Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hill stations in India

By the 1880s, imperial government's practice of ‘retreating’ to the Indian hill stations for much of the year was well established. Despite the strength of this new tradition, such a relocation of colonial administration never lacked its critics. This paper examines the expanding administrative use of the hill stations from the early nineteenth century through the 1880s. As the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ framework for British control of India was formed, conflicting strategies and practices for maintaining imperial control required mediation and contrasting frameworks for defining duty and loyalty between government and subject vied for dominance. The significance of Utilitarian thought, changing appraisals of climate and constructions of race are evaluated in an analysis of the imperial hill stations.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

New spaces of citizenship? Rethinking gendered participation and empowerment in South Africa

This paper draws on empirical research in South Africa to explore questions about the exclusionary nature of citizenship, the problems and possibilities of participatory citizenship and its potential reconceptualisation through the lens of gender. The paper examines some of the major debates and policies in South Africa around issues of citizenship, participation and gender and explores why the discursive accommodation of gender equity by the South African government is not fully realised in its attempts to construct substantive and participatory citizenship. It explores some of the emergent spaces of radical citizenship that marginalized groups and black women, in particular, are shaping in response. Findings suggest that whilst there are possibilities for creating alternative, more radical citizenship spaces, these can also be problematic and exclusionary. The paper draws on recent feminist writing to examine the possibilities for rethinking citizenship as an ethical, non-instrumental social status, distinct from both political participation and economic independence. This reframing of citizenship moves beyond notions of ‘impasse’ or ‘hollowness’, challenges the public/private distinction that still frames many debates about citizenship and considers the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity. The paper argues that citizenship is shaped by differing social, political and cultural contexts and this brings into sharp focus the problematic assumption of the universal applicability of western concepts and theories.     

William H. Tillinghast, John K. Wright, and some antecedents of American humanistic geography

The antecedents of twentieth century humanistic geography in America lie in part in the cultivation of geography by classicists, historians, librarians, and other nineteenth and early twentieth century humanistic scholars and writers. One of them, William H. Tillinghast, a Harvard College librarian trained both in classics and history, wrote an exemplary essay in the 1880s on ‘The Geographical Knowledge of the Ancients’ that provided a model analysis of early Western geographic ideas anticipating that of John K. Wright in the 1920s. Institutional analysis suggests their common rootage in an evolving Harvard ‘school’ of humanistic geography based in history and classics, the product both of a sequence of mentor/disciple relationships and a broader institutional environment shaping Wright's early concepts concerning the history of geography. 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.     

From town to town: how commercial travel connected manufacturers and markets during the industrial revolution

Positioning itself with regards to debates on the role of regionalization in the industrial revolution and on consumer and retailing revolutions, this paper uses the records of John Shaw, hardware factor of Wolverhampton, to examine how commercial travel created real spatial interactions across the industrializing economy of northern England in the period 1810–15. The paper argues that by integrating production and consumption, commercial travel played a vital part in advancing and reconciling the concurrent but apparently conflicting processes of economic regionalization and economic integration that characterized the period. Empirically, the paper contributes original data indicating concrete patterns of interaction across the space economy of early nineteenth century northern England in terms of both ‘routes’ and the intensity of interactions. The empirical material also allows for discussion of customer identities, the structure of geographically dispersed commodity chains and regional variations, if any, the nature of customer relationships.     

Changes and survival: the territory of Lleida (Catalonia) after the twelfth-century conquest

The city of Lleida and its surrounding territory were conquered by the counts of Barcelona and Urgell in late 1149, ending over four centuries of Muslim rule. This territory formed the western frontier of Catalonia with Aragon and Lleida, and would be one of the major cities of what was known as ‘New Catalonia’, the lands conquered to the south and west of the Carolingian ‘Spanish March’ during the twelfth century. The article describes how patterns of settlement, agriculture and fortification changed after the conquest to conform to the needs of a feudal society. It describes continuities such as the importance of irrigation canals, as well as the reorganisation of the population with Christian settlement and transfers and expulsions of the Islamic population and a greater concentration of the population into fortified spaces.     

Imperialism and nationalism: The Home Rule struggle and border creation in Ireland, 1885–1925

This article explores relationships between imperialism and nationalism, illustrated by their interactions in the struggle over devolved Irish ‘Home Rule’ and partition between 1885 and 1925. Ireland's partition border was primarily an imperial creation shaped by the prolonged, complex and unequal interactions between Irish nationalism and British imperialism. But partition was by no means an inevitable outcome of a mutually constitutive and ambiguous relationship where British imperialism had long characterised Ireland as a frontier zone but one within the core of empire. The Irish case serves as a reminder of the role of imperial arbitration in modern state and nation-building, and also in sowing the seeds of contemporary conflicts. This argument draws on the recent ‘re-discovery of imperialism’ and is advanced as a corrective to reading history backwards through the lenses of contemporary national states. It challenges the tendency to draw overly sharp temporal and spatial distinctions between imperialism and nationalism as rival ideologies and practices.     

The moral high ground in Albany: rhetorics and practices of an ‘Olmstedian’ park, 1855–1875

The mid-nineteenth century park movement represented a reaction to the tensions of growing, industrializing urban spaces. Parks provided a concrete way of aligning moral agendas with the built urban form, and a vehicle for varied and sometimes contradictory elite and middle class concepts of the purposes of public space. This paper describes conflicting strands in the rhetorics and practices of the ‘Olmstedian’ Washington Park in Albany, NY, placing them in the broader context of park ideologies. Contradictory strands in its discourses and moral agendas were never resolved, but they accomplished their fundamental purpose of creating a rhetorical space for civic leadership, and exclusive residential and public spaces for the middle class. Park regulations clearly expressed the culture of ‘refinement’ which accompanied the emergence of middle class sensibilities in the era before the electric streetcar. The park realigned elite residential development and guided Albany's subsequent social geography.     

Breaking ground—marginality and resistance in (post) unification Germany

Drawing on postcolonial theory and recent geographical debates on subaltern speech and marginal positioning this paper asks what the relevance of ‘place’ is for attempts to ‘transgress’ and ‘resist’ the marginalisation of (former) East Germans in (post)unification Germany. My intention is not to equate the postcolonial situation with that of East Germany after unification, but rather to engage the theoretical and political insights of postcolonial critiques to highlight the conflicts and contradictions that emerge from attempts to move ‘beyond’ oppressive binary constructions. Questions of speaking and listening, as well as seeing and being seen are attended to with a strong focus on the paradoxical places and spaces within which they come to matter in contradictory ways. How do the practices of listening/speaking, seeing/being-seen function to place particular groups in the social margin or centre of ‘(re)united’ Germany? Does ‘power’ reside less with the speaker than with the listener, or is it still important to claim voice (rather than being ‘given’ voice) as an ‘other’?The paper tries to work through some of the tensions, conflicts and concerns that have emerged from my PhD research on the construction of East German marginality through media practices, but also in German social, cultural, political and academic discourse. Perhaps the most significant of these conflicts is that of having lost one’s politically bounded place (as a GDR citizen) and yet finding oneself reconstituted in the (symbolic as well as socio-economic and political) margin of a nation that, to this date, is described as ‘divided within itself’. The sense of placelessness becomes politically relevant when ‘resistant’ or ‘transgressive’ acts are (to be) performed that have no ‘proper’ place from which to embark or in which to be staged. Similar to the post-colonial situation, where no ‘original beyond’ exists, and despite being frequently posited as a symbolically separate entity, ‘East Germans’ have no place for return, only an impossible situation of being constantly ‘out-of-place’ even in the locales that used to be ‘home’.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

The anxiety of cultural authenticity in Turkish communitarian thought: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Peyami Safa on Europe and modernity

The uneasy tension between ongoing disputes about Turkey's Europeanisation and an emphasis on cultural authenticity has characterised much of Turkish social and political thought over the last two centuries. This article explores conceptions of Europe, modernity and tradition contained in the writings of two twentieth-century Turkish writers, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) and Peyami Safa (1899–1961) whose writings express an anxiety of cultural authenticity. Varieties of communitarian thinking, coupled with an emphasis on a ‘synthesis’ between past and future, tradition and modernity, Turkey and Europe, had been invoked and advocated by many writers and scholars who sought to come to terms with the challenges surrounding Turkey's Europeanisation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tanpınar and Safa are widely considered to be among the most influential representatives of this deeply rooted communitarian tradition in modern Turkish social imaginary. By drawing on Tanpınar's and Safa's essays on politics, society, culture and the East–West distinction, this article demonstrates the radical divergences between their perspectives and draws out the political implications of their views of Europe, modernity and tradition. Although he appears to be one of the advocates of Turkey's Europeanisation and the idea of a civilisational synthesis, Safa's conservatism is based on a sketchy theory of radical particularity and cultural essentialism that reflects a repudiation of universalism and cosmopolitanism, and which shows a tendency bordering on a celebration of all collectivist self-assertions and struggles against liberal democracy. Tanpınar's communitarian vision, on the other hand, with its emphasis on ‘tradition’ and ‘continuity’, aims to reconcile the political ideals of European modernity with a restored cultural tradition. One of the primary purposes of this article is to fully work out the originality of Tanpınar's thought by highlighting the intimations of a distinctively hermeneutical dimension that figure prominently in his writings, and which have largely gone unnoticed.     

Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef

Through a close reading of the Anglo–Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's 1994 novel Reef, this paper interrogates the misplaced concrete-ness regarding Sri Lanka's status as archetypal ‘island-state’. I show how Reef maps an imaginative geography which both naturalizes and problematizes Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’. Through the memory of the novel's main protagonist the author's exploration of modernity fixes geographical knowledge of Sri Lanka. ‘Island-ness’ emerges as a rationalization of modernity, one with its roots in Sri Lanka's colonial experience which the author then unpicks as he proceeds to explore the limits of modernity. I suggest that Reef demonstrates how island-ness is an inescapable yet problematic dimension of contemporary Sri Lankan geography. This is an ambivalent contradiction that fuels a civil war in Sri Lanka which relentlessly and sanguinely contests the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness. The paper emphasizes how Romesh Gunesekera's hybrid position, as an author born in Sri Lanka and now writing from England, constitutes a post-colonial intervention which allows us to ask new questions about Sri Lanka's ‘natural’ insularity. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.     

Communications, innovation, and territory: the production network of Swift Meat Packing and the creation of a national US market

This study is an historical and theoretical account of how market territory, configured from flows of production and trade, gets reshaped by the innovative behavior of business firms. The research for this study focuses on the production network developed in the late nineteenth century by the American firm of G.F. Swift & Company. The central theme of this case is how businesses reorganize their strategies, routines and structure as transport and communications technology changes, and how the innovations in production networks engineered by firms as part of this reorganization, become territorially embedded and reconfigure the space for economic activity. The production network pioneered by Swift from railroad and telegraph technology, created long-distance production and trade linkages in the economy that widened the boundaries of formerly-localized markets, and established the foundations of a more geographically-extended, nationally-oriented market space. As it widened market boundaries, however, the network of Swift concentrated economic activity in new places. The essay builds a theoretical framework of the route from the ‘communications revolution,’ to the process of innovation in the firm, to the production network, to territorial transformation. This framework reveals how the railroad and telegraph revolution enabled firms in the US to develop innovations in production networks on the basis of vertically-integrated, geographically-dispersed enterprises organized over a national market space. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved     

Frontiers and boundaries of pre-modern Japan

In the popular imagination, Japan is an island country with relatively static, geographically-determined borders. This is not supported by the historical record. Historically, Japan's borders have been determined primarily by political factors, and their location, nature, and significance have varied considerably over time. Not surprisingly, these changes correlate closely with the evolution of the Japanese state. In general, periods of strong central government were associated with territorial expansion and the establishment of relatively well-defined political and administrative boundaries. In periods of weak government, territorial expansion came to a halt and border regions devolved into vague, poorly-defined frontiers. Whether government was weak or strong, however, the concept of territorial sovereignty remained alien to Japanese thinking until the nineteenth century, when the country was incorporated, more or less against its will, within the «modern world-system». Far from being geographically pre-ordained, Japan's national boundaries—at least in the modern sense of the term—are less than 200 years old.     

The end and renewal of ideology in Central Europe and in Hungary

Society has to be understood as a process of fast changes (revolutions) and slow transformations (reformism). This is what has been happening in Central Europe, where the big changes of 1989–1990 were preceded by several small social, political and ideological transformations. When analysing Central European societies, one should also remember that there is an ‘official’ society and a ‘hidden’ society.In addition, the relation of state and civil society is deformed since in most cases the civil sphere is repressed and undeveloped due to the predominance of the ‘official state’. In such societies, you cannot find real hegemony but only dominance, which is practiced by the state not only in the sphere of economy, society and culture, but also in and through ideology.The essence of modern totalitarian society cannot be understood without addressing the permanent existence of unofficial, ‘civil’ ideologies penetrating the ‘hidden’ society at the same time as the ‘official’ ideology. Apart from the slow transformation of ideologies and the crisis of ‘official’ ideology, the strengthening of ‘hidden’ ideology is also required for revolutionary changes. This is how a historically new situation with new ideologies can come into being, in clear contrast to the renewal of old ideologles, which generates a mixture of the old and the new. A look at what happened in Central Europe, but particularly Hungary, should clarify the point.     

Historical geography and the society/nature “problematic”: the perspective of J. F. Schouw,G. P. Marsh and E. Reclus

The “retreat” of the recent past within geography to a conception of the discipline as an ahistoric science which is either spatial or ecological is seen to be an atavism—a throwback to a disciplinary framework or “problematic” which dichotomizes human society and nature into fixed exclusive categories. This essay explores an alternative “problematic” which integrates society's spatial and ecological dimensions in a study of the historical process of “dialectical” interaction between society and its geographic environment, and the political and economic consequences of this interaction. The significance of this alternative approach is elucidated through an examination of its emergence, at the time of the origins of modern geography in the early nineteenth century. Its developing importance for the present-day position of the discipline is exemplified in the work of three prominent, socially engaged, nineteenth-century geographers. Although these geographers have tended to be either ignored or misunderstood in the recent literature, their approach has much to offer the field at a time when its division into ahistoric spatial and ecological disciplines is being questioned.     

Articulations of rule: landowners, revolution, and territory in Chiapas, Mexico 1920–1962

This article examines struggles over the spaces of landed property in north-central Chiapas. Engaging the work of Mexico's ‘new cultural history’ and geographic theorizing of the entanglements of space, hegemony, and territoriality, it argues against widespread representations of Chiapan landowners maintaining autonomous domains of domination ‘untouched’ by the Mexican Revolution. Rather, the contours of landed property were made and remade through the complex articulation of landowner, state, and indigenous territorialities. Based on this analysis, it concludes that territoriality—as the diverse constellation of social–spatial practices through which space is bounded and these boundings sedimented with meanings—is both a central arena through which hegemony operates and a constant outcome of those struggles.     

Der priesterkönig Johannes und sein Reich — Legende oder realität?

In the middle of the twelfth century rumours of a powerful Christian ruler beyond Islam, called Prester John, spread through Europe. In his vast kingdom, according to report, society was at peace and strange people, animals and plants, as well as valuable precious stones with miraculous powers, were to be found.At first this kingdom was sought for in India, then in the thirteenth century was transferred to Central Asia, and in the fourteenth to Ethiopia. Henry the Navigator and his captains tried to reach this powerful ruler in order to combine with him in attacking Islam in the rear. But it was only in 1517 that the Portuguese succeeded in contacting the Ethiopian ruler in person and helping him against his Islamic enemies. Through political ineptitude they made themselves unpopular, were persecuted, and finally in 1640 driven out of the country.Using an interdisciplinary approach based on history and ethnology, but also on geography, Germanistics and theology, an attempt is made here to decide if Prester John really existed and where his kingdom was, and, failing both possibilities, to ascertain who in the twelfth century had an interest in the ‘discovery’ of such a person, and to review the consequences of this ‘discovery’ in subsequent centuries.     

Hermoupolis: the archaeology of a Mediterranean industrial city

Abstract

Hermoupolis, on the island of Syros, developed in the nineteenth century as the first industrial city in Greece. Its historical monuments are of more than national importance, providing evidence which does not survive elsewhere of particular processes, and forming a landscape which illuminates the whole history of industrialisation.     

Remapping Tutira: contours in the environmental history of New Zealand

Although members of the first generation of professional geographers in New Zealand identified the ousting of the indigenous plant cover and the partial establishment of an exotic (mainly European) vegetation in its place as an essential theme in the history of that country, and Alfred Crosby made a brief case study of the islands in hisEcological Imperialism, scale problems have made it difficult to develop a microgeographical perspective on the often intricate and incremental processes of environmental transformation. To this end, this paper explores a detailed account of the natural history of a single North Island sheep station written by its owner, W. H. Guthrie Smith, in 1921. By readingTutira, an idiosyncratic but fascinating work, with a geographical eye, the local dimensions of the floral and faunal invasion of New Zealand are revealed. “A record of minute alterations noted on one patch of land” illuminates the biogeographical processes by which New Zealand was transformed and offers insight into an important distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘environmental’ history.