A brief description of the ordnance survey,and some notes on the advantages of a topographical survey of South Africa

Early maps of Scotland at a national scale provide historical geographers with an important source of data. One of the most important of these maps but still relatively unexploited and poorly understood is the Military Survey of Scotland or Roy Map. Examination is made here of its two versions, the Protracted Copy and the Fair Copy, to check the veracity of the draughtsmen who produced the latter and most commonly consulted version. An examination is made by focussing on two areas of Fife.     

Regional Journals in Geography: A Vision for the 21st Century*

Abstract

This paper (originally published in The North West Geographer, 1997, 1(1), 2–17)) contributes to the debate on journals in geography and the production of geographical knowledge by considering a hitherto neglected issue – the role of regional journals of geography. Initially, an overview is provided which considers issues such as the status of the regional journal within the discipline and its fortune relative to the changing concerns of geography in the late 20th Century. A case study of The Manchester Geographer then critically appraises this particular journal's contribution to geographical knowledge. Finally, and in conclusion, some suggestions are offered which it is believed would ensure that regional journals perform a useful and unique role in the production of geographical knowledge in the 21st Century.     

Europe,public opinion,and Brexit*

ABSTRACT

The construction – and deconstruction – of Europe is a spatial democratic process, and public opinion is central to it. One part of public opinion is fuelled by pragmatic – either economic (the search for prosperity) or strategic (the need for security) – arguments. Another is fired by political, moral and religious ideologies and identities (and utopian views of Europe in particular). Attitudes concerning Europe were never identical in the Western or Eastern halves of the continent, or in Britain. They evolved in connection with processes of economic change (from the second to the third phase of the Industrial Revolution), and latterly in relation to globalization and its geographic impact. Euroscepticism demands a deep adjustment of Europe to its current political-intellectual scene and geographic organization.     

4. GLOBALIZING THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

The Comanche rose by adapting to the technological and trade opportunities brought to New Mexico by the eighteenth‐century expansion of New Spain's globally linked silver economy. They built an empire that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century, dominating vast areas of the high plains and controlling complex trades, just as a social revolution within Mexico's wars of independence undermined the silver economy and ended its northward dynamism. Comanche power flourished between a struggling Mexico and an expanding US, until the military and industrial power of the latter combined with the ecological vulnerabilities of the Comanche economy to enable the Anglo‐American triumph in what should be called the War for North America of 1846–1848. The US claimed a continental West from an uncertain Mexican sovereignty and an assertive Comanche empire of war and trade. The expansion and collapse of New Spain, the rise and fall of the Comanche empire, and the rise of the United States all occurred within an evolving globalization. Spanish North America expanded to 1810; Comanche power rose in the eighteenth century and soared after 1810 as Mexico struggled with the challenges of nation‐making; then the United States defeated both to claim continental hegemony in the 1840s. These expansions, conflicts, and changes—all tied to larger processes of globalization—reshaped North America between 1700 and 1850.     

Locality,Mobility and Governmentality in Colonial/Postcolonial New Caledonia: The case of the Kouare tribe (xûâ Xârâgwii), Thio (Cöö)

The colonial history of New Caledonia has been one of dispossession, alienation, and racial segregation. Indigenous people did not experience a life of all‐embracing confinement and immobility. Instead, Kanak localities were historically shaped by the interplay of colonial projects, ideas, tensions, power relations, practices, representations, values, norms, and emotions. Based on the example of Thio, located on the south‐east coast of New Caledonia, this article explores these transformations, focusing on processes of localization and mobility in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The first section focuses on the encounter with and the interplay between different organisations in Thio: the missionary, mining, pastoral, and administrative frontiers. The second section explores the multilayered history of the landscape and settlement patterns in Xârâgwii/Kouare (a tribe located in the mountainous part of Thio), and the third section analyses the interplay of locality and mobility since World War II. The final section examines the ‘invention’ of the tribe as part of colonial governmental projects. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the meaning of this evolving dialectic in the current context of decolonization.     

Developmentalities and Donor–NGO Relations: Contesting Foreign Aid Policies in New Zealand/Aotearoa

In this paper we draw on the concept of governmentality to examine the relationships between donors and northern non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) during moments of policy change. Our case study comes from New Zealand/Aotearoa where a change in government has seen aid policy shift from poverty alleviation to sustainable economic development. We detail three mechanisms through which the government sought to normalise this change: changes in language and fields of visibility; institutional reform; and funding delays and cuts. Far from being complete, however, we also trace how some NGOs contested the new agenda through engaging in the practice of politics and how, at least temporarily, new more politicised development subjectivities were created. While our study raises awkward questions about the autonomy of NGOs within current funding environments, we also emphasise the productive possibilities and openings that emerge as one set of development ideas and techniques, or developmentalities, shifts to another.     

Abstracts of Articles

ANDREW BREEZE, ‘Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37’. A mega-eruption of 535 in the Americas produced a volcanic winter in 536-37, with crop failure throughout the Northern Hemisphere. It thus reveals a Welsh annal for 537 on 'mortality in Britain and in Ireland’ as referring to famine, not plague. Mention in the same annal of Arthur’s final battle at Camlan, located at Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, will further point to a campaign by starving North Britons under Arthur's leadership to seize food-supplies from their neighbours. The extreme weather phenomena of 536-37 also suggest that Gildas wrote his De Excidio in the summer of 536 (as implied by David Woods of Cork), because in chapter 93 of that work he alludes to a ‘thick mist and black night’ sitting ‘upon the whole island’ of Britain, but says nothing on the harvest failure which it led to. We may infer as well that the Britons defeated the Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’ in north Wiltshire in early 493, because Gildas declares that the battle was won at the time of his birth, forty-three years and a month before he was writing.’

DAVID M. YORATH, ‘Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windemere, c. 1441–99’. To date, researchers have little cared for Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windermere (c. 1441–99), Member of Parliament for Westmorland, conservator of the peace with Scotland, escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland and steward of Penrith. There exists no ODNB article or source-based examination of his career — only a brief, error-strewn note in J. B. Wedgwood’s ‘Biographies of the Members of the Commons House 1439-1509’. This is unfitting, for it is clear there was a mastery of technique about Moresby — something that not only ensured his survival during one of the most turbulent periods in English history, but also made him an indispensable political figure, regardless of regime. What follows is an examination of his hitherto unstudied career, with some remarks on wider developments pertinent to the history of the North West.

VICTORIA SPENCE, ‘Adapting to the Elizabethan Settlement: Religious Faith and the Drive towards Conformity in Craven, 1559 to 1579’. This article explores the reception in Craven to Elizabethan religious reform. Until the 1569 Rebellion the interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement was broad, pragmatic and accommodating. Following Elizabeth’s excommunication and the stringent enforcement of conformity, Catholics, supported by Marian and seminary priests, resorted to recusancy and a separate Catholic identity. Archbishops Grindal and Sandys installed university-educated preaching clerics to establish and promote conformity in the northern diocese. Many were Puritan nonconformists who felt reform was incomplete, and opposed a hierarchical Church with surviving Catholic rituals. Increasingly confessional identities diverged, although eventually the majority of the Craven laity adapted and conformed.

IMOGEN PECK, ‘The Great Unknown: The Negotiation and Narration of Death by English War Widows, 1647–60’. The truism that death is life’s only certainty may have seemed far from obvious to the women of mid seventeenth-century England. For the conditions of the British Civil Wars, in addition to causing significant physical destruction, also brought much uncertainty to the lives of the civilian population, who could struggle to ascertain whether men serving in the wars were alive or dead. Drawing on the relief petitions of war widows and court depositions from the northern counties of England, this article explores the impact this uncertainty had on the wives of Civil War soldiers. In particular, it focuses on the strategies women used when navigating the problem of how they could know, or prove, that their husbands were dead, the ways they narrated and interpreted the loss of a spouse, and the predicaments faced by ‘phantom widows’: those women who believed their husbands to have been killed in the wars, only for them to return home alive sometime later. In doing so, it illuminates a little-studied dimension of female experience during the revolutionary period, while also contributing to our understanding of early modern mentalities more broadly, and, in particular, attitudes to death and civil war.

CONOR O’BRIEN, ‘Attitudes to St Cuthbert’s Body during the Nineteenth Century’.

St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral was opened in 1827, occasioning the start of a cycle of polemic and counter-polemic between Protestant and Roman Catholic writers throughout the rest of the century. The excavation of 1827 aimed to disprove the medieval legends about the incorruption of Cuthbert’s body, but it (and the many texts which debated its findings throughout the course of the nineteenth century) must be understood in the light of local religious controversy as much as of Victorian antiquarianism. The texts which addressed the issue of Cuthbert’s body in the years which followed were concerned with religious, as well as historical, truth and reveal shifting attitudes in both the Anglican and Catholic communities to the role of saints, miracles and relics within their own forms of Christianity. While this paper mainly concerns a comparatively small element of Victorian religious debate, one focused upon issues of local interest and identity, it problematises some of the traditional paradigms used to understand nineteenth-century scholarship. Not the increasing secularisation of historical practice and antiquarianism, but the continuing, albeit changing, importance of Durham’s patron saint, is the most striking feature of the dispute.

EDWARD M. SPIERS, ‘Yorkshire and the First Day of the Somme’. Given the prominence of the First Day on the Somme in the UK’s collective memory of the First World War, it is timely to reconsider the impact of that disastrous battle upon Yorkshire, a county that contributed more fighting units (c. 20 per cent), and suffered more casualties, than any other county in the United Kingdom. The fighting experiences of Yorkshire units ranged from utter disaster (not even reaching their own front line), and suffering the largest proportion of casualties of any unit in the British army, to making the largest gains of ground on the day. The spread of bereavement, however, was far from uniform, and so partly on account of the units engaged, and their recruiting whether pre-war (where regular) or wartime (in the case of Kitchener’s Service battalions), losses were concentrated within the West Riding. Moreover, despite the heavy losses within the “Pals” battalions, the legendary burden of bereavement within local communities did not apply uniformly because some units in 1916 were nothing like the “Pals” of 1914. The process of releasing details about deaths over days and weeks, with a huge ‘missing’ sub-group, robbed the First Day of anything like the significance it now holds. The dominant Press narrative, supported by letters from the front, remained overwhelmingly positive about the battle, the role of Yorkshire units and the prospects for the war itself. Political, military and religious elites reinforced this narrative at the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of the war, which coupled with the reception of the film, ‘Battle of the Somme’, assisted in sustaining the coping mechanisms within the country.     

Archaeology Underfoot: On-Campus Approaches to Education,Outreach, and Historical Archaeology at Brown University

This article explores the methods and outcomes of “The Archaeology of College Hill” (AoCH), a hands-on fieldwork course at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The first half of this paper recounts the results of a three-year research program (2012–2014) on the Quiet Green of the university’s campus. This work identified a material assemblage associated with the school’s first official President’s House and uncovered evidence for over two centuries of student life. The second half of this article addresses our pedagogical methods, including elements of replicable course design and feedback from a qualitative survey on students’ impressions of the class. By situating this project within wider dialogues on the role of fieldwork in undergraduate teaching, we demonstrate the ways in which practical, on-campus projects like AoCH can reach a more diverse body of students, increase enrollments in other archaeology courses, and develop a more engaged, de-centered pedagogy.     

New Moscow: An Exploratory Assessment

An American geographer specializing in Russia examines the unprecedented plan announced in mid-2011 by the country's President Dmitriy Medvedev to expand the territory of Moscow and move government offices to newly annexed areas. The plan aims to increase the land area of the capital by 155 percent, mainly by annexation of a vast tract southwest of the city. The author demonstrates that while "New Moscow" is envisioned as a multi-polar and low-density urban site, the historic core would likely focus on tourism. He discusses the official reasons given for the immense undertaking, the potential problems raised by urban specialists and local media, as well as the results of public opinion polls detailing the attitudes of Muscovites toward the city's proposed transformation.     

Tourism and the management of cultural resources in the Pays Dogon,Mali

Abstract

The Pays Dogon, designated a joint Natural/Cultural World Heritage Site in 1989, is Mali's leading tourist attraction receiving 6,000 visitors per year with an annual growth of 10% which may increase when a new access road is constructed. Tourism is the major source of income for the Dogon who have lived in picturesque villages clinging to the sides of the 600m cliffs of the Bandiagara escarpment since the 15th century. The Dogon are best known to Europeans for their masked dances and powerful woodcarvings, much prized by collectors. Loss of cultural property by illicit trading combined with alteration of the traditional masked dances for visitor preference is contributing to cultural change within Dogon communities. The harmony and cohesion which enabled the Dogon to resist the colonial power is being threatened by a new set of historical constructs and priorities indicating that Dogon culture is more fragile when confronted with the 20th century.