Out of the ‘moribund backwater’: territory and territoriality in political geography

Political geography emerged from the ‘moribund backwater’ to which Brian Berry had assigned it during the discipline’s ‘quantitative and theoretical revolution’. It didn’t fit well into the emerging conception of spatial science, however, which paid scant attention to one of political geography’s main spatial concepts — that of the bounded space. This essay traces the consideration of bounded spaces in political geography over the last 30 years, focusing on Peter Taylor’s major contributions, first, to the spatial analysis of the translation of votes into seats in constituency-based electoral systems and, secondly, his essays on territories and territoriality.