A Hundred Years of Geography

T.W. Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351535083
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Far from dissolving, this effort demonstrates the ongoing vitality of geography as a profession. In a world increasingly sensitive to the problems of people and resources, geography has constantly provided the basic information for its sister sciences, economics, political science, sociology and demography, This book turns, attention to geography itself, in an incisive survey of the development of the discipline as a science. "A Hundred Years of Geography" draws together the threads of a century of progress, from the first scientific explorations and mappings to present-day trends toward specialization and generalization. It contains a synoptic view of the development of the various aspects of geography, showing how the field has been differentiated from associated disciplines and how it has differentiated and specialized within itself. The book also offers two important reference tools: a bibliography of the important geographical works published throughout the world, and biographical sketches of ninety important geographers. It is informative, stimulating, urbane and civilized reading, as well as being an excellent introductory text and reference work to recent scholarship in the field of geography.

CHAPTER ONE
CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

A century of progress; six trends of geography; specialization and generalization

ANY ONE who earns his living by teaching geography has to endure the comment that his subject is ‘new’, though in fact i. i it goes back to the beginnings of learning as many historians of geography have shown. Its roots lie in the natural curiosity of people about places and ways of living other than their own, and at least from the days of Herodotus explorers and military conquerors wrote down what they saw for the benefit of governments and of a wider circle of readers. Speculation about the nature of the world, its shape, size and qualities goes back to the ancient Egyptians who viewed the sky as a kind of ceiling supported above the earth by four pillars corresponding to the cardinal points. In the third century B.C., Eratosthenes of Alexandria accepted the Greek view that the earth was a sphere with a diameter of some 25,000 miles.

The woes of Galileo and the fears of Columbus’s sailors came from the medieval belief in a flat earth, but the darkness of the Dark Ages is often exaggerated for in fact the knowledge of the world was increasing all the time: explorers seeking conquest, trade or merely adventure, went forth and left accounts of their journeys and observations for posterity. It is not with the thousands of years of geography that this book deals—indeed, there are already fine histories available¹—but rather with the last hundred years only. At the outset, however, it is well to realize that so much has gone before: during the past hundred years, more and more people have referred to themselves as ‘geographers’, but in many past generations people have been geographers in fact if not in name. One need pay little attention to those who designate themselves as belonging to the third (or second) generation of British geographers, for the shades of Hakluyt, Mary Somerville and many more stands in dumb rebuke.

A Century of Progress

The past hundred years have seen a vast growth of geographical knowledge. This has come through the opening-up of the world by conquest, trade, missionary enterprise and exploration, and above all through the provision of quick transport by steamship, railway and aeroplane. Within a century the population of the world has been doubled, vast new lands have been settled, the political maps altered almost beyond recognition, and new ideologies given practical expression in government and allied social policies. One may question the validity of the view of a British geographer, C. B. Fawcett, that the last hundred years are of more significance than all previous history, yet one is bound to recognize that the changes have been revolutionary. In the Rede Lecture of 1958,² Sir Charles Darwin noted that more minerals had been removed from the earth during the past forty years than in all previous time and that though the world’s farmlands were producing more, the increase in food had not kept pace with the increase in people. It may be a difficult world to live in, but it is hardly a dull one.

Against such a background a great mass of raw material has been provided for geographical study. Raw material is always raw, and its discriminating use has depended on the growth of education in schools and universities and on the provision of scholars to use the rich resources available. The talented amateur, the critically-minded explorer, the natural scholar of independent means, have all existed and become known as geographers, but the real modern growth of the subject came with the recognition given by universities, in not a few cases reluctantly and even under the pressure of fashion—even universities keep up with the Joneses. Many of the world’s early geographical societies regarded educational advance as essential to their work, though their main purpose was to encourage exploration and to gather up the fruits of enterprising penetration of the remoter areas of the world. Some, however, had other aims—in fact, as shown in chapter three there is no such thing as a standard geographical society. Perhaps it is just as well. Geography is by no means unique in its recent penetration of many of the world’s universities; many other subjects, notably economics and the social studies, have only a comparatively short history of university recognition, and as shown on page 19, there have been demands for greater facilities for study by those responsible for several subjects in Britain quite recently. New opportunities were offered for geographical work, at varying times in different countries, as part of a general broadening of university education.

In the pages that follow, an attempt has been made to give an outline history of the modern growth of geography with a discussion of various aspects of the subject. It is not proposed to solve all the great controversies that have arisen, nor to advocate any particular view or doctrine: many of these are of considerable interest, even fascination, and some of them are obviously rooted in a divergence of views on life in general. In our own times both Fascism and Communism have been geographically expressed: the former brought arguments for spread of a greater Germany and the latter is prominent in Russian economic geographies which maintain how vastly beneficial all the rearrangements of population and the undeniable intensification of economic activity must be. Looking further back, the differences of outlook between Ritter and von Humboldt have been ascribed partly to the former’s conception of a divine purpose in all existence, and the latter’s more cautious and in some ways neutral approach to theological problems. Much of the stimulus to geographical inquiry in the nineteenth century came from the Darwinian hypothesis, and especially from the idea of the adaptation of organisms to environment with varying success: inspiration was given, too, by the widening of scientific enterprise, particularly in field study. Mackinder³ has claimed that one of the main foundations of Darwin’s work was the appreciation of the geographical distribution of animals under varied climatic conditions. Some organisms have successfully adapted themselves to changed circumstances, while others have not, and in time this had human analogies; for some stocks have apparently shown greater powers of adaptation in new areas, or under charged climates, than others. It is a truism that human life and environment have been intimately interwoven, biologically and culturally, from the beginning of life on earth, but extreme claims have been made for environmental influence, notably by Ellsworth Huntington in his studies of the effects of climate on human communities, or by some of the more vigorous writers on the effects of particular types of physical setting, such as mountains, plains, peninsulas or islands or social and political organization.

Such arguments are tempting. An American writer has shown that Finnish immigrants have been successful and happy in areas similar to those of their homeland, with coniferous forests, numberless lakes and rivers, and a cold winter.⁴ Chisholm⁵ in 1916 drew attention to the dangers of generalizations: he quoted a statement that ‘nations that are accustomed to a limited territory, as were the Greeks, always search for a similar limited area’ by pointing out that the Greeks spread successfully on the broad lowlands of much of western Asia under Alexander the Great. Equally he criticized Buckle for saying that the Indians are condemned to poverty by the physical laws of their climate, or that civilizations outside Europe were through the influence of ‘nature’ liable to possess imaginative faculties at the expense of reason. Nevertheless, such questions as the way of life of European settlers in the tropics and their powers of acclimatization are of considerable interest: there can be no harm in asking why the Japanese have never settled in large numbers in areas with cold winters, such as Manchuria, when the opportunities were available to them. Chisholm favoured caution in any effort to explain human life in environmental terms, and quotes with approval the statement of Jean Brunhes that ‘every truth concerning the relations between natural surroundings and human activities can never be anything but approximate; to represent it as something more exact than that is to falsify it, is to become anti-scientific in the highest degree’. To search for a general law is a fascinating exercise, but Chisholm apparently thought it a wiser policy to look for empirical laws, which could be expressed by percentages or other numerical statements.

In its present development, geography owes much to the work done in the past hundred years. Apart from a vast accession of material, there has been a good deal of thought on its relevance and on the methods of study likely to produce good results. No subject can retain academic standing merely by announcing its methods of work, but only by carrying them out and letting the results speak for themselves, or, failing that, by asking the right questions even if no final answers can be given. Any study concerned with the distribution of population over the world, past, present and even possibly future, must be of relevance. There is no need to restrict investigation to areas at present occupied, as even areas of permanent ice and snow may become significant for temporary occupation or for air routes, and with modern resources life at the south pole can be made quite tolerable, at least for a time. It is a not uncommon academic experience that someone begins to study something merely for interest, only to discover in the end that it becomes of great significance: it is also true that an idea may be put forward, widely accepted and applauded, but finally swept into oblivion. Another idea may attract little attention, but become popular—even fashionable—many years later: various examples are given in this book of such a nature. In cynical moments, the present author has thought that there are few new ideas in modern geography, but rather a number of old ones that have been put forward, forgotten, revived and in some cases used to good purpose. The modern interest in medical geography or in colonial study is following lines of inquiry suggested eighty or more years ago: modern physical geographers are considering matters that puzzled the pioneers of the American geological surveys in the days before W. M. Davis. Land use surveys of towns seem extremely modern until one remembers that some were done more than a hundred years ago. But here has been a vast increase in research work, and the present range of inquiry is well shown by the recent French and American reviews of recent publications.⁶

Much of the modern impetus was given by the 1914-18 war and the subsequent treaties. While it is clear that the re-drawing of the map of Europe was done partly with map evidence, including such distributions as those of nationality, language, and communications, the full story has not been told, though presumably the diaries and other private papers of Isaiah Bowman, when released, may prove informative.⁷ Before the war, geography was already strongly established in France and Germany and a useful beginning had been made in Britain and America: speaking of Britain, H. J. Mackinder⁸ said in 1935 that ‘the half-dozen years before the Great War may perhaps be regarded as the divide between the dominance of the old and the oncoming in strength of the new kinds of geographical activity’. The splendid survey by W. L. G. Joerg⁹ of European geography in 1922 showed that there was an excellent foundation for the advanced teaching of the subject in many universities: long taught for its practical value to students of commerce and for its general interest to others, including intending teachers, geography was now able to attract specialists in Britain as in France and Germany. In this critical phase of development, many British scholars turned to French writers for guidance on method, though before 1914 some such as Herbertson and A. G. Ogilvie had studied in German universities: after 1918, German geographers once more influenced British geographers, but in time the pulsating activity of American geography gave stimulus not only to British but to other European workers. At present the pioneer work of Russian geographers is being watched with interest by geographers in many countries: fortunately some of the abundant material they produce is available in translations. The Russians, too, have made translations of books published in other languages, in some cases without the knowledge of the authors concerned.

From its very nature, the subject must be international: for a time between the 1914-18 and 1939-45 wars some of its most distinguished exponents in Britain were so conscious of this that they used their lectures partly as a means of fostering support of the League of Nations and of liberal views on race relations. On a more formal basis, the congresses of the International Geographical Union every four years gather up some of the researches of the time and inaugurate commissions to deal with special problems, such as the world mapping on the 1:1,000,000 scale (p. 67) or a standardized representation of land use (p. 169-71).

Six Trends of Geography

Over the past hundred years, it would scarcely be possible to trace a series of consecutive phases without twisting the evidence into tortured generalizations of a chronological type; there have rather been six main trends of development which will now be considered. Of these the first, and most fundamental, is the acquisition of raw material by explorers and travellers and the less renowned, but generally far more thorough, field-workers of modern times: this may be called the encyclopaedic trend. Second, the need for efficient teaching of geography as part of a general education has long been recognized, especially by many of the Societies, and some part—but by no means all—of the modern advance indicates an educational trend. Third, the practical value of geography in assessing the potentialities of new lands and their problems led to a marked advance in commercial geography, and in time to wider studies, such as those of agricultural life, rainfall distribution and periodicity, and even conditions of health: this, in a general sense, may be termed the colonial trend. Fourth, efforts to trace a world pattern have always attracted some minds, and though this activity goes back into the early part of the nineteenth century, it was especially prominent in the early twentieth: it was a trend, or tendency, to generalization. Fifth, during and after the 1914-18 war, as in the works of some writers before it, the political implications of geographical distributions were increasingly realized, and consequently there was a definite political trend. Sixth, the natural recent development has been towards specialization.

The encyclopaedic trend was, in effect, one of exploration and recording of observations made with a varying degree of perspicacity. Some of the early compendiums of geography, such as Stanford’s Universal Geography, are full of facts and essential in their day to later writers. Much of the knowledge of such areas as Japan and China came from the careful recording of journeys by travellers, without whose work geography in its modern form could not have existed at all. The attraction of reading about journeys into previously unknown areas has always been considerable, and the lectures of Livingstone, Stanley and similar travellers were thronged. Almost everyone is at some time thrilled by the account of an expedition to Everest, or a few months in the Antarctic, though the last area has now become a field of great scientific enterprise. Thirty years ago one listened to Antarctic lectures as adventures of fit young men with some interest in birds and glaciology: now one listens to accounts of the International Geophysical Year. Livingstone and other explorers were pathfinders:¹⁰ he gives in his works much curious information, for example that ‘intercourse with departed spirits’ is considered witchcraft, or that ‘the people seem to live in abundance. They have rice growing among the native corn. Only some of the women wear the rings in the lips. The rest are good looking. We never were visited by more mosquitoes than here’. Such an area, on the Zambezi, would now be visited by serious economic geographers, and perhaps also by social anthropologists.

By the eighteen-nineties, however, there were signs that some people were tiring of such stuff, and a group of French geographers founded the Annales de géographie with an academic purpose and the aim of avoiding ‘nouvelles à sensation’ (p. 62): even so, there are still many people who are impressed by tales of remote regions, though nowadays this kind of curiosity is likely to be best satisfied by underwater photography on the television screen. Opportunities of travel are always of value, but there is a quaint view among some people that one cannot be a proper geographer unless one has visited some area of great remoteness, and there are still people who proudly assert that they have been all the way to Timbuktu. In 1899, H. J. Mackinder made the first ascent of Mount Kenya, having decided that he must do something of the kind because ‘most people would have no use for a geographer who was not an adventurer and explorer’.¹¹ But it is not by Mount Kenya that Mackinder is now remembered: the main phase of exploration has passed, and by 1914 the only major unexplored area outside the polar areas was Arabia.

In education, geography has often been advocated as a ‘bridge’ subject between science and the humanities: Thomas Arnold of Rugby¹² said in 1842 [sic] that ‘a real knowledge of Geography embraces at once a knowledge of the earth and of the dwellings of man upon it; it stretches out one hand to history, and the other to geology and physiology: it is just that part of knowledge where the students of physical and of moral science meet together’, The early educational efforts of the Royal Geographical Society culminated in the famous Scott Keltie report which reviewed the position to the 1880’s. Writing in 1913 on ‘Thirty years progress in geographical education’, Scott Keltic¹³ noted that from 1905 the new secondary grammar schools had included geography as a major subject, that there were advances in the primary schools and in the training colleges for teachers. At this time, the real lack was suitable teaching in British universities comparable to that available in France and Germany. In Germany,¹⁴ many early efforts were made but in 1893, it was urged at the annual Education Congress that geography should be taught in all classes of the gymnasia and similar institutions: the Germans at that time regarded the French as more enterprising, particularly from the 1870’s (p. 46). Many of the pioneer modern geographers devoted much of their time to the encouragement of school-teaching, to extra-mural lecturing and to arranging summer schools: in Britain, for example, A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• 1. CHANGING GEOGRAPHY
• 2. GEOGRAPHY FROM THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 3. EXPLORATION AND EDUCATION: THE WORK OF THE SOCIETIES FROM 1820 TO 1900
• 4. GEOGRAPHY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
• 5. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
• 6. THE REGIONAL APPROACH
• 7. ECONOMIC FACTORS IN GEOGRAPHY
• 8. SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
• 9. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
• 10. THE ADVANCE OF CARTOGRAPHY
• 11. NEITHER A BEGINNING NOR AN END
• NOTES AND REFERENCES
• APPENDIX: SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF GEOGRAPHERS
• INDEX