Journal of Historical Geography最新文献

The World's Edge — The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity showcases, in exhibition and book form, the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946) and his project to chart photographically the edges and extremities of the Atlantic Basin. Cooper's large black-and-white prints, often abstract and tied tenuously to a specific location by words, are visually arresting and intensely geographical. This essay points to Cooper's work as an imaginative geography that inspires a deep rethinking about how we encounter land, sea, and sky; map space; contemplate emptiness; label extremity; and assign meaning to place.

Engaging with the literature that since Horden's and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea has reflected on the multicultural dimension of the Mediterranean over the long period, this paper aims to discuss Carlo Maranelli's (1876–1939) perspective on the Adriatic Sea, highlighting his radical democratic view and situating his contribution in the present post-national and multicultural scenario. Despite not being renowned in the international debate, Maranelli is a key figure as an anti-colonialist and social-democratic geographer in the context of natural positivist and nationalist Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At the 6th Italian Geographical Congress in 1907, Maranelli discussed a paper on the economic geography of the Adriatic, in which he emphasized the multicultural dimension of trade and networks on both sides of the sea, linked to the historical framework of different languages, rules, and traditions that coexisted and shaped the Adriatic space. His views challenged the nationalist perspectives that dominated mainstream geographical analyses at the time and aimed to sustain an imperialist project of domination, later actualized by the narrative of the Mare Nostrum, linked to the fascist goal of extending Italian domination over the entire Mediterranean. We argue that rediscovering Maranelli's work on the Adriatic can be useful in the current debates for a relational and inclusive perspective on the Mediterranean and its inhabitants.

In this paper we examine the activities of US Army topographers and engineers in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) watershed during the violent transformation of the region from the heartlands of the Creek confederacy to US territorial control. A vital waterway for the Creek in the late eighteenth century, the rivers would become an important transportation network in the US plantation economy by the early nineteenth century. We emphasize that the army made its initial infrastructural improvements in the region to provide security for the plantation system. Army engineering in the ACF watershed began in the struggle for the Gulf borderlands, as white American settlers, British forces, Indigenous peoples, and Black maroons fought for control over the contested terrain. US engineers and topographers produced territorial knowledge and physical infrastructure to facilitate the occupation of Indigenous territory and elimination of potential spaces of Black freedom. Topographic knowledge would later serve as the foundation for restructuring the land as property, naturalizing its possession by white plantation owners. Similarly, roads and waterway improvements, created to facilitate troop movements, would later serve as vital transportation infrastructure for settlement and expanding plantation slavery. This paper demonstrates how military engineering techniques designed to secure the Nation in the context of race war subsequently provided the coordinates for reorganizing the land within an emergent plantation economy inside its territorial borders.

Between 1876 and World War II, Antwerp's business elite regularly convened at the lectures of the Société Royale de Géographie d'Anvers (SRGA, ‘Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp’). Similarly to other geographical societies emerging across Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, these lectures employed the magic lantern to project visual images from distant lands. The SRGA had close ties with King Leopold II of Belgium and his imperial pursuits. Nestled within the international port city of Antwerp, the society attracted an audience vital to Leopold II's colonial ambitions – the city's commercial and financial elite. This study reflects on knowledge production and dissemination within this scientific circle in a Belgian colonial context. Rather than academic enrichment, the evenings were leisure activities, fostering connections among the business elite. Against this backdrop, the article reflects on the concept of scientific legitimacy during a specific era of Belgium's colonial past.

This paper discusses ideas of anarchist (historical) geographies of rivers and seas. It does so by addressing works of early anarchist geographer Lev Ilich Mechnikov (mentioned here with the more known French spelling Léon Metchnikoff) (1838–1888), which lie at the origin of broader ‘Mediterranean metaphors’ comparing the globalising role of oceanic navigation to early Mediterranean connectedness, mainly discussed by Metchnikoff in his key book La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques [Civilisation and Great Historical Rivers]. A close collaborator of Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin and a multifarious scholarly talent, Metchnikoff provided contributions that still need to be fully rediscovered. Based on a systematic reading of Metchnikoff's archives and works, I argue that, starting from historical rivers and the early Mediterranean, his ideas on the historical roles that can be possibly (and relationally) played by water-land assemblages can nourish current notions of more-than-wet ontologies and critical geopolitics. Eventually, these ideas provide models for understanding spatialities that are alternative to those of state borders, bounded land and terracentric territorialities, contributing to shape the open and boundless world that is currently conceived by scholarship informed to pluriversal notions of critical Mediterraneanism.

Tourism and conservation policies in Sweden share a significant common history, involving constructions of the non-human world. In this paper, the development of this historical relationship is traced through national park policies and the Swedish Tourist Association's yearbooks, from the late nineteenth century onward. We explore this in theoretical terms of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘boundary struggles’: constantly mutating institutionalized divisions between capitalist production and nature, public governance, and social reproductive activities. Through our analysis, we identify five discursive formations — significant changes in the discursive constructions of the non-human world entailing reconfigurations of boundary struggles. Shifts between notions of sublime and wild nature external to capitalism, as stakes in welfare state accessibility debate, and as tools in the current moment of intensified commodification of the non-human world, confirm the persistence of boundary struggles in capitalist society.

The coasts of Australia are bestowed with place names (toponyms) that offer great cultural insights into the Australian history and its European connections. This paper focusses on the 598 place names set up by the authors of the narratives and atlases of the French voyage of discovery captained by Nicolas Baudin who undertook the surveying and exploration of parts of the South and West coasts of New Holland, and of the east and north coasts of Van Diemen's Land between 1801 and 1803. These names have been gathered into a database where they have been categorised, for example, according to the endeavour of personalities (scientific, military, administrative among others) or members of the expedition. The article shows that the French toponyms mirror the building up after the turmoils of the French Revolution of a new national narrative which gives pride of place to the men of science, cultural figures, and military officers dear to the French emperor, Napoléon I, and whose work and actions were portrayed as great examples for the nation. This retroactive reading of the French nomenclature discloses an Australian early nineteenth century French background with around half the names still recognised today.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Adriatic was still insufficiently explored sea. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), which in 1806 resulted in a territorial expansion of the French Empire to the eastern Adriatic (formerly part of the Austrian Empire), highlighted the issues of territorial sovereignty both on land and at sea, triggering the first hydrographic survey of the Adriatic. Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military operations were conducted precisely at sea, hired Charles François Beautemps-Beaupré, his best hydrographer, to conduct a hydrographic survey of the eastern coasts of the Adriatic. Conducted in the period 1806–1809, the survey resulted in the first modern hydrographic charts of the Adriatic that were accompanied by a hydrographic report, containing an analysis of its currents, winds, tides, and geomagnetism. Beautemps-Beaupré’s campaign was the first scientifically based survey of the Adriatic whose charts and the attached report represented a shift towards an all-encompassing convention of maritime cartography. It enhanced both the sovereignty over the newly acquired sea and the insight into the maritime theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, thus confirming a strong union between political power and science. The aim of the article is to show why the French survey was a turning-point in geographical knowledge on Adriatic and how French imperialism affected the knowledge on martime geography of the Adriatic Sea.