Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of The Antarctic Peninsula, by Adrian Howkins

Abstract

In 1900, Antarctica remained largely unexplored, virtually unknown and a blank on world maps. Indeed, a few years earlier, the 1895 International Geographical Congress held in London identified the southern polar continent as the greatest task of geographical exploration still to be undertaken—an assertion accentuated by the recent rapid opening up of other parts of the world. The challenge was soon answered. Britain played a pioneering role in exploring and unveiling Antarctica, while typically taking the lead in extending imperial control over what Adrian Howkins represents as the ‘blank space’ of Antarctica (p. 7). Thus, in 1908 and 1917, the British government, though lacking a clear idea of either its extent or nature, asserted sovereignty over the Antarctic Peninsula region, a territory named the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Soon afterwards, during 1919–20, the government adopted a policy seeking to acquire control over the whole continent through a gradualist strategy. In this manner the Antarctic Peninsula region, ‘an imperial environment’ (p. 55), was represented as the foundation for Britain’s ‘frozen empire’ in the Far South. Although such moves can be viewed as part of the so-called ‘Age of Imperialism’, Howkins concedes that, hitherto, the history of Antarctica in general and the Antarctic Peninsula in particular has tended to be told separately from the history of empire.