Epilogue

Abstract

This book has attempted to reconstruct the rise of a distinct geographic paradigm during the same period, offering an archaeology of geographic space and spatialization. While providing some final caveats, this chapter explores the legacy of the geographic imagination by sketching out two aspects of its impact in the nineteenth century: on political thought and on cultural thought. It examines the nation-state and geopolitics, the world of ethnic cultures, and geographic modernity. It notes that the emergence of the modern geographic imagination coincided with the rise of a momentous idea in political thought, namely, the idea of nation, in the early nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, geographic imagination was occupied with the development of European peoples toward nation-statehood.