Historical geography has consistently been at the cutting edge of scholarship and research in human geography for the last fifty years. The first generation of its practitioners, led by Clifford Darby, Carl Sauer and Vidal de la Blache presented diligent archival studies of patterns of agriculture, industry and the region through time and space. Drawing on this work, but transcending it in terms of theoretical scope and substantive concerns, historical geography has long since developed into a highly interdisciplinary field seeking to fuse the study of space and time. In doing so, it provides new perspectives and insights into fundamental issues across both the humanities and social sciences. Having radically altered and expanded its conception of the theoretical underpinnings, data sources and styles of writing through which it can practice its craft over the past twenty years, historical geography is now a pluralistic, vibrant and interdisciplinary field of scholarship. In particular, two important trends can be discerned. First, there has been a major 'cultural turn' in historical geography which has led to a concern with representation as driving historical-geographical consciousness, leading scholars to a concern with text, interpretation and discourse rather than the more materialist concerns of their predecessors. Secondly, there has been a development of interdisciplinary scholarship, leading to fruitful dialogues with historians of science, art historians and literary scholars in particular which has revitalised the history of geographical thought as a realm of inquiry in historical geography. Studies in Historical Geography aims to provide a forum for the publication of scholarly work which encapsulates and furthers these developments. Aiming to attract an interdisciplinary and international authorship and audience, Studies in Historical Geography will publish theoretical, historiographical and substantive contributions meshing time, space and society.
By Angharad Saunders
September 25, 2019
The act of writing is intimately bound up with the flow and eddy of a writer’s being-within-the-world; the everyday practices, encounters and networks of social life. Exploring the geographies of literary practice in the period 1840-1910, this book takes as its focus the work, or craft, of ...
By Christina E. Dando
March 05, 2019
In the twenty-first century we speak of a geospatial revolution, but over one hundred years ago another mapping revolution was in motion. Women’s lives were in motion: they were playing a greater role in public on a variety of fronts. As women became more mobile (physically, socially, politically),...
By Gavin Bowd, Daniel Clayton
February 21, 2019
Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary – ‘us’ and ‘them’ – terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy. This book explores this ...
By Briony McDonagh
January 23, 2019
Social and economic histories of the long eighteenth century have largely ignored women as a class of landowners and improvers. 1700 to 1830 was a period in which the landscape of large swathes of the English Midlands was reshaped – both materially and imaginatively – by parliamentary enclosure and...
By Judith A. Tyner
April 25, 2018
From the late eighteenth century until about 1840, schoolgirls in the British Isles and the United States created embroidered map samplers and even silk globes. Hundreds of British maps were made and although American examples are more rare, they form a significant collection of artefacts. ...
By Diarmid A. Finnegan, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright
February 12, 2018
’Global’ knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose...
By Anne-Flore Laloë
February 12, 2018
Despite the fact that the vast majority of the earth’s surface is made up of oceans, there has been surprisingly little work by geographers which critically examines the ocean-space and our knowledge and perceptions of it. This book employs a broad conceptual and methodological framework to analyse...