Decolonising geography - early days

While looking for something else I came across Daniel Clayton's paper from the University of St. Andrews.

In it he talks about the emergence of decolonising and the early proponents of looking back at the nature of Empire, with Felix Driver's work being mentioned prominently.

In the aftermath of World War II, two British geographers, Sidney Wooldridge and Ronald Harrison Church, implored colleagues to take the study of colonial geography more seriously.  Wooldridge (1947, 202) ventured that “it appears to me to throw a strong light on the position of Geography in this country that we are so calamitously and shamefully ignorant of our Colonial Empire”.  And Harrison Church (1951, 116-17) sought to make amends with a primer entitled Modern Colonization, noting that Africa was “ripe for rearrangement” (albeit colonial reform more than independence).  

As Britain’s sprawling empire shrank, the type of geographical study and imagery associated with it became less acceptable and feasible, and Alastair Bonnett (2003) asserts that geography soon abandoned its bequest as a “world discipline” and geographers sought to make their discipline ‘useful’ again by focusing on pressing domestic problems.  Yet geography was not taught at many of the new universities established across the United Kingdom in the post-war decades, in part because politicians continued to view the subject as having “a somewhat ‘dated’ look about it”, as Ron Johnston (2003, 69) puts it. 

 Indeed, the ‘conquest’ of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in June 1953, coinciding with the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was arguably the crowning glory of 1950s British geography and points to the post-war extension rather than liquidation of geography’s empire.  

The RGS was a proud sponsor of the Everest Expedition, and through to the 1970s its learned organ, The Geographical Journal, kept a populist foot in the imperial past by publishing excerpts “from the journal a hundred years ago”, most of which were manly tales of expeditionary derring-do.   

Source: (PDF link) to read the whole paper.

https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/files/263517541/Clayton_2019_AAAG_geography_sempire_AAM.pdf