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Ellen Churchill Semple’s political economy: slavery, frontier, imperium

Abstract:
Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932), the first woman president of the Association of American Geographers, is widely recognized for her role in the formation of twentieth century human geography and geopolitics. Her oeuvre, however, is often situated exclusively within the tradition of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie. Crucially, an equally important source of inspiration predated Semple’s encounter with the German geographer and remains largely unaccounted for: Anglophone liberal political economy. This paper argues that from her 1891 dissertation on slavery until her 1931 book on the geography of the ancient Mediterranean, Semple mobilized a framework of liberal political economy to reconcile tensions she imagined between her country's legacy of slavery and her support for its growing empire. This strand of her thought highlights the political versatility of anthropogeography and sheds new light on the interplay of geopolitics and liberalism which haunts U.S. security, trade and migration policy to this day.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1080/24694452.2023.2210209

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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
SSD
Department:
SOGE
Sub department:
Geography
Role:
Author


Publisher:
Taylor & Francis
Journal:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers More from this journal
Volume:
113
Issue:
9
Pages:
2237-2251
Publication date:
2023-06-12
Acceptance date:
2023-04-26
DOI:
EISSN:
2469-4460
ISSN:
2469-4452


Language:
English
Keywords:
Pubs id:
1340409
Local pid:
pubs:1340409
Deposit date:
2023-05-09

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