History and philosophy of geography III

I Introduction

In John Henry Newman’s lectures that outlined his famous Idea of a University, there is an extended section detailing an imagined, but nevertheless bruising, encounter between a rather hopeless candidate for university admission and an imperious tutor in Dublin. The pontifical interlocutor focuses on the Anabasis by Xenophon and delights in his victim’s tortuous responses. As Newman argues, his candidate

had read the Anabasis, and had some general idea what the word meant; but he had no accurate knowledge how the word came to have its meaning, or of the history and geography implied in it.… Nothing is more common in an age like this, when books abound, than to fancy that the gratification of a love of reading is real study. (Newman, 1852: 262)

Why return to this now? This chimerical confrontation is important because it presages a number of concerns of the recent period in the history and philosophy of geography. The first theme is a resurgent interest in the history of the classics and the canonical amongst historians of geography. Second, there have been calls for greater awareness of the history of disciplinary practices in new agendas for enthusiasm in geography. Third, there has been a revivification of histories of geographical concepts. Finally, there has been an evident exacerbation of geographical and spatial influences in intellectual history sensu stricto. There are evident audiences for histories of geographical thought both within and without conventional disciplinary communities. This, my final of three biennial reviews, focuses on material from 2013, 2014 and early 2015. In sum, it is argued that there is much exciting and stimulating work by historians and philosophers of geographical thought.

It is necessary to proclaim this now because back in March 2011, soon after I had finalized my first report of this series (Powell, 2012a), in a post on his influential blog Progressive Geographies, Stuart Elden asked: ‘where are the historians of geography, as a subfield within the history of ideas or history of science? Apart from those I’ve already mentioned, I can’t think of many more’ (Elden, 2011a: 1). Looking at the list, and its absences, it might seem a little trivial to say, ‘well, I can think of some more’. ¹ Rather, what is significant is that Elden, as a recent convert to his ‘adoptive discipline’, quickly identified that ‘a sense of the discipline’s history – even its very recent history – is often lacking’ (Elden, 2011a: 1). ² In a recent interview with Berkeley geographer Michael Watts, Elden elaborated that ‘[o]ne of the things that struck me from moving from a Department of Politics to a Department of Geography was that, compared to political theory at least, Geography didn’t have an especially broad grasp of its own history’ (Elden, 2015: 19). It might be interesting to insert the locations of these departments (that is, Warwick PAIS to Durham Geography), and ponder how that affects the situation, but it is nevertheless an important observation. As Neil Smith might have asked, though: where does the blame for this lie?

II Recalling the ancients?

During the post-1945 period, Anglo-American geographers began to shed scholarly interest in the history of geography, leading to Neil Smith’s (1988) searing critique. In many cases, this was because of the inherent conservatism, and Conservatism, in much published history of the discipline, particularly in Richard Hartshorne’s (1939) The Nature of Geography. Indeed, it was Smith who first highlighted the ‘highly selective geographical canon’ that Hartshorne recovered from, mainly, the German tradition and its implications for disciplinary practices in the 20th century (Smith, 1989: 93). As predicted in the first of my reports (Powell, 2012a), an emergent theme in history of geography has been attempts to reconsider the discipline’s relationship with canonicity (Keighren et al., 2012a, 2012b; Agnew, 2012; Hubbard, 2012; Maddrell, 2012; Mayhew, 2012; Monk, 2012; Powell, 2012b; Schein, 2012; Withers, 2012). ³

But like so many modern disciplines institutionalized during the late 19th century, geography owes a debt to scholars of the ancients (Powell, 2015b). In a significant landmark, Bill Koelsch (2013) has produced a major study of the classics and their influence on the discipline. Classical geography, as Koelsch frames it, emerged as an important component of humanities education in 18th-century Europe, following the rediscovery of many of the Greek and Latin classics. During the second half of the 19th century, familiarity with these ‘greats’ (and inter alia their geographies), as Cardinal Newman demonstrated, was prized such that it became the very essence of the secular university. But during the 20th century, they declined in pedagogical importance, and now ‘Anglo-American geographers have done … a good job of erasing the geography of classical antiquity from the history of their own subject’ (Koelsch, 2013: xix). Koelsch proceeds to recover the influence of classical geography in British and American universities such as Liverpool, Harvard, Oxford, Chicago and Clark. In doing so, he reveals a pantheon of long-neglected figures such as Thomas Jefferson, James Rennell, Thomas Arnold and Henry Fanshawe Tozer.

Of all of the figures discussed, though, perhaps the most important is the account of John Linton Myres, the classicist and historian of ancient history. Myres’s role in the history of anthropology is well known by students of that discipline (Rivière, 2007; Mills, 2008). However, his contemporaneous role in the formation of geography at both Oxford (the first department in Britain and Ireland) and Liverpool (the first Honours degree in Britain or Ireland) has long been forgotten, and Koelsch does much to rectify this neglect. Koelsch (2013) also persuasively demonstrates how many of the concerns of the ancient geographers were recurrent in the development of the modern subject. He traces many important connections for the later history of geography, such as his discussion of J.N.L. Baker’s and T.W. Freeman’s respective roles at the Dundee meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1947, whereby Section E (Geography) formed a committee to catalogue the development of modern geography since the 1880s. In Koelsch (2013), therefore, we find a clear account of a geographical canon from the ancients through the 20th century. This book feels like it is the product of 50 years of learning and scholarship. Given Koelsch’s octogenarian status, it perhaps tends towards the antiquarian, but it is far, far from retarded. The book is entertaining, inspiring and deserves a huge readership in the discipline.

Interests in classical geographers have also continued to inspire work on the geographical thought within the oeuvres of other intellectuals. There has been more investigation of the geographical thought of Immanuel Kant (Louden, 2014), complemented by new considerations of G.W.F. Hegel (Bond, 2014) and Gottfried Leibniz (Elden, 2013a). There has been a comprehensive re-thinking of Carl Schmitt’s legacy for geographical thought (Legg and Vasudevan, 2011; Atkinson, 2011; Elden, 2011b; Heffernan, 2011; Legg, 2011; Steinberg, 2011; Minca, 2012a; Barnes and Minca, 2013; Sherratt, 2013; Minca and Rowan, 2014; 2015). Schmitt, a noted 20th-century German juridical theorist, has been extensively discussed in recent Anglophone geography for his spatial thinking, his evident debt to certain geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel and Halford Mackinder, and his apparent importance for an understanding of the early 21st-century world. The initial geographical (re)discovery of Schmitt derived from Giorgio Agamben’s work on ‘the exception' (Legg and Vasudevan, 2011; Teschke, 2011). Inevitably, as Schmitt’s corpus has been more extensively translated, geographers have pointed to aporia in prior geographical engagements. Minca and Rowan (2014, 2015) make a plea for geographers to contribute to more sophisticated reflections on Schmitt’s legacy for spatial thinking in global political debates. At the very least, the recovery of such ideas indicates that further work is required on the history and politics of early 20th-century geography, particularly in Germany (Heffernan, 2011; Barnes and Minca, 2013).

This geographical engagement with Schmitt has also raised important ethical and political questions about the recovery of German spatial and political thought from the Nazi period. As David Atkinson puts it, ‘it is clear that Nazi Germany was not a land without intellectuals’ (2011: 207). But how does one remember Nazi intellectuals appropriately? As noted in my previous report, this issue continues to have consequences for the history of political geography (Powell, 2015a). Yvonne Sherratt (2013) has provided an engaging account of a number of German thinkers who were enrolled into Nazism. There has been recent discussion in the popular press about the Nazi heritage of Martin Heidegger (Rothman, 2014). Furthermore, the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas (2012) has carefully demonstrated the intellectual debt that Martin Heidegger owed to geographers such as Ratzel and Paul Vidal de la Blache, particularly around ideas of holism and place-oriented thinking. It would seem that historians of geography have much to learn from, and contribute to, the imbrication of geographical ideas and concepts in early 20th-century philosophy.

III Re-energizing geographical biography?

Over a decade ago, David Livingstone (2002: 34) made a plea for ‘geographical biography’, and this was a perennial theme of my predecessor Trevor Barnes’s (2008, 2009, 2010) reports. There have continued to be calls for more widespread use of biography in studying the history of geography over this review period (McGeachan et al., 2012; Finnegan, 2013; Heffernan, 2014b; Lorimer, 2015). In an examination of the landscape photographer W.A. Poucher, Hayden Lorimer (2015: 2) has recently called for a ‘geo-biographical approach’ to approaching histories of geography, whereby ‘biography becomes a spatial formation emerging through the multifarious spaces and landscapes produced in a life’. A long-awaited study of Carl Sauer has been published posthumously (Williams, 2014), and there have been new investigations of the lives and works of geographers as varied as Ellen Churchill Semple (Koelsch, 2014), Élisée Reclus (Ferretti, 2013, 2014, 2015), Claude Raffestin (Fall, 2012; Klauser, 2012; Minca, 2012b; Murphy, 2012; Raffestin, 2012), James MacQueen (Lambert, 2013), David Stoddart (Malanson, 2014), Isaiah Bowman (Butler, 2013) and William Warntz (Barnes, 2014). There were a number of published forums and reflections marking the sad passing of historian of geography Neil Smith (Cowen et al., 2012; Castree, 2013; Mitchell, 2014), and Don Mitchell’s (2014) poignant account of Smith’s brilliance and weaknesses is particularly thought-provoking.

In recent work by historians of geography, productive avenues have been found by pursuing biographical methods to recover hidden stories of geographers from the middle of the 20th century. To this end, there has been a range of interventions explicitly examining Nazi geographies and geographers (Barnes and Minca, 2013; Barnes and Abrahamsson, 2015; Flint, 2014), and the role of race and racism in American geography (Kobayashi, 2014). In their examination of the Haushofers, Trevor Barnes and Christian Abrahamsson demonstrate persuasively that fuller historical geographical accounts are required to reveal the ‘complicated complicities and moral struggles involved’ in the enrolling of German geographers into the Third Reich (Barnes and Abrahamsson, 2015: 73). This paper is part of an important theme issue of Journal of Historical Geography about European geographers and the Second World War (Clayton and Barnes, 2015; Bowd and Clayton, 2015; Shaw and Oldfield, 2015; Withers, 2015). Taken together, these papers provide a fascinating glimpse of some of the lost geographical traditions and practices following the global conflict of 1939–45. Hugh Clout observes the consequences of the German Occupation for the development of French geography after 1945 (Clout, 2015; Van der Wusten, 2012). Mike Heffernan contributes an entertaining discussion of the connections between espionage and geography in the career of Hungarian geographer and Soviet agent Alexander (Sándor) Radó (Heffernan, 2015). The trial of the Professor of Human Geography at the University of Copenhagen, Gudmund Hatt, is detailed in an excellent contribution by Henrik Larsen (2015). As Larsen shows, Hatt was a Danish geographer who believed in the contribution of his science at the expense of his career and reputation. Although Hatt became something of a scapegoat in the Danish academy, it is worth stressing that ‘[h]is conception of (political) geography as an objective science was by no means unusual’ among his peers across Europe and North America (Larsen, 2015: 38). Similar themes have been pursued for geographers working on the Tropics during the early Cold War period (Clayton, 2013; Bowd and Clayton, 2013).

Other contributions to the history of geographical thought have weaved biography with study of the circulation of texts, ideas and their legacies. As a first-year undergraduate, I had to read Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population and present on it to my peers as part of a course on ‘set texts’ that required first-hand reading but no other supporting teaching. I did not think I really understood the Essay then – neither text nor context. I remember churning out the line in an examination essay that the Essay was a critique of Godwin and Condorcet, but had no clue at all of that claim’s significance. That I am now convinced that this was a viable critique to make is due solely to Robert Mayhew’s (2014) magisterial new study of Malthus and his legacies. Attempts to understand the connections between population, resources, economy and environment have underpinned the development of social thought since the late 18th century. Mayhew (2014) provides extensive discussion of both Malthus himself and Malthusian prophets and critics through the ages. These range from those commonly referenced in such discussions like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and the Club of Rome, to those less known as Malthusian interlocutors, such as John Ruskin. It is particularly interesting to read of John Maynard Keynes’s attempts to establish Malthus as the first ‘Cambridge economist’ in the early 1930s, as part of his own intellectual empire-building (Mayhew, 2014: 171). What Mayhew wants most of all, though, is for Malthus to be read seriously today, especially by geographers. Malthus, after Frank Kermode, is ‘perpetually modern’ – the very essence of the canonical (Mayhew, 2014: 233). Without being uncouth enough to claim as much, this book is a rallying call for the reading of the canon of human-environment relations by students of geography.

In further evidence of Malthus’s canonicity, historian Alison Bashford’s (2014) brilliant study of 20th-century population dynamics makes a major contribution to the history of the social sciences. Bashford’s (2014) argument is that the 20th-century’s ‘Malthusian moment’ should not be linked solely to the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it began much earlier, around the end of the Great War. In demonstrating this, Bashford provides documentary discussion of the transition from geopolitics to biopolitics in global, imperial and state strategy. Bashford’s (2014) account delivers extensive evidence for the ways in which geographical and spatial concepts were folded within struggles over the future of life and earth across the 20th century. ⁴ In doing so, she has given inspiration to a new generation of historians of the geographical and life sciences.

IV Institutions and enchantment in the production of geographical knowledge

In the general field of history of geography, other work has continued to focus on familiar themes of site, institution and instrumentation. Mike Heffernan (2014a) has provided a recent discussion of 18th-century geography in France. Charles Withers (2013a, 2013b), Sarah Louise Millar (2013) and Jason Grek-Martin (2014) have examined the importance of instrumentation in the establishment of geographical science during the 19th century. There has been continued interest in fieldwork and the geographies of scientific knowledge (MacDonald, 2011; Forsyth, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Ogborn, 2013).

In institutional histories, Karen Morin (2011, 2013) has examined the record of the American Geographical Society after 1860. There have been reconsiderations of the RGS-IBG Women and Geography Study Group (Wyse, 2013), the RGS-IBG Historical Geography Research Group (Butlin, 2013), and the admission of women fellows to the RGS (Evans et al., 2013). The shifting administrative locations of geography departments in the UK (Hall, 2015; Hall et al., 2015), Monash University (Kull, 2014) and the University of Toronto (Warkentin, 2014) have been examined. Graeme Wynn (2012) has provided a valedictory statement addressing the history of historical geography in Canada.

Another interesting intervention in the institutional history of geography in the US has been provided by Michael DeVivo (2015), a former US Marine, who uses oral histories to focus on the issue of leadership in the growth and decline of American departments of geography. This may simplify the story overly in some cases, but DeVivo (2015) provides a wealth of interesting material on many schools. Notable among these, and building on a theme from my earlier report (Powell, 2015a), he adds yet further detail to the ‘Waterloo moment’ of geography at Harvard, as well as providing a fascinating account of the birth of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara (DeVivo, 2015: 83). Earlier in my career, I would have completely resisted the underlying premise of this book, but as one gathers experience of different departments, there is definitely something to the issue of leadership and personality within highly complex institutions, such as those in higher education.

In other work, there have been engagements that deploy explicitly cultural geographical practices in the understanding of disciplinary histories. Felix Driver (2013) has provided a fuller account of the ‘Hidden Histories of Exploration’ exhibition at the RGS in 2009. Likewise, in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, there have been related developments in the history of collections and museology. Archaeologist Dan Hicks, in uncovering significant new dimensions of the emergence of the American ‘four field’ model, suggests that ‘collections-based research into anthropology’s past requires us to develop distinctive forms of disciplinary historiography’ (Hicks, 2013: 761). There is potential for further work here to investigate the interconnected histories of the field disciplines of geography, archaeology and anthropology and their relations to collections and museums (MacDonald, 2011, 2014; Hill, 2015; Ingold, 2011). There has been a suite of related work that has reconsidered the importance of spaces of collection (Sjöholm, 2014; Bauch and Scott, 2012; Schein, 2011), narrative (Lorimer, 2014; Lorimer and Parr, 2014; MacDonald, 2014; Parr and Stevenson, 2014; Stewart, 2014), exhibit (Warren, 2012; Martin, 2013; Driver, 2014), archive (García-Álvarez and Marías-Martínez, 2013; Craggs et al., 2013; Bressey, 2014; Cameron, 2014; DeLyser, 2014; Geoghegan, 2014) and remembrance (Fall and Minca, 2012; Keighren, 2012) for geographical knowledge.

Chris Philo, in a close philological examination of the development of the variations of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, has made a call for the recovery of a ‘“romantic geographical imagination”‘ (Philo, 2013: 185). This imagination draws together, for Philo (2013), concerns for otherness, theories and experimentation. Thinking through spaces and forms of experimentation continues to be an important resource in history and philosophy of geography (Enigbokan and Patchett, 2011; Macpherson and Bleasdale, 2012; Roberts, 2012; Whatmore, 2013; Jellis, 2015). A major contribution here has been Derek McCormack’s (2013, 2014) articulation of the importance of the affective spaces of experimentation and atmospheric things. Philo (2013), though, uses his textual exegesis to posit that a tension between Enlightenment and Romanticism persists through Foucault’s versions of this text. Moreover, for Philo, ‘a credible history of (human) geography as a disciplinary endeavour could be crafted in [these] terms’ (Philo, 2013: 184). Philo has always been interested in recovering the longue durée of social and cultural geography (Philo, 1991), and it does seem that he is here articulating a subtle argument for rapprochement across these elements of contemporary human geography that is informed by, and informs, the histories and futures of the discipline.

In a related set of exciting papers, Tara Woodyer and Hilary Geoghegan have called for a revalorizing of awe, wonder and enchantment in engagements with geographies (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013; Geoghegan and Woodyer, 2014). In an inspiring account, they plead for greater cheerfulness, optimism and a ‘firm appreciation of our historical disciplinary trajectory’ (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013: 211). In doing so, they have helped to re-energize conceptions of disciplinary histories and practices through resources from cultural geography. Richard Phillips (2014) has made an analogous argument about the need for the cultivation of spaces of and for curiosity by and for geographers.

As part of this process of re-enchantment, there has been excellent work that has brought together insights from the history of fieldwork to instigate collaborations between art and geomorphology (Dixon et al., 2013). In turn, this seems to be part of a wider reconsideration of the contribution of place-based concepts in physical geography (Brierley et al., 2013; Wilcock et al., 2013; Malanson et al., 2014; Malanson, 2014). Intriguingly, although previously mainly associated with English scholar-geomorphologists such as Barbara Kennedy and David Stoddart (Powell, 2002), there seems to be growing consideration of these themes by American, Australian, New Zealand and Chinese geomorphologists and physical geographers.

If there have been calls to rethink the legacies of disciplinary practices, then there have also been injunctions to return to theories that seem to have fallen out of recent favour in human geography, such as critical realism (Cox, 2013a, 2013b; Katz, 2013). In this vein, and notwithstanding Woodyer and Geoghegan’s (2013) calls for cheerfulness and joy in philosophical discussions about geography, it was rather disappointing to read the bad-tempered dialogue about the place of anarchism in radical geography (Springer, 2014a, 2014b; Mann, 2014; Clough, 2014; Ince, 2014; Gibson, 2014; Waterstone, 2014). Simon Springer (2014a, 2014b) rightly draws attention to the supremacy of particular versions of the radical tradition within geography, although he does perhaps skirt over some of the issues. In response, Geoff Mann (2014: 272) says his argument is ‘totally and completely uninformed’, although he does suggest that Springer needs to target instead particular senior figures in Marxist geography. This exchange betrays the fracturing of the Left amongst theorists in geography, which was arguably held together over the past couple of decades by the deliberately amorphous moniker ‘critical geography’. From their institutional affiliations, it feels as if the reader of this dialogue is an unwelcome snoop, eavesdropping on the squabbling of southern British Columbian neighbours. Indeed, perhaps the vitriol does emerge from the incompatibility of ‘Marxist-geography-as-lived-as-political-economy’ by some on the hill in Burnaby and the ‘Marxist geography’ dismissively caricatured by some in their teaching at West Point Grey.

Within British geography, versions of this crisis over ‘what radical/critical/Marxist geography ought to be’ have continued. Geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift have continued to outline their vision for the future of the Left (Amin and Thrift, 2013; Amin, 2013). The terms of their agenda seem to have departed from geographical interlocutors, although they do use some of the framings of non-representational theory (affect, organization, and envisioning futures) to articulate their version of progressive politics. It appears that the vision for leftist geography in Britain and the future agenda for the political Left as articulated by senior British geographers are increasingly divergent and even oppositional. Clive Barnett (2013: 32) in a barnstorming, if slightly cantankerous, review argues therefore that ‘Arts of the Political is a peculiarly disheartening book’.

V Studying the Anabasis? Conceptual histories of single words

In a recent lecture, the political geographer John Agnew claimed that ‘human geography has become increasingly interested in the history or “genealogy” of its basic concepts’ (Agnew, 2014a: 311). The major contribution here has been Stuart Elden’s (2013b) publication of his magnum opus – a distinguished history of the concept of territory. This is a fascinating story that pursues the emergence of territory through Greece, Rome and early modern Europe by working between sources in a number of languages. It is serious, elegant and a significant milestone in the history of geographical thought. Elden has already received acclaim through a number of review symposia by geographers (Minca et al., 2015; Charron et al., 2014; Campanile, 2014; Legg et al., forthcoming), and there is perhaps not much further to add, save that it is an exceptional book.

In this culture of reception, a number of commentators have noted that The Birth of Territory stands askance to much ‘mainstream human geography’ (Minca in Minca et al., 2015: 93). This is undoubtedly the case, as very few geographers have ever been minded to attempt Cambridge School intellectual history. ⁵ Indeed, Elden’s textual exegesis can seem decidedly unfashionable, as he mentions himself (Elden in Legg et al., forthcoming), at least when compared to the material and ontological turns of the past couple of decades. Just to deliver such scholarship requires a major effort of expertise, intellect, time and resources.

However, it is incorrect to state that this type of approach is wholly without precedent in the history of geography. No one has ever managed to do so with the depth and aplomb presented in The Birth of Territory, but many historians of geography writing before the 1970s did so in this sort of humanities tradition. ⁶ In terms of style, then, perhaps Elden’s most obvious geographical progenitor is not Jean Gottmann but rather J.N.L. Baker. In this way, Elden’s critical legacy for geography may well be to re-valorize a commitment to some of the burdens of scholarship in the humanities tradition: notably, philology. At the same time, we might remember Smith’s caution that the recovery of a canon for geographical thought can be exclusionary. Inevitably, we end up with Dead White European Males (Maddrell, 2012; Powell, 2015b). This appears to characterize the contemporary canonization of geographers as well.

Agnew (2014a, 2014b) criticizes what he sees as a static nominalism within the history of ideas, and as then applied by Elden to the history of geographical concepts. By discussing the practical, contemporary significance of geopolitics, region and territory, Agnew resists this ‘history of ideas’ approach (Farish, 2014; Paasi, 2014; Roberts, 2014; Sultana, 2014). If any given geographer was asked to choose (only) a single concept for a conceptual history, in some sort of strange parlour game, it is very unlikely that many would have chosen territory – as opposed to, say, place, space, environment, earth or landscape. This has meant that, for Agnew, ‘the field has become so obsessed with tracing the intellectual genealogies of its concepts (as singular words) that the practical lives to which the concepts can help provide tentative understanding have been increasingly forgotten’ (Agnew, 2014a: 318).

However, the extent of this new interest as methodology is disputable. Although undoubtedly a welcome contribution to political geography and the history of geographical thought, this approach cannot be read as history of geography tout court. Recent work in history of geography has not taken on the history of single concepts in any comprehensive fashion. Rather, Stuart Elden has done this specifically for territory. ⁷ Much more still remains to be done on other concepts. What has been a little depressing, for example, in recent concerns for the Geo and Anthropos in political geography is that not nearly enough time has been spent examining etymology, never mind philology. Moreover, on reading Agnew (2014b) carefully, it does seem that he is making an argument for a resurgent historical geography of geographical knowledge, rather than the history of political thought as applied to spatial and geographical concepts. The arguments of the (historical) geography of geographical knowledge were concerned with sites, texts and bodies as much as particular concepts. David Lambert’s (2013) excellent study of mid-19th-century geographer James MacQueen, for example, places the history of geography’s disciplinarity centrally within the politics of Atlantic slavery. Likewise, Federico Ferretti’s (2013, 2014, 2015) work on Élisée Reclus has demonstrated the wide-ranging social and intellectual networks of late 19th-century geographers, as well as their deep imbrication and influences upon the politics of anarchism. The history of geographical thought should not be, and indeed is not, only concerned with the history of concepts.

Another element of the reception of The Birth of Territory has been the comparison with Clarence Glacken (Heffernan in Legg et al., forthcoming). This analogy is welcome, although Glacken (1967) was resolutely not aiming at a history of a particular concept, but rather at the three questions from antiquity derived from the ultimate geographical process (human-environment relations). The interview between Watts and Elden mentioned at the outset also discusses what happened to the Holy Grail of the history of geographical thought – the lost sequel to Clarence Glacken’s (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore that was to deal with the 19th century. Watts’s account of what happened to Glacken and this text is distressing, but he suggests that at least some of this material will soon be published (Elden, 2015; Fish, 2012). This also posits the intriguing counterfactual of what would have happened with history of geography had Glacken not destroyed the manuscript after the rebuttal of a philistine publisher.

What I am trying to say, then, is that this would be a strange moment to reduce ourselves to the spatial grammar of the Anabasis, because trends in intellectual history are increasingly calling for spatial and geographical influences. As mentioned in my previous report (Powell, 2015a), there is a growing need for interdisciplinarity in studying histories of the disciplines (Bell, 2013; Marchand, 2014). This would place geography’s stories within and against those of other disciplines. Recent trends in the history of ideas and intellectual history are away from the Cambridge School and Begriffsgeschichte (McMahon, 2014). Instead, there are new interests in spaces, sites, and institutions (Smith, 2013; Randolph, 2014; Keim et al., 2014). There is already an evident influence of geographers in these developments, but more engagement is needed on both sides. The work pioneered by Richard White’s Spatial History Lab at Stanford University, for example, has become increasingly influential in American history. This ‘Spatial History’ uses GIS, technologies of visualization and spatial theory to think through new ways of writing global history (White, 2010). Apart from a handful of exceptions by American geographers (Knowles et al., 2014), these linkages have not yet been pursued by those interested in the history and philosophy of geography. ⁸ A related field, global intellectual history (Moyn and Sartori, 2013), also requires input from historians of geographical thought.

VI Conclusion

As Harvard intellectual historian David Armitage (2014: 244) puts it: ‘Historicizing conceptions of space – of the national, the international, the transnational, and the global – may in fact be the implied agenda for intellectual history after the international turn, just as historicizing conceptions of time was a major project for intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. Intellectual historians are beginning to look outwards, but in doing so are importing some rather limited spatial metaphors (cf. Armitage and Bashford, 2014). In other words, this is not the moment for historians of geography, for they are legion, to retreat back into antiquarianism or, indeed, concentrate solely on the impressively detailed philology of a few spatial concepts. Rather, it is time to deliver on the promise of the (historical) geography of geographical and environmental thought. History of geography – Ubique.

There is, of course, room in ‘geography’s capacious tent’, as environmental historian Bill Cronon (2015) puts it, for many approaches to disciplinary histories. The question of the lack of knowledge of geography’s history is linked, and will forever be so, to the events of the middle of the 20th century and deliberate attempts at their intellectual erasure. Such events have had long-term consequences for the confidence of geography and geographers. Geography: always welcoming to new practitioners and ideas. Geography: always ready to besmirch its history and wedded to fleeting celebrity. Geography: the non-conformist discipline. So where does the blame lie? It is a shared responsibility; very much so.

As I reflect on the work over the period of my reports, what has been demonstrated is the depth, range and significance of work by historians and philosophers of geographical thought. Geography, and geographical ideas and concepts, are absolutely fundamental to understanding intellectual and political worlds. They have had a critical role in the formation and understanding of doctrines and ideologies as significant as colonialism, fascism, anarchism, slavery, anthropogenic climate change and the birth of the modern state. These ideas have built worlds and destroyed them. We might remember this. And be prepared to teach our students about it.