27 April 2015

Geography and World Power at 100

By Francis P. Sempa
April 25, 2015

One hundred years ago, British writer and teacher James Fairgrieve (1870-1953) wrote Geography and World Power, an important but mostly forgotten work on global geopolitics. Written during the First World War, Fairgrieve’s book sought to “show how the history of the world has been controlled by” geographical conditions.

Fairgrieve was an intellectual disciple of the great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder, and borrowed some of Mackinder’s concepts in formulating his own geopolitical worldview. Fairgrieve factored into his geopolitical analyses topography, location, climate, relative population density, the distribution of energy, the ease or difficulty of movement, and political and social organization.

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