Review of Milton Santos 1978 2021: For a New Geography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Translated by Archie Davies.

The Black Brazilian geographer Milton Santos is arguably one of the most influential radical geographers from the formerly colonized world, though possibly unfamiliar to many readers of this journal.Originally published as Por uma Geografia Nova in São Paulo in 1978 shortly after his return from two years at the University of Dar es Salaam, Santos envisioned this as the first of five volumes articulating 'the general theme of Human Space' (p.3).In his terrifically informative and thoughtful introduction, the translator Archie Davies notes that the remaining four volumes were not published as planned, but Santos did publish another nine monographs (including one in English, The Shared Space, in 1979).This volume, as its title indicates, seeks to lay out a vision for a 'New Geography' capable of making sense of the world Santos inhabited.Consisting of 18 short chapters, the book is organized around three interlinked lines of argument.The first part critiques Geography as it was in 1978.Working through a remarkable breadth (by current standards) of French, German, Russian and Anglophone geographical scholarship ranging over the best part of two centuries, Santos takes the reader from 'founders', through environmental determinism and the regional tradition, to the post-1945 'new' geographies (spatial science, models and systems thinking, behavioral geography).Notwithstanding this succession of 'revolutions', he argues that little of importance has changed.He demonstrates that this first-world scholarship is blinded by its focus on spatial units of analysis (regions, cities, isotropic planes), blissfully ignoring the shaping effect of the global economic processes so central to the third world he inhabited.Arguing that the global discipline was 'occupied by North American thought' (p.64) after 1945, Santos' critique long predates contemporary attempts to decolonize mainstream Geography.He castigates geographers for treating space as Newtonian rather than socially constructed, and for ignoring time and thus how contemporary landscapes are a palimpsest of previous landscapes and production systems.He saw the mathematization of Anglophone geography as elevating method and data collection over the careful theorization that attends to reality.Spatial science theories 'are nothing less than … forms of philosophical idealism, if not of abstract empiricism' (p.66), treating 'human liberty as absolute' (p.53).