Publishing anarchism: Pyotr Kropotkin and British print cultures, 1876–1917

This paper addresses the relationship between the famous anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin and his most important British editors, John Scott Keltie and James Knowles. It analyses their unpublished correspondence, which has survived, for the most part, in the state archive of the Russian Federation. Drawing on recent literature on anarchist geographies, transnational anarchism and historical geographies of science, it examines the material construction of Kropotkin's works on mutual aid, decentralisation and ‘scientific anarchism’, which were originally published as articles for British periodicals. The paper argues that Kropotkin's acquaintance with liberal editors was not only a matter of necessity but a conscious strategy on his part to circulate political concepts outside activist milieus, thereby taking advantage of the public venues then available for geographers. In this way, Kropotkin succeeded in getting paid for working almost full-time as an anarchist propagandist. The paper also contributes to the wider field of critical, radical and anarchist geographies by providing early examples of knowledge struggles against creationism, Malthusianism and environmental determinisms which have lessons for the present.