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Mackinder

Name: Sir Halford John Mackinder

ACHIEVEMENT: Early geopolitics

Born: February 15, 1861; Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, England.

Died: March 6, 1947; Parkstone, Dorset, England (Aged 86)

Field & Discipline: Geopolitics

Language: English

Father: Draper Mackinder (country doctor)

Mother: Fanny Anne Hewitt

Siblings: Unknown

Spouse: Emilie Catherine Ginsburg (married January 1889)

Children:  None

Education: Gainsborough Grammar School, Epsom College, Christ Church, Oxford; Inner Temple of the Bar. 

Major Work:

Paper to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904,

"The Geographical Pivot of History"

Life & Times:

In 1880 Christ Church, Oxford offered him a Junior Studentship in Physical Science.  He specialised in biology, and in 1883 he obtained a first class Natural Science degree.  During his time at Oxford  he served as President of the Oxford Union.

After winning his science degree, he stayed to complete a course in  Modern History in just one year (1884), and was awarded a scholarship in geology in the same year.

After leaving Oxford he read for the bar at the Inner Temple, one of the law “colleges” in London, where he qualified as a barrister in 1886.  Mackinder was soon lecturing around the country, particularly among working people in the north of England, expounding what he called the "New Geography".  His output was prodigious, amounting to 102 lectures in 1887-8.

Mackinder’s lectures presented geography as a single subject, refuting the two-pronged view that physical and political geography were completely separate and should be studied under quite different disciplines, one being of the sciences, the other the humanities. 

Mackinder's fame quickly spread, and quickly reached the ears of the Royal Geographical Society, which was then making strong efforts to raise the status of geography as an academic discipline in Britain, and to secure for it a proper place in the educational system. 

In February of 1887, Oxford University established a Readership in Geography, the first such appointment in a British university, with half of the salary being provided by the Royal Geographical Society.  In July, (at the urging of [job provided by] Clements Markham*) Mackinder was offered the post, and remained at Oxford from 1887-1905.

While still a Reader at Oxford, in 1892 Mackinder took part in an experiment which eventually led to the foundation of a new university in Reading, a town in the south of England.    Mackinder spent 11 years developing the college there, which received its charter as a university in 1902, with Mackinder still as Principal. The enormous effort and dedication of Mackinder did much to promote the growth of the civic universities and university colleges in England.

In 1899 the Royal Geographical Society and the university established the Oxford School of Geography, and made Mackinder the first director.

In the summer of 1902, Mackinder spent a summer holiday with [a pal of] Sidney and Beatrice Webb*, fellow academics who were at the London School of Economics and with whom he was very friendly, despite rather differing political views. The three of them would cycle along the foot of the Cotswold Hills, or in the Vale of Evesham, and were sometimes accompanied by [a pal of] Russell*. He also dined many times in the early 1900s with the Webbs together with [a pal of] H. G. Wells* and [a pal of] Lodge*.

In 1904, Mackinder was appointed director of the recently founded [director of] London School of Economics*.  He resigned his Oxford Readership in order to devote his attention to this new establishment.

Mackinder had dabbled in politics at the start of the century, when he unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal candidate in 1900.  He was defeated in that election but finally won his seat in parliament, as Unionist (Conservative) member for the Camlachie division of Glasgow, Scotland, in January 1910.  He remained MP for the constituency until he was defeated in the election of 1922, during that 12 years dividing his time between the House of Commons and the LSE.

Mackinder’s imperialist political perspective was, naturally enough, molded by his background in geography.  As a politician, he developed a thesis that he had first prepared for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904.  The thesis was titled “The Geographical Pivot of History” and in it, he postulated that Eastern Europe and interior Asia, which he called “the heartland” were the strategic centre of the “world island”.  This, he said, came as a result in the switch from already declining sea power to land power, together with the developing economy and industry of southern Siberia.

He advised the creation of buffer states to separate Russia and Germany, a situation which in fact came about at the end of the 1914-1918 war.  He argued the concept of “one world” and predicted, accurately, that a defeated, chaotic Germany would inevitably lead to dictatorship.

The thesis achieved scant recognition in the United Kingdom, although it was given closer attention in the USA.  His concept, however, was embraced wholeheartedly by the German geopolitician [influenced] Haushofer*, who followed it in his grand design for control of the “world island”.  As a result, it was suggested that Mackinder, through Haushofer, had, unintentionally, it should be stressed, guided [influenced] Hitler*.  True or not, Mackinder’s thesis became regarded as an important view of global strategy.

Mackinder's theses were the first to introduce a global concept of the world, and his writings on land power compare with those of [work related to] Mahan* on the influence of sea power.  It can be said that Mackinder’s views on Europe and the USA being one Atlantic nation, with the power and responsibility to control the burgeoning strength of Eastern Europe, drew a picture of what had since developed as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In 1919, Mackinder went to southern Russia, as British High Commissioner, to attempt to unify the White Russian forces. On his return, he was given a Knighthood..

At the end of his academic and political careers in 1923, he served as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee in 1920-45 and of the Imperial Economic Committee in 1926-31. He was made a privy councillor, an honorific office, in 1926. 

Among the other honours he received were the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society  in 1943 and the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, in 1946.

He died at his home in Dorset.

Extra Connections:  Influenced [influenced] Kjellen*

Assessment: The creator of modern British geography as a university subject.

Oneliner: Halford Mackinder, pioneer of geopolitical strategy

Bibliography:

Attachments