“Our Field Is the World”: Geographical Societies in International Comparison, 1821–1914

Abstract

As associations for the promotion and dissemination of geographical knowledge, Geographical Societies were the institutional basis of geography for the larger part of the “long” nineteenth century. Before 1914, up to 170 such Societies existed in all inhabited continents. Most historiographical research has focused on Geographical Societies in capital cities and/or dealt with them as being inside the “containers” of their respective nation-states, and as if they existed and operated in independence and isolation from one another. By contrast, in a research project launched in 2015/16 at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Leipzig, within the framework of the Leipzig Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”, we seek to identify connections and draw comparisons among 34 Geographical Societies from all continents and of 13 languages, including Societies from minor cities and countries. Our data comes from the Societies’ yearly journals, which we record with a standardized method that we have developed. From a Society’s proceedings, we gather, rather qualitatively, its organizational structure including its networking with other Geographical Societies; from the geographical articles in its journal, we gather, rather quantitatively through codes, the Society’s subjects (e.g. “physical geography”: “geology”; or “human geography”: “economy”), and world areas (e.g. “Africa, West”, or “Polar Regions, South”) of interest. For each Society, we thus obtain a profile reflecting its structure, activities, interests and evolution. Each profile may be explained by the Society’s local and historical context (e.g. French colonialism; Czech nationalism), and further understood through the theoretical concepts of our Collaborative Research Centre: each Society “spatialized” the world into certain “spatial formats”, which then made up a certain “spatial order”. By negotiating modes of dealing with a globalized world, the Geographical Societies thus contributed to the professionalization of geography.