ABSTRACT
In 1885, incarcerated in a French prison cell, the Russian geographer-anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, wrote ‘What Geography Ought to Be’, an impassioned plea for geographers to engage in the work of social justice and critical pedagogy (Kropotkin, 1885). His paper formed part of a report on Geographical Education to the Royal Geographical Society (Keltie, 1885). Following his release from jail the following year, Kropotkin moved to London where he was lauded by the Society. However, ‘in spite of a close personal friendship with Scott Keltie (Secretary of the RGS from 1892 to 1915), Kropotkin declined the honour of being elected an official “fellow” of the group. Hostile towards any organization under royal patronage, but committed to the advancement of science, he nevertheless established a close working relationship with its members’ (Breitbart, 1981, 143).
This vignette illustrates several themes of this chapter: the task of recovering histories of critical and radical 1 geography in Britain (so that Kropotkin's work has come to be widely read and celebrated, for example); the place of critical pedagogy in those histories; the importance of transnational connections (Kropotkin spent time in France, Canada and the United States, as well as England, Scotland and his native Russia); and the ambiguous and contradictory relationships between dissident and mainstream geography and geographers in Britain.
