This article examines how theories of Aryanism influenced geographic theories of race and environmental influence. The argument is made that the entanglements between Aryanism and geographic theories of race provide a new site in assessing the history of geographic thought. It begins by illuminating the rise of Aryanism in colonial India. As it moved across time and space, Aryanism became a foundational element in racial science, and informed a number of disciplines, including geography. The majority of the article is devoted to exposing the influence of Aryanism in American geography from the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The paper finds that the influential geographers Arnold Guyot, Nathaniel Shaler, Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington were all indebted to Aryanism in the production of their theories of race and the environment.

This article will show how theories of Aryanism in colonial India influenced human geography’s constructions of race in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In its origins in British and German Orientalism, Aryanism posited that the linguistic similarities shared by a wide swath of humanity lay in a proto-IndoEuropean language that traveled across Eurasia with human migrations. Aryanism’s initial emphasis on language shifted into a theory of race in the mid-nineteenth century and found favor with colonial bureaucrats, anti-colonial Indian nationalists, and natural scientists. Arguing that a superior race of people known as Aryans conquered Europe, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent, Aryanism helped fuel the rise of racial science across fields of knowledge. Geography proved to be no exception. In this discipline, Aryanism permeated theories of environmentalism, which identified a range of physical geographic features, such as landforms and climate, in order to explain racial and cultural superiority, ascendency, and decline. Critical assessments of geography have exposed its development through the expansive projects of race that include slavery, American manifest destiny, and colonialism.1 Yet within this vast literature the specific entanglements between Aryanism and geography’s environmentalism remain underexplored. I, therefore, show how the prominent geographers Arnold Guyot (1807e1884), Friedrich Ratzel (1844e1904), Nathaniel Shaler (1841e1906), Ellen Semple (1863e1932), and Ellsworth Huntington (1876e1946) used the Aryan idea in their environmentalist understandings of race. These geographers have received much attention. They are often regarded as formative for the discipline’s establishment in the United States, and their environmentalist theories relied on a variety of racial ideologies. I argue that their statements on India, however fleeting within their corpus, provide an important lens for interpreting how Aryanism helped shape the discipline. By examining Aryanism in environmentalism, this article begins the process of reorienting the loose canon, understood as both texts and concepts, that has comprised the discipline of geography.2 While my account of the history of the discipline does not unearth new archival sources, I bring together new histories focusing on colonial knowledge production and the work of Orientalists who developed Aryanism to read anew these geographers’ published writings on race in India. These texts constitute an archive by containing the racial classifications that formed the basis of colonial power. This archive is, of course, partial. It is limited to sources in English, and English translations. Future scholarship on the links between Aryanism and geography will require turning to original language sources and private papers about Aryanism and Indology. In addition, the need remains for further research that explores the entanglements between geography and Aryanism that had different disciplinary articulations in its various national settings. The present study is confined to establishing that Aryanism traveled across continents and disciplines and found its way into geographic theories of environmentalism.