Dutch inspiration for an engaged pluralist historiography of geography

Abstract

This paper introduces to an international audience the ‘encyclopaedic approach’ to geographical historiography. This approach was developed at the Free University of Amsterdam between 1961 and 1987 by Marcus Heslinga and Andries Kouwenhoven. Signalling how contemporary geography is hampered by the silofication of different subdisciplines and how a better understanding of our shared and pluriform histories can help overcome these silos, the encyclopaedic approach demonstrates how an ‘engaged pluralist’ historiography of geography could take shape. Testifying to its bridge-building character, the approach was developed in response to decades of acerbic conflict between rivalling schools of human geography in the Netherlands. Its central premises involve an acknowledgement that geography is a dynamic discipline with shifting formal and material objects and an empirical strategy to map and relate these different conceptual fields.