ABSTRACT
An account of the modern geopolitical imagination – the predominant ways world politics has been represented, talked about and acted on geographically by both major actors and commentators over the past two hundred years – must start with the origins and development of the capacity to see the world as a whole. From this point of view, the ‘modern’ world is defined by the imaginative ability to transcend the spatial limits imposed by everyday life and contemplate the world conceived and grasped as a picture. The geopolitical imagination, therefore, is a defining element of modernity. Its most distinguishing feature is the conception of the world as a single if divided physical–political entity – a feat of imagination impossible before the encounters of Europeans with the rest of the world beginning in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
