The standard starting points for political histories
of academic subjects are the first use of the
term and the seminal first work; in the present
case, the coining of ‘political geography’ by the
French philosopher Turgot in 1750 and the publication
of Friedrich Ratzel’s Political Geography
in 1897 (Agnew, 2002: 13). Yet, the majority
of evolutionary approaches are limiting, to say
nothing of being potentially stodgy and boring.
The tendency is to present a story of progress from
a benighted past to an enlightened present. In the
case of political geography, the usual story is of a
heyday characterized by racism, imperialism, and
war in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
followed by a period of stagnation and decline
in the 1950s, and finally a Phoenix-like revival
that started in the late 1960s and now seems to
be coming to a lackluster end with the cooptation
of key issues of ‘politics’ and ‘power’ by other
sub-disciplines of geography. However, as David
Livingstone has pointed out so aptly, the history of
geography, and by extension, political geography,
cannot be reduced to a single story (Livingstone,
1995). There are many stories and these stories
are marked by discontinuities and contestations, in
other words, ‘messy contingencies’, which complicate
things (Livingstone, 1993: 28).