The Royal Geographical Society of the United Kingdom, founded in 1830 as the Geographical Society of London (gaining Royal Charter a few years later), was one of the world’s first learned societies for the discipline of Geography. In its early days it was a dining club, and it had a particular focus on British colonial exploration and expansion in Africa, the Indian subcontinent and central Asia. As a result of this interest, it was a key supporter of explorers and expeditions, including those of Darwin, Livingstone, and Stanley (the explorer that is famously supposed to have said, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”). Through the Society’s interactions with Darwin, other explorers and Britain’s wider colonial exploits at the time, the Society developed inherently racist undertones. These undertones were supported by the growing ideas of ‘social darwinism’, for example. Another key theory that developed at the time that entrenched these views was that of environmental determinism. This suggested that certain regions of the world were more developed because their climates and environments were more conducive to ‘modernity’ and the development of modern social, economic and political structures. This idea grew out of Darwin’s belief in the intimate relationship between nature and habitat (Darwin believed that the habitat of a species had a strong influence over the development of species). Thus, the ideas of Darwin through the nineteenth century certainly permeated a number of levels of British society, having an impact on the way in which British explorers and colonial figures viewed and understood the world.
In Russia, the Russian Geographical Society was founded in 1845 and this, through the geographers linked to it, also had their own connections to emerging theories of social darwinism and environmental determinism which were linked to ideas of imperialism and coloniality. Count Alexander Keyserling took part in many geographical expeditions with links to the Royal Geographical Society of Russia, and he had links to the Russian Finance Ministry, which provided backing to these societies. The background to many of Keyserling’s expeditions was ‘exploration’, but imbued within this aim was a desire to test and then affirm beliefs with a racist or environmentally deterministic undertone.