Whether in contemporary debates around space colonisation, migration, or spheres of influence thinking, Friedrich Ratzel's corpus has resonated through the early twenty-first century in unexpected ways.

Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of this German zoologist turned geographer, famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought and for developing the concept of Lebensraum. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely known political geography. Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.