Geografia

I. História da Geografia

1.1 Expansão colonial e pensamento geográfico

Por constituírem duas faces de uma mesma moeda, não é por acaso que a expansão colonial e a
afirmação nacional na Europa no final do século XIX confundem-se com a legitimação do antigo saber geográfico
enquanto disciplina acadêmica de grande prestígio oficial. Com efeito, nesse período, a expansão do imperialismo1,
no plano da política internacional, ocorreu em meio à intensa luta entre as potências europeias pela divisão dos
continentes em “zonas de influência”.
Dessa forma, a firmação do próprio sistema capitalista em nova fase – o imperialismo – trará profunda
repercussão na realidade concreta e, portanto, na divisão política do mundo e, consequentemente, no plano do
saber geográfico e de sua aceitação enquanto um conhecimento escolar e universitário estratégico.
Adquiriu-se reconhecimento oficial nesse período, o sa ber geográfico acompanhou a descrição e o
conhecimento do mundo em todos os tempos. Nesse sentido, Lacoste (1981) indaga se “as grandes descobertas” e
as descrições dos “geógrafos” árabes da Idade Média não seriam também Geografia2.

1 An unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in the form of an empire, based on ideas of superiority and practices of dominance, and
involving the extension of authority and control of one state or people over another. Derived from the Latin word imperium (‘sovereign authority’),
imperialism is closely affiliated with colonialismo. Both are intrinsically geographical – and traumatic – processes of exprorpiation, in which people,
wealth, resources and decision-making power are relocated from distant lands and peoples to a metropolitan centre and elite (through a mixture of
exploration, conquest, trade, resource extraction, settlement, rule and representation), although the latter differs from the former in terms of
intensity and materiality of its focus on dispossession. ‘Imperial’ is used to denote attitudes and practices of dominance befitting an empire.
The term was originally used in the second half og the nineteenth century to describe a state-centred ethos of territorial expansion –
epitomized by the imperial partition of Africa between 1885 and 1914 – that involved both aggressive national competition for prestige and a more
general rationalization of imperialism a as a ‘civilizing mission’. This era of ‘classical imperialism’ drew old and new imperial powers (Britain, France,
Portugal and Belgium; Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA) into an expanding and volatile capitalist world system, and two world wars that
precipitated the swift disintegration of the sprawling colonial empires that had been built over the previous four centuries. Geography – as both a
discipline and wider discourse – forged an intimate relationship with imperialism during this period, projects of exploration and mapping, geopolitical
models and climatic arguments for European superiority and racial difference played especially important imperial roles.
Yet the idea and practice of imperialism has a longer history, and attempts have been made to explain it in more systematica terms. It
has been traced back to Antiquity into what David Harvey has called ‘the new imperialism’ (or ‘neo-imperialism’) currently being expedited through
American military and economic overlordship (especially in the Middle East), and justified as a ‘war on terror’. The romans left some important
imperial precedentes. Such as the imperative to legitimize colonization by recourse to divine or secular law. However, a series of advances – initially
in navigation and military technology, and then in commerce, administratioin and methods of knowledge production – helped European powers to
create overseas empires on a scale never imagined or deemed feasible before; and recent work on imperialism emphasizes how the imperial
prerogative of the West (and especially the USA) now resides in the power to circumvent international institutions and law and thus in some
measure leave behind the moral and political legacy of rome.
Critical approaches to imperialism emphasize the exploitative and dehumanizing nature (evidenced, for instance, by slavery), and – at
the risk of oversimplification – have come in three main forms and phases. First, and beginning with the early twentieth-centure work of J.A. Hobson,
V.I. Lenin and Joseph Schumpeter, imperialism has been analysed in economic and political terms – as central to the evolutionof capitalism and the
nation-state. A lerge historical and geographical literature seeks to account for the specificity of imperial power, and examines how different phases
of capitalist accumulation (mercantile, industrial, monopoly) have been connected to different forms of imperialism (maritime and land-based,
formal and informal) and cycles of global dominance. Monocausal, teleological and diffusionist explanations (including Marxist ones) of the West’s
rise to global dominance – encompassing 85 per cent of the Earth’s surface at its 1920s peak – have been discredited in historical terms but remain
culturally and politically resilient, not least in ‘end of history’ scenarios that see liberal capitalism as the high point and terminus of human progress.
Second, since the 1980s, imperialism has been studied as a discourse – or grammar – of domination fuelled by images, narratives and
representationis, and shaped by categories of gender, sexuality, race, nation and religion, as well as capital and class. Critical energies are focused on
the potency of binary and essentialist thinking –us/them and self/other stereotypes, such as the opposition between civilization and savagery – and
the ways inwhich Western knowledge effects and secures empire and dispossessioin by denigrating indigenous knowledges and representing the
Earth as the imperialist’s rightful inheritance. Edward Said’s work on orientalism, and imperialism works as a multi-faceted ‘struggle over geography’,
has been particularly influential in spurring interdisciplinary interest in the culturally and spatially constructed nature of Western knowledge abouth
the ‘Other’. While gegraphers have paid close attention to how a range of geographical ideas, practices and texts might be conceived as imperial
discourses, they have weaned against reducing imperialism to discouse, and insist on the need to materially ground understading of imperialism’s
operations.
A third approach – and one currently making great headway in history and geography – is concerned with the locational basis of
imperialism. It mobilizes web and network concepts to redress the residual Eurocentrism and metro-centrism (and textualism and abstraction) of
much writing on imperial/colonial discourses, and guards against portraying imperialism as either rigidly hierarchical, or all seeing and knowing.
Setemming from older historical debates about the ways and extent to which actions and policies emanating from the imperial core were shaped by
peripheral/colonial events and pressures, this ‘imperial networks’ approach treates metropole and colony as mutually constitutive (rather than
separate and isolated) entities, and breaks down the strict equation of imperialism with the centre/core and colonialism with the periphery/margin.
This literature examines the variegated, shifting and unstable make-up of different imperial and colonial projects, and how multiple forms of affinity,
difference, assymetry and inequality became mapped across nation and empire. Imperialism can thus be seen as both unitary and highly
differentiated. However, questions can be raised about how adequately this literatura addresses question of power.
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