Journal of Historical Geography最新文献

The article examines the development of a new discourse on habitability in the sixteenth century, which breaks with the ancient notion that distinguished between habitable and uninhabitable spaces according to their climate and location. In it, a new conception of the world as completely habitable and exploitable is articulated, and the European ideal of a temperate climate as a reference to characterize the territories and inhabitants of various latitudes is put forward. I considered more than sixty texts related to cosmography, and a hundred maps and diagrams that were published and circulated as Europe expanded around the globe in the early modern period, and that exhibit new semantics and meanings about habitability. This study, through the analysis of these specific sources, aims to contribute to the debate on the origins of the Anthropocene and the political and imaginative logic that enables its development. The author suggests that the discursive pillars that shaped modern thinking about habitability were crucial in giving life to the ideas of extractivism, speculation, and unlimited connectivity that structures the Anthropocene.

Portugal was the longest modern European imperial power, yet the dominant historical narrative is characterised by a celebration of the ‘Discoveries’ and a denial of colonial violence. This is visible in Lisbon's public space, dotted with monuments and statues glorifying the imperial past, while occluding less convenient histories. Especially since 2017, more attention has been given to Portugal's colonial past in public debates. Various initiatives have stimulated discussions about this past, while highlighting socio-cultural issues connected to these histories that continue to affect Portuguese society today. These have contested certain monuments and the narratives they embody, as well as created alternative narratives regarding the public space and cultural memory. This article compares a selection of recent interventions that contest monuments and dominant narratives about Portugal's colonial past. We look at the ways in which certain spaces and monuments become zones of contestation, and how such contestation not only contributes to changing dominant narratives, but also to resignify such spaces and structures. Our goal is to shed light on the variety of agents working towards a change of narrative regarding Lisbon's public space and memory, while reflecting on the socio-political meanings surrounding the presence and absence of monuments related to the colonial past.

This article develops a dual analysis of commemoration in Wales and Trinidad that extends outwards from a monument in the Welsh town of Carmarthen to Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, the most senior officer to die at the battle of Waterloo and an aggressive imperialist who has since been accused of committing crimes against humanity in the name of the British Empire. Using torture and public executions to control the enslaved population of Trinidad during his term as military Governor of Trinidad between 1797 and 1803, Picton accumulated great personal wealth through ownership of slaves and plantations. The article seeks to extend emerging scholarly analysis of commemorative activism and, specifically, the application of memorial publics to a contemporary Caribbean context. Archival research on the history of the Picton monument from regional archives in Carmarthen and national archive collections in Aberystwyth is connected to data from contemporary interviews with activists and public officials in Wales and Trinidad and Tobago as well as detail from public surveys, audits, and policy reviews concerning commemoration in the public realm. Despite wavering public support since its first iteration in 1828, Carmarthen's Picton monument has endured to become an important social arena for reckoning with British colonial violence as demands for its removal in Wales has helped initiate Picton-related decolonising efforts in Trinidad and Tobago producing memorial publics that are variously confined and extended.

This article addresses competing visions of sovereignty that underwrite recent debates about monuments. It turns to a well-known monument built to commemorate the loss of British lives in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–59: the Kanpur (Cawnpore) Memorial Well Monument. The memorial stood over a well in which the bodies of 200 British women and children killed by Indian sepoys lay buried. A large landscaped enclosure was built around the memorial and only European visitors were given access to the site. On August 15, 1947, the day of Indian independence from British rule, a crowd overran the site and defaced the monument. Much of the monument was subsequently dismantled and moved to a more secluded site within the Kanpur cantonment. The desire among the British stakeholders to leave no trace of its former identity focused attention on those aspects of meaning ascribed to the monument that could not be erased. Building on the Hobbesian idea of passion as a key element of sovereignty, this article argues that the monument may be viewed as an aegis — an apotropaion — that deflects gaze more than it enables attentive looking.

There is a significant dearth of knowledge regarding changes in intra-metropolitan local labor markets in former socialist countries, which encompass extensive parts of Eurasia and where industrialization and urbanization were centrally controlled by the state. This paper aims to contribute to the existing body of research by (a) illuminating and explaining changes in the spatial structure of urban regions in Poland during the transition from 'extensive' to 'intensive' socialist urban development (1973-1983), and (b) investigating changes in commuting patterns and their socio-demographic composition during the transition to 'mature' socialism. We selected four major city-regions for analysis: gdański, katowicki, łódzki, and warszawski. These regions were carefully chosen to represent different types of polycentric development and diverse economic profiles. The main findings of our paper are as follows: (a) despite the substantial population growth and the unprecedented rate of new housing development in the four city-regions, the overall impact of the socialist transition to intensive urbanization on their spatial structure was relatively minor, (b) the intensification of urbanization process in Poland contributed to the reduction in commute distance for all socioeconomic and demographic groups of workers.

This paper explores the placement and function of the discipline of geography in the expansion of the Japanese empire, doing so through the prism of the work and field research of Tada Fumio, a leading geographer in Japan both before and after 1945. This examination of this aspect of Tada Fumio's career and its interweaving with the construction and consolidation of Japan's empire will broaden recent studies of imperial Japan's simultaneous encounter with geopolitics and fascism while engaging with Japan's developing ideas about geography as a political and cultural discipline. This paper demonstrates the importance of the entwined histories of Japanese and German geographers in the Japanese empire, as well as documenting Tada Fumio's activities in Manchuria (northeast China) and on the Korean peninsula. Finally, the paper reveals fissures in the historical record of Japanese geographers in continental Asia and, until such time as more subaltern voices can be found, seeks to lay down the foundation for further research on the study of geography in the Japanese empire.