Bowman, Isaiah(1878–1950)

Although not one of the discipline of geography's intellectual giants, Isaiah Bowman was surely one of its most influential. He wrote 17 books and 170 articles, but he is not known for his academic work. Rather, he held an astonishingly large number of public policy positions in the early and mid 20th century that allowed him significant influence at the highest political circles.

Canadian by birth, Bowman grew up in Michigan. A student of William Morris Davis, Mark Jefferson, successfully encouraged him to attend Harvard University, where Bowman was greatly influenced by the geopolitics of Friedrich Ratzel. He then lectured at Yale University for 10 years and completed his PhD there (notably, after he left, that department was eliminated during World War I).

Bowman's initial interest was in Latin America, particularly the Andes. In 1911, he accompanied adventurer (and later Senator) Hiram Bingham to the region on an expedition sponsored by the American Geographical Society (AGS), a journey that discovered the lost Inca city of Macchu Pichu. From 1915 to 1935, Bowman was the director of the AGS, and under his leadership it became a major center of cartography, producing, for example, the Millionth Map of South America, the largest cartography project of the 20th century. With his administrative skills flourishing, Bowman developed a reputation as an expert in geopolitics. In 1935, he was called on to resolve the famous dispute between Robert Peary and Frederick Cook regarding the discovery of the North Pole (conveniently, he ruled on behalf of Peary, who had been sponsored by the AGS in 1909).

In 1919, Bowman served as a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, partaking in a critical moment in the history of the world system that marked the decisive beginning of the end of colonialism. The Paris Conference was the last one in which global geographies would be dictated by an elite group of experts (much like its predecessor in Berlin in 1884). Bowman had become a personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and shared his vision of a New World Order. As head of the intellectual branch of the American delegation, Bowman, the “geographical expert,” drew the boundaries of Poland/Danzig, Alsace-Lorraine, and Trieste; supervised the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires; and helped allocate the foreign colonies of the war's losers to its winners. He advocated the use of ethnicity in the drawing of the new boundaries and supported the newly formed League of Nations as a means of applying the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world.

After the war, Bowman became a founding member of the Council of Foreign Relations, which had begun as an advisory group to the State Department at the end of the Paris Conference. The council played several important roles as a think tank and media outlet for the nation's elite, including publishing the influential journal Foreign Affairs. In this capacity, Bowman became one of the architects of 20th-century American liberal internationalism, helping forge a policy that broke decisively with 19th-century isolationism. His sketch of the role of the United States in the new world system and his internationalist vision were codified in his volume, The New World, which was distributed to all army libraries.

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