Anarchy and Geography. Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK

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 byworks 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, antiracism, feminism, civil liberties, animal rights and ‘humane’ or humanistic, approaches to socialism.