FERRETTI Federico, Anarchy and Geography : Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. Abingdon, Routledge, 2018, 248 p., ISBN 9781138488120
In the last few years, anarchist geographies had seen an outstanding international rising, and anarchist approaches experience a growing interest in all scholarly disciplines. Nevertheless, many aspects of the international anarchist tradition remain little-known, and English-speaking scholarship remains mostly impenetrable to authors and works from other linguistic traditions. Inspired by relational and transnational approaches in historiography and by works on locations and mobilities of knowledge in historical geography with a special focus on print cultures, this book explores for the first time the relation between a French, Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), a Russian, Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and a region, the ‘British Isles’. It does this through an analysis of their works and networks in this region, based on extensive exploration of primary sources. The respective biographical links with this area and the great variety of their friends, collaborators and political fellows there allow us to conclude that Britain and Ireland were fundamental places for the establishment of the early networks of anarchist geographies. Their social, cultural and geographical context played a decisive role in the formation and dissemination on anarchist ideas on geographies of social inequalities, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminism, civil liberties, animal rights and ‘humane’ or humanistic, approaches to socialism.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION : ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHICAL TRADITIONS
1. THE RECLUS BROTHERS : TRANSLATING SCIENCE AND RADICAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE
Exiles in the ‘British Isles’ : discovering social and colonial questions
Reclus in Ireland : discovering colonialism and landlordism
Long-lasting effects of the London experience : dealing with ‘British science’
Reclus in London on numerous occasions
2. EDITORIAL NETWORKS AND THE PUBLICS OF SCIENCE : BUILDING PLURALIST GEOGRAPHIES
Early Kropotkin’s networks : John Scott Keltie, Patrick Geddes and Joseph Cowen
Geographers, editors and gentlemen : Henry Bates, Hugh Mill, William Robertson-Smith, Hugh Chisholm
The Nineteenth Century : socialism and evolutionary theorising
Kropotkin : an anarchist in the editorial business
The business world of publishing again : Halford Mackinder and the anarchists
3. ESTABLISHING A GEOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN THE ‘BRITISH ISLES’ : EMERGENT SOCIAL AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES
A universal geography, and an amazing traveller’s guide
Showing London to the French
The NGU and the Mediterranean metaphor
The new Archipelago and the principle of coastal indentation
Fields, factories and workshops : an anarchist economic geography of England
4. STRIVING FOR FREEDOM : RECLUS’S AND KROPOTKIN’S POLITICS IN THE UK
Charlotte and Pyotr : founding a journal
Anarchism, female activism and women’s rights
For ‘subject races’ and for Ireland : Nannie Dryhurst and the others
A strenuous anti-colonialist
Freedom for Ireland
Kropotkin and Alfred Marsh : between activism and scholarship
Decolonizing socialism (and geography) : The Black Man’s burden
Reclus and Freedom against the Empire
Jingoes and Matabele
Non-European revolutions
5. RIPPLES AND WAVES OF ANARCHIST WRITING : TOWARDS HUMANE SCIENCES
The most ‘humane’ collaborator : Richard Heath
Reclus, and Heath’s French connection
Heath, and Kropotkin’s British connection
Anarchism, humanism and gay rights : Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis
Ethical socialism : Henry Salt, William Morris and Walter Crane
Morris and anarchism
The Scottish connection : James Mavor, the Geikies and the Geddeses
CONCLUSION : THE RELEVANCE OF EARLY CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES
Appendix A : Pyotr Kropotkin, ‘Natural selection and mutual aid’, Humane Science Lectures, 1897
Appendix B : Elisée Reclus, ‘War’, Freedom, May 1898
Appendix C : [Edward Carpenter] To Peter Kropotkin from Friends in Great Britain and Ireland, 1912
Archives
References