical environment rather than on cultural environment, but he seemed to have focused attention on the theme of human’s relation to his physical and bio tic surroundings. The traditional outlines of a regional study started with location or position and then proceeded through chapters on geology, relief, climate, vegetation, natural sources, settlement, and population, the form of economy, communication and political divisions.
The outline was based on the notion that this formed a kind of sequence of cause and effect; in dealing with each topic the relationships with the physical base were discussed, but not the relationships with other topics.
Hettner made no significant contribution to political geography, but his periodical Geographische Zeitschrift was put on a war basis and gave much space to articles on the areas of battle and the countries involved. The most significant of these was his editorial statement published in 1919 on the Treaty of Versailles.
‘Our work in the world is destroyed, our land is dismembered, our national wealth has been taken away from us, our economic life is burdened with numerous mortgages; and what is worst is that the German nation, which had broken its back through the destitution of war and the insolent revolution, and thus a dishonourable peace, is thrust on us’. This statement is significant in the sense that it added philosophical basis towards the development of geopolitik in Germany.
This editorial statement on ‘Peace and Political Geography vis-a-vis the Treaty of Versailles’ was given much political propaganda by Karl Haushofer. Despite this, Hettner was often accused of being a ‘positivist’ by the Nazi people in Germany.
This was because the positivists were opposed to everything that smacked of metaphysics and unverifiable phenomena. They, therefore, became bitter opponents of Nazism, which they saw as a mixture of irrational prejudice and ideological dogma. Positivist became a term of abuse in Nazi Germany.
Harvey has criticised both Hettner and Hartshorne for having relied too much on Kant’s concept of a chorological science because it was developed on the assumption of ‘absolute space’ which was tied to Euclidean geometry. As the science has accepted Einstein’s theory of relativity, it has rejected the concept of absolute space.
It is, therefore, ironic that such influential geographers as Hettner and Hartshorne took guidance from Kant, rather than from Gauss who also directly made major contribution to the science of geography in his work with map projections. As a consequence, the main current of philosophical opinion within geography in the first half of the twentieth century was based upon concepts which other scientists have already rejected as untenable.
A number of contemporary geographers in Germany expressed scepticism about the identification of geography as a chorological science and, hence, defined it by its method rather than by its subject matter and its concepts. Others were also concerned about the overemphasis on the significance of the physical features of an area that resulted from following the scheme.
By tying back everything to the physical features, other important relationships were over looked—such as the relation of population density to the economy, or the economy and the routes of circulation, or even the relation of all of those to the political units.
Many of the interrelations observed in regional studies were in the process of change through time; and only by examining the past geographies and the changes taking place could the idea of processes, or sequences of events, be introduced to geographical work.
Geographer # 3. Vidal de la Blache of France:
The growth of professional geography in France, unlike that in Germany with its several distinct schools of thought, has been shaped by the work of one man, namely, Vidal de la Blache. His disciples spread throughout France the point of view and the method that came to be known as ‘la tradition Vidalienne’.
Blache graduated in history and geography in 1865 at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He found his way into geography through the study of ancient history and classical literature. He spent some time at the French School in Athens and returned to France in 1872 where he completed his doctoral dissertation. He taught geography at the University of Nancy from 1872 to 1877 and then returned as Professor to the Ecole Normale Superieure.
While at Nancy, during 1872-1877, he prepared the manuscript of the La France de L’ Est (published in 1917). This is in many ways Blache’s most original work. It studied the development of the landscape and agricultural societies in Alsace and Lorraine over a period of 2,000 years.
A considerable portion of the book, which is arranged chronologically, is concentrated on changes which preceded the French Revolution of 1789. The revolution produced a great ripple in the picture, but afterwards the main lines of development reasserted themselves.
In this book, Blache attempted to develop the concept of ‘landscape chorology’. It is from Richthofen whom he met at Leipzig (Germany) in around 1876—77 that he learnt about the causal interrelation among the diverse things in particular areas, to which the term ‘chorology’ was applied.
The period between 1877 and 1898 was significant for the future development of geography in France, in the sense that during this period Blache devoted himself to improving the training of teachers of geography and to making up-to-date materials and ideas available to them.
He was exposed to the ideas of ‘new geography’ of Germany, and the apparent dichotomy in contemporary German geographic tradition. In 1891, in collaboration with Marcel Dubois, he founded a new professional periodical, the Annales de geographie, with the purpose of publishing the new methods, concepts and paradigms of geography.
In each number of the periodical, he included a bibliography of published materials where additional information and new geographic concepts could be found. In 1894, the first edition of his Atlas generate Vidal la Blache was published.
In 1898, Blache was appointed professor at the Sorbonne, when the chair of the professorship became vacant. He was the first professional geographer to have been appointed to the chair of geography of Sorbonne since the chair was established in 1809. His appointment as the first professor of geography in France in 1898 marked the beginning of professionalism in the French geography, or in other words, it could be said to have laid the foundation of ‘new geography’ in France.
Geographic Concepts:
Vidal de la Blache seeks to establish geography as a distinct discipline. Its field of study is the ensemble of phenomena that occurs in the zone of contact of the solid, liquid, and gaseous masses that make up the planet. These phenomena are studied in relation to place, localisation and distribution.
Thus, the field of geography has a double aspect—Nature and Man. He urged upon his disciples to focus attention on the close relationships between humankind and the immediate surroundings (milieu) by studying small homogeneous areas which are popularly known as ‘pays’ which roughly resemble the German ‘Landschaft’.
The area over which an intimate relationship between humans and nature has developed through the centuries constitutes a region. Neither humans nor nature is subordinated to each other, because the very ‘synthesis’ would be disturbed if any one of them is regarded as dominant at the cost of the other. He felt that the peculiar obligation of the geographer lies in the correlation of physical and human conditions in their spatial interrelations.
Blache pointed out the inherent weakness of the geographic concept of ‘environmental determinism’ which was prevalent at the time as a Darwinian heritage. He realised the futility of setting humankind’s natural surroundings in opposition to his social milieu and of regarding one as dominating the other. From Ratzel’s second volume of Anthropogeographie, Blache formulated the concept of ‘possibilism’ which was fully developed by the historian Lucier Febvre.
If chronology is to be believed, then it can be said that the concept of possibilism was long developed in an amateurish way by Montesquieu, but Blache treated the concept within the framework of a scientific professionalism and precision in which he incorporated the Comtean positivism.
‘Nature sets limit and offers possibilities for human settlements, but the way man reacts or adjusts to these given conditions depends on his own genre de vie (traditional way of living).’ He points out that through his occupance and imprint on the land, Man creates distinctive countries, be they states or minor unit areas (pays).
It is unreasonable to draw boundaries between natural and cultural phenomena; they should be regarded as united and inseparable. In an area of human settlement, nature changes significantly because of the presence of man and these changes are greatest where the level of material culture of the community is at the highest level.
Blache points out that man establishes relations with the environment not as an individual, but through the heritage and objectives of the group to which he belongs. The same environment has different meanings for the people with different heritage and objectives (genres de vie).
The genre de vie is a basic governing factor determining the man-milieu relationships because it lays down which of the various possibilities being offered by nature are to be selected. The physical environment provides a range of possibilities which Man turns to his use according to his needs, wishes and capacities, in creating his habitat.
The ‘paradigm of possibilism’ appears to have resulted on account of an academic encounter between Durkheim, Ratzel and Blache at the turn of the century. In fact, Blache mediated between the two protagonists. He rejected Durkheim’s proposed reduction of geography to social morphology by insisting that the human being ‘joins nature’s game’, and that the ‘milieu externe’ was a partner not a slave of human activity.
While he shared Ratzel’s belief that society ought not to be left ‘suspended’ in the air, he was quick to dispel any lingering determinism by insisting that nature is never more than an adviser, and that the ‘milieu interne’ revealed the human beings as at once both active and passive.
These mediations were doubly important because Blache’s scheme led neither to a radical possibilism nor to environmental determinism. His was essentially a neo-Kantian philosophy that embraced the organising freedom of the human being, bounded by the realities of the mechanisms of the natural realm.
Blache believed that whereas society and nature were usually represented as two adversaries in a duel, the human being was in fact ‘part of living creation’ and was the most active collaborator who acted upon nature only through her and by her. It is this dialect which he subsumed in the concept of the genre de vie, wherein the moments of a recursive creativity could be both powerful factors and yet so vital agents.
In his article, The Geographical Conditions of Social Facts (1902), Blache considers the physical milieu as the ‘natural’ or ‘geographic’ environment of human occupance. It is indeed a reflection in a modified way of La Play’s study of human societies in their environmental settings.
In another article, ‘Modes of Life in Human Geography’ (1911), Blache points out that social conditions find their expression in distinctive modes of life (genre de vie), which in simpler societies show a close adjustment to the natural environment.
In contradiction to Buache’s concepts of drainage basins, Vidal de la Blache supported the idea of small natural regions (‘pays’). Such small natural regions are manifestations of intimate relationship between man and nature that developed through the centuries.
The study of such small natural regions, each one of which is unique, should be the task of the geographer. Blache, therefore, argued for regional geography and against systematic geography as the core of the discipline. Man-nature relationship cannot be studied along systematic lines.
His method of regional geography was inductive and historical, and best suited to small regions (‘pays’) which were ‘local’ in the sense of being somewhat isolated from the world around them. The idea of identifying the regions of France as proposed by Blache was picked up by Lucien Gallois, who provided a meaningful review of the history of the regional idea in France.
Blache supported the concept of chorology as the study of things associated in area, mutually interacting, characterising particular segments of Earth space. He asserted that geography must have a place among the natural sciences and in human sciences.
Geography is the science of places and not that of men; it is interested in the events of history in so far as these bring to work and to light, in the countries where they take place, qualities and potentialities that without them would remain latent. Blache was truly the founder of modern scientific geography in France.
Vidal Blache is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern human geography. He had developed human geography as an entity, incorporating into it the positivist legacy of Comte. His Principles de Geographie Humaine, which was published posthumously in 1922 (through the efforts of de Martonne), is regarded by geographers as a classic. The historical evolution of each phenomenon in human geography is followed by a study of its present setting, localisation and correlation. In the Introduction, he analyses the principle of terrestrial unity, concept of milieu, the significance of environmental factors and of man’s work in it.
The first part of the book is devoted to studying population density, clusters, major agglomerations in Europe and movements of population in Europe. Part two deals with the man-milieu relation, and the method man has used to develop his environment and of his several civilisations.
Part three deals with transport and communication. Emmanuel de Martonne completed the book, as he added few aspects in part three relating to the origin of races, diffusion of inventions and cultural regions as well as cities.
The arguments in the book are closely reasoned and the book has had great success in English-speaking world through its translation. Blache regarded human geography as a natural science. With his death in 1918, France lost a doyen of the subject. It was largely due to his geographic skill that the ongoing dichotomy between physical geography and human geography in Germany could not succeed to motivate the contemporary French School of geography.
In the words of Joerg, ‘nearly all the occupants of chair in geography in France are pupils or pupils of pupils of the late Paul Vidal de la Blache. In no other country, it may be said, has the development of geography centred about one man as in France’.
Gregory writes, ‘although Febvre had the greatest admiration for Vidal Blache himself, although he later said that la geographie vidalienne had played an important part in the formation of the Annales School of history, his interest in the structuration of specific societies set him some way apart from the mainstream of French geography.
The Vidalian School continued to be preoccupied with a socialised nature; even Vidal Blache had described geography as a natural rather than a social science, and many of the pupils who followed his teaching took this to mean that ‘the nearer man is to the brute, the more geographical he is’.
The complexities of his social structure received little attention, and where they were examined at all the typology of genres de vie what resulted was a resolutely empiricist one with few concessions to any kind of structural explanation. This dismayed Febvre too, because although he was no structuralist, he was undoubtedly influenced by several precursors of the structuralist school.
Geographer # 4. Halford J. Mackinder of Great Britain:
In British, Halford J. Mackinder was both a scholar and a practical man of affairs. He held many important positions. While at Oxford he also held the post of Principal of University College at Reading (1892-1903). He was the director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He was a member of the British Parliament between 1910 and 1922. Between 1920 and 1945, he was chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee, and from 1925 to 1930 he acted as Chairman of the Imperial Economic Committee.
Mackinder was trained in the contemporary tradition of natural science and history. The Darwinian themes of ‘association and organisation’ (man as part of a living ecological organism), and ‘struggle and natural selection’ appeared to have had a profound effect on Mackinder.
He pointed out that history without geography was a mere narrative and that since every event occurred in a particular time at a particular place, history and geography, which dealt respectively with time and place, should never be separated.
The Darwinian paradigm of determinism was so much overriding that Mackinder, in one of his extreme statements, stated that ‘no rational (human) geography can exist which is not built upon and is subsequent to physical geography’.
Mackinder’s first major work, Britain and the British Seas, published in 1902, was an example of a regional study in a global context. In the work, he sought to state the unity of geography in terms of natural regions based primarily on the hydrosphere rather than on lithosphere—a conception that undoubtedly owes much to Herbertson.
Mackinder’s major contribution to the geographic paradigm lies in his spatial political model, which he developed to explain the world political patterns in the light of the declining relative strength of the sea power, and was primarily based on the sequence of events which occurred between the fifth and the sixteenth centuries. In 1904, he delivered his famous lecture at the Royal Geographical Society on ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ which was published in the geographical journal.
Mackinder argued that the European civilisation was an outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion. Through the steppe, there came from the unknown recesses of Asia, by the gateway between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, in all the centuries from the fifth to the sixteenth, a remarkable succession of the Turarian nomadic peoples.
The region in the center of Asia from which these invaders came ‘is on the whole a steppe land supplying a wide spread of scanty pasture, and the horse and camel mobility was relatively easy over the steppe, and the ruthless and idealess horse-men could turn in any direction they wished from their pivot area. The geographical pivot area of history was that vast area of Eurasia drained either to inland lakes or to a frozen northern ocean and thus inaccessible to ships and to sea power’.
‘Enclosing the pivot area on the west, south and east, was the inner or marginal crescent, consisting of those areas of Eurasia from Scandinavia to Manchuria which are drained into the ocean and presumably, accessible to sea power. Outside this again, and separated from it by seas of varying width, are the lands of the outer or insular crescent.
Sea power gave a kind of unity, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal, to the lands of the inner crescent. All the settled margins of the old world sooner or later felt the expansive force of mobile power originating in the steppe. Russia, Persia, India and China were made tributaries or received Mongol dynasties. There was a certain persistence of geographical relationship’.
Mackinder further argued, ‘if Turkic and Tartar nomads, equipped only with the horse and camel, could so shape the course of history in the peripheral lands of the inner crescent, what might not a modern power, its mobility enhanced by the railroad, achieve this respect?
This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia; it could also happen, were Chinese organised by the Japanese to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory. In such an event, France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies in order to prevent the powers of the pivot area from expanding down to the sea’.
In the light of some events; such as the failure of the British navies to force entry through the Turkish Straits into the Black Sea, and their exclusion from the Baltic Sea by the German mines, Mackinder made some changes in his original thesis.
Fifteen years later since his concept first appeared, he published a small book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). In the book, he emphasized the relative ease of movements through the South Russian Steppe from the pivot area (here for the first time called the heartland) into East Europe.
The heartland of 1919 was not quite same as the pivot of 1904. ‘The heartland as a region to which, under modern conditions, sea power can be refused access, though the western part of it lies without the region of Arctic and continental drainage’.
Nevertheless, Mackinder no longer regarded the heartland as completely inaccessible to power of the inner marginal crescent. Indeed the heartland had its ‘Achilles heel’, that region of the south Russian steppe through which the German armies had advanced in 1917.
He summed up his view of the global strategy with the famous dictum:
i. Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.
ii. Who rules the Heartland commands the Worldlsland.
iii. Who rules the World Island commands the world.
In 1943, Mackinder offered yet another modification of his own theory, which was strongly influenced by contemporary events. He separated off from the heartland that part of the Soviet Union lying east of the Yenisei River, which he called ‘Lenaland’.
In opposition to ‘heartland Russia’, he established the ‘midland basin’ consisting of the North Atlantic Ocean, the Eastern United States and Western Europe. The East Central Europe, thus separated from the Midland Basin and the Russian heartland, came to be known as the ‘shatter belt’.
Commenting on the spatial-political model, as developed by Mackinder to explain the world political pattern, James and Martin observe- ‘the paradigm that Mackinder set before the British geographers called for basic work in physical geography to provide scientifically accurate description of the stage-setting on which the human drama was to be played out.
In this point of view, he was close to the concept of Richthofen and Hettner, but not Schluter, and close to Vidal de la Blache and de Martonne, but not Brunhes. He himself was concerned with the global view, but most of his contemporaries and his followers turned their attention to the analysis of man-land relation in small areas’.
Mackinder’s heartland theory is an example of a simplified model in which too much truth has been sacrificed for too much simplicity. It can be further said that the application of this historical natural model involves a translation of the simplified model into a different time and/or place, on the assumption that what has happened before will happen again, or what happens here will happen there.
The assumption well fits into the paradigm set forth by Mackinder in his successive modifications of his earlier thesis regarding the world political pattern vis-a-vis the global strategy. It appears that Mackinder’s thesis made little impact on British geographers, but it certainly formed a symbiosis which seemed to have a special relevance to German ‘Geopolitik’. He had a group of followers in Germany who strictly adhered to the Nazi propaganda.
Geographer # 5. Petre Petrovich Semenov of Russia:
is often regarded as the ‘grandfather’ of the pre-revolutionary Russian geography who acted as a bridge between the scholars of the classical period, such as Lomonosov, Busching and Arsenyev, and the scholars of the modern period.
He attempted to build his own conceptual framework. In 1853—54 Semenov attended Ritter’s lectures at Berlin and worked with Richthofen to prepare for exploring work in Central Asia. He was more influenced by Richthofen than by Carl Ritter. Ritter’s teleological philosophy made no appeal to him.
Sernenov is credited with a distinct humanistic approach in the contemporary Russian geography which emphasised questions of social inequality. He developed a ‘welfare paradigm’ for social relevance in geography that stressed the quality of life.
The empirical identification of social inequality in terrestrial distribution involved developing social indicators such as poverty in rural areas, hunger and crime. His empirical generalisations on social relevance appeared to have a naturalistic pragmatic trend which had a profound effect on the future paradigm of Russian geography.
His regional monographs, including a five- volume work on Russia dealt with ‘the causal interrelations among the diverse things in particular areas’. The work has been described as a perceptive blend of natural, historical and economic phenomenon.
In 1871, Semenov also published a general work on the historical geography of Russian settlement. He was also a member of the committee that planned and directed the first Russian census of population in 1897. He is often credited with having set a distinctive stamp on Russian geography, giving it unity in spite of the variety of its parts and pointing it towards practical and remedial objectives.
Geographer # 6. Isaiah Bowman of America:
He was one of the outstanding geographers of the American geographical scholarship of the early twentieth century. He made significant contributions to the conceptual structure of geography, which reflected explicit positivist approach.
He believed that the scientific status of knowledge had to be guaranteed by the direct experience of an immediate reality, which required a particular conception of causality in which causal relations amounted to regular associations with phenomena.
This philosophical assertion very often inevitably belonged to one of the methodological precepts of Comte’s ‘le reel’. With this approach, he moved on to work for the ‘new geography’ initiated by W. M. Davis. To some extent, Bowman’s contribution to the concepts of geography was far greater than that of his predecessors.
Bowman was graduated at Harvard and Yale. After completing his undergraduate work at Harvard with Davis in 1905, he received an appointment in the Department of Geology at Yale. He led a number of scientific expeditions to various parts of South America from 1907 to 1913. In 1907, he landed at Iquique, Chile and made his way across the Atacama Deserts to the Bolivian Altillano and thence to the forested eastern slopes of the Andes. He returned by the way of Peru, through Cuzco, and Arequipa, and Mollendo.
Based on this scientific expedition and observations, Bowman prepared his doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Geography of the Central Andes’. It was a landmark in the contemporary conceptual structure, of geography in the United States. In 1911, he went on the Yale Peruvian Expedition headed by Hiram Buigham. In 1913, he went for a third Peruvian expedition, which was financed by the American Geographical Society.
These expeditions, in fact, led him to discard the Davisian paradigm which was the ruling paradigm for the American geographic community. The results of these expeditions were published in two books, The Andes of Southern Peru – Geographical Reconnaissance along the Seventy-third Meridian (1916) and Desert Trails of Atacama (1924).
In these books, he sought for an effective way to generalise the many detailed observations regarding the terrain and people which he had collected in his expeditions. His imaginative innovation was his application of ‘regional diagrams’ in his books, which in itself set forth a distinct paradigm for the research community.
Bowman remained at Yale until 1915 and from 1915 to 1935 was the director of the American Geographical Society. He was engaged on research after the First World War at the Peace Congress at Paris. From 1935 to 1948, he was President of Johns Hopkins University.
It is equally important to know that Bowman during this period made significant contributions to the conceptual structure of geography. He attempted to apply geographical methods to the study of practical problems during and after First World War that tended to strengthen the conceptual structure of ‘Applied Geography’ not only in America, but outside also.
At Paris, Bowman was appointed as the chief territorial specialist of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. There he applied his geographical skill to study the politico-territorial problems of Europe, arising out of the territorial disorganisation. He treated the territorial problems within the framework of the regional paradigm, as reflected in his The New World – Problems in Political Geography (1921).
The book dealt with particular problems of particular regions, with adequate description of the local setting and historical backgrounds so that people could know about the resultant effects of the territorial reorganisation. Extraordinary effective use of maps in the book has made it a unique contribution in the field of political geography.
The basic notion of the book, concerning the post-First World War boundary problems of Europe, and the application of regional paradigm to find out remedial measures, inevitably pointed towards the explicit nature of the positivist approach in political geography. It was a book on ‘applied’ political geography. He was probably the first geographer to have introduced empiricism in politico-geographical studies in the USA.
Bowman pioneered boundary studies in the United States. He was asked by the Secretary of State to arrange for a study of Guatemala – Hondorus boundary problems and suggest a solution. The survey of the disputed region was made in 1919-1920 and the solution to the problem was submitted to the Secretary of State, which was accepted only in 1933.
From boundary studies, Bowman moved on to the study of pioneer belts. In 1925, he turned attention to problems relating to the thinly populated areas on the margins of settlement. Pioneer belt studies are not solely concerned with the possibilities of new settlements; they may also be concerned with the need to withdraw from less favourable places.
He proposed to study the pioneer movements all around the world and to identify certain general conditions, not only the physical conditions considered favourable, but also the attitudes and objectives that led people to become pioneers and the economic, social and political institutions that could best support pioneers.
He also proposed to investigate the particular and unique conditions in specific pioneer areas, knowledge of which would be essential to the formulation of policy. Bowman’s proposal ranged widely over all the fields of the social sciences and was essentially multi-disciplinary in approach and concept.
His book The Pioneer Fringe was published in 1931, which studied the nature of problem and offered examples from the western United States, Canada, Australia, southern Africa, Siberia, Mongolia, and South America.
Bowman, who was earlier a follower of the doctrine of environmental determinism, an ardent supporter of the Davisian heritage, ultimately championed the cause of the ‘possibilist philosophy’ and became a possibilist geographer. The change was a result of his Peruvian expeditions and the pioneer belt studies. He offered structural explanations on possibilism, based on his empirical generalisations.
On human activity, he pointed out:
‘As knowledge of the world spread, the associations of events or conditions with place widened, they became more complex, they, had less or more significance with respect to mankind. The potato and maize plants were unknown to pre-Columbian Europe. Their discovery raised the question, are they useful to the rest of humanity and where can they be grown? The whole known world was in a sense resurveyed by the rough processes of trial and error and the result has been astounding. These two plants largely changed the economy of Europe. The soil had not changed; man had gained a little more knowledge of it through a new plant. An element of one environment had been added to the elements, long fixed, of many other environments’.
On the role of environment, he said:
‘The geographical elements are fixed only in the narrow and special sense of the word. The moment we give them human associations they are as changeful as humanity itself. That is why modern geography has so definitely steered away from determinism and towards a study of types of actually working regional combinations of human and environmental conditions…. Earth facts do not determine the form and nature of human society in development. They condition it. New Earth facts are continually being discovered and old Earth facts given new significance as human knowledge, thought and social action develop. The relations are reciprocal’.
However, he also pointed out:
‘While the physical laws to which mankind responds are variable in their application and in degree of effect, yet this is also true that all men everywhere are affected to some degree by physical conditions’.
Bowman’s possibilist philosophy appears to have incorporated the neo-Kantian philosophy that sought for a symbiosis for the organising freedom and capacity of man bounded by the realities of the mechanisms of the environmental realm. In fact, he laid the foundation of a new professional geography in the United States which was markedly different from that of Davis and others.