History, Geography and the ‘Still Greater Mystery’ of Historical Geography

Abstract

‘Historical geography’ is a term that has long been employed in the English-speaking world to describe certain varieties of topographical writing, and it is a term that in more recent years has come to identify a seemingly distinctive subdiscipline of academic geography. Certain difficulties attach to this subdiscipline, however, and students first encountering courses on historical geography are often bemused by precisely how these courses are to be distinguished from others given in departments of history and geography. Indeed, historical geography — unlike the more systematic geographies designated as ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘political’, ‘urban’, ‘agricultural’, ‘medical’ and so on — cannot claim a clearly defined object of study, for what does it mean to say that ‘history’ is this object when history itself is so heterogeneous and can be studied in so many different aspects (and when historians themselves divide up their inquiries into boxes labelled ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘political’)? Moreover, it is evident that researchers who call themselves historical geographers concentrate upon a diversity of substantive issues, and also tend to deploy a diversity of philosophical and methodological toolkits upon a diversity of primary and secondary sources. The situation is not so much one of a unitary academic enterprise spurred on by a commonality of interest, theory and practice, then, as of a loose and eclectic collection of inquiries adding up to what Mitchell (1954) described as the ‘still greater mystery’ of historical geography.

Some look upon the geographer as a kind of intellectual ragand-bone [collector] content to cull ill-assorted bits and pieces of information from many other disciplines…. Historical geography is a still greater mystery; few go further than a belief that it is about ‘old’ maps, and perhaps concerns itself too with the tales of ancient mariners, medieval travellers and merchant adventurers. Some feel that it is an unsound attempt by geographers to explain history, and think that the historical geographer is most certainly trespassing and probably should be prosecuted. This is not so, the historical geographer is a geographer first, last and all the time (Mitchell, 1954, pp. 1–2).