Abstract
What, exactly, can “space” do in an historical analysis? There is a very considerable body of work, notably, addressing the “historical geographies of science,” but also spreading more broadly into other arenas of political and intellectual history, which offers what might be called a “strong” program for the role of space in historical events.1 This program, which tends ultimately to be grounded in the arguments about the production of space developed by Henri Lefebvre, suggests that space is not a “passive container,” a mere stage on which players make history, but is itself co-constitutive of that history, as an active participant.2 As two of the most distinguished scholars who argue in this vein put it recently, “geography, like time and embodiment, is an essential thing.”3 Their individual monographs have enunciated similar positions. David Livingstone in his benchmark survey of the geographies of science concludes that “the impact of place on science is inescapable.”4 And for Charles Withers, it is clear that the answer to a question he poses at the opening of his study of nineteenth-century geography at the British Association for the Advancement of Science—whether “geography as a subject was altered in its nature, even in its content and meaning, by geography as setting”—is in the affirmative.5
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Notes
The phrase “strong program” is a nod to the so-called strong program in the sociology of science developed by Barry Barnes and David Bloor. Their attention to social constructivism is one shared by scholars attending to the “historical geography of science.” Some of the work emanating from this rubric in the history of sciences and its intellectual underpinnings is canvassed in Diarmid Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2008): 369–388 and
Richard Powell, “Geographies of Science: Localities, Practices, Futures,” Progress in Human Geography 31 (2007): 309–327. For its broader ramification into other arenas of historical inquiry see
Robert J. Mayhew, “Historical Geography, 2009–2010: Geohistoriography, the Forgotten Braudel and the Place of Nominalism,” Progress in Human Geography 35 (2011): 409–421; and
Robert J. Mayhew, “Geography Is the Eye of Enlightenment Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010): 611–627.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwells, 1991);
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Charles Withers and David Livingstone, “Thinking Geographically about Nineteenth Century Science,” in Geographies of Nineteenth Century Science, ed. David Livingstone and Charles Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3 (emphasis in original).
David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 186.
Charles Withers, Geography and Science in Britain, 1831–1939: A Study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 3.
William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 139.
J. Weisheipl, “The Interpretation of Aristotle’s Physics and the Science of Motion,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 530.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 39–40. The Clarke-Leibniz debate over Newtonian physics rehearsed the same issues in the 1710s, with Leibniz adopting the nominalist view of space.
Reinhart Kosselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 256–257.
The geographical debates between a realist and nominalist conception of space are best displayed in the controversies sparked in the pages of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2005–2006 by Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 416–432. These debates are well canvassed in
Andrew Herod, “Scale: The Local and the Global,” in Key Concepts in Geography, ed. Nicholas Clifford et al., 2nd edn. (London: SAGE, 2009): 217–236; and Andrew E. G. Jonas, “Scale and Networks: Part I” and
John Paul Jones III et al., “Scale and Networks: Part II” both in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography, ed. John Agnew and James Duncan (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 387–403 and 404–414.
Kosselleck, Futures Past, 260; see also Reinhart Kosselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6–7. A similar sense of the inescapability of spatial metaphors as a realist grounding for historical inquiry surfaces in
Philip Ethrington, “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking History 11 (2007): 465–493.
See John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of the Past: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) for an extensive use of spatial terminology/metaphors (signposted in the title) to address how historians practice their craft. For a more reflective and philosophical approach to the same topic, see now
Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978); see also
Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance, 3rd edn. (Berlin: Springer, 1977).
Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) strongly revitalized this conceptual debate about spatialization. Having pulled apart the traditional geographical divisions we deploy, of course, Lewis and Wigen try to reconstruct them in their concluding chapter in ways they deem more in tune with socio-economic realities. From the present, nominalist, perspective theirs is but one further worldmaking whose claims to superiority only make sense within their own logic of unpicking and reassembling.
Although the emergent field of “global intellectual history” is partly remedying this for the history of social science, particularly in the areas of political thought, economics and law: see David Armitage, The Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn, ed., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014);
Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and
Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge, 1979).
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas writings, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 38–39.
For extended analyses of Malthus’s argumentation in the Essay, see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), part III;
A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and
Samuel Hollander, The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). For more thorough histories of the reception of Malthus’s ideas, see
Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951);
Derek Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and US Policy Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and
Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1, in E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, eds., The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1986), 8. All subsequent references to the 1798 edition of the Essay are to this version, by page number, in the text.
For discussions of stadial theory, see: J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and
Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. Chapters 5 and 8;
Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31–52; and
Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, eds., The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for The Royal Economic Society, 1989), 1: 9 and 148.
I allude, of course, to Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See for postcolonialism,
Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Alison Bashford, “Malthus and Colonial History,” Journal of Australian Studies 36 (2012): 99–110; and
Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201–236.
Andrew Berry, ed., Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology (London: Verso, 2003), 68–69.
Charles Darwin, Autobiographies, ed. Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), 2.
On this relationship, see Sandra Herbert, “Darwin, Malthus and Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology 1 (1971): 209–217;
Peter Bowler, “Malthus, Darwin and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 631–650; and
Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: the Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” Past and Present 43 (1969): 109–145.
The Ternate paper is reprinted in Berry, ed., Infinite Tropics, 52–62. See especially 53–54 for Wallace’s deployment of Malthusian terms. The paper in which Darwin and Wallace jointly announced the core ideas of evolution by natural selection, also specifically styles its argument as “the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with tenfold force.” See Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” (1858) in Charles Darwin: Shorter Publications, 1829–1883, ed. John van Whye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 282–296, quote at 284.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. John Tyler and Robert May (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 131.
For more on Malthus and Victorian anthropology, see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 220–222; and
Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 156–184. Malthus’s role in Victorian debate more generally is addressed in
Piers Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 67–68.
The phrase is, of course, Karl Polanyi’s in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar & Reinhart, 1944). Wrigley’s argument has proved enormously influential and structures the binary between n historical, “Malthusian,” socioeconomic regime and an industrial one, which broke the Malthusian shackles offered in global economic histories by
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007);
Edward Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed through Natural Resource Exploitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and
Oded Galor, Unified Growth Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 247–248.
For this era in the reception of Malthus, see Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-War Population-Resource Crises (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2003);
Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); and
Ronald W. Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).
Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Chapter 9.
See Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010);
Peter Donaldson, Nature against Us: The United States and the World Population Crisis, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Richard Symonds and Michael Carder, The United Nations and the Population Question 1945–1970 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); and
Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), especially Part IV.
Sales figures for Ehrlich’s Population Bomb are taken from: Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1 (2009): 63–71. For the debate between Simon and Ehrlich, see
Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehlrich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Michael F. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (New York: Carol Publishing, 1978).
Frederik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 188–212, quote at 195. See also
Philipp Lepenies, “Of Goats and Dogs: Joseph Townsend and the Idealisation of Markets—A Decisive Episode in the History of Economics,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38 (2014): 447–457.
For Coleridge and Wordsworth on Malthus, see Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of “Culture” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. Chapter 1. For the Shelleys and Byron, see
Margaret McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. Chapters 3 and 4.
Robert Southey, “Review,” Annual Review, January 1804, reprinted in Population: Contemporary Responses to Malthus, ed. Andrew Pyle (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 116–137, quote at 129.
Ibid., 136; see also Robert Southey, New Letters, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 1: 351.
On these popular images of English national identity at this time, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861–1863), cited in Ronald Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on Malthus (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953), 116–117.
Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in Manchester (1845), cited in Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus, 76–78.
Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), cited in Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus, 60.
Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). For more spatially varied readings of Darwin, see
Ronald Numbers and John Stenhouse, eds., Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963);
David Harvey, “Population, Resources and the Ideology of Science,” Economic Geography 50 (1974): 256–277. Thompson, in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, argued that “the Victorian bourgeoisie had constructed from bits of Adam Smith and Ricardo, Bentham and Malthus a cast-iron theoretical system…to justify and perpetuate exploitation,” cited in
Donald Winch, Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 376.
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 90.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 86–87. My thanks to Pepe Romanillos for drawing this quotation to my attention.
Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The Story of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: Phoenix Press edition, 1992), 172.
Ibid., 243–244; and Hugh Gough, “The Crisis Year: Europe and the Atlantic in 1798,” in The Irish Rebellion of 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, ed., Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 544–547.
See Raymond Postgate, Story of a Year: 1798 (London: Prentice Hall, 1969), 179ff and 215–219.
Henry Malden, A History of Surrey (London: Eliot Stock, 1905), 260–277.
Malthus to Daniel Malthus, February 11, 1786, in John Pullen and Trevor Hughes Parry, eds. T. R. Malthus: The Unpublished Papers in the Collection of Kanto Gakuen University Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41.
Dennis Hodgson, “Malthus’ Essay on Population and the American Debate over Slavery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009): 742–770.
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Mayhew, R.J. (2015). A Tale of Three Scales: Ways of Malthusian Worldmaking. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_9
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