The effacement of early modern geography (c.1600–1850): a historiographical essay

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which geographers have written about the history of geography in the early modern period ( c. 1600–1850). It is argued that geography was a clearly defined practice in that period, but that a century of writing about the period by geographers has consistently effaced that definition. This practice began with modern geography's ‘founding fathers’, of whom Mackinder, Hartshorne and Sauer are considered. They developed an ‘essentialist’ historiography – postulating what geography is as a science ‘in essence,’ judging geography's history in the light of this essence and placing the early modern period in a precritical era. This model proved highly influential with historians of geography, and even contemporary work has not escaped from its framework to take on board the alterity of the early modern conception of geography.