Counterfactual reasoning and method in historical geography

This paper connects philosophical debate concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of counterfactuals to the methodological concerns of historical geography. It argues that counterfactual claims are implied by a wide range of common epistemic judgements, specifically those regarding evidential support and explanatory connection. In addition it argues against those who have sought to restrict the use of counterfactuals to, in particular, rational action, or systems that are inherently chancy. Rather it argues in favour of an expanded role for counterfactual method in history and geography, in the forms of imaginary experiments and the questioning of ‘what might have been’.     

Counterfactualism,utopia, and historical geography: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Though counterfactual histories are treated with suspicion by some historians, they can be both useful and politically progressive. In fact it is possible to argue that counterfactual historical geographies might even be utopian. Though this seems counter-intuitive (how could alternative histories imagine a better future?), both histories and utopias encourage a kind of popular historicism, a sense that things have been (and could be) different. Whether this makes counterfactual fictions utopian depends on how you define utopia. Recent critical re-appraisals of the concept have suggested that we might think of it as a process, an ongoing critique of the present, not as an end in itself. Counterfactual histories can be utopian because they encourage a critique of teleology and determinism; their geographies can also be utopian because they remind us that spaces are multiple and open. A close reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (2002), a novel that describes a world without Europe after a more virulent version of the fourteenth-century plague kills everyone west of Constantinople, demonstrates that counterfactual historical fictions present an unequalled opportunity to reflect upon the practice of history. The novel also suggests that counterfactual historical fictions also allow for a critical evaluation of the nature of space. The paper concludes by demonstrating the value of counterfactual fictions through their representations of history, and of spaces of movement, multiplicity, and agonistic encounter.     

Interventions in the political geography of ‘libertarian paternalism’

Contributions from political, health and economic geography, social policy and environmental policy studies are brought together here in order to examine the implications of a ‘libertarian paternalist’ political ‘project’ which seeks to react in pragmatic and ideological terms to the excesses and limitations of neoliberalism in liberal democratic contexts. The authors explore the contemporary relevance and historical antecedents of so-called ‘nudge’ tactics of governing, and draw attention to the political geographies encountered in this popular political programme in specific cases.     

Black-Atlantic counterfactualism: speculating about slavery and its aftermath

This paper critically examines the role of counterfactual thought and argument in a series of interconnected contexts that span what Paul Gilroy termed the ‘black Atlantic’ and what Ali Mazrui described as ‘Global Africa’. The paper aims to show that a more or less explicit use of conjecture and speculative reasoning has characterised attempts to represent and demand recognition for the horror, inhumanity and injustice of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery, and their legacies. To do so, the paper examines a number of interrelated examples, including the campaign for reparations for slavery in the USA; African demands for reparations for slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism that draw on ideas about the continent's ‘underdevelopment’; and speculative writing that imagines alternate historical geographies of slavery. The paper argues that their concerns with Atlantic slavery and its consequences evince a particular way of engaging with the past that might, at first sight, appear to be aligned with a broader temporal sensibility associated with notions of ghostly return, haunting and trauma. The paper argues, however, that such an assumption is mistaken and that the presence of counterfactualism here illustrates a rather different philosophy of history at work. By highlighting forms of making the past present that are speculative rather than spectral, the paper aims to open up new lines of geographical enquiry that will enhance understanding of Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.     

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Water, technology, and the courtroom: negotiating reclamation policy in territorial New Mexico

Historical investigation of arid landscapes and communities in the American West has long focused on the pivotal influence of federal reclamation policy, typically characterizing its implementation as the application of scientific and technological methods to a variety of water resource management issues. This paper departs from traditional views of reclamation by highlighting the highly variable and contingent ways in which new science-based forms of water management were proposed and negotiated in specific local places with particular cultural, legal, and historical geographies. Drawing theoretically from literature on the ‘geography of science,’ the paper probes the ways in which authority for a scientific approach to water management was created, negotiated, and expressed in local and regional contexts in the Territory of New Mexico, where authoritative systems of practical resource use and administration had been in long use before the U.S. government initiated its federal water reclamation program in 1902. Specifically, the paper examines two disputes entered and argued in front of northern New Mexico’s Rio Arriba District Dourt between 1903 and 1905. By departing from the geographical and scalar perspectives typically applied to environmental histories of the West and its reclamation landscapes, this ‘microgeographical’ approach promises a fresh perspective that emphasizes the highly contingent ways in which science-based water policy was implemented in multiple and complex environments.     

Currents,visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geographies of spaces beyond the local and the national, and can attend to the relationships between the human and natural worlds. Second, through a consideration of the imaginative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies of the sea that contends that maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation. Finally, in a survey of the material and social worlds of the oceans that suggests that new life can thereby be breathed into current concerns with global political economy, material geographies, the relationship between knowledge and located practice, and the intersections of social and spatial difference. The paper also provides an introduction to a special issue on the historical geography of the sea.     

When things were ‘closing-in’ and ‘rolling up’: the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish war novel The Last September

This paper examines the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Drawing on Said’s analysis of imaginative geographies as registers of territorial identity, I consider the ways in which Bowen’s text maps Anglo-Irish territorial identity in early twentieth-century Ireland. Reading the text as an authoritative, albeit subjective, record of Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland, I identify four interconnected spaces which constitute the imaginative geography of the novel: the open, empty and isolated country; a wider landscape of resistance and control; a distant but necessary England; and an historical landscape of colonial decline. In conclusion, I outline how the concept of imaginative geographies provides a useful lens through which the often fragmented and conflicted nature of territorial identities, both during and after the colonial period, can be explored.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.     

The institutionalisation of ‘colonial geography’ in France, 1880-1940

Between 1880 and 1900, the conjunction of the development of higher education in France with the renewal of colonial expansion resulted in the creation of the ‘colonial sciences’. ‘Colonial geography’ played a key role in the development of these new disciplines, alongside ‘colonial history’, ‘ethnology’, ‘colonial economics and legislation’ and ‘colonial psychology’. This paper considers the social history of this field and of the institutions in which colonial geography was formed. This involves examination of the study of the teaching of ‘colonial geography’ in the universities and French grandes écoles, the gradual professionalisation of scholarship, and the increase in the number of doctoral theses and book publications, which all serve to demonstrate the vigour of the subdiscipline, leading to the emergence of a veritable research community. Under the Third Republic, ‘colonial geography’ in the universities was characterised by great diversity, irreducible to a single or homogenous ‘colonial discourse’.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Networks, narratives and territory in anthropological race classification: towards a more comprehensive historical geography of Europe's culture

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe's biological races in the 1820s-1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community's shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core-periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe's complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity.     

Multiple historical geographies: responses and resistance to colonial conservation schemes in East Africa

Examining four colonial soil conservation schemes in East Africa that were part of the modernising project of colonialism, this article considers multiple historical geographies of the colonised world. There were multiple modernities: while information and ideas flowed in many directions between (and within) the metropole and colonies, the particular ‘modernity’ that was put into practice was shaped by its context. The article highlights therefore that – despite playing to the same tune of modernity – colonialism was highly differentiated in the way that its policies played out on the ground. Furthermore, the ‘colonised’ acted and reacted to the policies in highly differentiated ways that depended on their particular context in time and space. All but one of the soil conservation schemes examined were rejected and there was significant resistance to them. Much of the existing literature on such schemes examines them in the context of essentially political processes, and in particular their influence on rising nationalism. Whilst these processes are important, this paper shows that there were other, non-political, factors that influenced the reception they were given, which need to be considered too. These ‘everyday’ details were about the practical and technical nature of the schemes, and by exploring these aspects of the schemes, and comparing them, the article highlights why most were rejected. It suggests that different aspects of conservation schemes need to be explored for a firm understanding of the reasons behind resistance to such schemes.     

John Shary,Charles Pease,and contested irrigation landscapes in early-twentieth-century South Texas

The paper contributes to notions of ‘hybrid’ historical geographies of irrigation by focusing on contested visions for irrigation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Adding to geographical work using biography, notions of performance, and racialized landscapes, the paper analyzes debates between John Shary and Charles Pease. Shary and Pease were protagonists, respectively, of pumping water from the Rio Grande and a gravity scheme reliant on action by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The pumping system survived; the gravity system was never constructed. However, the debate between Shary and Pease illustrates tensions within the Anglo elite. The analysis focuses on three early-twentieth-century moments. The first is a 1918 crisis in Shary’s irrigation company, followed by a 1927 debate between Shary and Pease over the flaws of the pumping system and benefits of gravity irrigation. Finally, the paper focuses on Shary and Pease’s constructions of racialized landscapes that subordinated Hispanics as voters to be utilized for Shary’s accumulation strategy, or as ‘non-water users’ that should be excluded from water politics. The paper argues that Shary and Pease projected similarly exclusionary social visions onto the irrigated landscape in spite of their differences on irrigation systems.     

Light railways and the rural–urban continuum: technology, space and society in late nineteenth-century Belgium

Combining the literature on ‘city systems’ and its intermediary spatial categories with the discourse on ‘socio-technical’ hybrids, this article examines whether the early rural–urban condition in Belgium was the planned spatial outcome of infrastructure policy. More specifically, it analyzes the dialectic between the conception of light railways and the geographies of power, tracing its impact on the spatial organization of the territory. In 1911 the British sociologist Seebohm Rowntree stated that Belgium had gone further than any country in supplying its working class with gardens. The dense Belgian railway network encouraged workers to commute between land and labour, travelling from their homes in the healthy countryside to work in urban factories and mines. Despite the agricultural crisis and accelerating industrialization in nineteenth-century Belgium, infrastructure policy had resulted in a peculiar territorial balance between city and countryside by transforming agricultural labourers and farmers into industrial workers without forcing them to leave their ancestral villages. Rather than nostalgically clinging to a disappearing countryside, the government harnessed the modern technology par excellence, combining rails, steam and state management, to safeguard the country as well as to facilitate modern dynamic. Countryside preservation and accelerating industrialization were reconciled in a reshaped configuration that rendered the countryside and its inhabitants simultaneously rural and urban, traditional and modern. As most literature situates the genesis of rural–urban landscapes after the First and Second World War, this article on late-nineteenth-century Belgium adds a further facet to the recently growing international research on hybrid territories within the fields of urbanism and geography.     

For post-statist geographies

This article critically investigates past and contemporary treatments of the state within geographical scholarship. We propose that there is a silent statism within geography that has shaped it in ways that limit geographical imaginations. Statism, herein, refers to a pervasive, historically contingent organisational logic that valourises and naturalises sovereign, coercive, and hierarchical relationships, within and beyond state spaces. We argue that although the explicit, colonial statism that characterised early geography is past, traces of statism nonetheless underpin much of the discipline. While political geography has increasingly critiqued ‘state-centrism’, we argue that it is essential to move beyond critique alone. Using anarchist state theory to critically build upon perspectives in geography, we argue that statism is intellectually and politically problematic and should be recast as an active constituent of unequal social relations. In turn, we outline five core myths that form its logical foundations. In concluding, three initial areas in which post-statist geographies can make inroads are identified: interrogating intersections between statism and other power relations; constructing post-statist epistemologies and methodologies; and addressing how the state is represented in geographical work.     

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

Abstract

As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane.