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Classifying Geographical History

Alan R. H. Baker

To cite this article: Alan R. H. Baker (2007) Classifying Geographical History , The Professional
Geographer, 59:3, 344-356, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9272.2007.00617.x

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Classifying Geographical History*

Alan R. H. Baker
University of Cambridge

Although the term ‘‘historical geography’’ has been the subject of a sustained and critical debate, that of
‘‘geographical history’’ has not. Usage of the latter term has been variable and the epistemological status of
geographical history has been ambiguous. An examination of the usage of the term ‘‘geographical history’’
during the past 100 years or so reveals both that it has been employed little but confusingly and that there have
recently been calls for its wider adoption. Two key themes are identified in the literature: first, that of geo-
graphical history as the study of changing geographical distributions; and second, geographical history as the
study of geographical (in the sense of physical environmental) influences in history. In theory it is possible to
distinguish geography from history and historical geography from geographical history, but in practice it is often
difficult to do so. Nonetheless, examining usage of the term matters as a contribution to the history of ideas, and
identifying its common usages allows scholars to communicate with mutual understanding. Key Words: geo-
graphical history, geography of history, géohistoire, historical geography, history of geography.

any different meanings have been at-
M tached to the term ‘‘historical geogra-
phy’’ during the past 100 years or so and there
has been a lively debate about its meanings. Al-
though there is today not a total consensus
about the term, there is substantial agreement
that ‘‘historical geography’’ is the study of past
geographies and that specific studies under that
general banner reflect the differing discourses
to be found within the broad discipline of ge-
ography, notably those of location and distri-
bution, of interactions between peoples and
their physical environments, of landscape, and
of region (Baker 2003; Boulanger and Trochet
2005). By contrast, there has been no such sus-
tained and critical debate about the term ‘‘geo-
graphical history’’ and its usage has been
variable and its status as a field of study ambig-
uous. Furthermore, the term ‘‘geographical
history’’ has not been included in recently-pub-
lished dictionaries of historical concepts, of
historical terms, or of the history of ideas (Ritter
1986; Cook 1998; Horowitz 2005). My aim in
this article is to examine the character of ‘‘geo-
graphical history’’ by considering some works
published under that title, to reflect on its
relation to historical geography, and to ask why
the distinction is more than just a terminolog-
ical nuance among a few scholars. But initially
I want to emphasize the need to clarify the
meaning of the term by outlining the confusion
that has persisted about it.
Because of the positioning of the adjective
and the noun, it would be logical to assume a
priori that historical geography is a branch of
geography and geographical history a branch of
history. But usage of these terms has not been
that simple. An early usage of ‘‘geographical
history’’ was in 1749 by P. Vaillant in his
A Geographical History of Nova Scotia. This was
an account, intended for prospective settlers, of
the physical geography of the area, a history of
its settlement, and an assessment of its potential
for further development. Notwithstanding the
book’s title, its main text was headed ‘‘The His-
tory and Geography of Nova Scotia’’ and the
book was, in effect, a topography of the kind
produced in large numbers in Britain and
Europe during the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries. In 1882 a French scholar, Ludovic
Drapeyron, who had been trained as a historian,
believed paradoxically that he would become
more of a geographer by giving up what he saw
as historical geography for geographical history.

*The author thanks the editor and four anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions for improving this article. An earlier version of this article was
presented to the Thirteenth International Conference of Historical Geographers held at the University of Hamburg (Germany) in August 2006. That
presentation was kindly funded in part by the British Academy.

The Professional Geographer, 59(3) 2007, pages 344–356 r Copyright 2007 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, July 2006; revised submission, October 2006; final acceptance, December 2006.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.

‘‘Historical geography,’’ he declared, ‘‘is
a branch of history. Geographical history is a
branch of the natural sciences. Its mission is to
furnish a scientific or physical explanation for
historical events.’’ In 1892 an American scholar,
Walter B. Scaife, published the six lectures he
had given to graduate students at Johns Hopkins
University under the general title of America: Its
Geographical History. Collectively, those lectures
addressed three themes: first, the history of ex-
ploration and mapping of the Atlantic and
Pacific coasts, and of the interior and polar re-
gions, of North America in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; second, the development of
the state and national boundaries of America
during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eigh-
teenth centuries; and third, the surveying and
mapping work undertaken by the American na-
tional government in the nineteenth century.
For Scaife, a historian, geographical history was
essentially the history of exploration and map-
ping. Then in 1902, William Morris Davis, a
leading American geologist/geomorphologist,
argued that geography was ‘‘distinctly not a his-
torical study’’ (241) but one concerned with the
present and thus ‘‘with the past not as an end in
itself but as a means to an end: and [a geogra-
pher] cares only for so much of it as shall serve
his present needs’’ (246). This line of reasoning
led Davis to conclude, ‘‘What is often called
historical geography might be much better
called geographical history’’ (241). This view
found a distorted echo when in 1953 John My-
res, a British ancient historian, wrote in the
preface to a collection of his previously-pub-
lished essays, titled Geographical History in Greek
Lands: ‘‘The phrase ‘historical geography’ has
been familiar, since the work of E. A. Freeman
and H. B. George, both to historians and geog-
raphers. But there is a pendent group of studies
that might better be described as ‘Geographical
History;’ for sometimes it is the geographical
features which invite historical commentary,
rather than the historical events which invite
geographical’’ (Myres 1953, v).
Myres’s justification for using ‘‘geographical
history’’ and not ‘‘historical geography’’ in some
circumstances is somewhat perplexing and he
seems to have reversed his own argument.
Should he not have argued: ‘‘for sometimes it
is the historical events that invite geographical
commentary, rather than the geographi-
cal events, which invite historical’’? Perhaps
Classifying Geographical History 345
this is what he meant to say—if not, then it
seems to me that he was not entirely clear about
any possible distinction between geographical
history and historical geography.
But Myres’s claims were not always unam-
biguous. Much earlier, in 1910, he had con-
sidered the relations between history and
geography and concluded: ‘‘in so far as it is pos-
sible to look ahead, it seems likely that this
application of geographical criticism to histor-
ical problems . . . may in the near future be-
come a popular aspect of historical study,
perhaps even a dangerously popular one.’’
Myres enigmatically left it to his audience to
interpret the precise nature of that perceived
threat. He clearly wanted historians to be geo-
graphically aware but, he said, ‘‘it is well to be
forewarned, and to know what we are doing.
Geography is not history, and cannot be con-
fused with it; but geographical facts are among
the first materials for history, and in the equip-
ment of a historian geographical experience is
indispensable’’ (cited in Myres 1953, 62–63).
That view had underpinned W. Gordon East’s
(1938) consideration in The Geography Behind
History of the role of geographical influences on
history. East did not explicitly advocate geo-
graphical history but he certainly saw what he
termed ‘‘the geographical way of thinking’’ as
‘‘an auxiliary approach’’ to the branches of his-
tory. East followed the line of argument devel-
oped by many historians that geography
provided the necessary physical setting for his-
tory and played a part in that narrative. But his
prospectus for the geography behind history
went beyond geography as physical setting to
include study of the interactions between peo-
ple and their physical environments and their
resultant distinctive regions and landscapes, as
well as an assessment of the significance of geo-
graphical position and location on the course
of history.
Such ideas were echoed in 1940 in a statement
by a distinguished British economic historian,
Sir John Clapham, in his editorial preface to
H. C. Darby’s monograph on the draining of the
fens of eastern England (Darby 1940, v). Darby
was then on the way to becoming Britain’s lead-
ing exponent of historical geography in the
twentieth century. As part of his mission to cre-
ate a distinctive subdiscipline within geography,
Darby provided a codification of historical
geography that could not avoid addressing its
346 Volume 59, Number 3, August 2007
relationship to geographical history. Darby
identified four approaches in historical geogra-
phy, but he was himself only fully at ease with
two of them. To traditional studies of ‘‘geogra-
phies of the past’’ he confidently added studies
of ‘‘changing landscapes.’’ Both of these were
geographical in their subject matter and historical
in their approach, so that for Darby they were
unambiguously historical geography. By contrast,
studies of what Darby variously called ‘‘the his-
torical element in geography’’ or ‘‘the past in
the present’’ were geographical in their subject
matter but focused on historical survivals and
influences into the present day (and could thus be
viewed, somewhat disconcertingly, as being
both contemporary geography and historical
geography). Again, studies of what Darby
termed either ‘‘the geography behind history’’
or ‘‘geographical history,’’ viewed by him as
studies of the influence of geographical condi-
tions on the course of history, he regarded as
being logically studies in history rather than in
geography (Darby 1953, 1962). That Darby
equated ‘‘the geography behind history’’ with
‘‘geographical history’’ and that he considered
such studies to belong logically to the field of
history is also seen in the posthumously-pub-
lished lectures that he gave to students at
University College London and at Cambridge
in the 1960s (Darby 2002, 29–36, 91–100,
149–53).
Such a conceptual distinction between his-
torical geography and geographical history has
not been universally acknowledged, and ambi-
guities persist about both concepts but more
especially about ‘‘geographical history’’ (and its
doppelga¨nger ‘‘the geography behind history’’).
Another way of distinguishing between histor-
ical geography and geographical history was
advocated by Jean Mitchell in her 1954 essay
asking, ‘‘What is Historical Geography?’’ She
concluded: ‘‘Many books with the title Historical
Geography would be better entitled Geographical
History for they are concerned essentially not
with place but with civilization.’’ Mitchell’s case
was argued on her basic but questionable asser-
tion: ‘‘The ‘world’ to the historian means
civilization; the ‘world’ to the geographer means
the surface of the earth’’ (Mitchell 1954, 11–12).
John K. Wright, who trained as a historian
but practiced as a geographer, provided a more
rigorously logical examination of the relations
between geography and history in 1960. He set
out a sophisticated classification of sixteen cat-
egories of relationship between geography and
history. Distinguishing between the study of
these two disciplines and the reality that they
study, Wright identified eight relationships
in which geography was the senior partner, as
follows:
1. The influence of geographical study upon
historical study
2. The influence of geographical study upon
historic reality
3. The influence of geographic reality upon
historical study
4. The influence of geographic reality upon
historical reality
5. The geographical study of historical study
6. The geographical study of historic reality
7. The geographic reality of historical study
8. The geographic reality of historic reality.
Paralleling these categories there were, of
course, another eight in which history was the
leading partner:
9. The influence of historical study upon
geographical study
10. The influence historical study upon geo-
graphical reality
11. The influence of historic reality upon
geographical study
12. The influence of historic reality upon
geographic reality
13. The historical study of geographical study
14. The historical study of geographic reality
15. The historic reality of geographical study
16. The historic reality of geographic reality.
Wright explicitly acknowledged categories 6
and 8 as historical geography and categories 14
and 16 as geographical history. Although these
distinctions might be justifiable in theory,
Wright’s classification was too subtle for it to
be accepted in practice. Moreover, he gave each
category an algebraic notation and this might
have militated against wider adoption of his
classification. His classification also contained
some ambiguities. Wright admitted that no
sharp line can be drawn between geographical
history and historical geography and he was
unsure into which category to place some spe-
cific works, such as Ellen C. Semple’s Influences
of Geographic Environment (1911). Again,
Wright considered geographic history to be

the study of geographical circumstances from a
historical point of view while acknowledging
that many viewed it as primarily the geograph-
ical study of environmental influences on the
course of history. Indeed, Wright argued that
historical geography studies the course of his-
tory from a geographical point of view whereas
geographical history examines geographic cir-
cumstances from a historical point of view. But
that reversed the more commonsense under-
standing of historical geography as the study of
geography from a historical perspective and of
geographical history as the study of history from
a geographical perspective. In short, Wright’s
classification was not as rigorous or as unam-
biguous as it was intended to be.
Some Recent Pleas for a Renaissance
of the Term ‘‘Geographical History’’
In the almost half-century since the publication
of Wright’s paper, there has been a burgeoning
of historical geography but little growth of geo-
graphical history. This enabled Michael Wil-
liams to claim that, although the idea of the
geography behind history—of geographical
history—is today accepted, its practice has been
largely discarded (Williams 2002, 206). An ex-
planation of the differing fortunes of these two
terms probably needs to be sought in their in-
stitutional as well as their intellectual contexts
but that it not the purpose of this article.
Katherine Clarke, an ancient historian, in her
recent discussion of the nature and relations of
geography and history in the literature of the
late Hellenistic period and of the modern world,
explicitly aims to address ambiguities in the
definitions of geography and history. She con-
cludes that what she terms ‘‘neat’’ and ‘‘narrow’’
definitions were and are unacceptable and that
geography and history overlap considerably.
Indeed, so great does Clarke envisage the over-
lap that she makes little if any distinction be-
tween historical geography and geographical
history. Clarke arrives at that position after an
extensive review of the relevant literature of
her two selected historic periods (Clarke 1999,
1–76). Similarly, A. H. Merrills (2005) argues
that, in late Antiquity, geography and history
were so closely bound in its literature as to be
inseparable. Perhaps this provides some justifi-
cation for those authors who today use these two
Classifying Geographical History 347
terms interchangeably. For example, Maria
Fernández-Giménez (1999) titles her paper on
pastoral land use in Mongolia since the thir-
teenth century a ‘‘geographical history’’ but re-
fers to it in the paper’s abstract as a ‘‘historical
geography’’; Douglas Meyer (2000) titles his
book on settlement and migration in early-
nineteenth-century Illinois a ‘‘geographical his-
tory’’ but in the preface sets out what he terms
his ‘‘historical-geographical approach’’ and de-
scribes his book as an ‘‘investigation of the his-
torical geography of early processes and
patterns of settlement and migration in Illi-
nois’’; and Edward Muller (2004), in his review
of Carville Earle’s 2003 book, The American
Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery,
describes it as an ‘‘account of America’s chang-
ing historical geography from the moment of
initial colonization to the end of the nineteenth
century.’’
As a geographer, Carville Earle became a
powerful advocate of geographical history. He
set out his views on ‘‘the practice of geograph-
ical history’’ as the introduction to a book that
republished some of his essays on the American
past (Earle 1992, 1–23). Those twelve essays
aimed to ‘‘re-examine a handful of perennial
problems in American history from a geograph-
ical point of view’’; they were concerned with
the ‘‘processes that defined the American expe-
rience . . . and the geographical factors that
shaped them.’’ Earle’s approach prioritized geo-
graphical history over historical geography.
Initially, he appeared to deny such an assertion:
‘‘Frankly, I think that the distinctions made be-
tween geographical history and historical ge-
ography have been overdrawn and excessively
canonical.’’ But he then made such a distinction
himself: ‘‘The perspective of geography, in the
first instance, focuses upon those relationships
which have shaped the evolution of place and
landscape; geographical history, in contrast, fo-
cuses upon those relationships which have
shaped human affairs in the past.’’ Earle’s dis-
tinction rested initially on his personal embrace
of the locational and ecological (environmental)
traditions within geography and, surprisingly,
his rejection of the landscape and regional tra-
ditions. More fundamentally, Earle considered
that Darby’s codification of historical geogra-
phy had restricted its field of inquiry to changes
in landscape and region, omitting the study of
human affairs, of society, economy, and polity
348 Volume 59, Number 3, August 2007
on the grounds they were the domains of
history. Earle considered Darby’s relegation of
geographical history to the domain of history
to be ‘‘rigidly and indefensibly doctrinaire.’’
Earle’s claim was that geographical history con-
tinued to be pursued covertly by geographers
despite Darby’s having assigned it to history. He
named a number of self-styled historical geog-
raphers who were nonetheless ‘‘engaged in what
can only be described as geographical history’’
and he urged them to ‘‘confer upon themselves
the title of ‘geographical historian’’’(Earle 1992,
16, 19, 20). Earle has recently provided a sus-
tained example of what he regards as geograph-
ical history in his book-length account of the
periodic spatial restructuring of America’ econ-
omy and polity between the early-seventeenth
century and the late-twentieth century (Earle
2003).
Earle’s position—a prioritizing of ‘‘geo-
graphical history’’ over ‘‘historical geogra-
phy’’—has also been adopted by Chris Philo
(1994, 252–81) in his essay on the relations of
history and geography. Philo’s argument does
not, however, explicitly refer to that of Earle,
and partly because of its independent but si-
multaneous advocacy of a new ‘‘geographical
history’’ Philo’s argument deserves to be exam-
ined more closely. Its key point is ‘‘that the im-
portance of historical geography lies in bringing
a geographical sensitivity to bear upon the study
of all those past phenomena—economic, social,
political or whatever—that are the very ‘stuff’ of
history.’’ Philo is here asking us to be ‘‘alert to
the role of geography in history’’; his focus, like
Earle’s, is on a geographical interpretation of
history. Both Earle and Philo objected to the
way in which Darby, in his 1953 paper on the
relations of history and geography, appeared to
exclude from the field of geography studies of
the role of geography in history. But they over-
looked Darby’s more mature statement in 1962,
which included ‘‘geographical history’’ as one of
historical geography’s methodological quartet.
They did so, I surmise, because Darby’s project
was primarily geographical whereas their pro-
jects were, as I read them, primarily historical.
Programmatic calls for a new geographical
history have met with little response. A few au-
thors have recently published books as ‘‘geo-
graphical histories’’ but it is not always entirely
clear why they have done so. Thus John C.
Hudson’s (1994) study of the American Corn
Belt was presented explicitly as a ‘‘regional
geography’’ but without any justification being
provided for its being titled a geographical his-
tory. As previously noted, Douglas K. Meyer
(2000) referred to his own book by title as a
geographical history but in his preface as a his-
torical geography. Most recently, Samuel
Otterstrom (2004) has published A Geographical
History of United States City-Systems from Frontier
to the Urban Transformation, but it seems that he
chose the title principally to honor Carville
Earle rather than to distance his approach from
the practice of historical geography, not least
because for Otterstrom geographical history
‘‘is a type of historical geography’’ ( personal
communication from Samuel Otterstrom, 15
August 2005). A final and even more confusing
example: Philippe Bachimon’s (1990) study of
representations of and ideas about Tahiti, rang-
ing from that of a Utopian Garden of Eden to a
wilderness, was presented explicitly as an essai
d’histoire ge´ographique. It would have been be
more accurately described as an essay in histor-
ical geosophy, given that it is a study of the
history of geographical knowledges (Wright
1947; Dunbar 1980).
This survey has revealed some of the ambi-
guities and resulting confusions about two
terms, or more appropriately two concepts,
employed by geographers and historians to de-
scribe some aspects of the relationship between
their two disciplines. Given that uses and def-
initions of the term ‘‘geographical history’’ have
been culturally constructed, they will have
changed from time to time and differed from
place to place. But while acknowledging the
multivariate meanings given to the term, I sug-
gest that it is nonetheless possible to identify
some coherence in its usage. Two key themes
seem to recur and I will consider each of them in
turn: first, changing geographical distributions
and, second, geographical influences on history.
Geographical History as Changing
Distributions
Many authors have employed the term ‘‘geo-
graphical history’’ to mean changing geograph-
ical distributions through time. A major theme
of geographical writing has long been and con-
tinues to be describing and explaining the
specific location and general distribution of

both natural and cultural phenomena. Indeed,
for some practitioners, geography is the science
of location and distribution and the art of
describing the spatial or geographical patterns
of phenomena in particular places at given
times. All phenomena may be viewed as having
their own geographies at a moment in time and
also geographies that change over time. It is the
study of such changing distributions that some
scholars have termed ‘‘geographical histories.’’
But although location and distribution may be,
and have been, viewed as geographical concepts,
they cannot be claimed to be exclusively so.
Thus ‘‘objects’’studied by historians—such as art
and alcoholism, boundaries and battles, and cul-
tures and consciousness—each have their own
geographical (spatial) distributions. Moreover,
the same point applies to the ‘‘objects’’studied by
other disciplines. Not surprisingly, therefore, a
wide variety of geographical histories have been
published and their authors have not always been
either geographers or historians.
An early example that illustrates the wide
potential range of such geographical histories
was R. Lydekker’s A Geographical History of
Mammals (1896). This work examined the geo-
graphical distribution of the world’s fauna at
different spatial scales, relating them both to
features of their physical and human environ-
ments and to the roles of migrations and
diffusions. For Lydekker, geography was syn-
onymous with distribution over space and his-
tory with change through time, so study of
changing distributions was best described as
geographical history. Lydekker’s book, interest-
ingly, was published by Cambridge University
Press in its Cambridge Geographical Series. This
use of the term has persisted in the natural sci-
ences through to the present day; a recent ex-
ample is a paper on the geographical history of
the central-western Pacific black fly subgenus
Inseliellum (Craig, Currie, and Joy 2001).
This view of geographical history as the study
of changing distributions was a key part of John
Myres’s approach to ancient history. In a num-
ber of lectures and papers he reiterated the sig-
nificance of geographical distributions for
historical knowledge and understanding. He
liked making the point that what he termed ‘‘all
historical facts and events’’ happen ‘‘some-
where’’ as well as ‘‘somewhen’’ and that
consequently the study of changing distribu-
tions—the pursuit of geographical history—
Classifying Geographical History 349
was an important task for historians (Myres
1953, 59–63, 75–78, 108, 266–90). It is this form
of geographical history that some geographers
have chosen to revive more recently. Thus
Charles Withers (1984) wrote what he called
‘‘a geographical history’’ of Gaelic in Scotland
between 1698 and 1981, giving his book that
title because his central objective was to de-
scribe and explain the changing geographical
distribution of Gaelic speaking. Withers
achieved this by producing many maps of the
phenomenon at different times during his study
period. Furthermore, his usage of the term
‘‘geographical history’’ was deliberate and con-
sidered: he stated that his aim was not to write a
[holistic] historical geography of the Gaelic ar-
eas but rather a [systematic] geographical his-
tory of the language in which he would take into
account contemporaneous changes in economy
and society only insofar as they affected the lives
of Gaelic speakers and thus the distribution of
the speaking of Gaelic. A similar emphasis on
mapping distributions is found in two other self-
styled geographical histories mentioned already
and they seem to have followed implicitly the
similar line of thinking pursued explicitly by
Withers: Hudson (1994) produced numerous
maps, on a county basis, of the extent of the
Corn Belt in America at various dates between
1840 and 1920, and Meyer (2000) mapped the
distribution of thirty-three immigrant groups in
Illinois in 1850 and traced the emergence of
discrete culture regions in that state by that date.
Geographical history in this limited sense of
the (cartographic) study of changing distribu-
tions clearly has much in common with the
concept of geohistory (ge´ohistoire) developed by
some French historians. The most sustained
discussion and elaboration of geohistory as a
concept was provided by Charles Higounet
(1961), who saw it both as a method that pri-
oritized mapping historical data as a way of ex-
ploring problems and as an approach that
emphasized the importance of locating histor-
ical events. The geographical concept of distri-
bution embraces by extension those of location
and of spatial relationships, and it is possible to
detect a heightened and renewed awareness
of the significance of location and of spatial
relationships as a component of geographical
history (Grataloup 2004).
The impetus for such enlightenment has
come from those historians who, following
350 Volume 59, Number 3, August 2007
Fernand Braudel (1958), have pleaded for closer
relations between geography and history. Lo-
cational and spatial principles were applied, for
example, by historian Pierre Chaunu (1974) in
his broad-brush history and geography of the
world. Chaunu’s ambitious work drew on a
range of geographical concepts, especially those
of distribution, difference, and distance, and of
spatial relations and interactions. It made abun-
dant use of maps (e.g., a world map of civiliza-
tions, cultures, and primitive peoples ca. 1500)
as well as of graphs (e.g., of literacy levels in
Scotland, England, and France, 1600–1900). In
this study, Chaunu made no clear distinction
between ‘‘ge´ohistoire’’ and ‘‘ge´ographie historique,’’
using the terms interchangeably, although in
an earlier essay he had argued that early use of
the term ‘‘ge´ohistoire’’ had given way instead to
‘‘histoire ge´ographique’’ (Chaunu 1969). To avoid
this confusing use of a number of broad terms,
the approach that Chaunu adopts might better
be described specifically as ‘‘spatial history’’
(Baker 2003, 62–71). Chaunu drew his inspira-
tion explicitly from the work of Braudel, with
only passing reference to the work of geogra-
phers. Similarly broad and explicitly spatial
(geographical) approaches to world and nation-
al histories are exhibited in Christian Grata-
loup’s (1996) Lieux d’histoire: Essai de ge´ohistoire
syste´matique and in Jean-René Trochet’s (1998)
La ge´ographie historique de la France. But this
again indicates how the terms ‘‘geohistory’’
and ‘‘historical geography’’ are being used
interchangeably (and confusingly).
Surveying the relations of history and the so-
cial sciences, Braudel argued the need to refer
each society to the space, place, or region in
which it exists, to its broad geographical con-
text. For Braudel, not only history but all the
social sciences would have ‘‘to make room for
an increasingly geographical conception of hu-
manity’’—and here he was explicitly repeating
in 1958 the claim made in 1903 by Paul Vidal de
la Blache (Braudel 1958, 753). Braudel’s reiter-
ated plea for what might be called the ‘‘geo-
graphicisation’’ of history and the social
sciences took a long time to be heard but has
come to be highly significant. In 1971 an Amer-
ican historian, Edward Fox, published a book,
History in Geographic Perspective, in which he re-
gretted the fact that ‘‘history and geography
were once assumed to be sister sciences so close
in method and focus as to verge on representing
two aspects of a single subject’’ but that ‘‘today
they share nothing.’’ Fox’s exploration of ‘‘the
geographic dimension of history’’ argued for
historically specific studies of the limits
imposed by, and the opportunities offered
by, geography on human action. For Fox, the
‘‘geographic dimension’’ embraced both
environmental and spatial components where-
as his interest in geography sprang from his
concern to understand regional variations in
the social and economic history of France
(Fox 1971, 19). In 1989, Eugene Genovese
and Leonard Hochberg, in their editorial
preface to Geographic Perspectives in History, a
collection of essays in honor of Fox, claimed
that it was only during the previous decade
or so that ‘‘the long and debilitating separa-
tion of geography from history and, more
broadly, the social sciences [had] begun to be
overcome.’’
The geographical perspective provided by
thinking in locational and spatial terms may be
applied in a wide range of historical situations. It
can underpin both histories of spaces, such as
streets and ceremonial centers, and histories of
spatial relations, such as colonial systems and
knowledge networks. It has been impressively
deployed, for example, in Donald Meinig’s
(1986, 1993, 1998, 2004) magisterial study of
500 years of American history. I have discussed
locational and spatial histories elsewhere (Baker
2003, 62–71) and there is no need to dwell on
them further here. Except, perhaps, to point out
that Chris Philo’s doctoral thesis on ‘‘the mad
business’’ in England from the medieval period
to the 1860s was presented as a ‘‘historical
geography’’ but it came to be published as a
‘‘geographical history.’’ It is, in practice, a lo-
cational and spatial history; it adopts a specific
set of geographical (locational and spatial) per-
spectives to the history of institutions for the
insane ( Philo 1994, 2004).
The geographical concepts of distribution,
location, and space have always been embedded
to varying degrees in historical studies, enrich-
ing them in the process. They are being in-
creasingly applied today, in part because of an
enhanced interdisciplinary cross-fertilization
and in part because geographers cannot legiti-
mately claim exclusive ownership of these con-
cepts. But in addition to this geographical
perspective upon history, there is another set
of geographical—in this case, environmental—

concepts that have underpinned geographical
history.
Geographical (or Environmental)
Influences in History
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, geographers engaged with historians
in debate about the nature and extent of what
were then deemed to be ‘‘geographical influ-
ences’’ on historical developments. One foun-
dation for that debate was the proclamation by
the nineteenth-century French historian, Jules
Michelet, in a lengthy (130-page) geographical
scene-setting to his Histoire de France, that his-
tory is, in the beginning, all geography—by
which he meant physical geography. Reviewing
his panorama of French history in a preface to
the 1869 edition, he wrote:
Without a geographical base, the people, the
makers of history, seem to be walking on air, as in
those Chinese pictures where the ground is
wanting. The soils, too, must not be looked upon
only as the scene of the action. Its influence ap-
pears in a hundred ways, through food, climate,
etc. As the nest, so is the bird. As the country, so
are the men.
— (cited in Febvre 1932, 9–10)
Following Michelet’s prescription and exam-
ple, many a French historian, when writing a
history of a country or region, has introduced it
with a geographical description. This interpre-
tation of geography as the physical stage upon
which the drama of history was enacted came to
be widely adopted by many (not only French)
historians. Geographical introductions to his-
torical narratives have roots reaching down into
classical antiquity (Clarke 1999; Merrills 2005).
They blossomed, for example, in such classic
works as G. M. Trevelyan’s (1930) England under
Queen Anne and R. G. Collingwood’s (1936)
Roman Britain as well as in more recent works,
including Wickham’s (1981) Early Medieval
Italy and Alan Bowman’s (1986) Egypt After the
Pharaohs.
In North America during the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries, the first school of
American historical geography emerged with a
clear focus on geographical factors in history.
Albert P. Brigham’s Geographic Influences in
American History and Ellen Churchill Semple’s
American History and its Geographic Conditions
Classifying Geographical History 351
were both published in 1903, and both Brigham
and Semple also published papers that consid-
ered the relations of geography and history. In
their different ways—Brigham’s work was the
more regional, Semple’s the more thematic—
these books examine the role of the physical
environment, of ‘‘geographical influences’’ and
‘‘geographical controls,’’ on historical events
and developments. Darby categorized such
studies as examples of ‘‘the geography behind
history’’ or ‘‘geographical history,’’ although
they were not so titled. They certainly brought
the work of geographers to the attention of his-
torians, confirming for many of them their view
that ‘‘geography’’ could be treated as the phys-
ical environment, as what Semple herself
termed ‘‘the stage on which history unfolds’’
(Semple 1933, v). They also stimulated numer-
ous studies in similar vein. As Michael Conzen
has pointed out, many such studies were ‘‘flawed
by over-generalization and special pleading’’
and at worst they became ‘‘outright arguments
for environmental determinism,’’ ascribing only
a passive role to people. Unsurprisingly, some
historians immediately—and all geographers
eventually—were unwilling to accord ‘‘geo-
graphical influences’’ such primacy over histor-
ical agents (Conzen 1993, 15–19). But the basic
point remains that much writing about
America’s history was strongly imbued with
the spirit of geography. Frederick Jackson
Turner’s (1893) work on the significance of the
frontier in American history and Walter Pres-
cott Webb’s (1931) on the Anglo-American set-
tlement of the Great Plains are two classic
examples of historical studies—to use Darby’s
words— ‘‘impregnated with geographical con-
siderations,’’ so that they might well be viewed
(as they were by Darby) as ‘‘geographical histo-
ries’’ (Darby 2002, 149–51). Indeed, when
addressing the Association of American Geog-
raphers in 1960 about ‘‘geographical-historical
concepts in American history,’’ Webb identified
himself as ‘‘a geographical historian.’’ Speaking
almost thirty years after the publication of his
book on the Great Plains, Webb’s view of ‘‘ge-
ography’’ was surprisingly still limited to its be-
ing physical geography: he viewed geography as
treating the physical ‘‘environment’’ and history
as addressing ‘‘civilization,’’ or ‘‘human action’’
(Webb 1960).
A similarly restricted vision of the nature of
geography is to be seen in the early development
352 Volume 59, Number 3, August 2007
of the attitude of British historians to the rela-
tionship between history and geography. Kath-
erine Clarke has recently provided, as an
introduction to her 1999 study of Hellenistic
constructions of the Roman world, a detailed
account of the creation during the first half of
the twentieth century of a ‘‘geographical histo-
ry’’ produced mainly by Oxford-based histori-
ans, either consciously or subconsciously.
Scholars in ancient history like G. B. Grundy,
G. E. F. Chilver, and M. Cary found that they
could not fully comprehend their subject inde-
pendently of its geographical (which for them
meant environmental) context; they considered it
necessary to embrace study of the impact of
physical environments on historical events and
processes. While subscribing fully to that view,
another Oxford historian, J. L. Myres, devel-
oped it further into a more comprehensive por-
trayal of geographical history. Although
accepting the importance to history of influ-
ences from the physical environment, Myres
argued that historians should also embrace oth-
er geographical aspects, notably those relating
to distribution (which I have already men-
tioned) and to region (which I will address in
due course). But while Myres argued for the
near inseparability of history and geography and
explicitly espoused geographical history, he in-
sisted that ‘‘geography is not history, and cannot
be confused with it’’ (Clarke 1999, 1–76).
The pursuit of geographical history as the study
of environmental influences on historical events
and processes has an important limitation that
might explain why it has achieved limited purchase
within the academy of history. The relationship
between ‘‘environment’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ is not
one-way; it is a reciprocal relationship. Michelet’s
aphorism needs to be reversed, to read: ‘‘As the
bird, so is the nest and as the people, so is the
country.’’ Assessing the impact of human activities
on physical environments and their role in the
transformation of spaces into places and in the
making of landscapes has been a fundamental
concern of academic geography for centuries
(Glacken 1967; Livingstone 1992). Too few histo-
rians have been aware of those discourses within
geography.
It would also seem that the development of
one form of geographical history was to some
extent arrested by its focus on environmental
influences on human activities and its failure to
take fully into account environmental modifi-
cation by those activities. This is not to say that
all historians have ignored these latter pro-
cesses. For example, Lucien Febvre, in his re-
working of the relations between history and
geography, explicitly challenged both the view
of that relationship as being one concerned with
changing administrative boundaries and the
view of it as a study of geographical ‘‘influenc-
es’’ upon history. He offered instead a much
broader prospectus: ‘‘What,’’ he asked, ‘‘are the
relations of human societies of bygone times, at
different epochs in the various countries of the
world, with the geographical environment of
their day, so far as we are able to reconstruct it?’’
(Febvre 1922: translation 1925, 394). Indeed,
historians have long recognized not only that
natural environments have played a significant
role in how human societies have developed but
also that those societies have themselves had a
significant impact upon those environments.
But the practice of geographical history did not
itself extend its embrace that far. The past twen-
ty-five years or so have seen historians method-
ically pursuing a systematic exploration of the
reciprocal relations of society and nature, but
they have done so as ‘‘environmental historians’’
not as geographical historians (Fay 2003;
McNeill 2003).
What might now be viewed as a precocious, if
not premature, venture into geographical his-
tory as environmental history was Hermann
Muelder and David Delo’s Years of this Land:
A Geographical History of the United States, pub-
lished in 1943. This was a general study aimed at
a wide public audience, so it included neither
references nor a bibliography. It provided what
might today be termed a ‘‘big-picture’’ account
of the history of the physical geography of
North America, of the significance of the con-
tinent’s physical environment for its coloniza-
tion, settlement, and development, and of the
(often deleterious) impact of human activities
on America’s physical environment. The au-
thors, faculty members of a Presbyterian foun-
dation, Knox College (Illinois), were committed
historians in the sense that they wanted to draw
lessons from the past in order to forge a better
future for American society and for its physical
environment. They wrote about the history of
environmental damage as a preface to a wiser
understanding of how best to husband physical
resources. For them, geographical history had
relevance for their own time.

Does Defining Geographical History
Matter?
Having first outlined some of the ambiguities
engrained in usage of the term ‘‘geographical
history,’’ I then examined two threads that seem
to run through those usages. There is one fur-
ther concept that some users of the term also
seem to regard as integral to it: that of regional
history. This is especially clear in the exposi-
tions of Myres. To the extent that historians seek
to understand the society, economy, and culture
within a given area, their concerns approach
very closely to those of geographers. That his-
tory happens ‘‘somewhere’’—that history liter-
ally takes place—enabled Myres to argue that all
human history is regional history, and it loses
value and meaning when its geographical aspect
is overlooked. For Myres, geographical history
is geographical in part because of its adoption of
the regional method pioneered by geographers.
‘‘All history,’’ he asserted, ‘‘is the history of some
country and of the geographical distribution
of people and events that have successively co-
existed there.’’ A forceful advocate of the study
of selected periods of history on broad regional
lines, Myres focused his own research on ‘‘the
history of Man in the Mediterranean’’ (Myres
1953, 64, 75, 82–84).
Not all historians who have espoused geo-
graphical history have adopted this conception
of it as regional history. Edward Fox’s (1971)
interest in what he called ‘‘the geographic di-
mension in history’’ sprang from his concern to
understand regional variations in the social and
economic history of France, nevertheless he was
not a powerful proponent of regional history.
But many other historians have been, although
not explicitly as geographical historians. The
development of regional history has taken place
in a variety of guises and it has played a signif-
icant role in the prosecution of academic history
in Britain, France, and North America (Baker
2003, 191–97). But it would be a mistake to as-
cribe that development directly to the advocacy
of a geographical history by Myres. The history
of geographical history is a labyrinth, not a
straight-line path.
That ‘‘geographical history’’ as a concept has
had diverse meanings and origins is further
revealed in a reading of Gertude Stein’s The
Geographical History of America, published in
1936. Stein’s literary experiment combines
Classifying Geographical History 353
prose pieces, dialogues, philosophical medita-
tions, and playlets. As William Gass (1995, 3–
42) has pointed out, in Stein’s search for
American identity she worked with the belief
that the American experience was more strongly
influenced by space than by time and that it was
shaped on the frontier. To Americans, space was
more significant than time because from an An-
glo-European perspective the continent had
vast expanses of space but a very brief history.
Thus a geographical history was the only kind of
history America could have and, unsurprisingly,
for Stein its people have become cultural pio-
neers. Gass considered it unlikely that Stein had
any knowledge of Turner’s frontier thesis, but he
argued that her understanding of American his-
tory was based on something very like it. Stein
was also impressed by the flatness of the Amer-
ican landscape when seen from the air, its
apparent—as she saw it—detachment from his-
tory. The flatness of America’s landscape, its
lack of historical depth, impressed and encour-
aged her in her own search for both an ahistor-
ical prose and a personal identity not mired in
history (Vanskike 1993).
This brief excursion into a literary field em-
phasizes the widely different meanings and us-
ages that the label ‘‘geographical history’’ has
had to bear. But the fact that ‘‘geographical his-
tory’’ has had multiple meanings cannot explain
why it has been so little used or why the concept
had such an arrested development. Its close rel-
ative, ‘‘historical geography,’’ has carried a sim-
ilar burden of multiple meanings but it has
flowered into a spectacular subdiscipline
preached and practiced by many. By contrast,
apart from Myres, geographical history has had
few missionaries to spread its gospel. Historical
geography has become embedded within
university courses and has seen the establish-
ment of both journals and edited book series in
its name. That cannot be said of geographical
history. Might it also be that even the few mis-
sionaries for geographical history were not
themselves totally committed to their cause
and that they were willing instead to practice
more ecumenically?
Certainly doubts were expressed. Thus in
1928 even Myres’s advocacy of geographical
history was diluted: ‘‘Whether the geographer
or the historian takes the initiative [in recon-
structing past landscapes] seems to me to be a
matter of indifference, provided first that the
354 Volume 59, Number 3, August 2007
other colleague responds; and provided also that
initiative, response, and collaboration occur as
publicly, frankly, and naturally as educational
good manners allow’’ (Myres 1953, 85, italics in
original). Earlier, Febvre, in his reworking of
the relations between history and geography,
stated that it mattered ‘‘little whether those who
undertake such research [into the relations be-
tween people and their physical environments]
be labeled at the outset geographers, historians,
or even sociologists’’ (Febvre 1925, 394). Much
later, both in publications and in lectures to
students in the 1960s, Darby provided a codi-
fication of historical geography but stressed that
he did not wish to delimit too precisely the
frontier between history and geography. He
concluded his lecture to students on ‘‘the geog-
raphy behind history’’ as practiced in the United
States by arguing:
while we must recognize that ‘‘geographical his-
tory’’ can only belong to the field of history, we
are often forced to realize that sometimes it is not
easy to distinguish between the influence of ge-
ography upon history, and that of history upon
geography. Man in the very act of modifying na-
ture is often affected by what he sets out mod-
ify. . . . Although in theory it is possible to
separate the two themes, in practice it is some-
times difficult to do so.
— (Darby 2002, 153)
That balanced assessment seems to be the most
appropriate one to reach.
So, does defining ‘‘geographical history’’
matter?’’ Fundamentally, it should matter to
those who employ the term, because the prob-
lem of the relation between geographical histo-
ry and historical geography is more than
semantic. What meaning do those who use the
term ‘‘geographical history’’ wish it to convey to
a reader? The term itself has lacked coherence
and stability. Perhaps that does not matter if its
use in a specific context is explicitly defined. It
has been used by some scholars (especially his-
torical geographers wishing to study the history
of distributions) to differentiate what they do
from some (other) forms of historical geogra-
phy. It has also been a way of discussing geo-
graphical (meaning physical environmental)
influences on history. At the very least, identi-
fying usages of the term ‘‘geographical history’’
contributes to the history of ideas. Additionally,
there need to be agreed or commonly under-
stood meanings for such terms if scholars are
to communicate knowledge to each other
with mutual understanding. There is, then, a
straightforwardly pragmatic case for classifying
‘‘geographical history.’’ The distinction be-
tween historical geography and geographical
history is useful and worth preserving. Confu-
sion would be confounded if we were to hold to
the common sense understanding of historical
geography as the study of geography from a
historical perspective and of geographical his-
tory as the study of history from a geographical
perspective. The difference in principle between
geographical history and historical geography
has often been blurred in practice. Nonetheless,
the distinction between (geographical) history
and (historical) geography is fundamental. That
distinction is embedded in the Western Classi-
cal tradition that viewed history as chronology
and geography as chorography and that recog-
nized the interdependent nature of the two ap-
proaches. Usage of the term ‘‘geographical
history’’ has been confusingly varied: a clearer
understanding of its epistemological status is
desirable. Otherwise the term will continue to
be abused and encounters with it confused.’
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ALAN R. H. BAKER is a Life Fellow at Emmanuel
College, Cambridge CB2 3AP, United Kingdom.
E-mail: arb1000@cam.ac.uk. His research interests
include the historical geography of voluntary associ-
ations in rural France during the nineteenth century
and the methodology of historical geography.