Vertical Margins

Book excerpt: History meets high-altitude adventure This engaging analysis of twentieth-century imperialism takes early mountaineering beyond the realm of recreation. Vertical Margins sets Halford Mackinder's 1899 climb of Mt. Kenya, Annie Smith Peck's 1908 ascent of Huascaran in Bolivia, and John Baptiste Noel's filming of the 1924 British attempt on Mt. Everest in the larger historical context of American and British foreign policy and neo-imperialism. Reuben Ellis shows that mountain exploration reached far beyond the motivations of adrenaline-driven adventurers to an aggressive ideology of power and expansion that fed the "New Imperialism"--the end of the era of European empire-building and the beginnings of American dominance in world affairs. With so many mountains at the margins of European and American territorial and economic domains, mountaineering often overlapped with the motivations of empire; the earth's mountains came to be regarded as frontiers open to the full range of political, economic, and personal concerns that drove geographical exploration.