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Devon at work: Past and present
SHORTER
NOTICES
325
YI-FU TUAN, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
(Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Pp. 260. $4.95) Yi-Fu Tuan is seen by many to march to the beat of a very different drum. Topophilia, his opus maximus, comes crashing through with the power of an entire percussion section. Concerned with how people cognitively structure their environments, the book’s principal arguments are richly supported by historical evidence. Indeed, it is really a collection of essays treating various aspects of man’s historical quest to order his habitat. How have different societies valued their physical and man-made environments? What were their environmental ideals ? How have these ideals served historically to link man and his environment? Topophilia is necessary reading, especially for those historical geographers interested in such matters as the cognition of landscape and geographical decisionmaking in the past. JOHN A. JAKLE
B. L. ANDERSON(Ed.), Capital Accumulation in the Industrial Revolution (London : Dent, Readings in Economic History and Theory Series, 1974. Pp. xxvii+212. g2.95) The chronology of capital accumulation before and during the industrial revolution in Britain have become of increasing concern to historians since the early 1960s when Rostow argued for a rapid advance in capital investment as central to, and diagnostic of, take-off to sustained economic growth. The historical geographer, too, should give the process some attention, for it is clear that there was a spatial as well as a temporal element in the accumulation of capital, and that he has much to offer in studies of the channels, institutions and individuals through which geographical and sociological distances between getters and spenders were reduced. B. L. Anderson’s collection of reprints is therefore welcome as a guide to how contemporaries interpreted the subject. He has brought together eleven readings, ranging from Smith’s chapter on the accumulation of capital from The wealth of nations to Giffen’s statistical exercises made at the end of the nineteenth century, and has embellished them with an introduction where they are discussed in the context of developments in economic thought. WALTER MINCHINTON, Devon at Work: Past and Present
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1974. Pp. 112; plates. E3.50) Devon at work isan annotated collection of photographs relating to the county’sindustrial archaeology, broadly defined. Our image of Devon today is not one of an industrial county. Yet when Daniel Defoe crossed its borders in the 1720s he was as delighted as he always was when encountering an industrial landscape: “so full of people . . . so universally employed in trade and manufactures” that it could not “be equalled in England . . . perhaps not in Europe”. Earlier, in the fifteenth century, travellers would have encountered there many valleys echoing with the thud of cloth-fulling and with the clatter of tin mines. And, in addition to these two industries of national importance, Devon has always supported numerous trades associated with its basic occupations of agriculture and industry. Recent photographs of industrial fossil forms and cultural relicts (to use Carl Sauer’s terms), old plates of vanished mines and mills and of men at work, reproductions of relevant prints, maps and industrial artefacts: all have been assembled by Professor Minchinton in a book which may be read with equal profit and pleasure. WINIFRED PENNINGTON, The History of British Vegetation (London: English Universities Press, Modern Biology Series, revised edition, 1974. Pp. viii + 152; plates, &3*75and E2.10 softback) The history of British vegetation is offered as a modern “introduction to those two great
NOTICES
325
YI-FU TUAN, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
(Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Pp. 260. $4.95) Yi-Fu Tuan is seen by many to march to the beat of a very different drum. Topophilia, his opus maximus, comes crashing through with the power of an entire percussion section. Concerned with how people cognitively structure their environments, the book’s principal arguments are richly supported by historical evidence. Indeed, it is really a collection of essays treating various aspects of man’s historical quest to order his habitat. How have different societies valued their physical and man-made environments? What were their environmental ideals ? How have these ideals served historically to link man and his environment? Topophilia is necessary reading, especially for those historical geographers interested in such matters as the cognition of landscape and geographical decisionmaking in the past. JOHN A. JAKLE
B. L. ANDERSON(Ed.), Capital Accumulation in the Industrial Revolution (London : Dent, Readings in Economic History and Theory Series, 1974. Pp. xxvii+212. g2.95) The chronology of capital accumulation before and during the industrial revolution in Britain have become of increasing concern to historians since the early 1960s when Rostow argued for a rapid advance in capital investment as central to, and diagnostic of, take-off to sustained economic growth. The historical geographer, too, should give the process some attention, for it is clear that there was a spatial as well as a temporal element in the accumulation of capital, and that he has much to offer in studies of the channels, institutions and individuals through which geographical and sociological distances between getters and spenders were reduced. B. L. Anderson’s collection of reprints is therefore welcome as a guide to how contemporaries interpreted the subject. He has brought together eleven readings, ranging from Smith’s chapter on the accumulation of capital from The wealth of nations to Giffen’s statistical exercises made at the end of the nineteenth century, and has embellished them with an introduction where they are discussed in the context of developments in economic thought. WALTER MINCHINTON, Devon at Work: Past and Present
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1974. Pp. 112; plates. E3.50) Devon at work isan annotated collection of photographs relating to the county’sindustrial archaeology, broadly defined. Our image of Devon today is not one of an industrial county. Yet when Daniel Defoe crossed its borders in the 1720s he was as delighted as he always was when encountering an industrial landscape: “so full of people . . . so universally employed in trade and manufactures” that it could not “be equalled in England . . . perhaps not in Europe”. Earlier, in the fifteenth century, travellers would have encountered there many valleys echoing with the thud of cloth-fulling and with the clatter of tin mines. And, in addition to these two industries of national importance, Devon has always supported numerous trades associated with its basic occupations of agriculture and industry. Recent photographs of industrial fossil forms and cultural relicts (to use Carl Sauer’s terms), old plates of vanished mines and mills and of men at work, reproductions of relevant prints, maps and industrial artefacts: all have been assembled by Professor Minchinton in a book which may be read with equal profit and pleasure. WINIFRED PENNINGTON, The History of British Vegetation (London: English Universities Press, Modern Biology Series, revised edition, 1974. Pp. viii + 152; plates, &3*75and E2.10 softback) The history of British vegetation is offered as a modern “introduction to those two great