Geography militant: cultures of exploration and empire

sanitation. New Zealand distinctiveness is too important to the global historiography of colonization for it to be discussed only in the Antipodes. The term "geography militant" was used by Joseph Conrad in 1924 to describe what he saw as the second epoch in the history of geographical knowledge; roughly the age of heroic exploration from James Cook to the scramble for Africa. The first epoch was the era of "geography fabulous"; the age of extravagant maps and extraordinary beasts. The third epoch, in which Conrad saw himself to be writing, was that of "geography triumphant", which ushered in the modern world of well-worn tourist tracks. Although Felix Driver has some doubts about Conrad's taxonomy (after all Conrad was himself constitutive of it) this splendid book describes the culture of exploration and the making of the discipline of geography in Britain in the "militant" epoch. So many themes and substantive descriptions tumble from these pages that summary is difficult. The central focus of much of the book is the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) founded in London in 1830. The Society gets a chapter to itself but its activities are woven throughout the texture of this volume. Although the aims of the Society were the acquisition and promotion of geographical knowledge, the word diverse is scarcely sufficient to describe the ways in which RGS members considered this should be done. Perhaps the most fundamental division in the Society was between armchair geographers and explorers. It was not that those who never left England's shores denied the value of exploration, the rift lay in the fact that they believed the findings of exploration could be synthesized into geographical knowledge only in the Library of the RGS. Many explorers, on the other hand, claimed geographical knowledge could be constituted only in the field. The categories and claimants were, of course, by no means mutually exclusive. The similarities to the history of anthropology are very marked. Other fault lines divided the young discipline: between gentleman and player, collector and theorist, the dilettante traveller and professional explorer, missionary and gold-digger (not always different persons) and, later, amateur observer and full-time scientist. Driver treats all these themes in a theoretically-sophisticated fashion and in engaging prose. He takes in en route the culture of display of artefacts and natural historical specimens (including people) and, in an essay on David Livingstone and a wonderfully funny chapter on Henry Morton …