ABSTRACT
Around the turn of the twentieth century a particular type of social theory became prominent. Relating social behaviour to the changing geography of the times, ‘closed-space’ thinking was all the fashion (Kearns 1984). Such theories focused on the fact that European and European-settler land grabs in the nineteenth century had reached their limit, effectively bringing to an end the era of geographical expansion: in the New World the frontier had ended; in the Old World there were no new colonies for the taking. Global closure had occurred and its social implications were just beginning to be considered. The new subdiscipline of political geography was born into this intellectual milieu. Its special contribution to understanding the new geographical circumstances was to focus on the divisions within the new world unity. Given the creation of the latter, political geographers asked what is the basic geographical patterning that constitutes the unity. This duality of unity with division defines the common thread running through the global political geographies described in this chapter.
