Geography

Geography and Determinism

Emerging in the 19th and early 20th century, geography used the world's regions as a basic explanatory unit on scales ranging from continents to the political and natural subdivisions of countries. At first, this regional geography purely described region's social and natural contents. Gradually, however, the interaction of the natural environment and human behavior was accorded dedication attention. Drawing on Darwin's work, the theory of Environmental Determinism, for example, argued that local environmental conditions determine the character of people and their activities. Such arguments were used to explain European “achievements” over peoples living under less ideal environmental conditions and, not surprisingly, served to reinforce European supremacy in the world. Meanwhile, other influential geographers such as the German Friedrich Ratzel and the Englishman Halford Mackinder examined the territorial growth of states and empires. In his 1904 paper The Geographical Pivot of History Mackinder introduced his Heartland Theory, which argued that in order to dominate the world and dictate world affairs, the world's heartland (Eurasia) must be occupied. He famously stated, “Who rules East Europe commands the heartland, who rules the [Page 753]heartland commands the world island, who rules the world-island commands the world.” These kinds of ideas filtered into the turbulent and aggressive European politics of the era. At this time a divide was also growing between physical and human geography. The former being concerned with the working of the world's physical environment, the latter—as the above discussion of nation states indicates—being concerned with society and environment.

Spatial to Humanistic Geography

By World War II, human geography had begun to develop a scientific rationale and approach. In his 1939 book The Nature of Geography, Richard Hartshorne argued that geography existed purely to discover the functional spatial integration of phenomena. Based on these ideas, a growing assumption in the discipline of society being logically and geometrically distributed over space provided the theoretical basis of spatial science, which, as a paradigm, dominated geography until the 1970s. Assisted by emerging computer technologies in their attempts to articulate the world's various spatial orders, geographers focused their attentions on distances, directions, locations, and spatial associations. Geographers typically refer to the rapid emergence of spatial science in their discipline as the “quantitative revolution.”

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