Libraries as armouries: Daniel Coit Gilman, geography, and the uses of a university

The author builds on recent work on the history of geographical thought by focusing on the career of American geographer Daniel Coit Gilman, who was the first President of the Johns Hopkins University. It is argued that Gilmanʹs influential work in professionalizing an instrumentalist approach to knowledge production in the new institution of the research university forms an important link between the philosophically oriented geography of Alexander von Humboldt and the geopolitics of Isaiah Bowman. The author extends work in the history of the discipline by showing how geographical knowledge came to be seen in instrumentalist terms not only in the institutional context of geographical societies and European imperial administration -- the focus of much of the historical scholarship -- but also within the context of an intellectual division of labor that emerged in the second half of the 19th century as the modern research university took shape. It is suggested that a full account of the way in which Humboldtʹs project was displaced by Gilmanʹs may give us a better understanding of the role that geography might play in moving knowledge production beyond a purely instrumentalist orientation and into more liberatory projects of social justice.