ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the genealogy of development geography, relating it to geopolitical, economic, and social traumas of decolonization. It examines how revolutionary pressures and insurgencies, coupled with the eclipse of formal colonialism, led to the degeneration and displacement of a particular way of writing geographical difference of "the tropics." The chapter traces aspects of how colonial and tropical geography as performed in the post-World War II era became development geography in the 1960s and 1970s. It presents the paradigmatic shifts and epistemological transitions, and elaborates archaeologies of development knowledges and their association with geography. The chapter details the works of a series of geographers whose scholarship and teaching took them to the tropics, among them Keith Buchanan, a pioneering radical geographer trained at the School of Geography of the University of Birmingham, England. The identification of the Northern temperate regions as the normal, and the tropics as altogether other—climatically, geographically and morally—became part of an enduring imaginative geography.
