ABSTRACT
Sakai (1988) usefully reminds us that matters of geography and history are always intertwined – which has the curious effect of making the East not only a spatial but also a temporal category, just as it makes the Future a geographical, as much as a historical, category. As is indicated forcibly by the title of Mackinder’s classic article about Europe as ‘The geographical pivot of history’, the common sense of Western history has long been founded on a very particular conception of geography – which, in spatialised form, reads from right to left, on an Atlantic-centred map of the world, so that the narrative of historical development is assumed to run from its past in the Orient to its future in the Occident (Mackinder, 1904).
