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Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution
72
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, 304 pages, US$29.95 hardcover. For the better part of three decades I have taught at large freshman (first year undergraduate) class at Berkeley on the political economy of development. At the outset I ask of each student that they write a short memorandum on ‘the causes of poverty in the Global South.’ Some version of demographic causality invariably wins hands down (‘over population’, ‘population pressure’, ‘carrying capacity’). Most students possess no knowledge whatsoever of the famous English parson and his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. A few might offer name recognition based largely upon Malthus’ seemingly annual surfacing in the American newspapers, pressed into service to invoke the coming resource crisis (‘Malthus Rides Again’) or imminent population challenges (‘the youth boom’ or ‘the great greying’). In the last few weeks the great man was invoked by the new September 2014 United Nations ‘Bayesian probability estimates’ that global population will stabilize at 11 or 12 billion by 2100 (and not nine or ten million as earlier projections suggested) due in part to sustained high fertility in Africa. Among the Malthusian cognoscenti in the class e a limited pool I admit e there is often a sophisticated parsing of his ideas: ‘green Malthusianism,’ ‘neoMalthusianism,’ even ‘Left Malthusianism’! Malthus shows up in debates over the end of welfare, in the contentious deliberations on mitigating global climate change, in the immigration debate and Peak Oil, and e to invoke the specter of the apocalypse trucked by the likes of Robert Kaplan e ‘the coming anarchy’ associated with demographically propelled environmental insecurity. The incontrovertible fact is that not only do Malthus’s ideas have an enduring, visceral and intuitive appeal (population grows geometrically, the passion of the sexes is instinctual and so on) but among the classical political economists it is Malthusian ideas, and not those of a Smith, a Ricardo or a Marx, that have entered, indeed colonized, the popular consciousness. Malthus Rules OK! All of this provides even more raw material e as if we needed it e for Mayhew’s outstanding new book on the life and legacy of Thomas Robert Malthus. There is much biographical detail on offer here. ‘Bob’ was by all accounts a charming, mild-mannered man of ‘exemplary conduct’ but spent little time behind the curate’s pulpit and after his Cambridge graduation engaged in wide-raging debates with a freethinking and eccentric landowning father (a follower of Rousseau) and his Fellows at Jesus College before becoming in effect a professional economist, a professor at the newly minted East India College devoted to imperial administration. But Malthus is not a standard biography (Patricia James has written a definitive biography Population Malthus (1979)). It is rather an account of Malthus’s ideas in relation to the great Enlightenment figures of his time (Condorcet, Godwin, Byron, Southey, Cobbett, Ricardo), of the reception of his ideas in the nineteenth century (great Victorians such as Jevons, Darwin, and Marx) and most especially of ‘Malthusianism’ as a creed and a form of thought in the twentieth and twenty first centuries (Keynes, Erhlich, Hardin) that is as vital as it ever was at the dawn of the industrial revolution. In post-structural speak, one might say this is a book about travelling theory. And it is a very good one. Malthus was (and is) of course admired and reviled. Condemned as a class lackey by Karl Marx and Charles Dickens he was nevertheless one of the sources of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of Keynes’ General Theory. His purported pessimism derived from the two laws of the human condition, ran straight into brick wall of Enlightenment optimism and social progress. Malthus in the first half of the book locates his core ideas e his empiricism, his desire to account for things as they are, his belief that poor relief compounds the problem of demographically induced scarcity, that
the world’s table was ‘already full,’ that positive checks will inevitably come into play, that a right to subsistence could not be justified e on a larger historical landscape: the unrest of the 1790s, Malthus as the ‘malign muse of Romanticism’ (‘so contemptible a wretch’ said Coleridge of Malthus) and as the foundational figure in the making of ‘environmental economics,’ and not least as the reference point for three lines of proto social science thinking in the Victorian age: political economy (class, employment, poverty, effective demand), radicalism (prophetic, socialist and utopian) and evolution (Wallace, Huxley, Darwin). And one might add another, namely psycho-analysis since Sigmund Freud used Malthus in his writing on repression and neurosis. Malthusianism and its institutionalized form e the Malthusian League e were everywhere. As Mayhew puts it, ‘Malthus’s ideas were constantly and explicitly discussed.in all quarters of intellectual life in Britain’ (p. 154). The two chapters on the twentieth and twenty first chapters are the least satisfactory. In part because they cover well-trodden ground e Paul Sabin’s new book The Bet (2013) offers a richer account of the Simon-Ehrlich debates for example e and in part because the discursive forms in which Malthus shows up, in and outside of social science and public policy, is so vast and capacious that it presents a formidable obstacle to providing a full accounting of ‘Malthusianism.’ Mayhew is of course acutely aware that Malthus was in a profound sense quite wrong. After all food productivity historically, and indeed at the time of his writing, was and continues to outpace the rate of population growth (he did not foresee the radical shifts in energy sources and agrarian productivity but he could not have foreseen either the bleak pessimism of the current global water crisis or global climate change either). None of this is to suggest that a population doubling every twenty years or a demographic structure in which 60% of the population is less than 15 years doesn’t create significant and compelling challenges for any government (Chairman Deng understood this well in China in 1978). But he is able to convincingly show that the ‘was he right or wrong’ is a caricatured version of a complex and changing set of Malthus’s ideas. The bold and polemical tone of his work perhaps disguises the fact that his views on contraception, female education and so on changed. In Mayhew’s account Malthus was ‘a rational Christian and enlightened optimist,’ a theorist of a ‘more inclusive history’ (p. 68), and someone ‘softening, qualifying, adjusting and altering..always willing to suspend theoretical dispositions’ (p. 235). In my view Malthus was a bit of a Freudian (‘drive and instincts requiring repression’) and a bit of a Baconian (‘necessity is the mother of invention’). What Mayhew shows is that whatever Malthus we conjure up, he has never been out of public sight and discussion for more than two centuries and that so-called Malthusian ideas and engagements (the coming apocalypse, the market will solve everything) are often radically unhinged from what he actually offered in his famous essay.
Michael Watts University of California, Berkeley, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.11.009
David N. Livingstone, Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages, US$39.95 hardcover. Ten years ago James Secord used his Presidential Address to the combined US, Canadian and British History of Science Societies to
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
urge historians of science to replace their customary emphasis on ‘science in context’ with a new attention to what he termed ‘knowledge in transit,’ the inherent mobility of scientific theories and concepts as they move through different locations and are reconfigured in the process (‘Knowledge in Transit,’ Isis 95 (2004), p. 664). Secord’s influential call for a shift in both focus and terminology gave new emphasis to what might be called the ‘geographical turn’ in the history of science that had already been evident in the work of a number of historians and geographers, most notably David N. Livingstone. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University, Belfast, confirmed his position at the forefront of the subject’s geographical turn with Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003) and Geographies of Nineteenth Century Science (Chicago, 2011), co-edited with Charles W. J. Withers. In Dealing with Darwin, Livingstone now turns his attention to how Calvinist communities in five different cities dealt with Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories in the decades around 1900. Livingstone examines how the ‘local culture and conditions’ (p. 25) of Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Columbia and Princeton meant that each coped with the challenges of Darwinism in different ways, ranging from outright rejection, through toleration, to enthusiastic embracement. In fact, despite all these communities hailing from the same traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism and Common Sense philosophy, their diasporic adaptations to the new locations in which they settled across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic e what Livingstone calls ‘multiple geographies’ (p. 198) e entailed that what Darwin had said in On the Origin of Species (1859) and other works assumed new and radically different meanings. As Livingstone proposes: ‘In one place his theory of evolution was seen as an individualist assault on collectivism, in another as a justification for colonial supremacy; elsewhere it was taken to be a subversive attack on racial segregation, yet elsewhere as a symbol of progressive enlightenment’ (p. 197). It is only by a ‘systematic interrogation of place, politics, and rhetoric in religious encounters with evolution,’ Livingstone contends, that we can understand how such diverse, and even contradictory, meanings can be generated from the same scientific texts by members of the same religious communities (p. 25). After an introduction incisively detailing the methodological and historiographic questions involved in the history of science’s geographic turn, Dealing with Darwin devotes a chapter to each of the five cities that were the principal bastions of the ‘global community of Scots Calvinism’ (p. 200), thus enabling a sufficiently deep analysis of the local issues that were at play in their respective encounters with evolution. In Edinburgh the Free Church intelligentsia was already predisposed to view science positively, and evolution presented little that was objectionable to men such as Robert Rainey, the Principal of the city’s New College, who did not balk even at the idea of humanity’s animal ancestry. In fact, in comparison with the acute theological crisis incited in Edinburgh by William Robertson Smith’s heretical higher criticism and archaeological speculations about the origins of liturgical ritual in primitive sacrifices, Darwinism seemed relatively unproblematic. Across the Irish Sea, on the other hand, the pious Presbyterians of Belfast responded with a much greater degree of hostility, even though, as Livingstone remind us, the ‘Scottish intellectual tradition had delivered to Ulster Calvinists both philosophical and theological resources to foster the cultivation of a scientific culture in the north of Ireland’ (p. 61). The problem was that Presbyterians in the north of Ireland were already engaged in a bitter sectarian dispute over the control of higher education with the region’s Catholic minority, and they were loath to surrender their influence over universities and colleges to secularizing scientific professionals. To make matters worse, John Tyndall’s notorious Belfast Address of
73
1874, in which the Irish émigré physicist and arch-Darwinian appeared to espouse a materialist understanding of life, sharpened local hostilities towards evolution, and provoked a perception of being besieged by hostile scientific forces. Drawing on the terminology of anthropology, Livingstone views Edinburgh and Belfast as, respectively, ‘trading zones’ and ‘flash points,’ in which the interface of theology and evolution was characterized either by conciliation or toxicity (p. 200). In the New World the micro-politics of local issues were no less significant in determining the divergent responses of Calvinists in Toronto, where the city’s tradition of innovative Biblical criticism and attempts to establish itself ‘on the empire’s map of metropolitan science’ (p. 202) induced a cordiality to Darwinism that, below the MasoneDixon line in South Carolina, the Presbyterians of Columbia perceived, in very different rhetoric, as an ‘infidel canker that would rot the entire fabric of southern culture’ (p. 118). Meanwhile, Princetond‘American Calvinism’s nerve center’ (p. 203) e ‘neither baptized nor bestialized evolutionary theory,’ and instead ecumenical reconcilers such as James McCosh insisted that evolution, or at least certain non-Darwinian versions of it, could be ‘Calvinized with little difficulty’ (p. 196). Dealing with Darwin is a compelling account of how science is made in a process of transit. A theory such as Darwinian evolution is, after all, not a sealed package that is either accepted or rejected by its various audiences. Rather, as Livingstone’s book vividly demonstrates, different versions of Darwin were appropriated, reconstituted and constructed to suit various local needs and theological or scientific contingencies. Gowan Dawson University of Leicester, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.01.014
John Morrissey, David Nally, Ulf Strohmayer, and Yvonne Whelan, Key Concepts in Historical Geography. London, SAGE, 2014, xiv þ 308 pages, £65 hardcover. What is not to like about a book that quotes George Santayana, Karl Marx, and James Joyce in its first dozen lines, and purports to illuminate the relevance ‘of thinking in and across multiple temporal and spatial contexts’ (p. 4)? The answer, fittingly enough, is relative: ‘It depends’. It depends upon where one stands, upon what one knows of historical geography, upon what one thinks it might and should be, upon one’s conception of scholarship, upon one’s openness (or otherwise) to the idea that specific key concepts constitute the essential theoretical toolkit with which historical geographers must engage, and so on. As a contribution to SAGE’s recently-initiated Key Concepts in Human Geography series, this volume aims to fill the gap created by dictionary entries that are too terse to explain concepts that geographers use to think about the world, broad textbook overviews that rarely deal with conceptual issues, and narrowly-framed research monographs in which discussions of concepts are both advanced and inaccessible. Morrissey, Nally, Strohmayer, and Whelan set about their task with a certain brio. Their short introduction, much of which is devoted to outlining the sections and chapters that follow, includes quotations from E. P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, as well as citations to recent works by a large handful of widely-known historical geographers in its first four pages. Twenty-four short essays (ranging around 2,500 words, and each written by one of the volume’s authors) follow. Each is accompanied by a short (half-page) enumeration of ‘Key Points’, a list of
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, 304 pages, US$29.95 hardcover. For the better part of three decades I have taught at large freshman (first year undergraduate) class at Berkeley on the political economy of development. At the outset I ask of each student that they write a short memorandum on ‘the causes of poverty in the Global South.’ Some version of demographic causality invariably wins hands down (‘over population’, ‘population pressure’, ‘carrying capacity’). Most students possess no knowledge whatsoever of the famous English parson and his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. A few might offer name recognition based largely upon Malthus’ seemingly annual surfacing in the American newspapers, pressed into service to invoke the coming resource crisis (‘Malthus Rides Again’) or imminent population challenges (‘the youth boom’ or ‘the great greying’). In the last few weeks the great man was invoked by the new September 2014 United Nations ‘Bayesian probability estimates’ that global population will stabilize at 11 or 12 billion by 2100 (and not nine or ten million as earlier projections suggested) due in part to sustained high fertility in Africa. Among the Malthusian cognoscenti in the class e a limited pool I admit e there is often a sophisticated parsing of his ideas: ‘green Malthusianism,’ ‘neoMalthusianism,’ even ‘Left Malthusianism’! Malthus shows up in debates over the end of welfare, in the contentious deliberations on mitigating global climate change, in the immigration debate and Peak Oil, and e to invoke the specter of the apocalypse trucked by the likes of Robert Kaplan e ‘the coming anarchy’ associated with demographically propelled environmental insecurity. The incontrovertible fact is that not only do Malthus’s ideas have an enduring, visceral and intuitive appeal (population grows geometrically, the passion of the sexes is instinctual and so on) but among the classical political economists it is Malthusian ideas, and not those of a Smith, a Ricardo or a Marx, that have entered, indeed colonized, the popular consciousness. Malthus Rules OK! All of this provides even more raw material e as if we needed it e for Mayhew’s outstanding new book on the life and legacy of Thomas Robert Malthus. There is much biographical detail on offer here. ‘Bob’ was by all accounts a charming, mild-mannered man of ‘exemplary conduct’ but spent little time behind the curate’s pulpit and after his Cambridge graduation engaged in wide-raging debates with a freethinking and eccentric landowning father (a follower of Rousseau) and his Fellows at Jesus College before becoming in effect a professional economist, a professor at the newly minted East India College devoted to imperial administration. But Malthus is not a standard biography (Patricia James has written a definitive biography Population Malthus (1979)). It is rather an account of Malthus’s ideas in relation to the great Enlightenment figures of his time (Condorcet, Godwin, Byron, Southey, Cobbett, Ricardo), of the reception of his ideas in the nineteenth century (great Victorians such as Jevons, Darwin, and Marx) and most especially of ‘Malthusianism’ as a creed and a form of thought in the twentieth and twenty first centuries (Keynes, Erhlich, Hardin) that is as vital as it ever was at the dawn of the industrial revolution. In post-structural speak, one might say this is a book about travelling theory. And it is a very good one. Malthus was (and is) of course admired and reviled. Condemned as a class lackey by Karl Marx and Charles Dickens he was nevertheless one of the sources of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of Keynes’ General Theory. His purported pessimism derived from the two laws of the human condition, ran straight into brick wall of Enlightenment optimism and social progress. Malthus in the first half of the book locates his core ideas e his empiricism, his desire to account for things as they are, his belief that poor relief compounds the problem of demographically induced scarcity, that
the world’s table was ‘already full,’ that positive checks will inevitably come into play, that a right to subsistence could not be justified e on a larger historical landscape: the unrest of the 1790s, Malthus as the ‘malign muse of Romanticism’ (‘so contemptible a wretch’ said Coleridge of Malthus) and as the foundational figure in the making of ‘environmental economics,’ and not least as the reference point for three lines of proto social science thinking in the Victorian age: political economy (class, employment, poverty, effective demand), radicalism (prophetic, socialist and utopian) and evolution (Wallace, Huxley, Darwin). And one might add another, namely psycho-analysis since Sigmund Freud used Malthus in his writing on repression and neurosis. Malthusianism and its institutionalized form e the Malthusian League e were everywhere. As Mayhew puts it, ‘Malthus’s ideas were constantly and explicitly discussed.in all quarters of intellectual life in Britain’ (p. 154). The two chapters on the twentieth and twenty first chapters are the least satisfactory. In part because they cover well-trodden ground e Paul Sabin’s new book The Bet (2013) offers a richer account of the Simon-Ehrlich debates for example e and in part because the discursive forms in which Malthus shows up, in and outside of social science and public policy, is so vast and capacious that it presents a formidable obstacle to providing a full accounting of ‘Malthusianism.’ Mayhew is of course acutely aware that Malthus was in a profound sense quite wrong. After all food productivity historically, and indeed at the time of his writing, was and continues to outpace the rate of population growth (he did not foresee the radical shifts in energy sources and agrarian productivity but he could not have foreseen either the bleak pessimism of the current global water crisis or global climate change either). None of this is to suggest that a population doubling every twenty years or a demographic structure in which 60% of the population is less than 15 years doesn’t create significant and compelling challenges for any government (Chairman Deng understood this well in China in 1978). But he is able to convincingly show that the ‘was he right or wrong’ is a caricatured version of a complex and changing set of Malthus’s ideas. The bold and polemical tone of his work perhaps disguises the fact that his views on contraception, female education and so on changed. In Mayhew’s account Malthus was ‘a rational Christian and enlightened optimist,’ a theorist of a ‘more inclusive history’ (p. 68), and someone ‘softening, qualifying, adjusting and altering..always willing to suspend theoretical dispositions’ (p. 235). In my view Malthus was a bit of a Freudian (‘drive and instincts requiring repression’) and a bit of a Baconian (‘necessity is the mother of invention’). What Mayhew shows is that whatever Malthus we conjure up, he has never been out of public sight and discussion for more than two centuries and that so-called Malthusian ideas and engagements (the coming apocalypse, the market will solve everything) are often radically unhinged from what he actually offered in his famous essay.
Michael Watts University of California, Berkeley, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.11.009
David N. Livingstone, Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages, US$39.95 hardcover. Ten years ago James Secord used his Presidential Address to the combined US, Canadian and British History of Science Societies to
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
urge historians of science to replace their customary emphasis on ‘science in context’ with a new attention to what he termed ‘knowledge in transit,’ the inherent mobility of scientific theories and concepts as they move through different locations and are reconfigured in the process (‘Knowledge in Transit,’ Isis 95 (2004), p. 664). Secord’s influential call for a shift in both focus and terminology gave new emphasis to what might be called the ‘geographical turn’ in the history of science that had already been evident in the work of a number of historians and geographers, most notably David N. Livingstone. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University, Belfast, confirmed his position at the forefront of the subject’s geographical turn with Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003) and Geographies of Nineteenth Century Science (Chicago, 2011), co-edited with Charles W. J. Withers. In Dealing with Darwin, Livingstone now turns his attention to how Calvinist communities in five different cities dealt with Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories in the decades around 1900. Livingstone examines how the ‘local culture and conditions’ (p. 25) of Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Columbia and Princeton meant that each coped with the challenges of Darwinism in different ways, ranging from outright rejection, through toleration, to enthusiastic embracement. In fact, despite all these communities hailing from the same traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism and Common Sense philosophy, their diasporic adaptations to the new locations in which they settled across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic e what Livingstone calls ‘multiple geographies’ (p. 198) e entailed that what Darwin had said in On the Origin of Species (1859) and other works assumed new and radically different meanings. As Livingstone proposes: ‘In one place his theory of evolution was seen as an individualist assault on collectivism, in another as a justification for colonial supremacy; elsewhere it was taken to be a subversive attack on racial segregation, yet elsewhere as a symbol of progressive enlightenment’ (p. 197). It is only by a ‘systematic interrogation of place, politics, and rhetoric in religious encounters with evolution,’ Livingstone contends, that we can understand how such diverse, and even contradictory, meanings can be generated from the same scientific texts by members of the same religious communities (p. 25). After an introduction incisively detailing the methodological and historiographic questions involved in the history of science’s geographic turn, Dealing with Darwin devotes a chapter to each of the five cities that were the principal bastions of the ‘global community of Scots Calvinism’ (p. 200), thus enabling a sufficiently deep analysis of the local issues that were at play in their respective encounters with evolution. In Edinburgh the Free Church intelligentsia was already predisposed to view science positively, and evolution presented little that was objectionable to men such as Robert Rainey, the Principal of the city’s New College, who did not balk even at the idea of humanity’s animal ancestry. In fact, in comparison with the acute theological crisis incited in Edinburgh by William Robertson Smith’s heretical higher criticism and archaeological speculations about the origins of liturgical ritual in primitive sacrifices, Darwinism seemed relatively unproblematic. Across the Irish Sea, on the other hand, the pious Presbyterians of Belfast responded with a much greater degree of hostility, even though, as Livingstone remind us, the ‘Scottish intellectual tradition had delivered to Ulster Calvinists both philosophical and theological resources to foster the cultivation of a scientific culture in the north of Ireland’ (p. 61). The problem was that Presbyterians in the north of Ireland were already engaged in a bitter sectarian dispute over the control of higher education with the region’s Catholic minority, and they were loath to surrender their influence over universities and colleges to secularizing scientific professionals. To make matters worse, John Tyndall’s notorious Belfast Address of
73
1874, in which the Irish émigré physicist and arch-Darwinian appeared to espouse a materialist understanding of life, sharpened local hostilities towards evolution, and provoked a perception of being besieged by hostile scientific forces. Drawing on the terminology of anthropology, Livingstone views Edinburgh and Belfast as, respectively, ‘trading zones’ and ‘flash points,’ in which the interface of theology and evolution was characterized either by conciliation or toxicity (p. 200). In the New World the micro-politics of local issues were no less significant in determining the divergent responses of Calvinists in Toronto, where the city’s tradition of innovative Biblical criticism and attempts to establish itself ‘on the empire’s map of metropolitan science’ (p. 202) induced a cordiality to Darwinism that, below the MasoneDixon line in South Carolina, the Presbyterians of Columbia perceived, in very different rhetoric, as an ‘infidel canker that would rot the entire fabric of southern culture’ (p. 118). Meanwhile, Princetond‘American Calvinism’s nerve center’ (p. 203) e ‘neither baptized nor bestialized evolutionary theory,’ and instead ecumenical reconcilers such as James McCosh insisted that evolution, or at least certain non-Darwinian versions of it, could be ‘Calvinized with little difficulty’ (p. 196). Dealing with Darwin is a compelling account of how science is made in a process of transit. A theory such as Darwinian evolution is, after all, not a sealed package that is either accepted or rejected by its various audiences. Rather, as Livingstone’s book vividly demonstrates, different versions of Darwin were appropriated, reconstituted and constructed to suit various local needs and theological or scientific contingencies. Gowan Dawson University of Leicester, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.01.014
John Morrissey, David Nally, Ulf Strohmayer, and Yvonne Whelan, Key Concepts in Historical Geography. London, SAGE, 2014, xiv þ 308 pages, £65 hardcover. What is not to like about a book that quotes George Santayana, Karl Marx, and James Joyce in its first dozen lines, and purports to illuminate the relevance ‘of thinking in and across multiple temporal and spatial contexts’ (p. 4)? The answer, fittingly enough, is relative: ‘It depends’. It depends upon where one stands, upon what one knows of historical geography, upon what one thinks it might and should be, upon one’s conception of scholarship, upon one’s openness (or otherwise) to the idea that specific key concepts constitute the essential theoretical toolkit with which historical geographers must engage, and so on. As a contribution to SAGE’s recently-initiated Key Concepts in Human Geography series, this volume aims to fill the gap created by dictionary entries that are too terse to explain concepts that geographers use to think about the world, broad textbook overviews that rarely deal with conceptual issues, and narrowly-framed research monographs in which discussions of concepts are both advanced and inaccessible. Morrissey, Nally, Strohmayer, and Whelan set about their task with a certain brio. Their short introduction, much of which is devoted to outlining the sections and chapters that follow, includes quotations from E. P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, as well as citations to recent works by a large handful of widely-known historical geographers in its first four pages. Twenty-four short essays (ranging around 2,500 words, and each written by one of the volume’s authors) follow. Each is accompanied by a short (half-page) enumeration of ‘Key Points’, a list of