Pub Date : 2026-01-02DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.12.001
Tang Xiaofeng
This ‘Historical Geography at Large’ paper discusses two noteworthy features in the development of historical geography in China over the past half-century. The first is the close connection between historical-geographical research and the practice of national construction during the first decade or so following 1949, often referred to as the period of ‘New Construction’. The second concerns the Reform and Opening-up era since the 1980s, during which, alongside rapid modernization, a societal trend of returning to tradition has emerged. Against this backdrop, various public lectures and popular science works by historical geographers have been warmly received by the general public. As such, the paper outlines the impact of historical geography beyond academia in China, as well as the impact upon the discipline of the broader political and physical environment.
{"title":"Historical geography in contemporary China: Key opportunities and characteristics","authors":"Tang Xiaofeng","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.12.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.12.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This ‘Historical Geography at Large’ paper discusses two noteworthy features in the development of historical geography in China over the past half-century. The first is the close connection between historical-geographical research and the practice of national construction during the first decade or so following 1949, often referred to as the period of ‘New Construction’. The second concerns the Reform and Opening-up era since the 1980s, during which, alongside rapid modernization, a societal trend of returning to tradition has emerged. Against this backdrop, various public lectures and popular science works by historical geographers have been warmly received by the general public. As such, the paper outlines the impact of historical geography beyond academia in China, as well as the impact upon the discipline of the broader political and physical environment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 149-152"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145883260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-27DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.013
Manuel Méndez , Damir Galaz-Mandakovic
The transformation of the Atacama Desert into a global mining production hub required both material and conceptual changes to the territory. A critical factor in this process was the reframing of water as an exclusively economic resource. This article examines the geo-historical process of converting the waters of the Loa River into a key resource for mining development in the central Atacama Desert. Using Historical Political Ecology and Hybrid Geography approaches, the research draws on unpublished administrative historical archives. The use and appropriation of the Loa's waters involved a significant shift in power relations, accompanied by scientific and technical narratives as well as legal and material transformations that directly impacted the basin's historical activities and bio-physical characteristics. Ultimately, within the context of economic and political competition, the Loa's waters were transformed into virtual waters that flowed to the Global North in the form of nitrates and copper.
{"title":"Harnessing the flow: Mining, water, and energy in the Loa River basin (Chile, 1879–1956)","authors":"Manuel Méndez , Damir Galaz-Mandakovic","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The transformation of the Atacama Desert into a global mining production hub required both material and conceptual changes to the territory. A critical factor in this process was the reframing of water as an exclusively economic resource. This article examines the geo-historical process of converting the waters of the Loa River into a key resource for mining development in the central Atacama Desert. Using Historical Political Ecology and Hybrid Geography approaches, the research draws on unpublished administrative historical archives. The use and appropriation of the Loa's waters involved a significant shift in power relations, accompanied by scientific and technical narratives as well as legal and material transformations that directly impacted the basin's historical activities and bio-physical characteristics. Ultimately, within the context of economic and political competition, the Loa's waters were transformed into <em>virtual waters</em> that flowed to the Global North in the form of nitrates and copper.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 134-146"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145839930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-24DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.012
Greg Bankoff
Manila burned in the past as it still burns today. When the United States occupied the city in 1898, it inherited a Spanish colonial city rooted in classical urban traditions yet largely built of highly flammable nipa palm, bamboo and wood. This article examines urban fire in a colonial context, contrasting Manila's experience with better-studied Western cities to argue that industrial models of fire history cannot be applied uncritically to colonial settings. Shaped by unequal power relations and hybrid urban forms – a small European-style core amid a vast indigenous townscape – Manila's fire regime exposed distinct social and spatial vulnerabilities. Using fire statistics from the Municipal Board of Manila (1901–1913) and contemporary newspapers, the study reveals how fire reflected the wider tensions of empire, inequality, and urban change.
{"title":"Urban fire in an early American colonial metropolis: Manila 1901–1913","authors":"Greg Bankoff","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Manila burned in the past as it still burns today. When the United States occupied the city in 1898, it inherited a Spanish colonial city rooted in classical urban traditions yet largely built of highly flammable nipa palm, bamboo and wood. This article examines urban fire in a colonial context, contrasting Manila's experience with better-studied Western cities to argue that industrial models of fire history cannot be applied uncritically to colonial settings. Shaped by unequal power relations and hybrid urban forms – a small European-style core amid a vast indigenous townscape – Manila's fire regime exposed distinct social and spatial vulnerabilities. Using fire statistics from the Municipal Board of Manila (1901–1913) and contemporary newspapers, the study reveals how fire reflected the wider tensions of empire, inequality, and urban change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 122-133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145822776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-23DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.011
R. Alexander Hunter, Roderick MacKay
Scholars of timber colonialism debate the utility of the ‘frontier’ as an analytic for understanding the historical trajectory of the lumbering industry, an extractive practice that was at once transient and that lingered in places for extended periods. This paper examines the temporality of historical lumbering in Ontario's Algonquin Park, among Canada's most iconic natural places, but also the site of two centuries of industrial scale lumbering. Indeed, the park's founding, an act that alienated Indigenous Algonquin people from their traditional territories, was intended in part to protect trees that timber companies and the government counted as assets. By drawing on archaeological data the paper argues the history of lumbering involved multiple overlapping ‘frontiers’ as the industry created new resources in response to social and technological shifts and market demands. The paper shows how the anticipated mobility inherent to these frontiers shaped the lives of workers who lived through cutting seasons in Algonquin's woods. In sum, the paper posits that Algonquin Park's logging frontier was (and is) a cultural space of extraction. The material traces of lumbering that remain in Algonquin's woods testify to the repeated reconstitution of a dynamic lumbering resource frontier.
{"title":"A Dynamic Timber Frontier: An Archaeological Perspective on Lumbering in Algonquin Provincial Park (1836–1930)","authors":"R. Alexander Hunter, Roderick MacKay","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Scholars of timber colonialism debate the utility of the ‘frontier’ as an analytic for understanding the historical trajectory of the lumbering industry, an extractive practice that was at once transient and that lingered in places for extended periods. This paper examines the temporality of historical lumbering in Ontario's Algonquin Park, among Canada's most iconic natural places, but also the site of two centuries of industrial scale lumbering. Indeed, the park's founding, an act that alienated Indigenous Algonquin people from their traditional territories, was intended in part to protect trees that timber companies and the government counted as assets. By drawing on archaeological data the paper argues the history of lumbering involved multiple overlapping ‘frontiers’ as the industry created new resources in response to social and technological shifts and market demands. The paper shows how the anticipated mobility inherent to these frontiers shaped the lives of workers who lived through cutting seasons in Algonquin's woods. In sum, the paper posits that Algonquin Park's logging frontier was (and is) a cultural space of extraction. The material traces of lumbering that remain in Algonquin's woods testify to the repeated reconstitution of a dynamic lumbering resource frontier.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 108-121"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145813839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The gaihōzu (外邦図), ‘maps of outer lands' produced by the Japanese Imperial Army between 1873 and 1945, represent one of the most comprehensive cartographic records of East and Inner Asia. Created during Japan's imperial expansion, the gaihōzu offer rich detail of territories beyond Japanese control. Despite their military origins, the gaihōzu now serve as geographical time capsules, preserving landscapes since transformed by modernization. This study documents the Great Mongolian Road, a major yet understudied east-west caravan route across Inner Asia. Through analysis of the Tōa Yochizu (東亞輿地圖) ‘Maps of East Asia’ series and field verification across 1200 km of southern Mongolia, we document the route's infrastructure for the first time. The gaihōzu capture not merely routes but complete support systems, including water sources, terrain features, and settlements vital for navigation and survival in these harsh arid environments. By mapping this historical corridor, these once-secret military documents provide valuable baseline data for historical geography, cultural heritage preservation, and environmental change assessment across the landscapes of Asia.
{"title":"Mapping the great Mongolian road: The gaihōzu maps as records of Inner Asian trade networks","authors":"Chris McCarthy , Simon Phillips , Troy Sternberg , Uyanga Torguud , Yuki Konagaya , Takahiro Ozaki , Keiji Yano , Mitsuko Watanabe , Buho Hoshino , Adiya Yadamsuren , Battogtokh Nasanbat , Erdenebuyan Enkhjargal","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.015","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.015","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The gaihōzu (外邦図), ‘maps of outer lands' produced by the Japanese Imperial Army between 1873 and 1945, represent one of the most comprehensive cartographic records of East and Inner Asia. Created during Japan's imperial expansion, the gaihōzu offer rich detail of territories beyond Japanese control. Despite their military origins, the gaihōzu now serve as geographical time capsules, preserving landscapes since transformed by modernization. This study documents the Great Mongolian Road, a major yet understudied east-west caravan route across Inner Asia. Through analysis of the Tōa Yochizu (東亞輿地圖) ‘Maps of East Asia’ series and field verification across 1200 km of southern Mongolia, we document the route's infrastructure for the first time. The gaihōzu capture not merely routes but complete support systems, including water sources, terrain features, and settlements vital for navigation and survival in these harsh arid environments. By mapping this historical corridor, these once-secret military documents provide valuable baseline data for historical geography, cultural heritage preservation, and environmental change assessment across the landscapes of Asia.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 89-107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145813840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-19DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.010
Carolina Tytelman
This paper shows how speculative activity over the forest can be a form of timber colonialism. It focuses on the Labrador forest at the center of the Labrador/Quebec boundary dispute. Since the 1880s, the imagined potential for forestry in Labrador generated speculative activity and competing colonial ownership claims. In 1927, after decades of ambiguity and growing conflict between the Canadian province of Quebec and the Dominion of Newfoundland, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in England defined the Labrador boundary by the height of land, giving jurisdiction over most of the interior of the Quebec/Labrador Peninsula to Newfoundland. Throughout this colonial quarrel, the Innu people, the Indigenous inhabitants of the disputed area, were ignored. The ontological creation of the forest of Labrador as a natural resource and the establishment of the boundary resulted in the colonial encroaching of the Innu territory, Nitassinan. This process continues to marginalize the Innu people's practices in, relationships with, and conceptualizations of their territory, contributing to the ongoing colonial dispossession of their lands, even when the Innu nominally participated in a co-management process of the forest in Central Labrador that was at the heart of the boundary dispute.
{"title":"Timber colonialism in Labrador/Nitassinan: The case of the Labrador boundary","authors":"Carolina Tytelman","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.11.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper shows how speculative activity over the forest can be a form of timber colonialism. It focuses on the Labrador forest at the center of the Labrador/Quebec boundary dispute. Since the 1880s, the imagined potential for forestry in Labrador generated speculative activity and competing colonial ownership claims. In 1927, after decades of ambiguity and growing conflict between the Canadian province of Quebec and the Dominion of Newfoundland, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in England defined the Labrador boundary by the height of land, giving jurisdiction over most of the interior of the Quebec/Labrador Peninsula to Newfoundland. Throughout this colonial quarrel, the Innu people, the Indigenous inhabitants of the disputed area, were ignored. The ontological creation of the forest of Labrador as a natural resource and the establishment of the boundary resulted in the colonial encroaching of the Innu territory, Nitassinan. This process continues to marginalize the Innu people's practices in, relationships with, and conceptualizations of their territory, contributing to the ongoing colonial dispossession of their lands, even when the Innu nominally participated in a co-management process of the forest in Central Labrador that was at the heart of the boundary dispute.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"91 ","pages":"Pages 77-88"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145784427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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