On Jan. 25, 1904, British geographer Halford J. Mackinder read a paper titled “The Geographical Pivot of History” to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The German geopolitician Karl Haushofer in the 1920s called this paper “the greatest of all geographical world views.” In the 1950s, the American geographer Richard Hartshorne accurately described Mackinder's paper as “a thesis of world power analysis and prognosis which ... has become the most famous contribution of modern geography to man's view of his political world.” In 1962, New York University professor Anthony J. Pearce wrote that in “America and England ... most studies of global strategy or political geography have been based, in whole or in part, upon [Mackinder's] theories.”
Mackinder became a member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1886. The Society's membership, according to Brian Blouet, “consisted of men with a general interest in the world,” and included businessmen, army and navy officers, academics, diplomats, and colonial administrators. Mackinder had been writing about the causal relations between geography and history since at least 1890, when in “The Physical Basis of Political Geography” he sought to apply “geography to the lighting up of history.” “The greatest events in world history,” he wrote, “are related to the greatest features of geography.”
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