ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to show how three specific epochs or eras of geopolitics developed over the period from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s, built upon the interaction of changing material conditions with the ‘principles’ of the modern geopolitical imagination described in previous chapters. Even though the geopolitical imagination of each ‘age’ is distinctive in many respects, there are continuities as old themes are recycled in new contexts. The three discourses or modes of representation I discuss are referred to as civilizational geopolitics, naturalized geopolitics and ideological geopolitics, respectively. World politics in each of the epochs has been organized around the characterizations of space, places and peoples defined by these modes of representation and communication.
