Halford Mackinder

Halford Mackinder (born February 15, 1861, Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, England—died March 6, 1947, Parkstone, Dorset) was a British political geographer noted for his work as an educator and for his geopolitical conception of the globe as divided into two camps, the ascendant Eurasian “heartland” and the subordinate “maritime lands,” including the other continents. He was knighted in 1920.

Mackinder was the son of a physician of Scottish descent. In 1880 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied natural sciences with a preference for biology; he obtained first-class honours in 1883 and, one year later, a second-class in modern history. He was president of the Oxford Union, the principal debating society at the university. After leaving Oxford he read for the bar at the Inner Temple, one of the law “colleges” in London, and qualified as a barrister in 1886. As a lecturer for the Oxford extension movement—formed to give educational opportunities to people unable to attend a university—he traveled widely through the country, particularly among the workingmen of the north of England, expounding what he called the “new geography.” With this new, clear-cut concept of geography as a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities, he soon won attention. His Britain and the British Seas (1902, 2nd ed. 1930), written with assurance and style, is a recognized landmark in British geographical literature.

At that time, a group of men at the Royal Geographical Society were making strong efforts to raise the status of geography as an academic discipline in Britain and to secure for it an adequate place in the educational system. Learning of Mackinder’s success, the society invited him to address it on the new geography. He met the challenge boldly, delivering his paper on “The Scope and Methods of Geography” with great persuasiveness. In 1887 he had become reader in geography at Oxford, the first such appointment in a British university. When in 1899 the Royal Geographical Society and the university established the Oxford School of Geography, it was almost inevitable that Mackinder should be the first director. It was typical of the man that in the same year he organized and led an expedition to East Africa, where he made the first ascent of Mt. Kenya. As he commented, in the popular view the geographer must also be “an explorer and adventurer.”

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Mackinder, working also at Reading and London, continued at Oxford until 1904, when he was appointed director of the recently founded London School of Economics and Political Science, a constituent body of the University of London. There, for four years, he devoted his energies to its administration and to that of the university. He played a prominent part in ensuring that the university centre was established at Bloomsbury in the heart of London and not on the periphery of the metropolis. Though he continued as reader in economic geography for another 18 years, his resignation as director marked the beginning of the third phase of his career. He entered Parliament in 1910 as Unionist (Conservative) member for the Camlachie division of Glasgow. Holding strong imperialist views, he included in his circle of friends similarly minded men, among them the politician L.S. Amery and Lord Milner, the imperial administrator. In the House, Mackinder did not make a strong impact. He retained his seat at the general election of 1918, when he described his opponent as “boldly defensive of the Russian Bolsheviks,” but was defeated in 1922.

Studying the prerequisites for a stable peace settlement during World War I, he developed a thesis in political geography that he had first outlined in a paper read to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In it he argued that interior Asia and eastern Europe (the heartland) had become the strategic centre of the “World Island” as a result of the relative decline of sea power as against land power and of the economic and industrial development of southern Siberia. His extended views were set out in a short book, Democratic Ideals and Reality, published early in 1919 while the Paris Peace Conference was in session. The role of Britain and the United States, he considered, was to preserve a balance between the powers contending for control of the heartland. As a further stabilizing factor, he urged the creation of a tier of independent states to separate Germany and Russia, much along the lines finally imposed by the peace treaty. The book included, apart from the main theme, many farsighted observations—e.g., his insistence on the “one world” concept, the need for regional organizations of minor powers, and the warning that chaos in a defeated Germany would inevitably lead to dictatorship. The book attracted little attention in Britain but rather more in the United States. There was an unexpected sequel, however, for the concept of the heartland was seized upon by the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer to support his grand design for control of the World Island. Thus, during World War II there were suggestions that Mackinder, through Haushofer, had inspired Hitler. More sober evaluation disposed of this absurd notion, and, though developments have affected some of the arguments, the thesis is recognized as an important view of world strategy. In 1924, mindful of the lessons of World War I, Mackinder published his prophetic theory of the Atlantic community that became reality after World War II and assumed military form in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In his hypothesis—which remained largely unnoticed—Mackinder argued that the power of the Eurasian heartland could be offset by western Europe and North America, which “constitute for many purposes a single community of nations.”

In 1919 Mackinder went as British high commissioner to southern Russia in an attempt to unify the White Russian forces and was knighted on his return in 1920. After the close of his academic career 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 Patron’s Medal, Royal Geographical Society (1946), and the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society (1943).