Halford Mackinder and the ‘geographical pivot of history’: a centennial retrospective
n June 2004, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy wrote an article for the British daily The Guardian entitled 'the pivot of history' (Kennedy 2004). Despite the omission of the word 'geographical', it was readily apparent that the opinion-piece was referring to Halford J. Mackinder's 'The geographical pivot of history' presented to the Royal Geographical Society on 25 January 1904 and published in the Geographical journal three months later. Why would readers of a centre-left British newspaper be interested in a long dead conservative and arch-imperialist and a paper delivered 100 years ago? Kennedy proposed that the value of Mackinder's paper was several fold it not only pointed to the significance of distance/terrain/climate in shaping the conduct of international relations, but it also enjoyed a predictive value and designated the direction of world history against the backdrop of what Mackinder (1904, 421) termed 'the end of a great historic epoch'. But Kennedy was also pointing to Mackinder's contemporary geopolitical resonances: