ABSTRACT
The language of geopolitics emerges in a very particular moment in history. At the end of the 1800s, several different trends were unfolding in the world of international relations. For over a century, international affairs had been understood to be largely a European subject. The uneven and stuttering colonization of the rest of the world had proceeded apace, with the British Empire rising to global preeminence in the wake of Napoleonic France’s defeat (1815), but with other European countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Denmark carving out empires of their own. Of course, Spain and Portugal still maintained their empires in Latin America, but this grip was slipping and many of these colonies became independent in the nineteenth century. However, this Eurocentric understanding of the world was about to be challenged.
