Taylor, Griffith (1880–1963)

Thomas Griffith Taylor was an important figure in early-20th-century geography as an advocate of the doctrine of environmental determinism and social Darwinism.

British by birth, his family moved to New South Wales, Australia, when he was a young teenager. He earned a BSc at Sydney and returned to Cambridge for his BA. Trained in engineering, geology, and meteorology, he was selected from 7,000 applicants to serve on Robert Scott's ill-fated Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition in 1911, focusing on that continent's influence on Australia. He led a second expedition there later that year and drew some of the first maps of that continent. On his return to Australia, he assisted with the survey of the site for the new federal capital, even suggesting the name Canberra (of Aboriginal significance). He founded the New South Wales Geographical Society and was the founding editor of the journal Australian Geographer. In 1911, he published Australia in Its Physiographic and Economic Aspects. He earned a doctorate in geology from the University of Sydney in 1916, using his Antarctic research for his dissertation, and 4 years later, he became the founding head of that institution's geography department, Australia's first, and the McCaughey professor.

Taylor soon became known for his controversial support for environmental determinism, which he liberally laced with racism. He consistently advocated pseudoscientific notions that intelligence was correlated with skin color or the shape of skulls. Justifying the white conquest of the continent as an inevitable result of white racial superiority, he consistently portrayed Australia as too dry and harsh for the large numbers of immigrants seeking entry, in opposition to the boosterist “Australia Unlimited” school of thought. Taylor emphasized the region's limited carrying capacity, arguing that it was essentially a desert capable of supporting no more than 20 to 30 million people, and he was often criticized for an overly pessimistic reading of the continent's economic potential and population limit. His textbook espousing this view was banned in some school districts.

From the specific instance of Australia, he began to generalize to the wider world, theorizing links between race, nationality, migration, and climate. His major work on this topic was Environment and Race in 1927, which was widely read and translated into several languages. In Australia: A Study of Warm Environments and Their Effect on British Settlement, published in 1940, he put forth the opinion that the optimal course for a country to follow is dictated by the natural environment and that human deviations from this trajectory inevitably led to lower levels of social and economic development.

Frustrated by the university's denial of promotion, he left Australia to become professor of geography at the University of Chicago in 1929, and in 1935, at the initiative of the famed economist Harold Innis, he left for the University of Toronto, where he founded the geography department and remained until 1951. In 1941, he became president of the Association of American Geographers, the first non-American to hold that post; later, he was also elected president of the Canadian Association of Geographers. Over his career, he published 20 books, including his autobiography, Journeyman Taylor, and roughly 200 journal articles. After retirement, he returned to Australia, where he became a hero to those opposed to nonwhite immigration, and in 1959, he became president of the Institute of Australian Geographers. He died in 1963 and was cremated.

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