I am a climate scientist and geologist and think that climate, geology, and geography are incredibly interesting fields that people deserve to know more about. If you have any questions that you’ve sat with for a while, are just curious, want to know more about future or past scenarios, or even have worldbuilding questions, feel free to ask!
I’m wondering about something that’s more a political/history question about the field: So I often hear about how geography was the first modern science. Apparently it fueld many advances in how science is organized, including in other fields. The first modern scientific institution is supposed to have been the royal geographic society in Britain. And many learned people at the time at least new some geology. For example the first science fiction writer Jules Vern packs his journey to the center of the earth full of geological lingo, that his intended readership was expected to understand or at least associate with a feeling of modernity and progress.
So I wondered what’s special about geography and geology (why weren’t engineering, physics, biology etc. first to get big). And I wonder if the following take sounds plausible: that it was important for colonialism and imperialism, but even before that and more significantly for the enclosure of the commons. Many land surveyors were needed for primitive accumulation.
If you want to take people’s communally owned land, which there was a lot of, and divide it up and sell it, you need to be able to point on it on a map. So many surveyors needed to learn the trade and got send out to every last village, forest and field to steal people’s land, which they needed to live. Of course, thereby at the same time providing the initial funding for capital and also creating a vast army of hungry and newly landless people migrating to the cities to become workers. And to teach the surveyors, you needed professors and institutions and state funding and all that. And this spilled over to newer fields of the natural sciences and replaced the centuries old focus on theology (and law) at the Universities.
And that’s how geography helped to start both modern western science and capitalism. And that’s why it was always intertwined with the capitalist hegemony from the beginning. And it still is, isn’t it? Then again, there seem to be more Marxists among geographers then in other technical fields. I wonder why.
Wow that’s an awesome question.
It sounds like you have essentially rediscovered the concept of Marxist Geography all on your own, so congratulations and that’s something to actually be proud of. I’ll go into it a little bit and then give you some recommendations from there, because you sound very interested.
Marxist Geography, summarized as shortly as I can, is the study the spatial implications of capitalism, focusing on how economic order and social inequalities, resource distribution, and the organization of space mold each other. Importantly, unlike the study of geography under capitalism which functions to increase exploitation, Marxist Geography seeks liberation by fully understanding the role of geography in perpetuating class struggle. From this understanding we can determine that societies are reflections of their relation to material conditions, and what must be done to achieve liberation.
You’ve already figured this out. You perfectly highlighted how understanding that society is a reflection of its material conditions is a very powerful tool in the hands of people with the ability to impact material conditions within society. That’s why understanding spatial relations through geography was so important to the ruling class in early proto-capitalist societies. These people understood that control over the resources is control over material conditions and thus the society that exists around them (and in the case of the nobility and capitalists, the society that exists for them).
You can’t understand how a watermill works without understanding what powers it. You can’t plan where to put another watermill without understanding where you might find the correct conditions to power it. You can’t use a watermill to grind grain if the labor power to transport grain to the mill is not worth the effort. You can’t use your watermill if somebody was able to determine a more economically advantageous position to build their own and makes yours obsolete. You can’t use your watermill if you failed to properly enclose the commons and somebody else diverted your water source. You can’t sell the grain from your watermill if the town’s collective farming covers their own needs for grain. It goes back even into feudalism, where the landholding class understood that if peasants could freely till their own land, they would labor for only themselves or their immediate community. So what is so important about understanding geography and geology? It’s that engineering, mathematics, biology, physics, or even religion can’t exist isolated from their spatial relationship with the world around them, and the people that are a reflection of that world.
I recommend reading David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, where he talks about exactly this in the modern context!
Thanks, that was a great explanation! I really should read it then. I might not deserve all this credit though, because I already listened to some talks of Harvey on reading Marxs capital on YouTube. It wasn’t in a geography context, but something still might have rubbed off. Still your kindness is really appreciated!
Thoughts on Neil Smith?
He’s also great. Not in any way tooting my own horn but it’s hard to call yourself a Marxist Geographer without being pretty great. I think it’s one of the most radical and universal fields of study under the Marxist umbrella