ABSTRACT
Political geography had a history before the term itself came into use in the 1890s. For example, the seventeenth-century Englishman William Petty’s idea of ‘political arithmetic’ and his ‘Political Anatomy of Ireland’ can be seen as historical precursors of late nineteenth-century political geography. In mid-eighteenth-century France Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot used the term ‘political geography’ to refer to the relationships between the facts of geography, seen as all physical and human features of spatial distribution, and the organization of politics. It is also apparent that many of the great figures in the history of political thought, from the ancient Greeks Aristotle and Thucydides to the early modern Florentine Machiavelli and later writers such as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Turgot, Madison, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, had ideas about political territoriality and the effects of geographical location and access to resources on conflict and war that can be regarded as basic elements of political geography. They picked up on the practical realities facing political elites and offered their solutions in the context of the historical periods in which they lived. Thucydides’ great work, The Peloponnesian War, concerns the two decades of war between Athens and Sparta (431-411 BC), and forms the first example of use of the opposition between sea-and land-powers that later political geographers such as Halford Mackinder used as a basic organizing principle. The founders of political geography as such, therefore, could draw upon many centuries of relevant thought to inform their research and writing.
