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Key Concepts in Historical Geography
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
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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
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references, and a handful of further readings. These essays are organized under eight rubrics: ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies’; ‘Nation-building and Geopolitics’; ‘Historical Hierarchies’; ‘The Built Environment’; ‘Place and Meaning’; ‘Modernity and Modernization’; ‘Beyond the Border’; and ‘The Production of Historical Geographical Knowledge’ (in the singular). This is set to be an influential book. It has already been adopted for course use in some UK universities, and with its confident assertion of the central importance of its content, it warrants both careful reading and probing analysis. Let us begin then with the eight rubrics that define the major sections of the book. Some of these are more transparent than others. The first, for example, includes, logically enough, chapters on ‘Imperialism and Empire’, ‘Colonialism and Anti-colonialism’, and ‘Development’; the second discusses ‘Territory and Place’, ‘Identity and the Nation’, and ‘Imaginative Geographies and Geopolitics’. Two of the three chapters in ‘The Built Environment’ section are titled ‘Making Sense of Urban Settlement’, and ‘Geographies of Urban Morphology’; the third is ‘Nature and the Environment’. Less self-evident, perhaps, are ‘Historical Hierarchies’ (‘Class, Hegemony and Resistance’, ‘Race’, and ‘Gender’) and ‘Beyond the Border’ (‘Globalization’, ‘Governmentality’, and ‘Nature-Culture’). For completeness, the other chapters are ‘Landscape and Iconography’, ‘Conceptualizing Heritage’, and ‘Performance, Spectacle and Power’ under a ‘Place and Meaning’ rubric; ‘Capitalism and Industrialization’, ‘Cultures of Science and Technology’ and ‘Modernity and Democracy’ under ‘Modernity and Modernization’; and, in the final section, ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’, ‘Illustrative Geographies’, and ‘Evidence and Representation’. Reflecting on these chapter titles, I confess to confusion. ‘Race’, ‘Gender’, ‘Development’, yes these seem, at first glance, to qualify as concepts, but ‘Making Sense.’, ‘Geographies of.’, ‘Cultures of Science and Technology’, and ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’? I am less sure. Are all these ‘Concepts’ concepts? Where do ‘theories’ fit in this framework? And why these chosen twenty-four? Are not ‘Space’, ‘Place’, and ‘Geographical Change’ important historical geographical concepts? Given the inutility of dictionary definitions (a concept is a plan, intention, idea, or invention) and the extended philosophical debate over the termdas to whether concepts are fundamental categories of existence, whether they conform to a definitional structure, whether they are abstract objects or mental representations, etc.dwe probably need a 2,500-word essay to clarify the issues. Instead, the authors suggest that their purpose is to present ‘an overview of some of the most relevant and important concepts, practices and genealogies in.historical geography’ (p. 4). To this we might add that the authors aim to chart what Strohmayer refers to a third of the way through the book as historical geography’s recent acquisition of ‘a more pronounced taste for conceptually centred labour’ (p. 97). The results are uneven and, to my mind, often disappointing. Accepting that historical geography has to evolve, and that its future form will likely be quite different from its current and earlier manifestations, I am worried by the diffuseness of this book, by the ways in which it rather uncritically takes critical theoretical perspectives to constitute the field, and by the sense imparted by this volume that there is nothing central to or distinctive about the sub-discipline. Certainly, individual essays range over surprisingly diverse swaths of literature and offer interesting juxtapositions of ideas. They offer new insights and hold real potential for productive intellectual stimulation for those already broadly familiar with the geographical literature. Regular readers of the Journal of Historical Geography might think of this book as an immutable mobile substitute for the fascinating conversation likely to ensue were they to engage one or another of the authors over coffee or lunch.
Yet I wonder what the students at whom this volume is aimed will take from, or make of, it. They will no doubt appreciate that the authors go to conspicuous lengths to address the Millennial Generation. So the chapter on ‘Gender’ begins with Pope Benedict XVI’s December 2012 pronouncement about the immutability of an individual’s sexuality; that on ‘Imaginative Geographies and Geopolitics’ opens with the ‘9/11’ attacks on New York and Washington in 2001; that on ‘Conceptualizing Heritage’ begins with a 2007 protest against plans for a new high-speed road that would pass within a couple of kilometers of an important Irish archeological site. But from such arresting starting points these short essays meander idiosyncratically and discursively through the thickets of time, space, and ideas. Sometimes, it seems, displays of erudition squeeze aside concerted analysis and clear interpretation, as paragraphs attribute several short quotes to one individual or another, barely engaging the themes and arguments advanced in their work. Perhaps this is a reflection of the ‘sponge-like ability to absorb novel trends and ideas’ that is seen, on page 274, to have rescued historical geography from its drift into oblivion. But for neophyte students lacking a broad grounding in the field, I fear that Key Concepts might produce more confusion than clarity, more bewilderment than enlightenment, more nonchalance than rigour, and more presumption than understanding. Educators may regret that a volume intended for students is not more attentive to standards of scholarly practice than this one. Joint authors appear in different sequence in the text and in parenthetic citations and lists of references (e.g., pp. 126, 128, 188); letters are dropped from words (e.g., p. 114); circumlocutions are common. To some extent these kinds of errors can be ascribed to less-thaneffective copy editing and proof reading. Other errors are more troubling. The ‘notion’ of genres de vie is attributed to Braudel rather than to Paul Vidal de la Blache (p. 270). Attention to Florence Deprest’s arguments in ‘Using the concept of genre de vie: French geographers and colonial Algeria, c.1880e1949’ (in volume 37 of this journal), might have tempered some strong claims about colonialism, race, and environmental determinism. Why devalue an unassailable observationdthat ‘the entire social world bears the deep impress of gender divisions’dwith the misleading claim that ‘even the writing of the past is enshrined as “his-story”’ (p. 119), r meant when it is readily established that the ancient Greek hísto ‘knowledge from inquiry’, that the word entered the English language in the fourteenth century through the Latin historia, meaning the ‘relation of incidents’, and came thereafter to signify the ‘record of past events’? The authors’ opening references to Santayana and Marx are intended to make the point that ‘to ignore or forget the past is to risk becoming a prisoner of it’ (p. 1). The rest of their text works, ironically so far as historical geography is concerned, to ignore this claim. Key Concepts offers neither clear remembrance of the subdiscipline’s past, nor much sign of connection to or constraint by it. Indeed, earlier work is substantially set aside as ‘meticulously descriptive and materially rooted’ (p. 270). The authors’ nod to ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’ is cursory, and essentially ignores the well-documented development and distinctive practice of historical geography in North America. Although Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ phrasedand its corollary ‘[o]nly the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered’dare invoked in support of ‘approaching the past from the “bottom up”’, there is scant attention here to the work of historical geographers located beyond the tent of those writing the ‘historically sensitive critical geographies’ upon which this book focusesdeven when their work speaks directly to some of that group’s central concerns (p. 2e3).
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So, for example, Donald Meinig’s four-volume argument in The Shaping of America (1986e2004) that the development of the United States turned on the geopolitical process of imperialism, goes entirely unnoticed in the ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies’ section of the book (though it does get fleeting mention in the discussion of ‘Globalization’). But then, I suppose the authors anticipated such concerns with their observation that ‘“[e]very Friday buries a Thursday”, as Joyce creatively phrased it’ (p. 1). Of course the essays are short, the literature is voluminous, and authors invariably write to their own ‘sweet spot’. That said, titles are freighted with significance and one might have hoped, I think, for a less exclusive even preemptive claim on the entire field of historical geography and its practices. This volume finds its inspiration in Foucault’s arguments for ‘the history of the present’ and its centre in the twin convictions that historical geographical study should ‘teach us much about our contemporary world’ and reflect ‘a politics of scholarship that engages broader concerns relating to the historical production of space and geographical knowledge’ (passim, p. 2e3). It does this in an effort to locate historical geography ‘within wider currents across the humanities and social sciences’ (p. 3). This ambition is surely to be applauded. But I worry that the ‘plurality, indeterminacy and inchoate anarchy’ (p. 1) that the authors celebrate in James Joyce’s treatment of everyday practices, and that I find in too many of their chapters, too often loses sight of what a differently-conceived historical geography might bring to the table, leading away from the New Jerusalem toward Babel, and threatening a confusion of tongues rather than the heaven on earth that we so ardently seek.
Graeme Wynn University of British Columbia, Canada http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.002
Alexander von Lünen and Charles Travis (Eds), History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections. Dordrecht, Springer, 2013, xiv þ 242 pages, £90 hardcover. This book examines the reasons behind the slow take up of GIS by historians. In doing so, it explores the reluctance of historians to engage with GIS and of GIS specialists to develop more flexible applications which could allow it to be used more broadly. The collection comprises fourteen chapters, including five theoretical reflections on the challenges that historical research poses for GIS (Bodenhamer, Boonstra, Wachowicz and Owens, Griffiths, and Von Lünen), three interviews with established historians or historical geographers (Le Roy Ladurie, Olsson, and Staley), five case studies where researchers outline the ways in which GIS has furthered their work (Palmer, Baker, Taylor, Travis, and Ayers, Nelson, and Nesbit) and two chapters that consider the value of GIS for teaching (Mares and Moschek and Wachowicz and Owens). The volume begins with Bodenhamer’s examination of how history and social science are fundamentally different fields of inquiry, the result being that historians have been slow to engage with tools used primarily by those with different objectives and modus operandi. However, drawing on the concept of ‘deep mapping’dwhich stresses the importance of incorporating perceptions and experiences with space and timedhe outlines how recent developments in GIS technology, in particular 3D mapping, can produce the kind of richly textured reconstructions of the past that historians could find useful. The subsequent interview with French
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historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (whose contextual microhistories resonate with the ideas raised by Bodenhamer) illustrates that historians have long been cognisant of the value of quantitative and spatial perspectives but that institutional contexts influence the tools they choose to employ. The significance of academic environments is also made clear in Boonstra’s examination of the limited impact of GIS on contemporary scholarship when compared with the enormous impact that choropleth mapping had on knowledge production at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the context in which that cartographic revolution took place he identifies four necessary prerequisites: the availability of data, the existence of statistical procedures for analysis, appropriate technology for mapping, and an intellectual environment in which knowledge is exchanged. Reflecting on these factors today, Boonstra argues that the real problem is not the lack of data, statistics, or technology but contemporary academic environments in which there is little dialogue between historians and GIS specialists. Interestingly the subsequent chapter, which discusses the use of GIS with indigenous communities in the United States, demonstrates that groups with diverse spatial registers, as well as different ways of knowing and describing, can collaborate on GIS projects. Chapters by Mares and Moschek and by Wachowicz and Owens on GIS and history teaching also consider its collaborative possibilities. Mares and Moschek emphasise how GIS can be used for teaching students how to collaborate on shared platforms whilst Wachowicz and Owens argue that GIS can be a ‘knowledge space’ in which multiple users collate, analyse, and theorise about past processes. This intellectual space of the system is also taken up in the interview with Gunnar Olsson who argues that, by enabling historians to engage with multiple ways of organising data, GIS users are now more aware of their own role in the map production process. The subsequent two chapters by Baker on the geography of scientific instrument producers in early modern London and by Taylor on the use of GIS in the field of medieval studies both demonstrate that GIS can further historical research. Both authors argue that GIS enabled them to analyse their data in ways impossible without it and demonstrate that historians can think of novel ways of using it. If historians can map miracle stories and vernacular descriptions of place, as these authors do, they demonstrate that they can map anything. The interview with David J. Staley, which follows, shows that historians are not the computerphobes some assume them to be. Griffiths is, however, more cautious about the value of GIS. She argues that the extraction, abstraction, and categorisation of data that is needed before incorporating them into a GIS decontextualises the data by taking them out of their original formats and divorcing what can from what cannot be mapped. In spite of this, she does value GIS, particularly for the way in which it enables historians to build-up thick descriptions about place, but with the caveat that one must be mindful that these descriptions are productions. Mapping the biographical details of one poet’s life alongside the places and descriptions of place documented in his work, Travis demonstrates that GIS can provide perspectives on the different lifeworlds from which and of which poets write. In doing so, however, he also acknowledges that there is a certain level of conjecture and production on the part of the researcher, particularly when mapping ambiguous data. Ayers, Nelson, and Nesbit’s examination of the gradual and uneven unfolding of the abolition of slavery across time and space displays an acute awareness of the spatial variations and contingencies that underpin historical processes. Emancipation, they argue, did not happen all at once but emerged unevenly in diverse places; as much ‘on dark roads’ as ‘in obliquely worded government documents’ (p. 205). Mapping data from a range of sources in which that processes is documented, this chapter (along with those by Baker, Taylor, and Travis) is an excellent example of the way in which GIS adds to historical research.
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
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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
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Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
references, and a handful of further readings. These essays are organized under eight rubrics: ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies’; ‘Nation-building and Geopolitics’; ‘Historical Hierarchies’; ‘The Built Environment’; ‘Place and Meaning’; ‘Modernity and Modernization’; ‘Beyond the Border’; and ‘The Production of Historical Geographical Knowledge’ (in the singular). This is set to be an influential book. It has already been adopted for course use in some UK universities, and with its confident assertion of the central importance of its content, it warrants both careful reading and probing analysis. Let us begin then with the eight rubrics that define the major sections of the book. Some of these are more transparent than others. The first, for example, includes, logically enough, chapters on ‘Imperialism and Empire’, ‘Colonialism and Anti-colonialism’, and ‘Development’; the second discusses ‘Territory and Place’, ‘Identity and the Nation’, and ‘Imaginative Geographies and Geopolitics’. Two of the three chapters in ‘The Built Environment’ section are titled ‘Making Sense of Urban Settlement’, and ‘Geographies of Urban Morphology’; the third is ‘Nature and the Environment’. Less self-evident, perhaps, are ‘Historical Hierarchies’ (‘Class, Hegemony and Resistance’, ‘Race’, and ‘Gender’) and ‘Beyond the Border’ (‘Globalization’, ‘Governmentality’, and ‘Nature-Culture’). For completeness, the other chapters are ‘Landscape and Iconography’, ‘Conceptualizing Heritage’, and ‘Performance, Spectacle and Power’ under a ‘Place and Meaning’ rubric; ‘Capitalism and Industrialization’, ‘Cultures of Science and Technology’ and ‘Modernity and Democracy’ under ‘Modernity and Modernization’; and, in the final section, ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’, ‘Illustrative Geographies’, and ‘Evidence and Representation’. Reflecting on these chapter titles, I confess to confusion. ‘Race’, ‘Gender’, ‘Development’, yes these seem, at first glance, to qualify as concepts, but ‘Making Sense.’, ‘Geographies of.’, ‘Cultures of Science and Technology’, and ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’? I am less sure. Are all these ‘Concepts’ concepts? Where do ‘theories’ fit in this framework? And why these chosen twenty-four? Are not ‘Space’, ‘Place’, and ‘Geographical Change’ important historical geographical concepts? Given the inutility of dictionary definitions (a concept is a plan, intention, idea, or invention) and the extended philosophical debate over the termdas to whether concepts are fundamental categories of existence, whether they conform to a definitional structure, whether they are abstract objects or mental representations, etc.dwe probably need a 2,500-word essay to clarify the issues. Instead, the authors suggest that their purpose is to present ‘an overview of some of the most relevant and important concepts, practices and genealogies in.historical geography’ (p. 4). To this we might add that the authors aim to chart what Strohmayer refers to a third of the way through the book as historical geography’s recent acquisition of ‘a more pronounced taste for conceptually centred labour’ (p. 97). The results are uneven and, to my mind, often disappointing. Accepting that historical geography has to evolve, and that its future form will likely be quite different from its current and earlier manifestations, I am worried by the diffuseness of this book, by the ways in which it rather uncritically takes critical theoretical perspectives to constitute the field, and by the sense imparted by this volume that there is nothing central to or distinctive about the sub-discipline. Certainly, individual essays range over surprisingly diverse swaths of literature and offer interesting juxtapositions of ideas. They offer new insights and hold real potential for productive intellectual stimulation for those already broadly familiar with the geographical literature. Regular readers of the Journal of Historical Geography might think of this book as an immutable mobile substitute for the fascinating conversation likely to ensue were they to engage one or another of the authors over coffee or lunch.
Yet I wonder what the students at whom this volume is aimed will take from, or make of, it. They will no doubt appreciate that the authors go to conspicuous lengths to address the Millennial Generation. So the chapter on ‘Gender’ begins with Pope Benedict XVI’s December 2012 pronouncement about the immutability of an individual’s sexuality; that on ‘Imaginative Geographies and Geopolitics’ opens with the ‘9/11’ attacks on New York and Washington in 2001; that on ‘Conceptualizing Heritage’ begins with a 2007 protest against plans for a new high-speed road that would pass within a couple of kilometers of an important Irish archeological site. But from such arresting starting points these short essays meander idiosyncratically and discursively through the thickets of time, space, and ideas. Sometimes, it seems, displays of erudition squeeze aside concerted analysis and clear interpretation, as paragraphs attribute several short quotes to one individual or another, barely engaging the themes and arguments advanced in their work. Perhaps this is a reflection of the ‘sponge-like ability to absorb novel trends and ideas’ that is seen, on page 274, to have rescued historical geography from its drift into oblivion. But for neophyte students lacking a broad grounding in the field, I fear that Key Concepts might produce more confusion than clarity, more bewilderment than enlightenment, more nonchalance than rigour, and more presumption than understanding. Educators may regret that a volume intended for students is not more attentive to standards of scholarly practice than this one. Joint authors appear in different sequence in the text and in parenthetic citations and lists of references (e.g., pp. 126, 128, 188); letters are dropped from words (e.g., p. 114); circumlocutions are common. To some extent these kinds of errors can be ascribed to less-thaneffective copy editing and proof reading. Other errors are more troubling. The ‘notion’ of genres de vie is attributed to Braudel rather than to Paul Vidal de la Blache (p. 270). Attention to Florence Deprest’s arguments in ‘Using the concept of genre de vie: French geographers and colonial Algeria, c.1880e1949’ (in volume 37 of this journal), might have tempered some strong claims about colonialism, race, and environmental determinism. Why devalue an unassailable observationdthat ‘the entire social world bears the deep impress of gender divisions’dwith the misleading claim that ‘even the writing of the past is enshrined as “his-story”’ (p. 119), r meant when it is readily established that the ancient Greek hísto ‘knowledge from inquiry’, that the word entered the English language in the fourteenth century through the Latin historia, meaning the ‘relation of incidents’, and came thereafter to signify the ‘record of past events’? The authors’ opening references to Santayana and Marx are intended to make the point that ‘to ignore or forget the past is to risk becoming a prisoner of it’ (p. 1). The rest of their text works, ironically so far as historical geography is concerned, to ignore this claim. Key Concepts offers neither clear remembrance of the subdiscipline’s past, nor much sign of connection to or constraint by it. Indeed, earlier work is substantially set aside as ‘meticulously descriptive and materially rooted’ (p. 270). The authors’ nod to ‘Historical Geographical Traditions’ is cursory, and essentially ignores the well-documented development and distinctive practice of historical geography in North America. Although Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ phrasedand its corollary ‘[o]nly the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered’dare invoked in support of ‘approaching the past from the “bottom up”’, there is scant attention here to the work of historical geographers located beyond the tent of those writing the ‘historically sensitive critical geographies’ upon which this book focusesdeven when their work speaks directly to some of that group’s central concerns (p. 2e3).
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89
So, for example, Donald Meinig’s four-volume argument in The Shaping of America (1986e2004) that the development of the United States turned on the geopolitical process of imperialism, goes entirely unnoticed in the ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies’ section of the book (though it does get fleeting mention in the discussion of ‘Globalization’). But then, I suppose the authors anticipated such concerns with their observation that ‘“[e]very Friday buries a Thursday”, as Joyce creatively phrased it’ (p. 1). Of course the essays are short, the literature is voluminous, and authors invariably write to their own ‘sweet spot’. That said, titles are freighted with significance and one might have hoped, I think, for a less exclusive even preemptive claim on the entire field of historical geography and its practices. This volume finds its inspiration in Foucault’s arguments for ‘the history of the present’ and its centre in the twin convictions that historical geographical study should ‘teach us much about our contemporary world’ and reflect ‘a politics of scholarship that engages broader concerns relating to the historical production of space and geographical knowledge’ (passim, p. 2e3). It does this in an effort to locate historical geography ‘within wider currents across the humanities and social sciences’ (p. 3). This ambition is surely to be applauded. But I worry that the ‘plurality, indeterminacy and inchoate anarchy’ (p. 1) that the authors celebrate in James Joyce’s treatment of everyday practices, and that I find in too many of their chapters, too often loses sight of what a differently-conceived historical geography might bring to the table, leading away from the New Jerusalem toward Babel, and threatening a confusion of tongues rather than the heaven on earth that we so ardently seek.
Graeme Wynn University of British Columbia, Canada http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.002
Alexander von Lünen and Charles Travis (Eds), History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections. Dordrecht, Springer, 2013, xiv þ 242 pages, £90 hardcover. This book examines the reasons behind the slow take up of GIS by historians. In doing so, it explores the reluctance of historians to engage with GIS and of GIS specialists to develop more flexible applications which could allow it to be used more broadly. The collection comprises fourteen chapters, including five theoretical reflections on the challenges that historical research poses for GIS (Bodenhamer, Boonstra, Wachowicz and Owens, Griffiths, and Von Lünen), three interviews with established historians or historical geographers (Le Roy Ladurie, Olsson, and Staley), five case studies where researchers outline the ways in which GIS has furthered their work (Palmer, Baker, Taylor, Travis, and Ayers, Nelson, and Nesbit) and two chapters that consider the value of GIS for teaching (Mares and Moschek and Wachowicz and Owens). The volume begins with Bodenhamer’s examination of how history and social science are fundamentally different fields of inquiry, the result being that historians have been slow to engage with tools used primarily by those with different objectives and modus operandi. However, drawing on the concept of ‘deep mapping’dwhich stresses the importance of incorporating perceptions and experiences with space and timedhe outlines how recent developments in GIS technology, in particular 3D mapping, can produce the kind of richly textured reconstructions of the past that historians could find useful. The subsequent interview with French
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historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (whose contextual microhistories resonate with the ideas raised by Bodenhamer) illustrates that historians have long been cognisant of the value of quantitative and spatial perspectives but that institutional contexts influence the tools they choose to employ. The significance of academic environments is also made clear in Boonstra’s examination of the limited impact of GIS on contemporary scholarship when compared with the enormous impact that choropleth mapping had on knowledge production at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the context in which that cartographic revolution took place he identifies four necessary prerequisites: the availability of data, the existence of statistical procedures for analysis, appropriate technology for mapping, and an intellectual environment in which knowledge is exchanged. Reflecting on these factors today, Boonstra argues that the real problem is not the lack of data, statistics, or technology but contemporary academic environments in which there is little dialogue between historians and GIS specialists. Interestingly the subsequent chapter, which discusses the use of GIS with indigenous communities in the United States, demonstrates that groups with diverse spatial registers, as well as different ways of knowing and describing, can collaborate on GIS projects. Chapters by Mares and Moschek and by Wachowicz and Owens on GIS and history teaching also consider its collaborative possibilities. Mares and Moschek emphasise how GIS can be used for teaching students how to collaborate on shared platforms whilst Wachowicz and Owens argue that GIS can be a ‘knowledge space’ in which multiple users collate, analyse, and theorise about past processes. This intellectual space of the system is also taken up in the interview with Gunnar Olsson who argues that, by enabling historians to engage with multiple ways of organising data, GIS users are now more aware of their own role in the map production process. The subsequent two chapters by Baker on the geography of scientific instrument producers in early modern London and by Taylor on the use of GIS in the field of medieval studies both demonstrate that GIS can further historical research. Both authors argue that GIS enabled them to analyse their data in ways impossible without it and demonstrate that historians can think of novel ways of using it. If historians can map miracle stories and vernacular descriptions of place, as these authors do, they demonstrate that they can map anything. The interview with David J. Staley, which follows, shows that historians are not the computerphobes some assume them to be. Griffiths is, however, more cautious about the value of GIS. She argues that the extraction, abstraction, and categorisation of data that is needed before incorporating them into a GIS decontextualises the data by taking them out of their original formats and divorcing what can from what cannot be mapped. In spite of this, she does value GIS, particularly for the way in which it enables historians to build-up thick descriptions about place, but with the caveat that one must be mindful that these descriptions are productions. Mapping the biographical details of one poet’s life alongside the places and descriptions of place documented in his work, Travis demonstrates that GIS can provide perspectives on the different lifeworlds from which and of which poets write. In doing so, however, he also acknowledges that there is a certain level of conjecture and production on the part of the researcher, particularly when mapping ambiguous data. Ayers, Nelson, and Nesbit’s examination of the gradual and uneven unfolding of the abolition of slavery across time and space displays an acute awareness of the spatial variations and contingencies that underpin historical processes. Emancipation, they argue, did not happen all at once but emerged unevenly in diverse places; as much ‘on dark roads’ as ‘in obliquely worded government documents’ (p. 205). Mapping data from a range of sources in which that processes is documented, this chapter (along with those by Baker, Taylor, and Travis) is an excellent example of the way in which GIS adds to historical research.