Royal Geographical Society - Essay Example

Royal Geographical Society The famous Royal Geographical Society began its existence as a dining club in London in the early 19th century. It rapidlygained influence and in the mid-19th century was granted a royal charter from Queen Victoria. It sponsored many famous explorers and expeditions over the next hundred years and became quite prominent. It was created at an opportune time for British imperialists. The world was opening up, explorers were gaining ground, and the British crown was claiming more and more land. Not only did this new territory have to be mapped and surveyed and its inhabitants interviewed and learned about, but the new borders to be imposed would have to help Britain maintain and defend this new territory. An organization that could do all of this would be an organization that would and could become increasingly powerful. While some of the work done by the RGS was in good faith and showed a high level of accuracy and ability, much of it was politically influenced and done at the service of political and business interests that were more concerned with profit than geography. Indeed, when a person looks at a map of the globe today and the borders of countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, one often wonders, “Why a border there? There is no physical or ethnic reason for it to exist there . . .” Many of these borders actually fly in the face of any practical consideration and were created solely for the benefit of others. As such they continue to this day to create conflict and strife around the world. The RGS contributed to the British imperial ethos of the day. By the mid-19th century lots of places in the world, considered for many years as terra incognito were opening up for the first time. Explorers such as Stanley and Livingstone were for the first time making inroads into the interior of Africa. British citizens were present in India and had substantial roles in the various courts there. Britain had significant interests in the Middle East. Britain’s economy, more than ever before was linked to the world’s. Britain relied on its colonies and the new lands being discovered for a great deal of its wealth—and as such it wanted to keep control not only of these colonies and lands but of trade links that led to them. There were constant threats. Threats came not only from restless natives who were very resentful of being dominated by British soldiers and bureaucrats, but also from imperial rivals such as France and Germany. Everyone was trying to carve out a portion of the new land and to create various spheres of influence over which they would have dominion. Things were very competitive. And this is where the Royal Geographical Society came in and to some extent gave Britain a competitive advantage. Indeed, there was a lot at stake in these first encounters. The first explorers of the Orient brought to the West the first stories and images of the people of the East. In that respect they are responsible for setting the tone of the relationship between the two cultures. These first early images seemed in some way, the critic Edward W. Said has argued, to occasion what came after them—political and administrative control of the East as a vast colony.1 No effort was made to understand the cultural divide between East and West; this lack of understanding led Westerners to believe their own way of life was simply better and should be taught to Easterners. In the beginning, organizations like the Royal Geographical Society were purely scientific and academic organizations. That perfectly fit the principles of the political and business figures who wanted to hire explorers to claim land and resources, but who wanted to put a neutral, scientific sheen upon these expeditions. Essentially such individuals wanted to dress up their land grabs as scientific adventures. As one critic writes of such geographical and scientific societies (in a stinging rebuke to them and their kind): Initially, these new kinds of travellers were often sponsored by trading companies or were attached to government expeditions. But they rapidly developed independent scientific and religious institutions to support their work, such as The Royal Geographical Society or the various Missionary Societies, a development that allowed them ostensibly to distance themselves from commercial and military expeditions and to portray themselves as harmless knowledge seekers in contrast to rapacious traders and expeditionary forces of conquest.2 As newspaper owners and other media giants began to see how much money expeditions such as Henry Stanley’s was generating in ad revenue and paper sales, they too wanted a piece. Such expeditions became very profitable and contributed to the creation of an imperialistic ethos that soon helped the British Empire spread around the world. The Royal Geographical Society found this model very beneficial. They benefited hugely from playing a role “advising the prince,” so to speak. They were able to do the mapping, but they were also often asked for advice on matters relating to politics and the military. Once again without taking on a publicly political role, they were able to working the background shaping and deciding things of great consequence to people very far away. We should not overlook the maps that were made. It is to a large part the making of these maps, the creation of these geographies that helped implement the imperial project underway by Britain. The projects researched and completed by these geographers were done at the service of imperialism. As one author writes, the themes in the works include: The links between empire and antiquity, race and racism, and environmentalism . . . One of the important features of these historical geographies is the way in which they demonstrate a particular view of geography, seen as a background to history and as a scientific and humanistic justification for a range of imperial ideals and policies . . .3 This always underlined the activities of the Royal Geographical Society. And nowhere so much as in the Middle East, which Britain had long coveted and which became increasingly under its control in the late 19th century and early 20th century up until World War Two. The Middle East was strategically vital to the United Kingdom because of the Suez Canal and the way this strategic canal controlled trade to and from India, which was at the time a British colony. The British economy depended on goods from India and its rivals knew this too. This is part of the reason France spent much energy trying (and failing) to get involved in Egypt. During the late 19th century, Britain worked on a “lifeline to India” strategy which involved taking control of strategic parts of the Mediterrenan and the Middle East. It took control of Malta and Cyprus, and later Yemen and other coastal Middle Eastern areas. This was in large part a way to maintain and sustain its adventures in India. Throughout these endeavours, the British government relied on the Royal Geographical Society for advice and expertise. The Society was only too happy to help out. Its connections with the government and with prominent business titans went a long way to improving its own prestige. Indeed, many of Britain’s objectives in the Middle East were first dreamt up by the Royal Society. Sir Halford Mackinder was one of the main instigators. A member of the society and a prominent geographer, he was called by some the godfather of geostrategy, and melded both geography and politics into one seamless discipline. It was Mackinder himself who suggested to Britain, through a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society that was famously reported, that the future of world domination lay in the Middle East. In a fascinating article by Robert Kaplan in a recent issue of Foreign Policy called “The Revenge of Geography,” the speech is recounted. [Mackinder’s] thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the “pivot” around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the “heartland” in a later book. Surrounding it are four “marginal” regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two “monsoon lands”: one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa” and for the most part “thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is).4 It is not hard to see how such thinking not only appealed to the British empire at the time—which could easily imagine a doctrine of expansion not unlike the American idea of manifest destiny, in which their empire stretched across the world—but it is even easier to see how such thinking later infused much of British imperial policy. Much of the world we see around us today is a product of the imperial period which stretched from around the middle of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War. This period was characterized by huge political and social upheavals, but more than that even it was characterized by exploration and conquering. More land changed hands in this time than in any other in human history. Flags were raised, wars were lost, flags were lowered. The great victor of the period was Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set. The most amazing thing about this empire was that it was defended and maintained not only by hardened soldiers and diplomats, but also by geographers. These geographers, members of the Royal Geographers Society, mapped out the world and the strategy in which Britain would engage that new world. They contributed to and, in some ways, shaped the imperial ethos that dominated the lives of so many millions of people for so many years. References Ashcroft, Bill, et al. Post-Colonial Studies. New York: Routledge, 2000. Bell, Morag, and Robin Alan Butlin, M. J. Heffernan. Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. RGS. Explorations: Great Moments of Discovery from the Royal Geographical Society. London: Artisan, 2002 Kaplan, Robert D. “The Revenge of Geography.” Foreign Policy. May/June 2009. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4862&print=1 Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire, the Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Writings on Empire and Slavery, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. A. G. Hopkins, “Back to the Future: from National History to Imperial History”, Past and Present No. 164 (August 1999) pp. 198-243 Conklin, Alice. “Introduction: Writing Colonial Histories” French Historical Studies 27 no. 3 (Summer 2004) pp. 497-505. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979 Read More