Journal of Historical Geography最新文献

The conflict over Wallmapu-Araucanía in southern Chile, between the Spanish conquistadores, the Chilean state and the Mapuche peoples, dates from the 16th century, with a key moment being the forced integration of Mapuche land into the Chilean state in the late nineteenth century. This paper discusses this long period of conflict in three moments: conquest, occupation and liberation, and it focuses on the use of fire as a politico-symbolic and techno-productive tool. A ‘landscapes of power framework’ is used for this historical political ecology analysis, based on texts from the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusions point to the historical importance of the use of fire as a tool not only for physical changes in the landscape, but principally as a tool of political symbolism that relates to a history of conflict of terror and displacement, used by the forces of occupation and resistance.

The European Commission of the Danube (ECD) 1856–1939 published an impressive number of maps, the most important being included in four atlases. However, despite previous efforts, until 1870, no precise map of the Danube Delta based on a unitary triangulation survey has been published. This article examines the mapping effort to recreate the triangulation network containing all the 110 points, based on the distances specified in the 1874 atlas, landmarks discovered during fieldwork and other reference layers used for georeferencing the 1870, 1886 and 1902 maps. Moreover, it offers supplementary information about ECD's vision of the liquid territories and their central feature: water and its representation on cartographic material. In our explanation, we explore the differences between various cartographic products and other sources of information used by the European Commission of the Danube to update its navigation charts. By reproducing these mapping efforts, we highlight the technical challenges for accurately mapping the Danube Delta's everchanging territory. Furthermore, by carrying out the work on digitising and indexing available cartographic material and validating them for accuracy we deliver an enhanced resource that can provide a new understanding for these maps, given their political and economic message. Finally, in this article we offer some reflections on the possible propaganda role the atlases may have played, as the accurate map building role of the ECD does not only assert technical mastery, but also makes a statement of control over the mapped territory.

The Geography of Claudius Ptolemy is the sole work of ancient geography that presents an easily recognizable and rather realistic depiction of the Mediterranean Sea. The article ultimately aims to explain how Ptolemy achieved such results, given the available sources and methods of his time. It explores how Ptolemy structured the space of the Mediterranean Sea, examining how he positioned the major islands (Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Crete, Euboea, Rhodes) and two peninsulas (the Southern Balkans and the Crimea). It is argued that Ptolemy's outlines of the Mediterranean Sea can be accounted for as a result of using three theoretical tools available in his time for map construction: the so-called klimata or reference parallels, the wind rose for determining directions, and the so-called ‘opposite places’ or coastal points presumably situated on the same meridians. The overall outlines of Ptolemy's Mediterranean, and the position of Sicily in particular, are shaped by several latitudes established by earlier geographers. Two regions of Ptolemy's map, in the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, are clearly structured based on the 12-point Timosthenes' wind rose, centered at Ostia and Rhodes, respectively. The position of Crete is found to be linked to the African coast by means of the ‘opposite places’ concept. In several cases, the outlines of Ptolemy's map distinctly correspond and can even serve as illustrations to the relevant descriptions found in Strabo's Geography.

In this ‘Historical Geography at Large’ review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summer school led by Professor Alan Lester at the University of Sussex, entitled ‘How to talk about British colonialism in the middle of a culture war’. The workshop encouraged the participation of non-academics who desired greater knowledge of the British empire and its legacies, to help them negotiate contemporary debates over race, slavery, colonialism, and national identity. I recount the two days of lectures and debate led by Lester, as well as a day-long walking tour of London, where we discussed contentious statues and the even more contentious interior of the government's Commonwealth, Foreign and Development Office building. These generative encounters present an activist and participatory form of historical geography at large.

This article examines how early Cold War anti-communism transformed labor processes at the Port of Manila. In 1950 the threat of communism at the city's port gained the attention of the highest reaches of the US State Department. Shifting diplomatic discourses and a changing Cold War map imbued new meaning into trade union racketeering and Filipino dockworkers who were, it was dubiously argued, on the verge of joining the country's communists. Through archival analysis of diplomatic dispatches, intelligence reports, and newspaper sources, this article examines a series of spectacular events and covert political diplomacy. In particular it explains how an American Jesuit priest in Manila earned the trust of the State Department and played an outsized role in remaking pier-side labor politics. As concern grew in Washington, American diplomats covertly intervened to back the priest. In detailing how the piers staged global geopolitics, the article also situates these affairs in local political contexts to argue for a more nuanced understanding of anti-communism in Southeast Asia. Filipino trade union leaders and government officials colluded with but also subverted and remade American discourses and diplomacy to their own political and economic advantage.

McVeigh and Rolston's Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution puts colonialism at the heart of Ireland's social and economic history, but also as essential to understanding modern Irish politics. The subjugation of Catholics in Northern Ireland was a consequence of the failure to end British control over the island and a perpetuation of ethnic rule characteristic of other white dominions. The incomplete reckoning with colonialism has shaped the Irish engagement with global capitalism including its abandonment of its anticolonial allies with its embrace of the European Union. These historical and political issues are debated in this roundtable in which one of the co-authors of the book responds to interventions probing the work's treatment of capitalism, empire, gender, and anticolonial solidarities.

This article is an attempt to understand a mesh of complex relationships among tangible and intangible socio-economic factors that turned a desert city into the headquarters of one of the mighty polities in the Middle East in the fourteenth century CE. This paper argues that proto-industrialization led to the growth of ‘virtual water’ that helped the city of Yazd, in central Iran, to break free from its water limitation for the first time in its history. Yazd was almost absent in history until the twelfth century, as a peripheral oasis whose sparse population lived off subsistence agriculture irrigated by qanat systems (groundwater-mining subterranean channels). Following the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, the influx of landless refugees changed the relations of production and paved the way for proto-industrialization whose development hinged on skill and capital rather than water and land. Sufism and waqf (endowment tradition) contributed to the expansion of trading routes that facilitated the mobility of goods and people. The qanats were urbanized, and Yazd became an industrial hub where raw materials were processed into tradable products with considerable value added. This paper contributes to a broader understanding of the historical geography of the arid Middle East.

This paper discusses the re-animation of a geography departmental collection through a study of the archives and map collection of the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. The discussion is situated within parallel examples of work on geographical archives and map collections, and wider debates on engagement with archival sources. The paper considers how a previously dormant collection has been re-animated in recent years, conveys the range of source material involved, and discusses the possibilities of digitisation. The paper thereby raises questions which could be asked of the holdings of any academic department, from whatever time period.