The historical dimension of French geography

In France, the study of history behind regional geography has suffered a long decline since the late nineteenth century, but a new historical dimension is beginning to emerge. In the nineteenth century, historians showed how much regional character owed to remains from antiquity while historical geographers traced the history of exploration and discovery from ancient to modern times. Vidal de la Blache integrated historical reconstruction with social analysis in the study of regions. Vidal's followers not only characterized the distinctiveness of regional features but also demonstrated that differences in regional ways of life were more pronounced before industrialization and urbanization than later. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, historical investigations by geographers were neither sufficiently comprehensive nor sufficiently rigorous to explain spatial patterns. Historians of the Annales school obtained deeper understandings of social and economic changes and took a broader view of long-term psychological, cultural and geographical changes. Their interpretations of agrarian structures illuminated problems fundamental to the development of European civilization. In the 1970s, reacting against mechanistic analyses of spatial organization, young scholars again turned to historical geography to examine problems of social evolution. At the moment, this revival of historical interest among geographers has not attracted much attention from historians.     

On the Fractal Measurement of Geographical Boundaries

This paper has two main objectives. First, we review and evaluate four different computational methods for measuring the “fractality” of cartographic lines: these are known as the structured walk, the equipaced polygon, the hybrid walk, and the cell count methods. Second, because previous research has restricted the focus of fractal measurement exercises to isolated physical entities, the subject of our empirical study concerns the urban area of Swindon, United Kingdom, that comprises a mosaic of contiguous land-use parcels. In technical terms, the results pinpoint some of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the four methods, whilst our substantive conclusion is that fractal dimension appears to be a function of both scale and land-use type in our geographical study.     

Book reviews

Richard Higgott, The Evolving World Economy: Some Alternative Security Questions for Australia. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 51. Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University 1989. 90 pp. $10.00.

Andrew Mack and Paul Keal (eds), Security and Arms Control in the North Pacific. Sydney, Allen and Unwin Australia, 1989. xiii + 324 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $27.50 (paper).

Francis Stuart, Towards Coming of Age. A Foreign Service Odyssey. Centre for the Study of Australian‐Asian Relations, Griffith University, 1989. vi + 264 pp. $12.00.

Bruce S. Bennett, New Zealand's Moral Foreign Policy 1935–39: The Promotion of Collective Security Through the League of Nations. Wellington, New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 1988. vii + 134 pp. $NZ21.00.

E.E. Azar and Chung‐In Moon (eds), National Security in the Third World, The Management of Internal and External Threats. Aldershot, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 1988. 308 pp. £25.00.

Robert P. Haffa Jr, Rational Methods, Prudent Choices: Planning US Forces. Washington D.C., National Defense University Press, 1988. xv + 165 pp. No price given.

William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989. 204 pp. $29.95.

David H. Price, Atlas of World Cultures. A Geographical Guide to Ethnographic Literature. Newbury Park, California, Sage Publications, 1989. 156 pp. $US35.00.

Richard Sakwa, Soviet Politics: An Introduction. London and New York, Routledge, 1989. xvi + 356 pp. $120.00.

Terence Thomas (ed.), The British, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices 1800–1986. London and New York, Routledge, 1988. vii + 247 pp. $82.95 (doth), $29.95 (paper).

Robert A. Scalapino, Seizaburo Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Sung‐joo Han (eds). Asia and the Major Powers. Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 386 pp. $US20.00.

Robert A. Scalapino, Seizaburo Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Sung‐joo Han (eds). Asian Security Issues. Regional and Global. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 394 pp. $US20.00.

Robert A. Scalapino and Dalchoong Kim, Asian Communism, Continuity and Transition. Berkeley, Korea Research Monograph 15, Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. vi + 364 pp. $US20.00.

Ngok Lee, China's Defence Modernisation and Military Leadership. Canberra, Australian National University/Pergamon Press, 1989. xxi + 395 pp. No price given.

David G. Mart and Christine P. White (eds), Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Developments. Ithaca, NY, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988. 248 pp. $US12.00.

Philip Eldridge, NGOs in Indonesia: Popular Movement or Arm of Government? Working Paper 55, The Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. 59 pp. $6.00.

Saw Swee‐Hock. The Population of Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988. xv + 342 pp. $US32.00 (doth), $US25.00 (paper).

Colin Legum, The Battlefronts of Southern Africa. New York, Africana Publishing Company, 1988. xxiv + 451 pp. No price given.

Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986. Melbourne; Cambridge University Press, 1987. ix + 571 pp. $51.00.     

INTERRELATIONAL INCOME-DISTRIBUTION MULTIPLIERS FOR THE WEST VIRGINIA ECONOMY*

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a set of Miyazawa interrelational multipliers, which measure how direct changes in the income of each income bracket result in indirect and induced income changes in all other brackets. The multipliers have been calculated for a 9-by-9 pairing of income brackets for West Virginia in 1982. Their estimation is based on a combination of survey and nonsurvey data in three forms: a 1982 West Virginia input-output table, a multisector income-distribution matrix, and an income disaggregated consumption matrix. The paper illustrates the usefulness of the multipliers by showing how they provide insight into the viability of trickle-down theory and the incidence of regional development policy.     

Rational versus Heuristic Decision Making during Residential Search

The decisions of seventy household members during a residential search for a new home for owner-occupancy were measured in a search simulation game. Their decisions both to inquire about homes during the search, and to select a new home at the termination of the search, were more accurately predicted by a heuristic decision-making model than by a rational model.