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.

https://www.routledge.com/Anarchy-and-Geography-Reclus-and-Kropotkin-in-the-UK/Ferretti/p/book/9781138488120

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

Portfolio