ABSTRACT
One place to seek the origins of civilization is in descriptive and political geography. Geographers provided that expanded exposure and comprehensive engagement with other peoples and their ways that stimulated a more general, comprehensive, sociopolitical understanding of human organization. Material cultivation together with the civil, both begetting politeness or courteousness of deportment, enter at the outset into the begetting of our term civilization, though Strabo never used this one-word term for a composite notion. The emergence of the idea that civilization connoted more than simply refinement or a narrow political concept—the secular consolidation and expansion of the idea—was to play itself out on a global stage over the course of the nineteenth century. The apparent superiority of European civilization echoed that racial superiority which, at the end of the nineteenth century, white Europeans and European Americans arrogated to themselves.
