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The historical element and human action are implicit in the idea of the landscape. Such combinations, in various guises, often go under the name of historical geography. More latterly, the meaning of ‘history’, in its broadest sense, has been scrutinised closely because of the implicit subjective meaning embedded in any account of the past. Within geography, one of the earliest and most distinctive contributions to humanised landscapes came from the ‘Aberystwyth School’ of historically oriented human geography, which had an emphasis on anthropology and human ecology, and the western parts of Britain. As the l930s wore on, two figures emerged who were to dominate the debate about history in geography — Carl O. Sauer in the United States and H. C. Darby in Britain. There are basically two approaches to understanding past humanised landscapes — the reconstruction of these landscapes from consistent and comprehensive sources, and the mapping of relict features. Increasingly, both approaches combine history, archaeology, palaeobotany, and other disciplines.

Robin Donkin was an exceptional scholar in the field of historical geography, particularly concerning Latin America and the domestication of plants and animals globally. His early research was on the effect of the Cistercians on medieval landscape, and he held posts at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Brimingham. Donkin then lectured in Latin American geography at the University of Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. Obituary by Alan R. H. Baker FBA.

This chapter examines the range of popular and academic meanings of neoliberalism, including its associations with the ‘Washington Consensus’ and with ‘Thatcherism’, as a prelude to proposing a political-economic definition of the phenomenon. Emphasis is placed on the uneven development of neoliberalism across geographical space and the temporal evolution of neoliberal ideology and practice. Neoliberalism has not diffused in an invariant form, but instead has developed in a geometric fashion, through the increasing global interpenetration of its contextually specific ‘local’ forms. The ontology of neoliberalism is presented here in terms of an evolving web of relays, routines, and relations of market-oriented political practices. In turn, this calls for a methodological strategy which draws attention, simultaneously, to the ‘connective tissues’ of the neoliberalization process and its conjuncturally specific manifestations. An adequate analysis of neoliberalism must therefore entail an historical geography of the phenomenon.

This chapter complicates the received notion of the Magna Graecia's modern discovery during the 'Hellenic turn’ of eighteenth-century Europe. The historical geography of Leandro Alberti and others shows earlier Renaissance antiquarianism's perceptions of Greek South Italy as a place of picturesque natural beauty and lost antiquity, seemingly irreconcilable with the wider Italian classical past. The eighteenth-century rediscovery of Paestum is examined within its Neapolitan intellectual context, which includes the figures of Giambattista Vico, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi and even J.J. Winckelmann, and in relation to the emergence of vase studies analysis that reveals the differential investment of Italian and foreign scholars in Magna Graecia, with latter bent on a search for an ideal conception of classical Greece that would effectively relegate Magna Graecia to the margins of classical study.

Following the short introduction to Part 1, Chapter 1 begins the story of local carceral expansion with an examination of the 85-acre site designated to house the justice campus. The site was the former home of the largest color television production plant in the world, owned for decades by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA was the community’s largest employer at one point but began shifting production to Mexico in the 1960s and ultimately closed the Bloomington plant in 1998. Almost immediately, the county began considering the site for a justice campus. The chapter traces the community’s loss of that plant and subsequent attempt to build the campus as part of broader currents of the neoliberal state, including the geographical movement of capital across scale and space and the rise of the carceral state. As part of this examination, the chapter looks at the municipal growth strategies that created a zone of tax abatements and financing within which the justice campus would have sat. The chapter relies on research from cultural and Marxist geography to discuss the importance of material and symbolic reading of the landscape to consider its telling of history and the way it can be mobilized as an ideological template on which to project a particular vision for the future. The book begins with this history and analysis in order to situate and disturb the "common sense" of carceral expansion.

This chapter accounts for the emergence of different kinds of collections in specific locations: London, Edinburgh, and Dublin as British capitals and renowned centres for medical education; and Glasgow and Manchester as other major medical and museological centres. Within these locations we encounter the communities of practice that coalesced around and deployed collections, and through them the role of material culture in the medical marketplace and the construction of pathology as a discipline. The account takes the reader through different scales of analysis, dealing with the interplay between individual, institutional, disciplinary, artefactual, and architectural histories. Together these different angles generate a rich account of the cultural cartography of the pathology profession (or lack thereof) in nineteenth-century Britain.

This chapter concludes the book. It considers the aftermath of emancipation in the 1830s, arguing that all the work to make slavery and racial difference through speech across the many spaces of everyday life – as examined in the previous chapters – meant that when freedom came black freedom was not the same as white freedom. It then presents the book’s broader claims. First, how attending to speech, with its ubiquity and ephemerality, and its absent presence in the archive, is to be forced to reckon with the always ongoing and partial construction of worlds by, for, and between people. This requires attention to questions of power, communication, and difference, and provides a better starting point for the cultural history and historical geography of slavery and empire than one based on texts and readers. Second, that grounding discussions of speech and power – often understood in terms of a singular ‘freedom of speech’ – in the very different histories and geographies of speech in practice, offers a better way of evaluating what is at stake when different people speak or are silent. The chapter ends by attending to the last words of two black rebels executed in Jamaica in 1760.

This chapter analyzes the historical construction of the transportationeconomy aroundtheChagres River. Departing from a widespread discourse suggesting thatPanama’s role as a global transportation service provider was inevitable due to its geographic position (or “natural advantages”), the chapter shows howcapitalists, governments, engineers, and laborershave reshaped isthmiansociety and environmentsto facilitate interoceanic movement. The problem with thegeography-as-destinynarrative is not that it assigns physical geography an active role in human affairs, but that it naturalizes engineered systems like the Panama Canal, rendering the constant background work of facilitating transportation invisible and, thus, seemingly inevitable. In fact, centuries oftransportation projects—a Spanish colonial road, a US railroad, a failed French canal—along the Chagres River produced a sedimented transportation landscape in which each route depended upon its precursors and laid the groundwork for subsequent projects.

This chapter examines the historical geography of Neolithic Brittany and the peopling of its landscape. It describes the prehistoric settlement of Brittany, the slow progress of agricultural development in Brittany and the preservation and distribution patterns of Neolithic (mainly megalithic) monuments. It also discusses evidence of the patterning and intensity of Neolithic occupation and the factors behind the character and survival of the Neolithic monuments of Brittany.

The introductory chapter considers four central problems in regional history and sets out how each will be approached in this book. Firstly, I consider the contribution which historical geography can make as a form of comparative history. Secondly, I lay out how I have defined my region of study and why it is more important to focus on the underlying mechanisms which produce a region than on its precise territorial extent. Thirdly, I argue for the importance of focusing on intra-regional rivalries, resistance to regional integration, and failures of co-operation when writing regional history in addition to the more traditional themes of political solidarity and economic co-operation. Finally, I argue for the importance of regional history for understanding imperialism in antiquity.