American imperial expansion and area studies without geography.

While the immediate post-Second World War years in Europe were about decolonisation, in the United States it was the opposite. Those years were about imperial expansion driven by Cold War imperatives. Led by the military, including US covert intelligence agencies, the social sciences were also enlisted, albeit frequently reconceived as the behavioural or human sciences. Geographical knowledge was incorporated too, but similarly reconfigured. A new disciplinary formation known as area studies was in ascendance. It represented a new way of conceiving the 'international' and provided a national infrastructure of expertise for managing the work of empire. However, it was typically not offered by geography departments, or taught by geographers. Rather, new, independent, regionally specific area departments burgeoned across American university campuses from 1945. Area studies had an especial early grip at Ivy League universities, which was ironic given that during the same period those universities were dismantling their conventional geography departments. Consequently, American geography and geographers for the most part did not contribute to shaping US post-war imperial expansion. This was despite the long historical involvement by geographers in previous imperial ventures, and, specifically, the significant participation of American geographers both within the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War. This paper examines early post-war American imperial expansion and area studies without geography. • Explores how social science supported American imperial expansion during the Cold War. • Identifies post-Second World War area studies as a crucial national infrastructure of knowledge. • Analyses national security funders' efforts to multiply and employ area experts. • Shows that area studies and geography rarely mixed in the 1940s and 1950s. • Argues that geography's absence from early area studies distinguishes American empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]