The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography

Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, Charles W. J. Withers, Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, Charles W. J. Withers, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526404558
• eBook ISBN: 9781529737769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Geography

Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of scholarly work within modern geography, with strong and constantly evolving connections with disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Across two volumes, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides you with an an international and cross-disciplinary overview of the field, presenting chapters that examine the history, present condition and future potential of the discipline in relation to recent developments and research.

Part I Histories and Geographies

Michael Heffernan

Introduction

Historical geographers have a special responsibility to reflect seriously and critically on the history of their discipline. As the Introduction notes, and as several chapters demonstrate, historical geography has in recent decades merged with the history of geography, previously a distinct intellectual project, albeit with common points of departure. As historical geography and the history of geography have become increasingly synonymous pursuits, it follows that no serious survey of recent research in historical geography would be complete without some discussion of how the subject has developed over time and in connection with cognate disciplines. This is especially pertinent since enquiries into the sub-discipline's history necessarily involve the same techniques of archival, textual and visual research that historical geographers practise in their other investigations.

The five chapters in this part explore different themes and periods in historical geography's intellectual history. They are critical explorations in the history of historical geography that reveal how this unusual hybrid project, formulated and practised in the epistemological space between history and geography, has developed over a long period and through various incarnations in different countries. Taken together, these chapters read as a provisional historical geography of historical geography: interventions that consider the histories and geographies of this project, and which highlight how historical geography connects with the wider histories and geographies of history, geography and other disciplines too.

The first chapter, by Robert Mayhew, examines the ‘pre-histories’ of historical geography in three ‘sketches’ that suggest alternative approaches to the history of ideas. Each ‘sketch’ is informed by the same central question: ‘when, where and to what extent can we meaningfully say something called historical geography was formed’? The first ‘sketch’ considers attempts to ‘splice’ together historical and geographical knowledge in a variety of early-modern European authors and texts. The second sketch traces the changing use of the term ‘historical geography’ from 1649, when the phase was first deployed by Sir Balthazar Gerbier, to the late nineteenth century. In the third sketch, the analytical lens is refocused again to consider how far the forms of historical geography developed by mid- and late-twentieth-century practitioners, trained in the discipline of geography, can be traced backwards in time. The conclusion, formulated with reference to Wittgenstein and Oakshott, emphasises historical geography's multiple pasts.

This theme is explored further by Michael Heffernan and Karen Morin who consider how a distinctive form of historical geography emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, largely from the discipline of history rather than geography. This version of historical geography drew on ideas and methods from across the arts and humanities, especially from archaeology, classics and philology. It focused on the geographies of classical civilisations, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, to be sure, and in China, and formed part of a wider Orientalist imperialism extensively examined by historians of ideas in recent decades. Although this form of classical historical geography did not survive beyond the First World War in those countries where a modern version of the sub-discipline emerged in the interwar decades (largely through the efforts of a new generation of more empiricist and regionalist scholars trained in geography rather than history), the older, imperialist tradition persisted in Germany, often in disturbing forms, into the Nazi period.

In the third chapter, Heike Jöns considers how a modern version of historical geography developed in the twentieth century, as an integral component of the discipline of geography, in Europe and North America. Although historical geography became increasingly focused on the English-speaking, Anglo-American world in this period, the project diversified over time, extending beyond an initial emphasis on regional historical geographies to include more analytical and comparative research, across a range of scales, inspired by a multiplicity of philosophies and methodologies, and with reference to an ever expanding range of source material. This process was facilitated by enhanced interdisciplinary and international exchanges and the involvement of more socially diverse participants.

In the fourth chapter, Steven Jobbitt and Róbert Győri provide an account of the previously overlooked entanglements of history and geography in Eastern Europe from the interwar period, when German intellectual traditions retained much influence, through the post-1945 era of Soviet communism when historical geography was suppressed in several countries. In Hungary, the chapter's main case study, growing demands for greater national independence within and from the Austro-Hungarian Empire prompted an upsurge in historical and geographical research on the distinctiveness of the Hungarian Kingdom's landscapes, environments and people. Following the massive territorial and population losses imposed under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, historical geography became even more urgently relevant to attempts by successive Hungarian regimes to compensate for this traumatic experience by maximising the economic, cultural and political significance of the country's diminished space. Given its association with Hungarian nationalism before and after the First World War, communist authorities after 1945 saw historical geography as ideologically suspect as they imposed a rigid Marxist-Leninist view of history and geography. The collapse of communism generated renewed interest in historical geography, however, reflecting both these suppressed nationalist concerns and new forms of international scholarship.

In the fifth chapter, Jonathan Oldfield shifts the geographical focus further to the east to explore how Russia and Soviet intellectuals sought to interpret the histories and geographies of central Asia, and specifically the distinctive interactions between this vast region's natural environments and equally diverse human inhabitants, drawing initially on German intellectual traditions. Just as historical geography provided a legitimising language for late nineteenth-century imperial expansion in western Europe and the United States, so the conjoining of historical and geographical themes served the interests of the Eurasian movement which sought to expand Russian influence across central Asia in this period. Oldfield examines these ambitions in the writings of several Russian and Soviet intellectuals, including the explorer and statistician Pyotr Semenov, a hugely influential figure in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and the geographer Lev Berg whose investigations in the communist era sought to identify regularities and rhythms in the region's climates and physical environments.

These five chapters illustrate the conceptual complexity and regional diversity of historical geography over the course of its long history, and highlight the need for similar investigations in other parts of the world, including China, Japan and Latin America, where distinctive forms of historical geography have emerged. They also reveal, as do other chapters, that it is neither easy, nor especially useful, to focus narrowly on a tightly-defined version of historical geography as practised by the relatively small, often tribal communities that have self-identified as ‘historical geographers’ in any given period or place. Historical geography has always had a much wider and more complex reach and range than a narrow focus on the term might suggest. Although powerful and influential figures have dominated the sub-discipline in certain times and countries, the larger project has never been ‘owned’ by any single constituency or indeed cognate discipline. As a hybrid project, historical geography – almost by definition – draws on ideas and methods from the arts and humanities and the social sciences, sometimes in defiance of attempts to define and control its limits. This unruly but productive ‘tradition’ of openness and eclecticism shows no signs of abating.

1. Pre-histories
   Robert Mayhew
2. Between History and Geography
   Michael Heffernan and Karen M. Morin
3. The Modern Discipline
   Heike Jöns
4. East Central Europe
   Steven Jobbitt and Róbert Győri
5. Russia and Eurasia
   Jonathan D. Oldfield

1 Pre-Histories

Robert Mayhew

Introduction: Of Sub-Disciplinary Histories

As Jonathan Rée has recently noted in the context of philosophy, the construction of disciplinary histories is vexed and contentious (Rée 2019, 2–3). This has certainly been the case for those who have reconsidered the histories of geography in the quarter of a century since David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition (1992), probably the most sophisticated Anglophone history of the discipline currently available. Two sets of papers have reflected on Livingstone's achievement, one to mark its tenth, the other its twenty-fifth anniversary (Mayhew, Driver and Livingstone 2004; Boyle, Hall and Sidaway 2019). In both cases, in Livingstone's felicitous phrase, commentators have engaged in ‘ferret[ing] out an assortment of exclusions’ (Mayhew, Driver and Livingstone 2004, 233), honing in on matters overlooked or occluded in what was already a long book. Scholars have pointed, inter alia, to the neglect of female geographers, to the temporal and spatial limitations of the project, and to the need to decolonise its assumptions about the production of disciplinary knowledge. Simply put, to construct a narrative of geography's history and an implicit canon of those worthy of memorialisation, even if the history is fulsome and the canon is broad, is immediately and ipso facto to court debate and contestation (Powell 2015). Surveying this landscape of debate about the history of geography, Livingstone has reflected recently that, seen from outwith geography itself, ‘my hunch is that the disciplinary worries that frequently obtrude when geographers think about geography's history have much less salience for these [non-geographical] communities’ (Boyle, Hall and Sidaway 2019, 460). It appears, then, not only that the construction of disciplinary histories is frequently a fractious enterprise, but further that geographers as a community seem especially prone to contesting the stories they tell about the genealogies of their discipline.

In the context of debates about disciplinary histories, the construction of the sub-disciplinary history of historical geography is possibly still more problematic. As Jean Mitchell noted as long ago as 1954, the problem herein is that one not only has to agree to some definition of geography, but also to an understanding of what history is as an enquiry and how the adjectival linkage of ‘historical’ to geography works in order to construct a story about that sub-disciplinary enterprise: if ‘some look upon the geographer as a kind of intellectual rag-and-bone man content to cull ill-assorted bits and pieces of information from many other disciplines … Historical geography is a still greater mystery’ (Mitchell 1954, 1; Philo 1994). Mitchell, of course, is focusing here on the problem of how to define historical geography, but her comments make it clear that constructing a plausible history of historical geography may prove even more vexed than doing so for geography as a whole. In particular, does a practitioner have to self-identify as a ‘historical geographer’ to be included in that narrative? Need only geographers apply for inclusion or can historians and scholars in allied fields, such as anthropology and archaeology, be considered?

Of course, the difficulty of constructing a sub-disciplinary history of historical geography does not mean that no such efforts have been made. It is worth focusing briefly on two major projects to delimit and narrate the history and/or nature of historical geography as they were written by key interlocutors in historical geography and help to guide some of the approaches this chapter will both adopt and question. First, the longest attempt to narrate an Anglophone history of historical geography is that contained in the opening three chapters of Robin Butlin's Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time (1993). Butlin develops a simple definition of historical geography as ‘the study of the geographies of past times’ (Butlin 1993, 1) before inevitably recognising, with Mitchell before him, that no sooner has a singular definition been offered than it needs to be pluralised when he goes on to qualify this by noting it is a ‘multi-faceted and complex hybrid discipline, the product of differing fusions of geographical and historical traditions’ (Butlin 1993, 2). Butlin's history of historical geography stretches back to the early eighteenth-century efforts of Edward Wells (to whom we will return later), who published two works with the term historical geography in their titles. There is also a brief allusion to Eusebius's Onomasticon (4th century AD), whose twinning of geography with historical toponyms will also recur in this chapter (Butlin 1993, 2–7). He also notes fusions of history and geography which he deems allied with but different from historical geography, notably ‘geographical history’ as a project looking to the geographical determinants of historical events. Butlin's historiographical structure becomes more apparent at the outset of his second chapter, entitled ‘The Beginnings of Modern Historical Geography’, where there is immediately an implicit category division between early evocations of historical geography as a term or an enquiry prior to circa 1920 and the ‘modern’ enquiry of the chapter title, which is also then framed as ‘what may be termed “classical” historical geography’ (Butlin 1993, 24). This is also a category division that informs the historiographical presuppostions of the present volume and its decision to label the chapter you are reading here as a “pre-history” of historical geography. Working within that frame of reference, this chapter will at least call into question these presuppositions by its close. Returning to Butlin's analysis, this modern or classical historical geography – created by scholars such as H. C. Darby, E. W. Gilbert and E. G. R. Taylor – is clearly a project with which the modern historical geographer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Foreword
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Histories and Geographies
• 1 Pre-Histories
• 2 Between History and Geography
• 3 The Modern Discipline
• 4 East Central Europe
• 5 Russia and Eurasia
• Part II Land and Landscapes
• 6 Landscape and History
• 7 Landscape and Labour
• 8 Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes
• 9 Race, Land and Freedom
• 10 Global Cityscapes
• 11 Land, Landscape and Home
• Part III Property and Money
• 12 The Place of Money in History
• 13 Building Capital
• 14 Geographies of Dispossession
• 15 Slavery and Empires
• 16 Industrialization and Resistance
• Part IV Population and Mobility
• 17 Enumerating the Populace
• 18 Population, Mobility and Moral Regulation
• 19 Vagrancy, Mobility and Colonialism
• 20 Troubling, Troubled, Troublesome
• 21 Hunger and Famine
• 22 Disease: Dangerous Vectors
• Part V Territory and Geopolitics
• 23 Geography at War
• 24 State and Territory
• 25 Geography and the Holocaust
• 26 Cold War Planet
• 27 Borders
• Part VI Environment and Nature
• 28 Nature, Region and the North
• 29 Climate and Climate Change
• 30 Weather Watching
• 31 Urban Nature
• 32 Conservation
• Part VII Science and Technology
• 33 Outer Space
• 34 Technology as a Keyword
• 35 Engineering
• 36 Military Technology
• 37 Colonial Water and Hydro-Resilience
• 38 Science
• Part VIII Meaning and Communication
• 39 Speech
• 40 Worlds into Words – and Back Again
• 41 Newspaper Print Media
• 42 Maps, Publishing, and Civil Authority in the Age of Print
• 43 Cultures of Regulation and Calibration
• 44 Big Data
• Part IX Studies in Practice
• 45 Memory, Materiality, Museology
• 46 Photography, Travel, Archives
• 47 Architecture, Buildings, Stories
• 48 Craft and Practice
• 49 History, Geography and the GeoHumanities
• Index