Life, Earth, Colony

Reviews / Votes

"Ian Klinke has written the Ratzel biography we have been waiting for. Skillfully blending biography, conceptual history, and political theory, Klinke provides a critically minded account of one of the most fascinating intellectuals of the imperial age. He uncovers the cosmopolitan liberal progressive who admired US settler colonialism, the theorist of civilization preoccupied with extermination and death, the academic who unwittingly forged a vocabulary for fascism. Written in wonderful prose, the result is a compelling study that will endure." -- Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech University "Friedrich Ratzel was an equally influential and contradictory scientist of the nineteenth century: political geographer, convinced racist, and a dreamy critic of substance dualism. Ian Klinke succeeds in locating the Leipzig geographer in his scientific and political context in a way that is both remarkably readable and intellectually outstanding. The book balances elegantly between Ratzel's life-historical background, his colonial political agitation and academic research-the result is an excellent intellectual biography that undoubtedly sets high standards." -- Ulrike Jureit, Hamburger Institut fur Sozialforschung "Ian Klike's Life, Earth, Colony is an outstanding achievement. While the significance of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel for discourses of imperial expansion and settler colonialism in Wilhelmine Germany has been increasingly noted in recent historiography, Klinke is the first to unpack these issues in their full complexity. By training a zoologist, Ratzel offered a naturalist perspective in which expansion and colonization were projected as inherent processes of the natural world, as typical (and by implication as legitimate) for arctic lichens and ant communities as they were for European societies in the nineteenth century. Klinke argues that this biologism, which culminated in the concept of Lebensraum, was shaped by necropolitics, a preoccupation with death and decay in which 'biology, race, and sovereignty were fundamentally fused.' Informative and provocative in equal measure, Klinke's study will be of great value to all those interested in ideologies of European colonialism, the development of ecological theory, and the origins of Geopolitik." -- Mark Bassin, Sodertorn University "While critically scrutinizing Ratzel's claims, Klinke rightfully underscores the necessity of situating those claims in their time, and flags up the perils of drawing simple, linear lines between the work of figures such as Ratzel and the political aims of later readers. Klinke's work provides a valuable service to anglophone readers, moreover, because it offers an analysis deeply rooted in primary, German language sources, which is relatively rare in anglophone geography." -- Journal of Historical Geography "Ian Klinke's lucid book is more than simply a biography of Friedrich Ratzel, that much-defamed founding father of political geography: While it brings together the complicated threads of his life and thought, it is at the same time a journey back into the colonial gaze of much of European geography in the nineteenth-century." -- Erdkunde "Klinke conclude il suo lavoro con un'originalissima considerazione della necropolitica di Ratzel, e cioe la sua considerazione dell'importanza di quello che si potrebbe chia-mare freudianamente l'impulso alla morte, per comprendere la storia di alcuni popoli."
("Klinke concludes his work with a highly original consideration of Ratzel's necropolitics, namely his consideration of the importance of what could be in Freudian terms called the death impulse, for understanding the history of some peoples.") -- Storia e Politika "Life, Earth, Colony is the long-overdue comprehensive study of Ratzel's work that many scholars of modern Germany and beyond will have been waiting for (I certainly count myself among them)." * Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, The Journal of Modern History * "This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the origins of geopolitics, the foundation of German colonial ideology, and a fuller picture of one of Germany's most problematic Imperial thinkers and his complex reception." * Nicole Grewling, Central European History * "The book deepens our understanding of the intellectual antecedents of today's far right." * Matthew Unangst, Monatshefte *