In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the visiting nurses of western empires and nation-states performed vital labor in combating tuberculosis (TB). Their hybrid role combined modern nursing and social work, typically benefitting from civil society organizations. In late Ottoman and early republican Turkey, tuberculosis resulted in many fatalities. To overcome this biopolitical challenge

This review article sets Corinne Fowler's new book in the context of the political struggle over Britain's colonial past, often referred to as a ‘culture war’. It identifies this struggle specifically as a right wing backlash against Black Lives Matter, notes how Fowler has been targeted by its protagonists, and examines how she has responded with this a book intended to inform, ameliorate and encourage

The paper examines The Peoples of Austria-Hungary geographical handbook and the accompanying Atlas of Austria-Hungary, published by Britain's Naval Intelligence Division in 1919 and, in greater detail, the antecedent mapping and statistical studies of Bertie Cotterell Wallis, a London schoolteacher, who undertook to study Hungary's nationalities and demography from 1915 as part of the 1:1 M mapping

This article studies the virtual world(s) that Belgian audiences encountered through the multimodal mass medium of the projection lantern in the early twentieth century. In contrast to previous work, we move from studying the visual representation of a single place in a small number of projection slides to examining the virtual world(s) that the lantern medium enabled. To achieve this overview, we

The wars that ravaged the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century were among the most destructive events in the history of that part of Europe at the time. It is said that from this point on, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth transitioned from a subject to an object state. Through interdisciplinary research involving the analysis of written, cartographic, and paleoecological data, we aim

This article engages in examining the historical geography of ʾAmba Čara in the modern period of Ethiopia since 1850s. Ethiopian imperial history began in the Aksum era of the first century A.D., when an emperor moved from the country's capital and founded a number of temporary royal towns in order to develop and strengthen his kingdom. ʾAmba Čara was one of these towns. There is a dearth of research

This article explores the relationship between the spatial distribution of elite power and geophysical factors in two regions within the Low Countries between c.1350 – c.1650. It does so through a focus on seigneuries, bundles of territory and rights through which premodern lords and ladies across Europe held jurisdiction and economic prerogatives over local subjects. Historians have often assumed

This article, prompted by first-hand experience of considerable controversy over cruise ships in the Venetian Lagoon, seeks to take forward reasoning around archipelagic wateriness. In light of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals on ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’ and ‘Life below Water’, I shuttle between the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries on an experimental trajectory that brings

This article contributes to a body of scholarship examining the relationship between myth and geography. Specifically, I integrate a posthumanist understanding of assemblage theory to better account for the role that more-than-human entities play in the creation and transformation of mythic landscapes. To support this line of inquiry, I adopt Bowden's geographical traditions model to help trace the

This multidisciplinary study examines the potential causes of a severe and rapid population and settlement decline during the period of transition in the Jawlān and eastern Ḥawrān regions in the province of Damascus. The Jawlān had been part of a relatively small and centralized sultanate in the Mamluk period. However, in the sixteenth century it was incorporated into an empire that ruled over three

This paper introduces a virtual special issue that explores how monuments have been contested in the past and how they continue to be so in the present. A survey of papers published in this journal from the 1990s to the early-2000s demonstrates an ongoing and rich interest in the interconnections between nationalism, landscape and ritual, with some emphasis on resistance but little sense of the contemporary

Ideas of islands shaped Britain's self-identity and its relationship with the wider world in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Existing interpretations of Anglo-Japanese relations have emphasized the development of the idea of Japan as the ‘Britain of the East’ in the late nineteenth century with the significance of Japan adopting a western model of development. This article argues for a critical

This article argues that the spatial subjectivity of the map maker is a crucial component of historical geography and uses maps in post-Holocaust yizker bikher to demonstrate how these hand-drawn geographies are invaluable counterweights to perpetrator mapping projects. To develop the argument, the article analyzes three selected yizker bikher maps, renderings of towns inhabited by Jewish and non-Jewish

This study geolocates the place of residence for a majority of free residents in Washington, D.C. in the year 1860 using archival data and evaluates their spatial distribution with respect to racialized residential segregation patterns. Transcribed individual census entries were joined to city directory records and geocoded at the household level using a customized historical address locator derived

This article delves into the urban environmental history of early modern Amsterdam through the examination of water access. In this coastal city, environmental change combined with the late 16th and especially 17th century urban growth made ground and surface waters brackish and polluted. As a result, access to clean drinking water required substantial efforts. A combined system of mainly rain containers

Early-nineteenth century Russian accounts of the coastline between Alaska and Fort Ross are rare. This article helps fill this gap, providing diary accounts by Russian American Company employee, Afanasy Shvetsov, of two joint Russian-American sea otter hunting trips along the Oregon and northern California coasts in 1808-09. Recently recovered and translated, these accounts aptly describe landscapes

In the first half of the 19th century, Adriano Balbi (1782–1848) was one of the greatest geographers in Italy and Europe, having an extremely vast and constantly updated scientific output. He tried to keep up with new discoveries of ‘unknown and unexplored' territories. His work influenced geographers and cartographers, who used it as a source. Evangelista Azzi (1793–1848), a cartographer and military

This study examines weather conditions in Małopolska (Lesser Poland, southern Poland) from 1861 to 1919, utilizing historical meteorological materials stored in the Archives of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management — National Research Institute, Poland. The region developed an extensive meteorological network in the latter half of the nineteenth century, preserving daily and sub-daily measurements

This article traces the genealogy of the idea of sustainable development in Latin America. It links perspectives from historical political ecology and the history of ideas to trace authors, conferences and major works that produced and disseminated socio-ecological knowledge relating to sustainable development in the region. Challenging the pretensions of ‘universality’ of this concept, the article

This paper examines the role of law, particularly law related to private property, in the historical geography of class struggle. At the center of the analysis is the ‘access rule’, written by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 1975 and struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 2021. Responding to the specific geography of California agribusiness labor relations and the long

The article presents the rationale behind the construction of the Oder-Vistula-Dniester Canal, the implementation phase of the project, the environmental impact and the remaining contemporary vestiges of the investment. The spatial turn approach has been used to study the state of inland navigation and the political and economic factors linked to it, both at the level of the Empire as a whole and at

The World's Edge — The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity showcases, in exhibition and book form, the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946) and his project to chart photographically the edges and extremities of the Atlantic Basin. Cooper's large black-and-white prints, often abstract and tied tenuously to a specific location by words, are visually arresting and intensely geographical. This essay points

Engaging with the literature that since Horden's and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea has reflected on the multicultural dimension of the Mediterranean over the long period, this paper aims to discuss Carlo Maranelli's (1876–1939) perspective on the Adriatic Sea, highlighting his radical democratic view and situating his contribution in the present post-national and multicultural scenario. Despite not

This reflection traces my intellectual journey to geography. It focuses on the emergence of Global Black Geographies as a key methodological framework in my PhD research. The article explores its application to my work alongside my move from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. Global Black Geographies, which takes some of its cues from Black Geographies, is a field that powerfully interrogates the multiply

In this paper we examine the activities of US Army topographers and engineers in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) watershed during the violent transformation of the region from the heartlands of the Creek confederacy to US territorial control. A vital waterway for the Creek in the late eighteenth century, the rivers would become an important transportation network in the US plantation economy

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

This study critically examines the transformation of industrial chimneys into monuments within Barcelona's deindustrializing urban landscapes. Since the 1970s, redevelopment contexts and reimaging strategies have led to the conservation of industrial chimneys as public art and historic monuments. This paper explores the intersection of urban memory, heritage, and transformation in Barcelona, highlighting

This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981–2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with

In the context of class and culture wars over the social purpose of the university, it is time to revisit a pivotal question: to whom is the discipline of geography accountable and for what? In the spirit of looking back to look forward, we wonder to what extent and in what ways historiographies of geography that critically interrogate geographers' statements on the discipline's social mission might

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,

This short reflection on forty years of the UK's History and Philosophy of Geography group reflects on the poetics of geographical knowledge. Whilst histories of geography have diverged from philosophies of geography over recent years, the intervention proposes that a useful avenue of enquiry for future work is to develop fuller historical and philosophical accounts of the forms and poetics of geographical

This introduction to the special issue Reflections on Histories and Philosophies of Geography discusses the context and content of nineteen articles written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). The group was founded in 1981, two years after the early career

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

The conflict over Wallmapu-Araucanía in southern Chile, between the Spanish conquistadores, 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

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

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

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

Donna Haraway has been a constant presence in geographical thought and practice over the past 30 years. From her early and very influential essay on Situated Knowledges, to her more recent engagements with the Anthropocene in Staying with the Trouble, her work has become a key reference point for questioning the production of geographical knowledge. In this commentary I trace the influence of Haraway's

The Geography 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

This paper introduces to an international audience the ‘encyclopaedic approach’ to geographical historiography. This approach was developed at the Free University of Amsterdam between 1961 and 1987 by Marcus Heslinga and Andries Kouwenhoven. Signalling how contemporary geography is hampered by the silofication of different subdisciplines and how a better understanding of our shared and pluriform histories

In this ‘Historical Geography at Large’ review I recount my participation in an August 2023 summer school led by Professor Alan Lester at the University of Sussex, entitled ‘How to talk about British colonialism in the middle of a culture war’. The workshop encouraged the participation of non-academics who desired greater knowledge of the British empire and its legacies, to help them negotiate contemporary