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Geography, one of the oldest fields of human curiosity drew very little attention in Britain until the middle of the 19th Century. Exploration of new lands, description of travels and voyages, description of the newly discovered lands and their people were considered as the areas of geographical studies.

In the middle of the 19th century, academicians were busy in the accumulation of facts and information about the newly discovered places of the world. In 1859, Darwin published his 'Origin of the Species' which attracted the attention of biologists, geologists and sociologists. After this evolutionary theory British scholars started paying attention towards earth as the home of man. It was the end part of the 19th century when geography was introduced as a discipline in the British universities.

Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947). Halford J. Mackinder, the scholar of dynamic personality and the person who can give simple expression to complex ideas, with an imaginative mind, is known as the founder of the British School of Geography. His thinking was permeated by visualization, both on the map and in the mind, of the world's regional complexes as combinations of varied physical and human elements. He considered geography as a bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences, between history and geology. He applied these concepts to the interpretation of world political affairs.

In the initial stage, the British geographers were concentrating in the field of Physical Geography, in which there used to be hardly any description of man as an agent of change in the physical surroundings. Mackinder identified geography as a discipline that traces the interaction of man and his physical environment. In 1904, he formulated the concept of the 'Geographical Pivot of History' also known as 'The Heartland Theory of Mackinder'. In the Heartland Theory Mackinder identified a 'World Island' consisting of the continents of Eurasia and Africa. The most inaccessible part of the World, he called heart-land. This is the area of low population and difficult accessibility. He summarized his view of global strategy with the famous dictum;

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island;

Who rules the World Island commands the World.

He established that throughout the history of mankind, the coastal islands, had always proved vulnerable to attack from the heartland's the heartland remained invulnerable because sea power could be denied access to it. Thus Mackinder was mainly concerned with the global views. He repeated the same view in 1943, a few years before his death. He emphasized at later date during the Second World War, the danger of the heartland falling in its entirety under the control of Soviet Russia's ability then to strike out to peripheral lands to east, south and west of the 'World Island'. His regional concept also pervaded his interpretation of the countries, the British Isles. According to some scholars Mackinder's thinking was a generation ahead of his time.

Mackinder wrote Britain and the British Seas, published in 1902. This book is considered as a classic in modern British literature which shows a more mature and sounder approach to a regional interpretation of Britain and its seas. His second great work was Democratic Ideals and Reality, published in 1919. In this book he discussed world power-politics.

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