Mapping a New World: Geography and the Interwar Study of International Relations

Abstract

Before 1950, International Relations (IR) was a thoroughly interdisciplinary field. Geographers played a key role in the early development of IR, although they are now little known within the discipline that they helped to found. This article explores the pioneering work of three geographers in IR—Isaiah Bowman, Halford J. Mackinder and Derwent Whittlesey—and sets out to reclaim a lost chapter in the history of IR that questions the tendency to reduce IR to a conflict between realism and idealism.