ABSTRACT
Geopolitics, as a form of power/knowledge, was born in the era of imperialist rivalry between the decades from 1870s to 1945 when competing empires clashed and fought numerous wars, two of which were worldwide wars, all the time producing, arranging and then altering and revising the lines of power that were the borders of the world political map. An era characterized by colonial expansionism abroad and industrial modernization at home, it was a time of tremendous technological achievement, social upheaval and cultural transformation. The dominant imperialist structure of the age was the British Empire which, despite its increasing territorial size over the decades, was poorly adjusting to the transforming conditions of world power, particularly those in the early twentieth century. The other “great” imperial powers of the time-Russia, France, Italy, the United States, Germany and later Japan-were its general rivals and sought to profit from its difficulties and relative decline. Each of these imperialist states produced their own leading intellectuals of statecraft and came to develop their own distinctive cultural variants of geopolitics, congealments of geographical knowledge and imperialist power strategizing.
