Ellen Churchill Semple’s Political Economy: Slavery, Frontier, Imperium

Abstract

Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), the first woman president of the Association of American Geographers, was a pivotal figure in the formation of twentieth century human geography and geopolitics. Her oeuvre, however, is often situated exclusively within the tradition of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie. Crucially, an equally important source of inspiration predated Semple’s encounter with the German geographer and remains largely unaccounted for: Anglophone liberal political economy. This article argues that from her 1891 dissertation on slavery until her 1931 book on the geography of the ancient Mediterranean, Semple mobilized a framework of liberal political economy to reconcile tensions she imagined between her country’s legacy of slavery and her support for its growing empire. This strand of her thought highlights the political versatility of anthropogeography and sheds new light on the interplay of geopolitics and liberalism that haunts U.S. security, trade, and migration policy to this day. Key Words: anthropogeography, Ellen Churchill Semple, empire, frontier, liberalism, slavery.