{"title":"Imperial projections: The Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp and the magic lantern","authors":"Anse De Weerdt","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.07.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.07.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Between 1876 and World War II, Antwerp's business elite regularly convened at the lectures of the Société Royale de Géographie d'Anvers (SRGA, ‘Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp’). Similarly to other geographical societies emerging across Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, these lectures employed the magic lantern to project visual images from distant lands. The SRGA had close ties with King Leopold II of Belgium and his imperial pursuits. Nestled within the international port city of Antwerp, the society attracted an audience vital to Leopold II's colonial ambitions – the city's commercial and financial elite. This study reflects on knowledge production and dissemination within this scientific circle in a Belgian colonial context. Rather than academic enrichment, the evenings were leisure activities, fostering connections among the business elite. Against this backdrop, the article reflects on the concept of scientific legitimacy during a specific era of Belgium's colonial past.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 95-106"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141959580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"David Lowenthal's Archipelagic and Transatlantic Landscapes: His Public and Scholarly Heritage, Kenneth R. Olwig (Ed.). Routledge, London (2023), 110 pages, £108 hardback","authors":"Theano S. Terkenli","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 93-94"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141605220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mediterranean metaphor and Léon Metchnikoff's Great Historical Rivers: anarchist geographies of water-land hybridity","authors":"Federico Ferretti","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper discusses ideas of anarchist (historical) geographies of rivers and seas. It does so by addressing works of early anarchist geographer Lev Ilich Mechnikov (mentioned here with the more known French spelling Léon Metchnikoff) (1838–1888), which lie at the origin of broader ‘Mediterranean metaphors’ comparing the globalising role of oceanic navigation to early Mediterranean connectedness, mainly discussed by Metchnikoff in his key book <em>La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques</em> [Civilisation and Great Historical Rivers]. A close collaborator of Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin and a multifarious scholarly talent, Metchnikoff provided contributions that still need to be fully rediscovered. Based on a systematic reading of Metchnikoff's archives and works, I argue that, starting from historical rivers and the early Mediterranean, his ideas on the historical roles that can be possibly (and relationally) played by water-land assemblages can nourish current notions of more-than-wet ontologies and critical geopolitics. Eventually, these ideas provide models for understanding spatialities that are alternative to those of state borders, bounded land and terracentric territorialities, contributing to shape the open and boundless world that is currently conceived by scholarship informed to pluriversal notions of critical Mediterraneanism.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 82-92"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748824000604/pdfft?md5=eca5fc7fa49108347d60fe5302e29158&pid=1-s2.0-S0305748824000604-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141595402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historical boundary struggles in the construction of the non-human world: Nature conservation and tourism in Swedish national parks","authors":"Emelie Fälton , Tom Mels","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Tourism and conservation policies in Sweden share a significant common history, involving constructions of the non-human world. In this paper, the development of this historical relationship is traced through national park policies and the Swedish Tourist Association's yearbooks, from the late nineteenth century onward. We explore this in theoretical terms of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘boundary struggles’: constantly mutating institutionalized divisions between capitalist production and nature, public governance, and social reproductive activities. Through our analysis, we identify five discursive formations — significant changes in the discursive constructions of the non-human world entailing reconfigurations of boundary struggles. Shifts between notions of sublime and wild nature external to capitalism, as stakes in welfare state accessibility debate, and as tools in the current moment of intensified commodification of the non-human world, confirm the persistence of boundary struggles in capitalist society.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 70-81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748824000537/pdfft?md5=9ebf2785e29fa07d5289b75f23d7e7ec&pid=1-s2.0-S0305748824000537-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141542484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Environmentalism in the Nineteenth Century: Interdisciplinary workshop, hosted online by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International, 26 April 2023","authors":"Emily Vincent","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2023.11.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2023.11.002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 67-69"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141484757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"French names bestowed by the Baudin expedition along the coasts of Australia: A snapshot of French national spirit during Napoleonic times","authors":"Dany Bréelle","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.02.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.02.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The coasts of Australia are bestowed with place names (toponyms) that offer great cultural insights into the Australian history and its European connections. This paper focusses on the 598 place names set up by the authors of the narratives and atlases of the French voyage of discovery captained by Nicolas Baudin who undertook the surveying and exploration of parts of the South and West coasts of New Holland, and of the east and north coasts of Van Diemen's Land between 1801 and 1803. These names have been gathered into a database where they have been categorised, for example, according to the endeavour of personalities (scientific, military, administrative among others) or members of the expedition. The article shows that the French toponyms mirror the building up after the turmoils of the French Revolution of a new national narrative which gives pride of place to the men of science, cultural figures, and military officers dear to the French emperor, Napoléon I, and whose work and actions were portrayed as great examples for the nation. This retroactive reading of the French nomenclature discloses an Australian early nineteenth century French background with around half the names still recognised today.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 47-66"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141463781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Science and imperialism: Setting the maritime sovereignty at the periphery of the French Empire through the survey of the Adriatic Sea (1806–1809)","authors":"Mirela Altic","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.06.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Adriatic was still insufficiently explored sea. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), which in 1806 resulted in a territorial expansion of the French Empire to the eastern Adriatic (formerly part of the Austrian Empire), highlighted the issues of territorial sovereignty both on land and at sea, triggering the first hydrographic survey of the Adriatic. Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military operations were conducted precisely at sea, hired Charles François Beautemps-Beaupré, his best hydrographer, to conduct a hydrographic survey of the eastern coasts of the Adriatic. Conducted in the period 1806–1809, the survey resulted in the first modern hydrographic charts of the Adriatic that were accompanied by a hydrographic report, containing an analysis of its currents, winds, tides, and geomagnetism. Beautemps-Beaupré’s campaign was the first scientifically based survey of the Adriatic whose charts and the attached report represented a shift towards an all-encompassing convention of maritime cartography. It enhanced both the sovereignty over the newly acquired sea and the insight into the maritime theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, thus confirming a strong union between political power and science. The aim of the article is to show why the French survey was a turning-point in geographical knowledge on Adriatic and how French imperialism affected the knowledge on martime geography of the Adriatic Sea.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 39-46"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141463856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wallmapu-Araucanía in flames! An historical political ecology of fire in the domination of southern Chile","authors":"Miguel Escalona Ulloa , Jonathan R. Barton","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The conflict over Wallmapu-Araucanía in southern Chile, between the Spanish <em>conquistadores</em>, the Chilean state and the Mapuche peoples, dates from the 16th century, with a key moment being the forced integration of Mapuche land into the Chilean state in the late nineteenth century. This paper discusses this long period of conflict in three moments: conquest, occupation and liberation, and it focuses on the use of fire as a politico-symbolic and techno-productive tool. A ‘landscapes of power framework’ is used for this historical political ecology analysis, based on texts from the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusions point to the historical importance of the use of fire as a tool not only for physical changes in the landscape, but principally as a tool of political symbolism that relates to a history of conflict of terror and displacement, used by the forces of occupation and resistance.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 27-38"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141484756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ștefan Constantinescu, Marius Budileanu, Cristina Andra Vrînceanu
{"title":"Mapping the liquid territories of the Danube Delta (Romania): The atlases of the European Commission of the Danube","authors":"Ștefan Constantinescu, Marius Budileanu, Cristina Andra Vrînceanu","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.04.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.04.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The European Commission of the Danube (ECD) 1856–1939 published an impressive number of maps, the most important being included in four atlases. However, despite previous efforts, until 1870, no precise map of the Danube Delta based on a unitary triangulation survey has been published. This article examines the mapping effort to recreate the triangulation network containing all the 110 points, based on the distances specified in the 1874 atlas, landmarks discovered during fieldwork and other reference layers used for georeferencing the 1870, 1886 and 1902 maps. Moreover, it offers supplementary information about ECD's vision of the liquid territories and their central feature: water and its representation on cartographic material. In our explanation, we explore the differences between various cartographic products and other sources of information used by the European Commission of the Danube to update its navigation charts. By reproducing these mapping efforts, we highlight the technical challenges for accurately mapping the Danube Delta's everchanging territory. Furthermore, by carrying out the work on digitising and indexing available cartographic material and validating them for accuracy we deliver an enhanced resource that can provide a new understanding for these maps, given their political and economic message. Finally, in this article we offer some reflections on the possible propaganda role the atlases may have played, as the accurate map building role of the ECD does not only assert technical mastery, but also makes a statement of control over the mapped territory.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 14-26"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141438857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mediterranean islands in Ptolemy's Geography: Mapping seas through geometrization","authors":"Dmitry A. Shcheglov","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.05.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The <em>Geography</em> of Claudius Ptolemy is the sole work of ancient geography that presents an easily recognizable and rather realistic depiction of the Mediterranean Sea. The article ultimately aims to explain how Ptolemy achieved such results, given the available sources and methods of his time. It explores how Ptolemy structured the space of the Mediterranean Sea, examining how he positioned the major islands (Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Crete, Euboea, Rhodes) and two peninsulas (the Southern Balkans and the Crimea). It is argued that Ptolemy's outlines of the Mediterranean Sea can be accounted for as a result of using three theoretical tools available in his time for map construction: the so-called <em>klimata</em> or reference parallels, the wind rose for determining directions, and the so-called ‘opposite places’ or coastal points presumably situated on the same meridians. The overall outlines of Ptolemy's Mediterranean, and the position of Sicily in particular, are shaped by several latitudes established by earlier geographers. Two regions of Ptolemy's map, in the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, are clearly structured based on the 12-point Timosthenes' wind rose, centered at Ostia and Rhodes, respectively. The position of Crete is found to be linked to the African coast by means of the ‘opposite places’ concept. In several cases, the outlines of Ptolemy's map distinctly correspond and can even serve as illustrations to the relevant descriptions found in Strabo's <em>Geography</em>.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"86 ","pages":"Pages 1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141438213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}