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Geography and Enlightenment
Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 3 (2001) 441–474
Reviews doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0332, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
D N. L and C W. J. W (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. £17.50 paperback) With Geography and Enlightenment the relationship between the history of geographical knowledge and the history of science has come of age. This collection of papers from a conference held in Edinburgh in 1996, and edited by two of the geographers primarily responsible for the resurgence of interest in the history of geographical thought, brings together well-known scholars from geography, history, history of science, history of medicine and social anthropology to interrogate in different ways the geographies of and in the Enlightenment. Taken together this opens up a veritable treasure trove of ideas, perspectives and unexpected examples. It also shows that an engagement with the history of science is not only a shift in subject matter but also a shift in how the discipline of geography is positioned as part of an interdisciplinary field. Significantly, it is a move that accords questions of geography a central place in the exploration of phenomena that had been understood to be not geographical at all. On these terms ‘The Enlightenment’ is an inspired choice of subject matter for such a volume. If anything was taken to be without a geography—or at least a geography that goes beyond the categories of national differentiation and international diffusion—it was this universalized concatenation of reason, science and progressive politics. Indeed, as the editors note, geography’s recent rediscovery of ‘difference’ and the basis on which it takes its place within so much contemporary theory (and the interdisciplinary projects that provokes) was seen to have been based on a repudiation of ‘The Enlightenment Project’. The essays in this collection render that definite article indefinite, and in doing so they open up a series of enormously exciting geographical projects. The volume is topped and tailed with an Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by Roy Porter. The Introduction sets out a clear programme for the ways in which both ‘Geography’ and ‘Enlightenment’ are to be understood. This eschews any essentialized versions of either and considers them both as situated practices to be investigated in detail and in context. This allows geographies and enlightenments to criss-cross each other in a variety of ways. There are the ways in which Enlightenment practices had geographies: the movement of ideas, the localized encounters that forged particular perspectives, and the making of science and reason in gardens, courts, laboratories and salons. There are the ways in which enlightenments transformed the practices of Geography: with new forms of travelling, exploring, mapping, experimenting and comparing. And there are the ways in which geographical knowledge made possible the practices of Enlightenment thinking: contributing to stadial theories, challenges to theological orthodoxies and the construction of universal taxonomies. In this way discovering, travelling and mapping are inseparable from reasoning, historicizing and classifying—each set of practices is entwined with the other. This prospectus is endorsed in Porter’s Afterword (and it makes things difficult for any reviewer when a book comes already so effectively pre-reviewed), but he also suggests that the question of religion 441 0305–7488/01/030441+34 $35.00/0
2001 Academic Press
442
REVIEWS
has been underplayed. His subsequent discussion of the political theology of the English earth sciences, which shows how politics, religion and geographical science were woven together, is a convincing demonstration of “the enduring, though changing, Christian contribution to Enlightenment geographies” (p. 419). The essays that make up the collection bring together contributions to the history of geographical knowledge and what we might call the historical geographies of ideas. Grouped into four sections, there is attention to ways in which ‘traditional’ ideas were challenged or supported by new geographical knowledge (“Beginnings”); the ways in which Enlightenment knowledge produced itself through both imagining and mapping unfamiliar realms of near and far, and of past, present and future “Mappings”; of the production of knowledge through the movements of people and books “Travellings”; and of the locations and pathways of Enlightenment notions and practices “Placings”. All are concerned, as the editors are, with the dual tasks of expanding and exploring our notions of the history of geography and with showing that all ideas, including geographical ones, have historical geographies. Emphases differ of course. Some of the essays work by exploring the period as one before the institutionalization of geography as an academic discipline and pushing the history of Enlightenment geographical knowledge beyond the voyages of scientific ‘discovery’ into the Pacific which were canonized by David Stoddart. Thus, Denis Cosgrove detects a rather different Jesuit Enlightenment geography in the seventeenth century; Charles Withers traces a dynamic history of attempts to locate paradise which moves from biblical exegesis to environmental ethics; David Livingstone dissects for two contexts the very different contributions that Enlightenment geographical knowledge could make to understandings of race; and Anne Godlewska demonstrates the new arguments that were inscribed into Humboldt’s innovative modes of mapping. In other essays the authors are concerned with tracing the historical geographies of the more abstract notions of reason, progress, accuracy, improvement, and the Enlightenment’s distinctive combination of both pessimism and optimism, through the sites, connections and networks crucial to their production. In this way, Chris Philo maps the geographies of reason and unreason in Enlightenment Edinburgh; Matthew Edney reasons over the specific forms of accuracy encoded in Enlightenment mapping; Michael Heffernan shows how important geographical knowledge was to French reconceptualizations of progress; Peter Gould tracks the shock waves from the Lisbon earthquake (1755) to reveal the fault lines of Enlightenment Europe; and Stephen Daniels, Susanne Seymour and Charles Watkins trace horticultural ‘improvement’ to redistribute Enlightenment culture between the metropolis and the country house. Finally, although each piece in the collection has something to say about both histories of geographical knowledge and the historical geography of ideas there are those which most actively work to bring them together. This is done in very different ways. Dorinda Outram adopts the story of Perseus to analyse why the forms of knowledge produced by distant explorers proved so problematic for Enlightenment thinkers; Nicholas Rupke charts in column inches the reception of Humboldt’s work in Europe to argue that he was first a figure of Enlightenment rather than Romantic science; Paul Carter seeks a hidden epistemology of coasts and islands to explain the spatializations of Enlightenment thought; and Michael Bravo demonstrates that it was only through translating between forms of ethnographic and geographic knowledge that Enlightenment navigation could make claims to truth. The question can be raised whether all this is to offer a too narrowly ‘scientific’ view of Enlightenment. As Roy Porter has recently argued in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London 2000) there is a case for incorporating a huge range of popular and commercial practices under that heading, at least in Britain, and with them a similarly expanded range of spaces, places and networks. More narrowly, it can be asked whether Enlightenment Geography is adequately represented by two
REVIEWS
443
chapters on Humboldt but none on Cook or Banks. But this is to ask a pioneering text to provide a systematic synthesis. Overall, Geography and Enlightenment offers a series of detailed explorations of important and varied sets of situated practices in a crucial historical period. In doing so it significantly alters our view of what both Geography and Enlightenment might be. It also offers a sign of what the borderlands between historical geography and the history of science hold for others who care to travel there. Queen Mary, University of London
M O
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0333, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
A M C G, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+444. $27.50 paperback) The history of geography in the period which runs through the late Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Bourbon Restoration of the 1830s, is one of the great neglected topics in intellectual history. Too often, in intellectual history as much as in the general history of this period, the search for continuities between historical eras has been tacitly abandoned. This book’s attempt to examine what happened to geography throughout this era is thus greatly to be welcomed. So too is its detailed discussion of the work, not only of now much better-understood figures such as Volney, but also of now little-known figures such as Edme Mentelle, Buache, Jomard, Chabrol de Volvic, Letronne, Bory de St Vincent, Adrien Balbi and Jacques-Dominique Cassini. Bibliography and text are stuffed full of original sources used by these men, and should constitute a precious resource for future researchers. Alexander von Humboldt, too often discussed even today as an isolated figure of genius over-riding all disciplinary boundaries, gains additional depth and significance from the background provided by the work of these lesser figures. Godlewska’s discussion of Humboldt as a “descriptive” geographer (pp.119–27) is a good way of seeing how Humboldt’s work does in fact arch over this era, pointing back to the Enlightenment aim of a complete description of the surface world, and also forward to the deepening of that idea in the nineteenth century as the description of the world as a many-layered interacting system. Godlewska also rightly wishes to move away from the recently dominant approach to the history of science in this period, which has focused on discipline formation. This implicitly ‘Whiggish’ approach is indeed probably ripe for abandonment. But with what does she replace it? It is here that problems begin to accumulate. In accordance with the explicitly Foucaultian paradigm announced at the opening of the book, Godlewska announces that she searches not for geography as a discipline in the process of formation, but as a “discursive formation” (p.1, p.8.). Unfortunately, it is not really clear from her account just what a discursive formation is, and how we are to recognize its boundaries. Her account runs into self-contradiction, as she points repeatedly to the disunity of the geographical enterprise, and yet also talks in general about the failures of an entity called “geography” to become a “theory-driven” body of knowledge. It is not clear on what grounds work has qualified as being geographical enough to feature in this account. Again, she recounts Foucault’s objection, shared by most historians even before Foucault ever put pen to paper, to recounting the lives of individuals as though this were a substitute for the history of a shift in the episteme. 2001 Academic Press
Reviews doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0332, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
D N. L and C W. J. W (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. £17.50 paperback) With Geography and Enlightenment the relationship between the history of geographical knowledge and the history of science has come of age. This collection of papers from a conference held in Edinburgh in 1996, and edited by two of the geographers primarily responsible for the resurgence of interest in the history of geographical thought, brings together well-known scholars from geography, history, history of science, history of medicine and social anthropology to interrogate in different ways the geographies of and in the Enlightenment. Taken together this opens up a veritable treasure trove of ideas, perspectives and unexpected examples. It also shows that an engagement with the history of science is not only a shift in subject matter but also a shift in how the discipline of geography is positioned as part of an interdisciplinary field. Significantly, it is a move that accords questions of geography a central place in the exploration of phenomena that had been understood to be not geographical at all. On these terms ‘The Enlightenment’ is an inspired choice of subject matter for such a volume. If anything was taken to be without a geography—or at least a geography that goes beyond the categories of national differentiation and international diffusion—it was this universalized concatenation of reason, science and progressive politics. Indeed, as the editors note, geography’s recent rediscovery of ‘difference’ and the basis on which it takes its place within so much contemporary theory (and the interdisciplinary projects that provokes) was seen to have been based on a repudiation of ‘The Enlightenment Project’. The essays in this collection render that definite article indefinite, and in doing so they open up a series of enormously exciting geographical projects. The volume is topped and tailed with an Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by Roy Porter. The Introduction sets out a clear programme for the ways in which both ‘Geography’ and ‘Enlightenment’ are to be understood. This eschews any essentialized versions of either and considers them both as situated practices to be investigated in detail and in context. This allows geographies and enlightenments to criss-cross each other in a variety of ways. There are the ways in which Enlightenment practices had geographies: the movement of ideas, the localized encounters that forged particular perspectives, and the making of science and reason in gardens, courts, laboratories and salons. There are the ways in which enlightenments transformed the practices of Geography: with new forms of travelling, exploring, mapping, experimenting and comparing. And there are the ways in which geographical knowledge made possible the practices of Enlightenment thinking: contributing to stadial theories, challenges to theological orthodoxies and the construction of universal taxonomies. In this way discovering, travelling and mapping are inseparable from reasoning, historicizing and classifying—each set of practices is entwined with the other. This prospectus is endorsed in Porter’s Afterword (and it makes things difficult for any reviewer when a book comes already so effectively pre-reviewed), but he also suggests that the question of religion 441 0305–7488/01/030441+34 $35.00/0
2001 Academic Press
442
REVIEWS
has been underplayed. His subsequent discussion of the political theology of the English earth sciences, which shows how politics, religion and geographical science were woven together, is a convincing demonstration of “the enduring, though changing, Christian contribution to Enlightenment geographies” (p. 419). The essays that make up the collection bring together contributions to the history of geographical knowledge and what we might call the historical geographies of ideas. Grouped into four sections, there is attention to ways in which ‘traditional’ ideas were challenged or supported by new geographical knowledge (“Beginnings”); the ways in which Enlightenment knowledge produced itself through both imagining and mapping unfamiliar realms of near and far, and of past, present and future “Mappings”; of the production of knowledge through the movements of people and books “Travellings”; and of the locations and pathways of Enlightenment notions and practices “Placings”. All are concerned, as the editors are, with the dual tasks of expanding and exploring our notions of the history of geography and with showing that all ideas, including geographical ones, have historical geographies. Emphases differ of course. Some of the essays work by exploring the period as one before the institutionalization of geography as an academic discipline and pushing the history of Enlightenment geographical knowledge beyond the voyages of scientific ‘discovery’ into the Pacific which were canonized by David Stoddart. Thus, Denis Cosgrove detects a rather different Jesuit Enlightenment geography in the seventeenth century; Charles Withers traces a dynamic history of attempts to locate paradise which moves from biblical exegesis to environmental ethics; David Livingstone dissects for two contexts the very different contributions that Enlightenment geographical knowledge could make to understandings of race; and Anne Godlewska demonstrates the new arguments that were inscribed into Humboldt’s innovative modes of mapping. In other essays the authors are concerned with tracing the historical geographies of the more abstract notions of reason, progress, accuracy, improvement, and the Enlightenment’s distinctive combination of both pessimism and optimism, through the sites, connections and networks crucial to their production. In this way, Chris Philo maps the geographies of reason and unreason in Enlightenment Edinburgh; Matthew Edney reasons over the specific forms of accuracy encoded in Enlightenment mapping; Michael Heffernan shows how important geographical knowledge was to French reconceptualizations of progress; Peter Gould tracks the shock waves from the Lisbon earthquake (1755) to reveal the fault lines of Enlightenment Europe; and Stephen Daniels, Susanne Seymour and Charles Watkins trace horticultural ‘improvement’ to redistribute Enlightenment culture between the metropolis and the country house. Finally, although each piece in the collection has something to say about both histories of geographical knowledge and the historical geography of ideas there are those which most actively work to bring them together. This is done in very different ways. Dorinda Outram adopts the story of Perseus to analyse why the forms of knowledge produced by distant explorers proved so problematic for Enlightenment thinkers; Nicholas Rupke charts in column inches the reception of Humboldt’s work in Europe to argue that he was first a figure of Enlightenment rather than Romantic science; Paul Carter seeks a hidden epistemology of coasts and islands to explain the spatializations of Enlightenment thought; and Michael Bravo demonstrates that it was only through translating between forms of ethnographic and geographic knowledge that Enlightenment navigation could make claims to truth. The question can be raised whether all this is to offer a too narrowly ‘scientific’ view of Enlightenment. As Roy Porter has recently argued in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London 2000) there is a case for incorporating a huge range of popular and commercial practices under that heading, at least in Britain, and with them a similarly expanded range of spaces, places and networks. More narrowly, it can be asked whether Enlightenment Geography is adequately represented by two
REVIEWS
443
chapters on Humboldt but none on Cook or Banks. But this is to ask a pioneering text to provide a systematic synthesis. Overall, Geography and Enlightenment offers a series of detailed explorations of important and varied sets of situated practices in a crucial historical period. In doing so it significantly alters our view of what both Geography and Enlightenment might be. It also offers a sign of what the borderlands between historical geography and the history of science hold for others who care to travel there. Queen Mary, University of London
M O
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0333, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
A M C G, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+444. $27.50 paperback) The history of geography in the period which runs through the late Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Bourbon Restoration of the 1830s, is one of the great neglected topics in intellectual history. Too often, in intellectual history as much as in the general history of this period, the search for continuities between historical eras has been tacitly abandoned. This book’s attempt to examine what happened to geography throughout this era is thus greatly to be welcomed. So too is its detailed discussion of the work, not only of now much better-understood figures such as Volney, but also of now little-known figures such as Edme Mentelle, Buache, Jomard, Chabrol de Volvic, Letronne, Bory de St Vincent, Adrien Balbi and Jacques-Dominique Cassini. Bibliography and text are stuffed full of original sources used by these men, and should constitute a precious resource for future researchers. Alexander von Humboldt, too often discussed even today as an isolated figure of genius over-riding all disciplinary boundaries, gains additional depth and significance from the background provided by the work of these lesser figures. Godlewska’s discussion of Humboldt as a “descriptive” geographer (pp.119–27) is a good way of seeing how Humboldt’s work does in fact arch over this era, pointing back to the Enlightenment aim of a complete description of the surface world, and also forward to the deepening of that idea in the nineteenth century as the description of the world as a many-layered interacting system. Godlewska also rightly wishes to move away from the recently dominant approach to the history of science in this period, which has focused on discipline formation. This implicitly ‘Whiggish’ approach is indeed probably ripe for abandonment. But with what does she replace it? It is here that problems begin to accumulate. In accordance with the explicitly Foucaultian paradigm announced at the opening of the book, Godlewska announces that she searches not for geography as a discipline in the process of formation, but as a “discursive formation” (p.1, p.8.). Unfortunately, it is not really clear from her account just what a discursive formation is, and how we are to recognize its boundaries. Her account runs into self-contradiction, as she points repeatedly to the disunity of the geographical enterprise, and yet also talks in general about the failures of an entity called “geography” to become a “theory-driven” body of knowledge. It is not clear on what grounds work has qualified as being geographical enough to feature in this account. Again, she recounts Foucault’s objection, shared by most historians even before Foucault ever put pen to paper, to recounting the lives of individuals as though this were a substitute for the history of a shift in the episteme. 2001 Academic Press