Courses

To understand the world and grapple with its complexities, we must divide it into large regions, which in turn are subdivided into smaller areas, themselves divisible. The most basic units—the continents—are generally taken for granted, when in fact they emerged through a long, intricate, and contested intellectual process. Although the continental scheme is still regarded as the foundation of world geography, scholars largely abandoned it after World War II. They turned instead to the competing world-regional system. Here, for example, Africa is split in two, with sub-Saharan Africa forming a single region and North Africa appended to the Middle East. But such “world regions” are themselves disputed, with an uncertain number of units and with unclear and often overlapping boundaries. In this course, we explore a large array of maps to show how the world is, has been, and can be divided, and why the resulting divisions are both essential and intellectually treacherous.