H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (August, 2007)

David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. _Geography and
Revolution_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. viii + 433 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-226-48733-5.

Reviewed for H-HistGeog by Lesley B. Cormack, Department of History, Simon 
Fraser University

"We're going to have a Revolution!"

"Revolution" is a fraught term for historians these days. Handy for
labeling courses and textbook chapters, most revolutions have come under
fire from historians seeking complexity and multivalence rather than
cataclysmic change. So it is both brave and foolhardy of David
Livingstone and Charles Withers to create a book specifically about the
three great revolutions: the scientific revolution; the industrial
revolution; and the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. Of
course, it will come as no surprise to readers of this forum that this
is no simple reactionary undertaking. Rather, in an interesting and
occasionally provocative book, the authors make an argument for the
importance of geography to these revolutions, rendering them thereby
more complex and contextually rich.

Livingstone and Withers have assembled an important group of
collaborators, each looking at the relationship between geography and
one of these revolutions. The contributors take one of two approaches to
the interaction of geography and revolution. First, some essays examine
the geography of revolutions, arguing that all revolutions have a
geography; that is, they exist in space, in particular geographical
contexts, and this matters to the development of the revolution. Other
essays look at revolutions in geography, insisting that the discipline
of geography itself goes through transitions that could be called
revolutionary, especially in connection with these larger intellectual,
technological, and political changes. This leads to some very
interesting juxtapositions. By examining geographical knowledge and
study in conjunction with these revolutions, the editors have brought
together diverse historiographies seldom discussed together. This has
exciting possibilities, and the best of the chapters challenge us to
examine the topic in a new way. Of course, the downside of such an
undertaking is that there is not one large coherent argument. Some of
the chapters work better within the theme than others, and in the final
analysis there has been no major change in interpretative outlook.
Still, as a whole the volume does a good job of reminding us of the
important interactions between geography and revolution.

In the first section, dealing with geography and the scientific
revolution, three of the authors look at the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century transformation in natural knowledge. Peter Dear
argues that place and space are important both to investigating nature
and to the historical investigation of natural philosophy. Historians of
science have been taking this up in recent years, as John Henry's
wonderful chapter in this section makes clear. Henry demonstrates the
differences in national styles of doing science in the seventeenth
century, particularly those of England and France. Henry argues (perhaps
in a sophisticated return to Robert Merton's "sentiments") that the
French believed in rationalization and the investigation of causes,
whereas the English were suspicious of underlying causes (or at least,
our ability to know them). Isaac Newton, developing a mixture of English
and French styles through his autodidactic reading of Rene Descartes,
was able to achieve important breakthroughs denied to colleagues steeped
in only one geographical (national?) style. Charles Withers then argues
that the scientific revolution had a geography and that geography was
part of the scientific revolution. As he has shown us in other books and
articles, he insists that scientific knowledge was created in local
spaces, that such knowledge traveled over space, and that geography
itself as a set of knowledge practices was part of the scientific
revolution. Given one of Dear's most intriguing suggestions--that while
the history of science has done a wonderful job in recent years in
insisting on and understanding the development of local knowledge, we
have not explained how that local knowledge, grounded in social and real
space, becomes generalized--it would have been interesting to see
Withers and Dear engage with the question in a more dialogic form.

We turn to a geo-political comparison of Charles Darwin and Alfred
Russel Wallace for the final selection of this section on geography and
science. James Moore convincingly argues that Darwin's and Wallace's use
of biogeography and the study of geographical distribution varied in
significant ways due to their different socioeconomic statuses. Darwin
used the idea of invading organisms conquering the weaker native species
in a way that corresponded to a geopolitical view based on British
imperialism. Wallace, on the other hand, had less privilege in this
British imperial world, and constructed a (less successful) model of
equilibrium and mapping, rather than conquest. Clearly space and place
were important both to the science and to our understanding of its
development.

The relationship between geography and technological change is the
subject of the second section. Here we see the relationship between
geography and the print revolution, timekeeping, and photography. Both
Jerry Brotton and James Ryan look at the role of images in geographical
research and knowledge, and using different technologies and
chronological periods, both see the way such images affect the study of
geography "on the ground." In Brotton's excellent chapter, he traces the
depiction, both in words and pictures on the map, of the Khoisan people
of southern Africa and argues that their depiction created an
anthropology of subject peoples. Described and depicted as filthy eaters
of offal, they were thus reified and marginalized, until without
compunction they could be wiped from the map. Ryan looks at the use of
photography by Victorian geographers, arguing that while by the 1880s
photography was a necessary part of any expedition, there were major
concerns about its epistemological status. Geographers wished to augment
photos with narrative, description, explanation, and sketches. Indeed,
field sketches were often seen as more accurate. Where photography
became revolutionary was in the popularization of geographical
expeditions and knowledge, bringing the distant lands to popular
audiences. Professional geographers worried about this (after all,
amateurs and women could take pictures), but at the same time embraced
it.

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift's discussion of revolutions in
time-keeping, the final contribution to this section, is an interesting
examination of the adoption of a clock-time framework. This is a
sociological model of revolution as grounded in the practice of everyday
life, which has some geographical dimension, but is less clearly related
to the focus of either the section or the book than the other articles.

When we talk of revolutions, we think of the great political upheavals
of the early modern period--the English, French, and American
revolutions. There is, of course, a geography of political revolutions,
just as geography contributes to such revolutions, both contentions
demonstrated by the final chapters of this volume. Robert Mayhew, in an
excellent chapter on geography and the English revolution, argues that
there was a revolution in the generic form of the writing of geography
from 1600-25, influenced by humanistic practice; that this new genre
allowed politico-theological debates, especially between Calvinism and
Arminianism; and that the pamphlet debates of the English Civil War drew
on the geographical information developed in this new genre. The
Restoration confirmed the generic revolution, but effaced its religious
roots. In other words, a geographical revolution contributed to a
political one, which in turn confirmed the geographical transformation.
Michael Hefferman turns to the French Revolution, and by examining the
life and times of a successful yet unimpressive geographer, Edme
Mentelle, is able to show how geography was affected by the political
strife. Mentelle managed to survive as a writer of geography texts
through the ancien regime, revolution, Napoleonic period and at the
return of empire, by producing geography that was about facts and
descriptions, rather than theories or explanation. The effect of the
French Revolution on geography thus was to make it less interesting and
more descriptive, a conclusion with which Anne Godlewska would probably
concur. We turn next to the creation of the American Empire following
independence, a creation aided by the production of native geographies.
David Livingstone argues that the various geographies written in the
years after the revolution were essentially establishing the moral
validity of the American people, and their uniqueness. Contradicting the
Comte de Buffon, who had spoken about the degeneracy of America,
American geographers showed its fecundity and superiority. In all three
contributions, the authors show the important interconnections between
the changing discipline of geography and the political upheavals taking
place around its practitioners. This section thus demonstrates the real
power of juxtaposing these studies of different periods and countries
through the commonality of geography.

The section ends with a short but interesting chapter by Nicolaas Rupke
on the reception of Alexander von Humboldt after his death and the
publication of selected correspondence between Humboldt and Varnhagen
von Ense. These letters show Humboldt espousing liberal and republican
ideas and criticizing various heads of state. Liberal commentators,
during the politically tempestuous nineteenth century, welcomed these
letters, showing the great Humboldt to have been progressive, while
conservative commentators heavily criticized them, seeing him as petty,
mean-spirited, arrogant (and yes, republican). This is interesting
stuff, but would have benefited from a clearer articulation of its place
in the volume and the overall argument about geography and revolution.

This is my main criticism of the volume itself. Full of fascinating
material, well-written and well-argued chapters, this is a wonderful
collection of essays. However, it suffers from the problem of many
collected volumes. The overarching argument or theme is clearer in some
chapters than in others. The connecting introductions sometimes strain
to pull them all together. On occasion, the overall argument seems
almost banal: revolutions happen in space, and geography has
revolutions. In its most innovative sections, however, _Geography and
Revolution_ advances important arguments about the complexities of these
interconnections. Geography as a discipline was changed in fundamental
and far-reaching ways by its interactions with politics, technology, and
science. And these revolutionary movements were in turn affected by
their locale--and the study of that locale.

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