Halford Mackinder is credited with laying the theoretical foundation for modern geopolitics. Mackinder’s contemporary, Alfred Mahan, was a naval war theorist who studied the history of maritime warfare and empire to develop a strategic outlook on the imperial control of maritime space. Mackinder admired Mahan, but argued that industrialization and the resulting establishment of railroads were shifting the center of gravity for imperial power from the sea to land by the early twentieth century.
Mackinder’s pursuit of his geopolitical project arose in response to a challenge by the British Royal Geographical Society to improve geography instruction in the British education system (Kearns, 2004). Framed explicitly as necessary in the maintenance of British supremacy on the world stage, the call was taken up by Mackinder, who dedicated his career to the service of the British Empire. Mackinder’s most well-known work, The Geographical Pivot of History, argues that the political world has become a “closed system.” The age of conquest, in which European colonial powers expanded beyond their borders in pursuit of “unclaimed territories” had…show more content… As Richard Peet (1985) notes, the foundation of Mackinder’s geopolitics took place in an era of imperial power and expansion in Britain, other Western European states, and the United States. Intellectually, this time was dominated by ideas of Social Darwinism and Social Lamarckism, ideologies that ascribed naturalistic causality to the behavior of states in a world context. His strategic outlook was infused with white supremacy and offered in the service of white colonialism, which he perceived as in competition with other “races,” such as the Asian “Yellow Peril.” As such, Mackinder contributed to a foundation pursued by fellow geopolitical strategist Fredrich Ratzel and contemporary geographer Ellen Churchill
