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 t
he first President of the Johns Hopkins University. It is argued that Gilma
n's influential work in professionalizing an instrumentalist approach to kn
owledge production in the new institution of the research university forms
an important link between the philosophically oriented geography of Alexand
er von Humboldt and the geopolitics of Isaiah Bowman. The author extends wo
rk in the history of the discipline by showing how geographical knowledge c
ame to be seen in instrumentalist terms not only in the institutional conte
xt of geographical societies and European imperial administration-the focus
of much of the historical scholarship-but also within the context of an in
tellectual division of labor that emerged in the second half of the 19th ce
ntury as the modern research university took shape. It is suggested that a
full account of the way in which Humboldt's project was displaced by Gilman
's 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.