Progress in Human Geography

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Geography, empire and social theory

Nei Smith
Prog Hum Geogr 1994; 18; 491
DOI: 10.1177/030913259401800404
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491-

Geography, empire and social theory

NeiSmith
Department of Geography, Rutgers University,

New

Brunswick, NJ 08903,

USA

developments have led to a broad reconsideration of questions of geography and

In the first place, the American empire, successor to the European empires that
crumbled between 1918 and 1945, has itself declined since the mid-1970s (Schlossstein,
1989). The implosion of the Soviet and related regimes and the end of the cold war has led
to a dramatic reconfiguration of geoeconomic and geopolitical relations at the global scale.
From a quite different source, the formal decolonization of erstwhile European colonies in
the second half of the twentieth century led, by the 1980s, to a postcolonial intellectual
movement that recentres the experience of empire in the previously colonized societies
themselves. And the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s
in the metropolitan countries provoked a substantial reconsideration of imperialism in the
social science and radical political literature, while the publication of Saids Orientalism
(1978) a decade later forcefully inserted similar issues on to the agenda of the humanities.
More recently, and in the sphere of popular culture rather than intellectual discourse, a
parallel revisitation of empire is afoot: from movies (The jewel in the crown, Out of Africa,
The last emperor and many others) to fashion (Ralph Lorens Safari collection), a curious
but visceral reassertion of imperial nostalgia has also emerged from the metropolitan
Several

empire.

centre.

Threads of all of these developments have woven through and around the geographical
literature for the last 25 years, but only rarely has the complicity of the discipline itself with
empire been an explicit subject of concern. In this respect, Brian Hudsons (1977) early
discussion of the new geography and the new imperialism stands out as a pioneering work
which announced a healthy, critical retrospection (in anthropology, cf. Asad, 1973). In
geography at least, the spirit of this critical retrospection has only recently been picked
up.

The purpose of this article is to review

some

of the recent contributions

to

the

reconsideration of geography and empire in the light of the social and cultural theory
debates that have dominated critical human geography over the last two decades. In
arguing that this rediscovery and rewriting of the imperial past and postcolonial present
should be done in explicit connection with a sense of the lived geographies of empire - a
connection that is not always made in recent work that emanates from outside the
discipline - I also want to decentre the discussion of empire somewhat from the seemingly

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492

prototypical European adventures in Africa and Asia (Pakenham, 1991 ) . But I also want to
emphasize the ineluctability of social and cultural theory in this project.
I

Paris to

Sarajevo

One of the most difficult problems of southeastern Europe - and the most likely to lead to
future war - is the boundary problem confronting the new state of Jugo-Slavia. A major
symptom is the
peculiar distribution of the ethnic elements of the Slav state, whereby peninsulas of Slav population interlock
with those of other nationalities in a way that makes it impossible to divide the territory without leaving both sides
resentful
Overshadowing all [this] is the inherent weakness of the entire plan of a Jugo-Slav state, viewed from
the standpoint of national unity
All parties in Jugo-Slavia outside of old Serbia are opposed to the dominance of
Serbia in Jugo-Slav affairs.
...

...

...

So wrote Isaiah Bowman (1921: 253-59) on the heels of the Paris peace conference where
he participated in the deliberations that led eventually to the establishment of Yugoslavia
(see also Wilkinson, 1951). Whatever his misgivings, Bowman lobbied hard for the
establishment of a grab-bag Yugoslavian state. With other geographers, historians and
politicians, he spent considerable time at Paris poring over masses of data on population
distribution, ethnic differences, resources, physical features, trade patterns and industrial
activity in the Balkans, searching for feasible and coherent boundaries for the various new
states.

clearly recognized, nation-states are, by definition, geographical solutions

political problems. More than most, Yugoslavia resulted from a mopping-up exercise,
an afterthought to European capitalist state formation, the reconciliation of discrepant,
competing ethnic nationalisms left in the interstices of more established, more powerful
and (at least then) apparently more homogeneous states. Todays frenzy of primitive
nationalism (Denitch, 1993:3), Serbian ethnic cleansing, and the genocidal rape of
Bosnia by Christian Fundamentalists of Serbian, Croatian and again Serbian origin was
not only prefigured in the states territorial formation but also gives the lie to the lingering
monocultural myth that moulds western norms (if not realities) of nationhood, namely
that nation-states represent a territorial coincidence of ethnicity, grace and nationality, a
single people. Even in 1919 the Paris peace conference recognized the imperfection of
Yugoslavia by these criteria: they insisted on a minority treaty affording some token rights
to Bosnian Moslems, rights now drowned in blood.
Yugoslavia presents an interesting entr6e in any discussion of geography and empire.
First, it resides in Europe, generally accepted to be the font of imperial ambition in recent
centuries, yet it finds itself a casualty of empire. Secondly, it lies on the edge of European
and Asian imperia, its original nationhood resulting as much from the defeat of the
Ottoman as from the Hapsburg empire. More recently, the genocidal implosion of
Yugoslavia was precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet empire. And further, the ethnic
cleansing of Sarajevo and Gorazde is in large part about the nostalgic reassertion of a
nineteenth-century greater Serbian empire.
Geography was not merely engaged in discovering the world; it was making it, David
Livingstone (1992: 168) has observed in an altogether different context, but it is an apt
assessment of the participation of geographers from numerous nations at Paris in 1919.
Geography, of course, is intimately connected to the pursuit of war (Stoddart, 1992), and
for this as well as other reasons, the history of geography has always been a contested zone
As Bowman

to

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493

(Livingstone, 1992: 102). Yugoslavia represents a particularly poignant example of the

practical intertwining of the constructed historical geography of empire and the history of
geography as a practice of empire.
11

Empire writing

It is

widely acknowledged that geographers have always been among the front ranks of
explorers, surveyors, technologists and ideologues of empire, but the current rediscovery of
these connections is critical and interdisciplinary rather than apologetic. Quite suddenly,
the history of geography has become a fecund terrain for ploughing larger intellectual
questions of cultural identity, cultural history and cultural politics; a whole new crop of
political geographies of culture - hybrids most - are sprouting from outside as much as
inside the discipline - especially in cultural studies and literary criticism (Grossberg et al.,
1992; Bird et al., 1993). This parallel with literary studies is more than fortuitous. In the
traditional canon of English literature, as in geography, the theme of empire is deeply
embedded, but only in the last decade or so, with the advent of multicultural criticism and
a simultaneous burgeoning of literary and cultural theory, has the writing of empire been
confronted directly. As Edward Said (1993: 62-63) puts it:
Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the
facts of empire
As a reference, as a point of definition, as an easily assumed place of travel, wealth, and service,
the Empire functions for much of the European nineteenth-century as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence
in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but
scarcely ever more than named...
...

previously oddities in the canon (albeit well scrutinized oddities), are

obligatory luminaries in a veritable industry of empire rewriting.
Preceded by and in part built on a range of political, historical and social critiques of
empire, Edward Saids (1978) Orientalism was a foundational text in the literary revelation
of European colonialism. His latest book, Culture and imperialism (1993), also addresses
the complicity of high European culture with imperialism. If Orientalism was heralded as a
brilliant canvas of this dirty little secret of European gentility, the collected essays of
Culture and imperialism are part sequel, part response to critics. Said has been criticized on
several broad grounds: his orientalism leaves little room for independent and alternative
third-world histories, leaves his own position as representer of orientalism unquestioned
and tempts what might be called an orientalism in reverse (el-Azm, 1981; Ahmad, 1992).
The errantly brilliant Orientalism, in this view, becomes an unintended parody of the thing
it would criticize. Culture and imperialism tries to address some of these issues. Like most
empire writers, Said is adamant about the multiplicity of experiences of empire and
announces his intent to take up what was left out of Orientalism, especially the response
Conrad and Kipling,

now

Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization. There

was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the
resistance finally won out (1993: xii).
Geographers who were impressed with the geographical sensibility of Orientalism, and its
insistence on picturing imaginative geographies of empire, will be further impressed by
Saids intensified commitment to attempt a kind of geographical inquiry into historical
experience, and a search for rival geographies opposing imperial dominance. From
Foucault as much as from any history of political geography, Said understands that
geography is about power, and sees this connection written throughout the nineteenthto

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494

century literary canon: To us, a century later, he puzzles, the coincidence or similarity
between one vision of a world system and the other, between geography and literary
history, seems interesting but problematic. What should we do with this similarity? He is
especially interested in grounding this literary rewriting of empire geographically:
most cultural historians, and certainly all literary scholars, have failed to remark the geographical notation, the
theoretical mapping and charting of territory that underlies Western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical
discourse of the time (Said, 1993: 48, 58; see also Said, 1990).
...

Saids dilemma should seem perfectly familiar to geographers. Empire, broadly conceived, was also a central reference point for European and North American geography
since the late eighteenth century, and here, too, the weight of conservatism left the rich
imperial text and context largely unexamined. Conversely, the discovery of geography in
the humanities, which Said expresses, is matched by geographers discovery of cultural
discourses breathing new meanings into historical and geographical events and situations.
Thus Saids work has been widely adopted among geographers as a way of rethinking - or
thinking for the first time - various entanglements of geography and empire, humanities
and social science, culture and economy (see especially Driver, 1992). How indeed,
echoing Said, should this contemporary coincidence of vision be approached? The answer
has to be: critically.
Edward Said has an astonishing ability to connect an eclectic range of issues,
experiences and ideas into a coherent persuasive whole. But it is difficult not to sympathize
with one of his most trenchant critics that this audacity of combination has its problems.
Aijaz Ahmad (1992) finds in Said various layers of ambivalence and contradiction: a
transhistorical historicism, an anti-humanist redoubt of humanism, an anti-canonical
obsession with the literary canon and an extraordinary intellectual generosity together with
a blindness to his own intellectual indebtedness. Ahmad, himself a literary critic, is
concerned not only with Saids bypassing of a central Marxist literature on imperialism Amin, Frank, Kiernan, etc. - but also detects a surprisingly traditional reaffirmation of the
discursive privilege of literature and the implicit assumption in Said tat... the &dquo;contest
over decolonization&dquo; becomes mainly a literary and literary critical affair (1992: 208,
214). Literature constitutes meaning: ... modern imperialism itself appears to be an
effect that arises, as if naturally, from the necessary practices of discourses (p.182). And
discourse constitutes resistance: ... imperialism is mainly a cultural phenomenon to be
opposed by an alternative discourse (p.204).
If Ahmads critique can be overstated, it none the less provides a vital counterpoint vis-vis which Saids originality can be seen in focus. Applied primarily to Orientalism,
Ahmads critique remains relevant to Culture and imperialism. In the first place, the
alternative voices Said solicits in this latest work are numerous and varied but the list is
slanted towards the literary achievements of intellectuals who hail not only from the
privileged classes in various Third-world countries but who are also thoroughly engaged
with the western canon. But secondly, and more interesting in this context, Said is
unsuccessful in following through with his ambition to illuminate rival geographies. If
anything, and quite paradoxically, the more intense invocation of geography in this later
work highlights the descent into discourse (Palmer, 1990) noted in Ahmads critique. For
there remains in much of Saids later work a significant discrepancy between the imagined
geographies unearthed from his literary texts and the historical geographies with which he
seeks to re-entwine them; the latter never fully crystallize out of and into the former. To
Ahmads list of ambivalences we can add, then, a geographical ambivalence in Said: the

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495

invocation of geography seems to offer a vital political grounding to Saids textuality until
the abstractness of that geography is realized. Virtually absent is any analysis of the
historical landscapes depicted in the fiction he discusses. This is not in the least some
familiar disciplinary complaint about missing geographies, but goes to the core of Saids
political vision.
This absence is most telling, ironically, in his essay to Raymond Williams, a consummate depicter of landscape, in which Said wants to expose Camus fiction ... as an
element in the methodically constructed French political geography of Algeria (1990: 88;
reprinted in 1993: 176). The geography of it all remains quite opaque, however, even as
Camus is located in the historical events leading to the Algerian revolution, a general
description of French colonial tutelage is provided and Camuss sexual geography of
Algeria is intimated (Said, 1993: 176). Only in quotations from Camus himself does the
political geographic landscape of Algeria emerge; at best the reader gets very preliminary
hints from which to construct such a geography in the imagination. And yet the battle of
Algiers had a stubbornly material geography, to borrow Gregorys felicitous phrase
(Gregory, 1993: 67); the revolution as a whole involved quite specific rural, urban and
international geographies of domination as well as rebellion that clearly preceded the
imaginative geographies of Saids contemporary readers. Such political geographies cannot
so easily be forgotten in this way.
As Ahmad concludes more generally, for Said, souvereignty comes to be invested in
the reader of literature, fully in command of an imperial geography (1992: 217). There is
therefore a certain irony in the often uncritical adoption of Saids imaginary geographies.
Even Driver, who is gently aware of the contradictory humanism and the dangers of
orientalism in reverse that Saids work presents, fails to remark upon the privileging of
literature, the elision of material geographies and the political ramifications thereof. It is
symptomatic, indeed, that Driver steps back from placing geography and empire in the
of an expanding global capitalism, preferring instead a more postmodern
questioning of geographys role in the construction of modernity (Driver, 1992: 25). The
vagueness of this language, and its agnostic tendency concerning the social and political
relations of modernity, makes way for a potentially depoliticized vision of geography and
empire.
In a somewhat different approach to excavating the constructed cultural geographies of
empire, Mary Louise Pratt explicitly takes us to the contact zone of colonial conquest.
The systematizing of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pratt writes,
but an urban
represents not only a European discourse about non-European worlds,
discourse about non-urban worlds, and a lettered, bourgeois discourse about non-lettered,
peasant worlds. Discovery, whether in Africa, Asia or America, consisted of a gesture of
converting local knowledges (discourses) into European national and continental knowledges associated with European forms and relations of power (Pratt, 1992: 34-35, 202). If
a sequence of imperial incursions resulted in what she describes as a European planetary
consciousness, Pratt too insists that this was a multifaceted project rather than a simple
implant of western cultures, politics and economics. Based largely on travel writing, diaries
and scientific accounts of Europeans in the contact zone, she presents a series of vivid
vignettes to illustrate what has come to be called transculturation - the mutual forward
and backward translation of cultures with each other. These writings reveal the successive
waves of imperial exploration from the late eighteenth century, their different purposes,
imaginings and justifications: the Linnaean classification of planetary species; the variegated anti-conquest narratives of John Barrow, Mungo Park and others in the African
context

...

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496

interior; the reinvention of America through Humboldts systematized romantic empiricism ; its reinvention again by the capitalist vanguard in postindependence America; and
the differently articulated visions of Flora Tristan, Maria Graham and other European
exploratrices sociales in early nineteenth-century South America.
The rich detail of the accounts prevents the conceptual umbrella of a European
planetary consciousness from hardening into the dense self-referentiality of orientalism.
Pratt details several threads in an intellectual and ideological development described by
Gregory (1993: 13 7):... in the course of the nineteenth century dominant conceptions of
space installed within the political imaginary of the West a presumptive identity between
&dquo;rationality&dquo; and &dquo;space.&dquo; The &dquo;rational&dquo; ordering of global space became a mirror for a
reordering of society and politics. Yet it is difficult to see in all the details of Pratts account
too much of this broader pattern of transculturation. The examples do not suggest a
powerful participation by the colonized in this dialectic, and the difficulty of balancing
competing and asymmetrical claims of colonizer and colonized is not resolved here. Rather
it is attenuated by presenting extant voices from among those grouped as the oppressed.
Although Said may well have overstated the case in claiming that in almost all cases the
resistance finally won out, it may be that he is correct that the evidence of transculturation
is to be found in resistance, albeit more than literary resistance.
Pratts construal of women explorers engagement with the colonies and the colonized
touches on an ongoing debate in geography. Pratt argues that women explorers seemed
less concerned with conquest per se and framed their travels more in terms of experience
and self-discovery than discrete acquisitive goals; they were in effect better and more
conscious receptors of transculturation. Mona Domosh (1991a) has suggested something
similar in her call for a feminist historiography of geography. There were many women
travellers, she says, but they are ignored in historical reconstructions of geography and
empire. Stoddart ( 1991 ) rightly highlights the evident weaknesses of Domoshs argument,
especially the conflation of travel, exploration and fieldwork, and the derivative
inclusion of some marginal figures - marginal even from the perspective of feminist
geography. But he sees the gender bias of geography in only the narrowest personal and
institutional terms: who was allowed to become a fellow of this or that geographical and/or
colonial society and who was not, who could publish and who could not, who was hired
and for what. He rejects the larger point that these practices may express gender-specific
assumptions that utterly permeate(d) the disciplinary agenda, and so rejects the necessity
of a feminist historiography (Domosh, 1991b). To take one obvious case, we know well
that the fabric of assumptions behind polar (and other forms of) exploration are heavily
imbued with a mix of national and class interest (Fogelson, 1992), but it makes sense also
to see such explorations (very different as they were one from the other) as equally imbued
with a particularly masculine conquest of nature (Bloom, 1990; Katz and Kirby, 1991).
That women were rarely involved in these explorations should not imply that a feminist
historiography is unnecessary, thereby naturalizing the marginalization of women. Rather
it should lead to the question: why were women marginalized and what does this tell us
about the geographical pursuit of empire? Yet feminism faces the same challenge as
Marxism and other strands of social theory that are avowedly political: how to rewrite the
history of geography as an inclusionary rather than exclusionary history, and how to avoid
attributing essential, superorganic qualities to attributes of gender (or class). In Domoshs
more than Pratts account, this is a real danger; that some white women were able to
eschew their oppression on the grounds of gender by reasserting class and especially race

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497

superiority in the colonies is hardly

historiography of geography.

critical basis for

much needed feminist

,

..
.

IIII

The

empire

at home

The contemporary reconsideraton of empire focuses on a specific set of histories and

geographies. The story is generally set in the period prior to 1945 with an emphasis on the
nineteenth century, and in geographical terms it is a story about over there - or at least
about the texts that scripted the over there (see also Blaut, 1993). But the political history
of imperial geography is not simply a question of foreign wars, cultures and economics
from a bygone age. Questions of empire are equally contemporary and domestic. The
construction of a deracinated global American empire after 1945 brought an equally
visceral reassertion of empire at home against those who would resist, however

tangentially.
Owen Lattimore was an orientalist, if by that we mean someone who devoted a
passionate life to the study of China and Mongolia. But he was equally an anti-orientalist,
if by that we mean someone who devoted his life to defeating the plethora of racist,
imperialist and eurocentric assumptions that Said has taught us to see in orientalism. An
historian, geographer, East Asia specialist and Director of the Walter Hines Page School of
International Relations at Johns Hopkins from 1937 to 1953, Lattimore was FDRs
political adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in the early 1940s and the man Joseph McCarthy
came to name before the Senate in 1950 as the top Soviet spy in the USA. A new,
extraordinarily well researched and eminently readable biography by Robert Newman
(1992) tells Lattimores amazing story in harrowing detail. He makes extensive use of
Lattimores 38 900 page FBI file - at least those parts not officially censored - which he
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Lattimore was not fired by his university, as some victims of McCarthyism were, but he
was persona non grata to many among the trustees and administration from 1950 to 1955
while he battled through a seemingly endless string of Senate witch-hunt hearings,
indictments and appeals; the university archives hold a thick nest of McCarthyist hate mail
aimed at the Hopkins administration. More incredibly perhaps, Lattimore was openly
attacked by at least two geographers: Karl Wittfogel, an erstwhile friend and colleague,
gleefully volunteered to a 1951 Senate hearing that he, Wittfogel, was an ex-communist,
he could smell them a mile away, and Lattimore was one; George Carter, Chair of
Geography at Hopkins, responded to a friendly barbecue invitation from the Lattimores by
filing an accusatory affidavit with Senator McCarthy. As a result, the Hopkins campus
became split and the geography department, in which Lattimore taught some courses
following the political axing of his Page school in 1953, languished. In 1986 the
Association of American Geographers belatedly but touchingly honoured Owen Lattimore, a gesture not forthcoming from Johns Hopkins before Lattimores death in 1989
(see also Harvey, 1983; Lewis, 1993; Newman, 1983). Not just Hopkins but most
universitites were caught up in the McCarthyist conspiracies (Schrecker, 1986). Diamond
(1992) documents a long, thick, inglorious history of Harvards surreptitious collusion
with the FBI, CIA and other government security agencies, which was also systematized
during the cold war but which continues today. Even as Harvard was closing its geography
programme, the administration recognized the need for geographic intelligence of a rather
different sort. Instituted in 1947, Harvards Regional Studies Program, led by its Russian

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498

Research Center, oozed out of the nether zone of shadowy contacts between academics,
administrators and intelligence personnel (spies). It trained people for the CIA (two per
year in the late 1940s) and co-operated closely with the CIA, FBI and State Department
regarding research agendas, fellowships offered and personnel hired.
According to Paul Buck, Harvards Provost at the time, the model for the Russian
Research Center as well as the Department of Social Relations (Sociology) was the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS) (Diamond, 1992: 73). McGeorge Bundy, whom Diamond
reveals as a functionary of the intelligence services during his Harvard deanship in the
1950s, and who later distinguished himself when, as President Johnsons National Security
Adviser, he was the swing vote in advocating the massive escalation of the Vietnam war,
was even more explicit about the symbiosis of government and university:
_

It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies in the United States was not located
in any university, but in Washington during the Second World War, in the Office of Strategic Services
It is still
true today, and I hope it always will be, that there is a high measure of interpenetration between universities with
area programs and the information-gathering agencies of the government of the United States (quoted in Diamond,
...

1992:10).

Which brings us to Richard Hartshorne. Hartshornes death in 1992 (The New York Times,
1992) marks what traditional historians will inevitably refer to as the end of an era in the
discipline. A towering figure in twentieth-century Anglo-American geography, best known
for The nature of geography and for its effect on the discipline (Hartshorne, 1939; Brunn
and Entrikin, 1989), Hartshornes major contribution may well lie elsewhere. He was in
charge of the Office of Research and Analysis of the OSS from 1941 to 1945, in which this
area studies work, noted by Bundy, was carried out, and did indeed help to set a pattern
of new research methods in the social sciences. Independent of Bundys judgement,
Andrew Kirby (1994) argues forcefully that for all the fact that Hartshorne was demonized
as anti-science by the 1950s generation of new positivist geographers, his work in the OSS
actually forged the template for positivist research in postwar academic geography as well
as economics (see also Katz, 1989). The empire at home was equally a breeding ground for

emerging geographical practices.

Finally, Diamond makes clear that the retention of coveys of informants at Harvard,
Yale, most other large research universities (especially those with large federal research
budgets) and wealthy colleges is an established and ongoing FBI practice. He cites the
well-known investigations of CISPES (Committee in Support of the People of El
Salvador) in the 1980s, but also recounts an instance of academic/secret-service cooperation that is remarkable for its paranoia but should give geographers pause. In 19811
the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the United States
Secret Service jointly sponsored a conference to explore the ways in which each might be
useful to the other. As part of the conferees joint report entitled Behavioral science and the
secret service, advice was given about how to identify dangerous persons: ... history of
unemployment or employment difficulties..., &dquo;wanderlust&dquo; (no permanent home or
participation in stable social relationships); exaggerated concern with the world situation;
idiosyncratic gripes about the government (quoted in Diamond, 1992: 11, emphasis
added). By this account, most of the geography profession would be dangerous. Would
that it

were so.

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499

IV

Conclusion

are of course a central means of geographical discourse, and the power of maps, as
every geographer knows, is not always explicit in the arrangement of signs that make the
map. Whereas the purpose of military cartography, for example, generally remains evident
in the product (Pollack, 1991), other maps may be successful to the extent that they
convince us, however much we know better, that they depict the world as it really is; as
the author vanishes in the map, the map exudes authority. This naturalization of the map
takes place at the level of the sign system in which the map is inscribed, says Denis Wood

Maps

(1992: 2), whose The power of maps dissects the political construction and interpretation of
maps, the work maps do, the interests they serve and the histories of signs used in
mapmaking. Woods book is especially important in that it was accompanied by a large
public exhibition of the same name, drawing crowds first in New York then in

Washington, DC.
Efforts by Wood, Brian Harley (1989; 1990 - before his tragic death) and other
geographers to deconstruct the map and reveal the authorship, authority and politics of
maps fly very much in the face of Baudrillards aggressive postmodernist resignation to the
hijacking of signified by signifier. Predictably, Baudrillards (1991) trick of making the
Gulf war disappear into its signs has come in for excoriating criticism (Norris, 1992). And
so we return to where we began. That the pursuit of war and postwar reconstruction are
central bridges connecting geography and empire is as evident today as it was in British
Africa. The appropriate question today may well be: how many geographers are
participating in the current diplomatic cartography of the Balkans, the result of which will
be to make Bosnia disappear?

Acknowledgement
I would like

to

thank Ruthie Gilmore and John Kasbarian for very useful

earlier draft of this paper.

suggestions and

comments on an

References
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Asad, T., editor, 1973: Anthropology and the colonial
future. Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press.

Ahmad,

I. 1921: The new world. New York: World

Books.
Brunn, S. and Entrikin, N., editors, 1989: Reflections
on Richard Hartshornes The nature of geography.
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