Environment and Planning D Society and Space, 1992, volume 10, pages 23 A0

Geography's empire: histories of geographical knowledge

F Driver
Departments of Googmphy and History, Royal Nodaway and Bedford Now Collocjo, University
of London, Egham Hill, Surrey IW20 OEX, England
Received 22 Juno 1990; in revised form 29 November 1990
Abstract. In this paper the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of
geographical knowledge are considered. The focus is on the relations between modern geography
and European colonialism during the 'age of empire* (circa 1870-1914). For writers as
diverse as Joseph Conrad and Malford Mackindcr, this was a moment of decisive importance
for the making of the modern world. Although the interplay between geography, modernity,
and colonialism has recently attracted attention from the historians of geography, it is argued
in this paper that they have often conceived the role of geographical knowledge in .somewhat
narrow terms. The work of Hdward Said is discussed at some length, as it highlights some of
the key issues and dilemmas facing those who would rewrite critical histories of geographical
discourse. A totalising view of 'imaginative geographies' (such as those of Orientalism) is
argued against, and instead the heterogeneity of geographical knowledges is emphasised. The
paper concludes with a more general question: why have histories of geography at all, in
these (post)modern times?
Although geography has a long and varied past, the idea of a history of geographical
knowledge is of relatively recent date. The idea of a critical history of geography
is still more recent; indeed, some might argue that it is yet to be formulated. By
'critical history', I mean simply an account which is sensitive to the various ways in
which geographical knowledge has been implicated in relationships of power. In this
paper, I explore the possibilities and hazards of such a perspective by examining
the interplay between colonial power and modern geography during the 'age of empire'
(Hobsbawm, 1987). This theme is of more than antiquarian interest, I shall argue,
for the age of empire constituted a significant moment in the making of modernity.
1 Geography's empire: exploring a world in transition
In his essay on 'Geography and some explorers
1
, first published in 1924, Joseph Conrad
charted three epochs in the history of exploration. The first epoch, of Geography
Fabulous, he describes as a "phase of circumstantially extravagant speculation". It
encompasses the fantastic visions of medieval cartography, which, Conrad tells us,
"crowded its maps with pictures of strange pageants, strange trees, strange beasts,
drawn with amazing precision in the midst of theoretically-conceived continents"
(Conrad, 1926a, page 3). The coming of the second epoch, of Geography Militant,
is marked by a rigorous quest for certainty about the geography of the earth;
according to Conrad, Captain Cook is its most perfect embodiment. During the
nineteenth century, Geography Militant turned from the navigation of the seas to
the exploration of landmasses: central Asia, the Polar regions, and the heart of
Africa. Initially, Conrad insists, this had the effect of expanding rather than
contracting the geographical imagination; in place of "the dull imaginary wonders of
the dark ages" (page 9) the maps of Geography Militant charted "exciting spaces of
white paper" in the innermost regions of unexplored continents. Yet, as the white
spaces succumbed to the dominion of science, the mystery faded; and Geography
Militant gave way to Geography Triumphant.
24 F Driver
Conrad thus describes the genealogy of modern geographical science in the language
of both romance and tragedy. Romance, because the explorers of Geography
Militant are portrayed as "adventurous and devoted men, ... conquering a bit of
truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery
their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling" (1926a, pages 19-20). And
tragedy, because the passage from Geography Militant to Geography Triumphant
marks the irreversible closure of the epoch of open spaces; the end of an era of
unashamed heroism. Later explorers are "condemned to make [their] discoveries on
beaten tracks" (Conrad, 1926b, page 134); or worse, to find their romantic illusions
shattered by mere opportunists and fortune hunters. Conrad's description of his
own journey to one of the blank spaces which had so inflamed his youthful
imagination (the basin of the Congo River, which he navigated in 1890), provides
an instance of this sense of disenchantment: "there was no shadowy friend to stand
by my side in the night of enormous wilderness", he recalls, "no great haunting
memory, but only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper 'stunt' and the
distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history
of human conscience and geographical exploration" (Conrad, 1926a, page 25).
(1)
Conrad's picture of the history of geography may strike the informed reader as
rather too bold in its outline. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, its historical
impressionism, his essay does highlight some characteristic features of the modern
geographical imagination. The focus on exploration has the virtue of highlighting
both the technical dimensions of geographynotably, the arts of triangulation,
navigation, and cartographyand its cultural dimensionsnotably, the rhetoric and
iconography of discovery. These emphases are shared in some of the most innovative
of recent writing on the history of the discourses of modern geographical knowledge
(compare Bann, 1990; Cosgrove, 1985). Yet Conrad is rather more ambivalent
than many of today's commentators when it comes to the political dimensions of
modern geography. On the one hand, he is at pains to distance the quest for
science from mere lust for commercial or political power (which is not to say he
does not recognise science as another form of power). On the other hand, he
draws attention to the irony of his own quest for truth in central Africa, during
which (according to this story) his youthful dreams of heroism evaporated in the
face of other, more harsh realities. This tension between faith in the ideals of the
Enlightenment and disenchantment with their wordly, desacralising effects is an
irreducible feature of Conrad's essay. He is not simply writing in praise of a
robust, 'manly' science (as one historian of geography has recently interpreted him;
Stoddart, 1986, page 142), but rather in memoriam; for such a science was only
possible when there remained open spaces to explore, a horizon to conquer, and
an absolute faith in science to cherish. The closing decades of the nineteenth
century, as Conrad was keen to emphasise, brought into being an altogether
different world.
The world to which Conrad addressed his writing was a rapidly changing one;
new technologies, new aspirations, and new relationships were impressing themselves
upon the social, economic, and cultural landscapes of the globe. The 'age of empire'
was marked by a number of transformations; indeed, during the fin de siecle,
transformation seemed to be the only constant in a world obsessed by change.
In a moment of "extraordinary uncertainty and indecision on endless questions", as
H G Wells put it (1902, page 13), the imagined horizons of time and space were
(1)
Here Conrad refers to the publicity surrounding Stanley's search for Livingstone, and his
subsequent role in the scramble for Africa (see also Driver, 1991; Golanka, 1985).
Geography's ompiro: histories of geographical knowledge 25
being reshaped.*
21
The cultural consequences of this implosion of modernity have
recently been explored by a number of geographers and historians (Harvey, 1989;
Hobshawni, 1987; Kearns, 1984; Kern, 1983; Soja, 1989). For some the rise of
modernism between 1880 and 1920Conrad's erawas contemporaneous with the
subordination of space to time in social theory (Soja, 1989, pages 31-35). This
indictment of the space-devouring *historicism' of modern social theory finds an
echo in current debates over geography and the social sciences. Yet it leaves
relatively unexamined the role of space in a whole variety of modern aesthetic,
cultural, and political discourses beyond a narrow definition of 'social theory
1
in
architecture, in the visual and plastic arts, in literature, and in geopolitics, for
example (compare Gregory, 1990). In this context, Harvey's bold account of the
Condition of Postmodernity (1989) provides a somewhat less restricted view of the
intersections between modernity and the changing experience of space and time.
Yet here too, the richness and diversity of these intersections are compromised, by
a Marxism which seeks to reduce the cultural dimensions of modernity to the
workings of capitalism. The approach here is reminiscent of a remark made by
Manclel in his Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. ''Historical
materialism", Mandel insists, "should be applied to all social phenomena ... The
majesty of this theoryand the proof of its validitylies precisely in its ability to
explain them all" (Mandel, 1984, page viii). If modernism (never mind postmodernism)
has taught us anything it is that such claims must always be viewed with suspicion;
no theory is immortal. As has been well observed, "the universalizing habit by
which a system of thought is believed to account for everything too quickly slides
into a quasi-religious synthesis" (Said, 1985, page 143).
The present concern with the cultural shifts of the last fin de sieclc provides an
opportunity for geographers to reconsider the role of their discipline within the
various projects of modernity. Whereas Soja claims this period as the decisive
moment of geography's subordination, I would suggest an alternative focus on the
place that geographical knowledge has had in the construction of modernity. This
perspective may lead us to Conrad and Le Corbusier, as well as to Mackinder and
to Ratzel; and it will certainly extend beyond the world of the academy, towards
the various points where geographical discourse intersects with strategies of power.
Such a view embraces more than simply (say) the political and economic functions
of colonial geography during the age of empire. For, to take one example, Mackinder's
famous account of the geopolitical dilemmas posed by a shrinking globein which
(by the turn of the century) scarcely a region was left "for the pegging out of the
claim of ownership" (1904, page 421)finds parallels in Conrad's speculations on
the cultural condition of this inward-looking world. In 1923 Conrad observed that
"Nowadays, many people encompass the globe ... The days of heroic travel are
gone" (Conrad, 1926b, page 128). Such remarks frame a wider perspective on the
cultural consequences of modernity itself, in an age of "time-space compression"
(Harvey, 1989, page 240); "the glance of the modern traveller contemplating the
much-surveyed earth beholds in fact a world in a state of transition" (Conrad,
1926b, page 130).
Conrad explored the nature of this modern 'world in transition' in his novel
Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899. This tells the story of a quest (for
Kurtz, the mysterious figure who has 'gone native' in the heart of the Congo) which
is simultaneously an escape (from the decorous certainties of European civilisation).
<
2
> Wells's hope that science might conquer even the futurean "impenetrable, incurable,
perpetual blackness" (1902, page 34)evokes the symbolism of Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
without its sense of irony.
26 F Driver
According to one popular reading, the novel is a meditation on the associations of
colonial philanthropy and powerthe "merry dance of death and trade" (Conrad,
1988, page 17)which commanded the attention of critics of the 'new' imperialism
at the turn of the century (Brantlinger, 1988; Porter, 1968). Yet Heart of Darkness
is far from a straightforwardly anti-imperialist novel. Although Conrad lampoons
the "noble enterprise" of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition ("To tear treasure out
of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back
of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe"; pages 31-32), his writing is
replete with ambiguities and evasions. The "horror" of which Kurtz speaks in his
dying breath, for example, is never precisely named; in fact, Conrad conspicuously
avoids naming names throughout the story. Through its deceptions and mirages,
its multiplication of narrators, and above all its impressionist style (Watt, 1976,
pages 48- 49) , the novel represents the condition of modernity. Heart of Darkness
portrays a world of impressions and illusions, in which conventional certainties (not
least the integrity of the narrator) are radically disturbed (Jameson, 1981, pages
219-224). But, crucially, its vision of modernity also has a space; a space located
not within the salons of European culture and civilisation, but in the colonial
encounter between Europe and the rest of the world (compare Parry, 1983).
2 Modern geography unmasked?
Delineating the origins of modern geography (as of modernity itself) is no easy
task. Some of geography's historians focus on the scientific revolutions of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Livingstone, 1990), whereas others emphasise
the philosophers and geographers of the Enlightenment, such as Kant and Humboldt
(Glacken, 1967). Here I am concerned with a third moment in the history of
geographical knowledge: the institutionalisation of geography during the late
nineteenth century. This is not to argue that others have misconceived the genealogy
of 'modern' geography; modernity surely as a multiplicity of 'origins' which are
irreducible to each other (a point which is sometimes forgotten in current debates
over postmodernism). Yet the focus on the closing decades of the nineteenth
century is particularly appropriate in the present context, as it requires us to
acknowledge the practical role of a discipline which found itself embroiled in a
world of contracting spaces and expanding ambitions.
The relationships between geography and imperialism have attracted remarkably
few historians, particularly where the British empire is concerned (compare Mackay,
1943). The reasons for this neglect are difficult to detect, given the considerable
efforts that have made to reappraise the colonial past of allied disciplines, especially
anthropology (Asad, 1973; Leclerc, 1972; Said, 1989; Stocking, 1987). Some
might regard the lack of sustained critical reflection on geography and empire, in
Britain at least, as a sign of the strong hold that the colonial frame of mind has
upon the subject. It is as if the writings of our predecessors were so saturated with
colonial and imperial themes that to problematise their role is to challenge the very
status of the modern discipline. Yet this is perhaps the very thing that needs to be
done if geographers are to exploit present intellectual and political opportunities.
Such a critique need not result in mere handwringing; indeed, it might point us
towards alternative roles for geographers in the future. What better justification for
our historians?
(3)
.
One of the few explicitly critical attempts to wrestle with geography's colonial
past (in the English-speaking world) is Hudson's essay on "The new geography and
(3)
Some postmodernists might object to such a modern justification for the practice of history.
I will discuss this in the concluding section.
Geography's ompiro: histories of googmphicol knowledge)
27
(he new imperialism" (Hudson, 1977). In this paper, Hudson notes the close
chronological correspondence between the birth of modem geography and the
emergence of a new phase of capitalist imperialism during the 1870s (compare
Schneider, 1990). The relationship between geography and empire is defined in
starkly instrumental terms; the new geography, Hudson argues, was promoted
largely "to serve the interests of imperialism in its various aspects including territorial
acquisition, economic exploitation, militarism and the practice of class and race
domination" (1977, page 12). European geographers frequently associated their
discipline with the perceived needs of empire; geography was claimed as an aid to
statecraft. Representatives of the leading geographical societies were not slow to
pronounce upon the worldly significance of their discipline. In 1899 Thomas
Holdich (a military surveyor and future President of the Royal Geographical
Society) declared;
"Truly, this period in our history has been well defined as the boundary-making
era. Whether we turn to Europe, Asia, Africa or America, such an endless vista
of political geography arises before us, such a vast area of land and sea to be
explored and developed; such a vision of great burdens for the white man to
take up in far-off regions, dim and indefinite as yet" (Holdich, 1899, page 466).
Geographical knowledge was thus represented as a tool of empire, enabling both
the acquisition of territory and the exploitation of resources. In addition, Hudson
maintains, geographical science lent ideological credibility to ideologies of imperialism
and racism, especially through the discourses of environmental determinism. The
latter claim has been developed by Peet, in his wide-ranging essay on "the social
origins of environmental determinism" (Pcet, 1985). For Peet, the notion of
environmental determinism (particularly in its neo-Lamarckian form) functioned to
legitimise both the ideological claims of imperialism and the scientific claims of
geography itself. The geography of Semple, Mackinder, and Ratzel, he argues,
served primarily to "legitimate the expansionary power of the fittest" (page 327);
only when it became "dysfunctional" to capitalist imperialism, Peet maintains;:, did
environmental determinism lose its sway over geographical thought.
The writings of Hudson and Peet issue an important challenge to those who
would tell the story of geography's past in naively idealistic terms. They locate this
history firmly in the material world; geographical ideas are put firmly in their place,
interpreted as merely reflections or functions of material needs. Yet such accounts
beg a variety of important questions. Any viable attempt to place geographical
knowledge within the discourses of colonialism must surely acknowledge that the
'age of empire' was constituted in complex ways, culturally and politically, as well
as economically. As Hobsbawm has remarked, "economic development is not a
sort of ventriloquist with the rest of history as its dummy" (1987, page 62).
Geography during the 'age of empire' was more than simply a tool of capitalism,
if only because imperialism was never merely about economic exploitation. There
are significant aspects of the culture of imperialismits representations of masculinity,
for examplewhich deserve much more attention from the historians of modern
geography than they have yet received. The fears and fantasies surrounding the
notion of masculinity during the age of empire have recently been explored by a
number of cultural historians (Green, 1980; Mangan, 1986; Mangan and Walvin,
1987, Richards, 1989). The heroes of the colonial landscapethe explorer, the
hunter, the soldier, the missionary, the administrator, the gentlemanwere all
gendered in particular ways, providing moral models for a generation of empire
builders (figure 1). Geographical knowledge, in the broadest sense, was inevitably
shaped by and through such figures. Conrad's ideal of Geography Militant, for
example, was hypnotised by a particular vision of manly heroism under threat.
28
F Driver
The spectre of physical and moral degeneration in the modern, urban world was
also an important stimulus for Mackinder; his obsession wth the training of 'man-power
fused a concern about the enfeeblement of race with the geopolitics of empire
(Mackinder, 1905). Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement (Geography Militant on a
small scale?) was ybt another response to this overwhelming sense of malaise (Jeal,
1989; Warren, 1987). These attempts to negotiate the contemporary crises of
masculinity had very different origins; yet they converged in important ways upon
questions of geography. Contemporary writings on 'geography' were infused with
assumptions about gender, as well as empire; to ignore the former is necessarily to
misinterpret the latter.
Broadening the scope of the critical history of geography during the age of empire
would allow us to consider more directly the cultural and political dimensions of
geographical knowledge during this period. This is not necessarily to abandon a
materialist approach; the development of 'knowledge' would instead be grasped as a
situated social practice rather than a spontaneous reflex of the imperatives of economic
development. Peet's (1985) analysis of the new geography is in fact mainly concerned
with the ideas of 'great men' rather than the contexts in which they lived and worked;
Herbert Spencer, for example, is described as the 'godfather' of modern geography.
Figure 1. The Africanist, c.1900. Photographer unknown. From N Monti (ed.) 1987 Afru
Then: Photographs 1840-1918 (Thames and Hudson, London) page 155.
Geography's omplro; histories of geographical knowledge
29
In this account, concepts such as 'Social Darwinism* appear to tower like storm clouds
over the discursive practices of humble geographers. Yet, notwithstanding the current
vogue for 'contextual' history, comparatively little is known about the ways in which
geographical knowledge was socially constituted. There remains considerable scope
for more contextually sensitive studies of geographical societies and related institutions,
both metropolitan and peripheral (compare MncKcnzic, 1992; Schneider, 1990).
The activities of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), to take one example, were
clearly shaped, in a general sense, by Britain\s imperial role. However, one ought
not to prejudge the nature and extent of this role simply by referring to the most
quotable pronouncements of prominent Fellows. At the very least, these statements
need to be set alongside the activities of armies of anonymous cartographers,
navigators, surveyors, and explorers, whose practical labours in Europe and at the
imperial frontier were vital to the projects of colonialism.
The irony of Pect's apparently materialist account of the concept of environmental
determinism is that it presents the history of ideas in an excessively abstract,
disembodied way, leaving an enormous gulf between the level of the theoretical and
the level of the practical. This seems to reflect a particular interpretation of what
a 'contextual' approach demands. The 'context' envisaged by both Peet and Hudson
is provided by a version of the theory of imperialism as a 'higher stage* of capitalism,
refracted through contemporary social thought. The problem, as they sec it, is to
show how geography was 'functional' to the evolution of capitalism; all else is
secondary. This approach reproduces many of the more general problems encountered
by functionalism in social theory. It tends to neglect the antecedents of particular
ideas (environmental determinism, racism, etc), portraying them instead as functional
responses to the needs of the moment; it homogenises whole domains of knowledge,
reducing them to a single function, or family of functions (such as the reproduction
of capitalism); and it fails to ask how (and whether) particular knowledges actually
do fulfill the claims made for them (compare Bridges, 1982). It is certainly important
to recognise the extent to which geographical knowledge was represented in
instrumental terms towards the end of the nineteenth century, although the supposed
novelty of these associations might be questioned. After all, the scientific empire
commanded by institutions such as the RGS during the mid-nineteenth century was
truly global in its scope, Stafford's recent study of Roderick Murchison, for example,
suggests that science and empire were so intertwined in his career, that it is difficult
to say where one ended and the other began (Stafford, 1989). The RGS had long
provided the government with intelligence for the management and defence of the
empire. As one perspicacious observer of Scientific London put it in 1874,
"the military and civil servants of Her Majesty well appreciate the value of the
Society's map room. No sooner does a squabble occurin Ashanti, Abysinnia
or Atchinthan government departments make a rush to Savile Row and lay
hands on all matter relating to that portion of the globe which happens to be
interesting for the moment" (Becker, 1874, pages 332-333).
Yet this is not to say that geography served one and only one function; nor that its
colonial fantasies were uncontested (compare Driver, 1991). Indeed, we cannot
specify in advance the extent to which geographical knowledge (as opposed to other
kinds of knowledge or power) actually was instrumental within the imperial project.
These arguments raise broader issues concerning the nature of 'contextual'
interpretation which are of fundamental importance for historians of geography.
As Livingstone has recently observed, what once served as a flag of convenience
for the new history of geography now cries out for further elaboration (Livingstone,
1990, page 368). My own comments above are'concerned with a particularly
mechanistic view of the relationship between texts and their contexts, whereby texts
30 F Driver
simply reflect and reproduce some more fundamental, nontextual reality. There are
many possible alternatives to this approach, which veers towards a now discredited
base-superstructure model of culture (compare Bennett, 1987; Daniels 1989).
There are those, inspired by the models of poststructuralist literary theory (and the
work of Derrida in particular), who would abandon altogether the attempt to correlate
texts with some nontextual reality. This positionadopted in some, but by no means
in all, postmodernist quarterscommonly attracts the criticism that by confining itself
within the bounds of textuality, it creates its own version of internal functionalism
(Said, 1983, pages 44- 57) . One escape route from the self-referential world of the
text is provided by Jameson, who represents texts as socially symbolic acts, creating
imaginary resolutions of determinate material contradictions. Jameson's oft-quoted
injunction"Always historicize!" (1981, page 9)is intended not as a licence for
a crude materialism, but as a reminder of the historicity both of texts and of
interpretations (compare Gregory, 1990). Texts are read as unstable reworkings of
historical contexts which they themselves help to generate. Jameson's 'history' is
emphatically not just another text, even though it may not be directly accessible to
us (Jameson, 1981). This insistence on historicity is echoed in the work of Said
(to be discussed below), although he is far more sceptical than Jameson about the
theoretical self-sufficiency of Marxism. Said insists that texts cannot be isolated from
the circumstances which made them possible and which render them intelligible:
"My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even
when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world,
human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and
interpreted" (Said, 1983, page 4).
3 Imaginative geographies and worldly texts
I have suggested that we need to do more thinking about the way geographical
knowledge is constituted, and the various forms it takes, before we venture, if we
do at all, onto the treacherous terrain of functional argument. Said's work is of
particular interest in this context, not least because his extraordinary book,
Orientalism (1978), is so full of insights for historians of geographical knowledge.
Said highlights some of the key dilemmas facing those who wish to maintain a
critical attitude towards the history of European knowledge about the non-European
world. On the one hand, his critique of the discourse of Orientalism represents
Western humanism itself as an accomplice in the project of colonialism. On the
other, he refuses to abandon the critical legacy of the Enlightenment altogether,
always in his writings emphasising the possibility of emancipation. [No wonder,
then, that he responds to the word 'humanist' with "contradictory feelings of
affection and revulsion" (Said, 1985, page 135).] Said is thus of considerable
interest to critical historians of geography. Although he shares the suspicion
towards metanarratives that we now (too readily?) associate with postmodernism,
he refuses to abandon that emancipatory impulse we associate with the Enlightenment.
Once it is accepted that texts do not merely 'reflect' the demands of the material
world, the problem of representation becomes an important issue. It provides the
starting point for Said's Orientalism, in which he attempts to map the "imaginative
geography" of the Orient as it has been represented in a range of scholarly,
administrative, and popular texts. The recurring motif of the discourse of Orientalism,
he argues, is an opposition between Europe ('the West') and the Orient; the one
rational, mature, and normal, the other irrational, backward, and depraved. For
Said, the construction of this discourse is in itself a process of appropriation, of
colonisation, which inspires (as much as it 'reflects') more worldly forms of colonial
expansion. Significantly, in the present context, he argues that geographical knowledge
Geography's empire: hiBtortos of (joogrnphicol knowledge 31
constitutes a critical axis of the entire colonial process. "We would not have had
empire itself*, he has claimed, "without important philosophical and imaginative
processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination and
settlement of space" (1989, page 216). The process of exploration, for example,
did not merely overcome distance; it created "imaginative geographies
1
'. The
explorers 'conquered* truth (to borrow one of Conrad's most telling formulations)
not because they exposed the inner secrets of the regions in which they travelled,
but rather because they established particular ways of reading these landscapes.
At one level, Orientalism provides a critique of what one might call geographical
essentialismthe idea that "there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically
'different* inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or
racial essence proper to that geographical space" (Said, 1978, page 322; compare
Ashley, 1987). The essential Orient, Said argues, is a myth, the product of a
variety of discourses originating in the West; a "stage on which the whole East is
confined" (1978, page 63). Orientalism reminds us that the representation of the
Other (places, people, races, gender) is intimately bound up with notions of the
self; Europe defines itself through its representation of the Orient. Furthermore,
this process of representation is simultaneously cultural and political; it thus
renders impossible any absolute distinction between 'knowledge* (ideas, concepts,
texts) and 'power' (strategics, institutions, contexts). Scholars created imaginative
geographies which themselves implied and depended upon a relationship of power
between Europe and its other; statesmen were able to speak about the Orient in
the way they did because it had already been represented in the texts of scholars.
"To say that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the
extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than
after the fact" (Said, 1.978, page 39). The cultural and scientific supports of the
'new imperialism* were, after all, not so new (Brantlingcr, 1988; Stafford, 1989).
A number of recent studies have been concerned with the production of
'imaginative geographies' (Bishop, 1989; Brantlingcr, L988; Hcffcrnan, 1989; Pratt,
1985; Youngs, 1990). Many of these have examined the processes by which images
and fantasies about the colonial world were created within the texts of geographers,
soldiers, missionaries, anthropologists, novelists, and administrators. Of particular
concern are the idioms, figures, and styles employed within these texts, as well as
the different genres to which they belonged; for these defined what could be said
(and how) in particular fields. Thornton (1983), for example, distinguishes between
the monographs of anthropologists in the metropole and the ethnographical
narratives on which they depended. Whereas the former were generally modelled
on the 'objective' pattern of the natural sciences, the latter depended on the fiction
of a more direct relationship between narrator and reader. Equally, some themes
clearly cut across different genres of colonial writing. The myth of Darkest Africa,
to take one example, permeated a vast range of literature in the colonial period
and beyond. In his analysis of its genealogy, Brantlinger pays particular attention
to the duplicity of the rhetoric of 'exploration'; as he remarks, "Africa grew 'dark'
as Victorian explorers, missionaries and scientists flooded it with light" (Brantlinger,
1985, page 166; compare Curtin, 1965). The iconography of light and darkness,
which embodied powerful images of race, science, and religion, portrayed the
European penetration of the continent of Africa as simultaneously a process of
domination, Enlightenment, and liberation. The rhetoric of the 'dark continent' was
not without its ironies, however, as Conrad (amongst others) recognised.
(4)
Indeed,
<
4
> Conrad's attitude to race is, however, the subject of fierce debate: see Achebe (1988);
Brantlinger (1988).
32 F Driver
the metaphor of lightness - darkness could occasionally be turned against itself:
"You may say that by our commercial relations with African tribes we must surely
have let in light. I reply, if it be so, it is the blaze of the burning village, or the
flash of the Winchester rifleat best it is the glare from the smoke-stack of the
Congo steamer bearing away tons upon tons of ivory" (Waller, 1891, cited in
Driver, 1991, page 164).
For the vast majority of the world's population, Thornton argues, "the discovery of
Africa ... was a discovery on paper" (1983, page 505). Alongside the written word,
however, visual representations played an important role in the construction of these
'imaginative geographies'. Explorers' tales were lavishly illustrated with images of
fabulous creatures, awe-inspiring landscapes, and daring deeds. Exhibitions of
colonial booty and travellers' ephemera quite literally staged the drama of empire,
constructing a symbolic geography which simultaneously reinforced the distance
between the subjects and consumers of these images (Greenhalgh, 1988). The camera
itself was an important agent of this process of colonial appropriation (Banta and
Hinsley, 1986, Tagg, 1988), not simply recording the experiences of travellers, but
bringing them into the drawing rooms of the Home Counties. Photographs captured
the sites and scenes of empire for permanent display, and technological innovation
allowed for the mass production and distribution of relatively cheap colonial
images.
(5)
In The Queen's Empire, a vast photographic tribute celebrating Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee in 1897, readers could see for themselves the moral and economic
geography of empire; from "Treaty-making in East Africa", "Dressing cane in Malaya",
"Drying cocoa in Trinidad", and "Cutting bananas in Jamaica", to "The playing
fields of Eton" (Arnold-Foster, 1897). Such images claimed to represent the world
as it really was; each person, each race, in their own place.
Said's Orientalism is probably the single most important inspiration for recent
work on the genealogy of such Imaginative geographies'. In large measure, the
popularity of the book (and indeed notoriety, in some circles) may be attributed to
Said's attempt to repoliticise the apparently unpolitical. Although Said admits that
"most attempts to rub culture's nose in the mud of politics have been crudely
iconoclastic" (1978, page 13), he consistently warns against the analytical
compartmentalisation of culture and power. In the context of the discourses of
Orientalism, for example, "Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say
domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically" (1978, page 40). This
frankness echoes a famous remark in Conrad's Heart of Darkness; "The conquest of
the earth, which means taking it away from those who have a different complexion
or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it
too much" (Conrad, 1988, page 10). Said acknowledges that it is not enough just
to say this; "it needs to be worked through analytically and historically" (1978,
page 123). Yet Said's attempt to do just this, for all its brilliance and audacity,
faces a number of fundamental dilemmas. First, there is a problem of representation,
in the political sense of speaking on behalf of others. On the one hand, the argument
of Orientalism amounts to a passionate restatement of the values of liberal humanism;
by exposing the consequences of Orientalism, the critic is able to build new and
less oppressive visions of the oriental other. On the other hand, however, Orientalism
undermines the very foundations on which (Western) humanism was built; namely,
the power of the enlightened self to speak the truth of the Other in the name of
science. The second problem, of agency, emerges in Said's treatment of the role of
the individual author within the discourse(s) of Orientalism. On the one hand, he
emphasises the singular importance of the writings of particular figures (Ernest Renan,
(5
> Alloula describes the colonial postcard as the "poor man's phantasm" (Alloula, 1987, page 4).
Geography's empire: histories of googrophicol knowledge 33
Gustavo Flaubert, and Richard Burton, for example); on the other hand, he appears
to deny them the possibility of escape from the swamps of Orientalism. (It should
be noted that these problems of representation and agency are acknowledged, often
highlighted, by Said himself. Indeed, some would regard them less as failings of
method than as inescapable features of the modern human sciences as a whole.)
To speak of Said's work in these terms is immediately to raise the issue of his
relationship to the philosophical discourses of postmodernism/*) The postmodern
challenge has frequently been expressed as a revulsion against mctanarratives (such
as those found within Orientalism) which dissolve the flux of social life in the
name of totalising theory. Suspicious of transcendental themes such as the Progress
of History, the Destiny of the West, or the Inevitability of Revolution, it reinstates
local differences, divergences, and misunderstandings; it celebrates the collision of
levels and desires, rather than their resolution (Guattari, 1984), Postmodernists
would thus interpret Orientalism as one of the master narratives of modernity.
They are faced, however, with an immediate problem: how is it possible to write a
critical history of Orientalism which avoids the very csscntialism it seeks to expose?
For Said's own account of Orientalism might itself be (mis)conceivetl as a grand
narrative, drawing local and individual differences into its vision of a governing
structure of cultural power. There is an intriguing parallel to be drawn between
this reading of Orientalism and a common (mis)reading of Foucault's account of
'panopticism' in Discipline and Punish (1977). In both cases, the authors' emphasis
on the heterogeneity of modern discursive regimes is compromised by readings which
portray their effects as emanations of an essential master discourse, It should be
admitted that such readings cannot entirely be dismissed as misreadings. In Discipline
and Punish, as Said himself points out, Foucault's account of panopticism appears
to sweep all the different modalities of powersuch as the normative structures of
modern lawbefore it (Driver, 1985, pages 436-438; compare Fraser, 1989;
Habermas, 1987, pages 288-290; Said, 1983, pages 244-246).
Debates over Foucault's method and politics thus have important implications for
our reading of the work of Said. If Foucault's critique of totalising models of power
is taken at all seriously, it is necessary to maintain a distinction between different
kinds of domination. Read in this light, the subject of Orientalism would not be
power in general, but a variety of powers, geopolitical, authorial, disciplinary,
cultural, and military. The force of Said's argument demands that the boundaries
between these powers be occasionally blurred; but to erase them altogether would
surely remove our capacity to make necessary and important distinctions. We also
need to be more sensitive to the specific features of discursive regimes in different
periods and places; 'Orientalism' (just as much as 'panopticism') must not serve as
a flag of convenience, in place of contextually-sensitive historical and geographical
research. Said recognises the differences between the French and the English models
of Orientalism, for example; we might also consider the various ways in which
discursive regimes diffuse across the boundaries of particular spaces, whether these
are institutional, political, or cultural (compare Driver, 1990). There is also the
question of (internal) 'resistance' to the canons of Orientalism, which I would regard
as a special case of a more general characteristic of such discursive regimes; namely,
their heterogeneity. Although it is true, as Said maintains, that the very existence
of Orientalism is inseparable from the unequal (colonial) relationship between
Europe and the Orient (which is why Orientalism is not matched by an equally
powerful discourse of Occidentalism) this does not mean that all orientalists
shared the same visions and ideals. The history of European discourse about the
<
6
> I return to this question in the concluding section below.
34 F Driver
non-European world was punctuated by successive controversies over the purposes
and effects of colonialism, and the differences these disputes reveal are more than
simply tangential to the history of colonialism. At one level, Said suggests, they
may be portrayed as differences over means rather than ends,
(7)
insofar as the right
of the European to speak for the colonised is so rarely questioned. Yet there is
surely a violence done to the history of the colonial encounter when such divergences
are suppressed altogether. Methodologically, the study of particular moments of
domestic controversy, such as those concerning the bloody suppression of the
Jamaican insurrection by Governor Eyre in 1865 (Semmel, 1962), the violence of
Stanley's methods of exploration in central Africa (Driver, 1991), or the missionary
debate over Islam in Africa during the late 1880s (Prasch, 1989), may be particularly
illuminating, precisely because they expose important contradictions and tensions
within the contemporary scientific, political, and philanthropic discourses of
colonialism.
In considering the impact of Said's work upon the history of geography, it is
also necessary to acknowledge our relative ignorance about the processes by which
'imaginative geographies' become commercialised and popularised. Recent studies
of geography and popular culture (Burgess and Gold, 1985) have established a new
agenda for the historian of geographical knowledge; and the postmodern concern
with popular knowledges gives this agenda particular currency (compare McRobbie,
1989). Although we are beginning to learn a lot about the production of geographical
images, stereotypes, and myths, especially in the context of imperialism (compare
Bell, 1982; Curtin, 1965; Glendenning, 1973; MacKenzie, 1984; Richards, 1989),
we know far less about the ways in which such images are handled by their 'consumers'.
To speak of 'production' and 'consumption' is particularly appropriate in the present
context, because the age of empire was so closely associated with the intensification
of mass consumption and commodification in general. Explorers such as Henry
Morton Stanley (significantly, a journalist turned geographer) promoted the exploitation
of Africa in directly commercial and populist terms. In How I Found Livingstone,
for example, Stanley asserts that
"It is simply a question of money, which is the sinew of all enterprises. With a
sufficient supply of it all Africa can be explored easily. Not only explored, but
conquered and civilized. Not only civilized, but intersected by railroads from
one end to the other, through and through" (Stanley, 1872, pages 681-682).
Stanley's imaginative geographies sold very well indeed. Even the title of his last
major work, In Darkest Africa (1890), became a much sought-after commodity,
repackaged in a dozen different forms from Darkest England to Darkest New York
(Stanley, 1909, page 411; see Nord, 1987). During 1890 Stanley's own (adopted)
name was used to promote an impressive range of more mundane commodities,
from Bovril to soap (Opie, 1985). There is surely a need for historical studies of
the diverse ways in which such images were represented and reinterpreted; in
Stanley's case, for example, it is clear that although he was a 'household name',
he was certainly not universally admired. "Dr Livingstone I presume?" became a
popular joke rather than (as Stanley had intended in 1871) a momentous symbol;
and his subsequent attempts to portray himself as almost the archetype of what
Conrad later called Geography Militant were undermined by those who chose to
represent his exploits in comic rather than heroic terms. The story of Stanley's
mixed reputation (Driver, 1991) has more general implications for historians of
geographical knowledge. The terms 'popularisation' and 'commercialisation' in fact
(7)
This was Said's response to a question at his Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture in
October 1989 (Said, 1990).
(i ooyrnphy' n ompi m hmtono' i of qoogmphtc.nl knowledge* 3 b
stand for complex processes which remain almost entirely neglected. My suspicion
is that there is much more to be said about the ways in which individuals remake
the symbolic geographies they are sold. What is needed, in sum, is greater attention
to the ways in which geographical knowledge is presented, represented, and
misrepresented.
4 Choosing histories: some general questions
In much of this paper I have been concerned with a particular moment in the
making of modern geographical knowledge. By way of a conclusion, I should like
to consider some of the more general political and epislemological issues raised in
the writing of the history of geography.
Why are histories of geographical knowledge necessary at all, in these (post)modern
times? Some critics would complain that disciplinary histories all too frequently
serve to legitimise the present. The concerns of the present are thus given historical
roots, or even an evolutionary justification; those of the past, so the argument goes,
are either co-opted as 'precursors' of their successors, or dismissed as products of
a discarded prescientific imagination. This is, admittedly, to caricature the standard
disciplinary history; yet it is remarkable just how much of the history of geography
has been written in this way. The story of exploration, for example, has frequently
been interpreted as the gradual triumph of modern (European) geographical science
over the mysteries of the earth, the great explorers synthesising the fragments of
knowledge gathered by their predecessors. Critics of Whiggish histories of exploration
have been among the keenest advocates of alternative 'contextual' perspectives
(Livingstone, 1984). This term suggests a rather different vision of the history of
geography; less as a prop for the present, than as a means of understanding the
distanced relationship between past and present. In place of the continuous lines of
progressivist history, it substitutes a landscape of discontinuity; history as a series
of spaces, rather than a single, seamless narrative. The contextual approach to the
history of geography is thus more concerned with mapping the lateral associations
and social relations of geographical knowledge than with constructing a vision of
the overall evolution of the modern discipline. It demands a far more historically
(and geographically) sensitive approach to the production and consumption of
knowledge than that provided by more conventional narrative histories.
The apparent triumph of the 'contextual' approach has not met with universal
acclaim amongst historians of geography, however. As I have suggested in this
paper, there is considerable room for debate over the precise nature of the 'contexts'
which are supposed to give meaning to geography's past. In similar vein, Livingstone
has recently argued against any attempt to "privilege" either side of the "equation"
between text and context (Livingstone, 1990, page 368). Here, he objects to a very
particular version of 'contextual' history, in which ideas and concepts are regarded
as unproblematic reflections or functions of some extratextual real world. Others,
perhaps in the name of poststructuralism, might abandon the 'equation' altogether,
refusing any attempt to move 'beyond' the text. The polemical confrontation between
conventional Marxism and poststructuralism has entrenched such alternatives, as if
texts either fulfilled a narrow range of determinate functions transparently dictated
by the workings of capitalism or belonged to some pure space of discourse beyond
the world, beyond history and geography. Such a polarity places false limits on the
ways in which 'contextual' history might be written and read, because it represents
the problem of interpretation in terms of a choice for or against 'history'. In reality,
however, the choice we face is not whether to historicise, but how to do so
(Bennett, 1987).
36 F Driver
It is at this point that we must grasp a rather different nettle; less the world of
the text than the worldly role of the historian. It is in the narrating of history that
'equations' between texts and contexts are drawn up and dissolved, an imaginative
process which always involves choices of various kinds. Representing geography's
past is inevitably an act of the present, however much we attempt to commune
with the past.
(8)
Indeed, the idea of mapping the historical landscape depends on
the construction of perspective, a view from the present, around which the panoramas
of history are made to revolve. Yet 'contextual' history sometimes appears to deny
this fact. Indeed, it might be argued that the ultimate fiction of 'contextual' history
consists less in its separation of 'texts' and 'contexts', than in its continual silence
on the mediating role of the historian. This is all the more surprising in view of the
role that historical writing has played in the formation and legitimation of political
projects of many kinds during the twentieth century. E P Thompson, for example,
has famously argued that history is all about choices, in its writing as well as in
its making:
"Our vote [as historians] will change nothing. And yet, in another sense, it may
change everything. For we are saying that these values, and not those other
values, are the ones which make this history meaningful to us, and that these are
the values which we intend to enlarge and sustain in our own present. If we
succeed, then we reach back into history and endow it with our own meanings:
we shake Swift by the hand" (1978, page 234).
It is difficult to imagine a more eloquent defence of the modern version of a critical
history. In the context of the history of geography, similar stances have been taken
up by those who would rescue individuals such as Kropotkin and Reclus from the
"enormous condescension of posterity" (Thompson, 1968, page 12; see Lowe and
Short, 1990, pages 5- 6; Soja, 1989, page 4; Stoddart, 1986, page 128).
Postmodernists would wish to qualify, perhaps reject, such a stance. Does it
replay the old game of legitimising present projects by reference to authoritative
ancestors? Does it treat figures like Kropotkin and Reclus as totems of an
'alternative' contemporary geography of which they are hardly prophets? Should
we be suspicious of all attempts to construct countertraditions in which the very
notion of a 'tradition' remains unchallenged? Such questions deserve attention,
particularly in the light of the changing fortunes of Marxist social history in Great
Britain and elsewhere. The grand narratives of conventional Marxist history seem
quite simply to have fallen apart in the wake of the political and intellectual shifts
of the last fifteen years. Of all the critics of Marxist history, it is probably the
most reluctantFoucaultwho has had the greatest impact in Britain and North
America. In his writing the past is no longer a continuous terrain in which the
historian can shake hands with the subjects of history; it is instead a surface of
discontinuities, radical breaks, and fissures; it lacks depth, roots, or underlying
structures, and there is no privileged vantage point from which to survey the
whole; only a cloud darkening the brightness of the Enlightenment project.
Foucault's history, like Nietzsche's, is tragic; it tells a story of domination in the
name of emancipation.
And yet, this critique of critiques ultimately leaves us no basis on which to choose
or to act. It refuses to tell us what should be valued (a moral question) or what
should be done (a political question). At its extreme, as others have shown (Fraser,
1989), it can disable the very idea of a critical project. In hailing the end of a
(8
> Thus exhibition or museum displays which represent other people, times, and places
inevitably raise (political) questions about who is being represented by whom (see Karp and
Lavine, 1991).
(l Ooymphy' s ompt m hi stonos of qoonrnphtcnl knowl odyo 3/
particular history, it risks lending credence to clearly ideological pronouncements
about 'The End of History
1
(Eukuyama, 1989), as if the failure of one orthodoxy
amounted to the erasure of all other historical possibilities. Fukuyjima\s paean to
the 'triumph of the West* demands a response from those who emphasise the possibility
and necessity of emancipatory politics. The work of Said is particularly relevant in
this context, not least because his writings unashamedly embrace moral and political
questions, in a way rarely emulated elsewhere in the world of the academy. In one
respect, Said's writings belong to the philosophical discourses of postmodernity, in
the sense that he is so critical of the worldly role of the modern humanities, the
heirs of the Enlightenment (Said, 1985) and is so keen for us to listen to other
voices, Equally, however, he is frankly suspicious of what he calls the "aesthetic
response" which has characterised the postmodern turn in many of the human
sciences, especially anthropology (Said, 1989). Not all would agree with Said that
"poetics |arej a good deal easier to talk about than politics" (1989, pages 220-221);
yet his insistence on the need to make political choices provides a powerful
counterpoint to current drifts within postmodernist writing. One suspects that for
Said, as much as for Habermas (1985), modernity is "an incomplete project".
Geography's history, like historical writing of all kinds, presents tis with various
choices, both in its execution and in its interpretation. The choice between these
various routes through geography's past cannot be an absolute one, and it would
be wrong to see them as mutually exclusive in all circumstances. As Habermas
laments, postmodernism (in its more abandoned moments) "exacts a high price for
taking leave of modernity" (1987, page 336); and yet its critiques of the master
narratives of the Enlightenment (including Orientalism) have the effect of vastly
enlarging our vision of possible geographies and their histories. Retaining and
exploiting the tension between these alternatives is one of the most challenging
tasks faced by contemporary historians of geographical knowledge.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the following for their helpful comments on previous
incarnations of this paper: Nigel Thrift, Gillian Rose, David Livingstone, Peter Jackson, Gerry
Kearns, and Derek Gregory. None of them are responsible for the shortcomings of the final
version!
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