ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to provide an initial overview of the networks that emerged at the Geographical Departments of the Universities of Vienna and Berlin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to work out the similarities and differences on the basis of selected criteria such as internationalization and politicization. The geographers of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin included a larger number of non-European areas in their research and cooperated with a larger number of scholars from different countries. Moreover, in comparison with their Viennese colleagues, they worked more directly with political authorities, received commissions from them, and their research was more likely to influence the politics of the day. What both departments have in common is the fact that, due to their location in the capitals of two major empires, they largely functioned as primary nodes of local disciplinary networks; these geographers were hardly involved in research that was not organized from Vienna or Berlin. The two metropolises, with their supra-regional decision-making, innovation, and competition functions, were important engines of development for geographical science.
