Review Essays

Over the last few decades, the history of geographic thought has been greatly enriched. Not only are there new textbooks (and new editions of older ones), but a growing body of specialist work on key episodes and figures has appeared in the form of monographs, edited collections, and journal articles. Recent years, for example, have seen a collection on the historical geographies of critical geography (Berg et al. 2022) and spatial histories of radical geography (Barnes and Sheppard 2019, featured in a review forum in this journal; Sidaway et al. 2020). The two books reviewed in this essay are further useful contributions to the increasingly fecund field of the history of geography.

A Geographical Century is a collection of eighteen essays that emerged out of discussions between the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on the History of Geography and an IGU task force on the organization’s centenary. The Introduction (by the editors) makes the bold claim that, “The IGU has been critically important to Geography’s development as an international interdisciplinary project” (p. 2). The collection offers ample evidence of the IGU’s roles, but I do wonder if that opening statement might be qualified. The IGU has—at a number of key moments—played an important role in geography’s development, but many other agencies are at work, including national scholarly societies (some of which, like the American Association of Geographers, attract large numbers of international delegates to their conferences), other political and social forces, and multiple international connections outside the auspices of the IGU. The IGU—in its 1920s establishment and much of its subsequent trajectory—embodies particular forms of institutionalized internationalism that proliferated in the early twentieth century. Invariably this meant it was entangled with wider international (or more accurately interstate) relations. A close reading of the chapters that follow indicates these complex histories and enables a more measured judgment of the IGU’s roles.

Chapter 2 by Michiel Heffernan is a fascinating account of attempts to internationalize the discipline prior to the establishment of the IGU in 1922. This began, Heffernan notes, “barely a generation after the first geographical societies were established in Paris (1821), Berlin (1828) and London (1830)” (p. 10). This was during a time when international scientific congresses were proliferating. The first International Geo­graphical Congress (IGC) was held in Antwerp in 1871. Nine others followed in the years leading up to World War I. All were held in European cities, with the exception of a 1904 meeting held in Washington, DC, and other U.S. ­cities. In all cases, the backdrop of imperialism and nation-building was evident. The association with empire and nationalism saw geography and geographers from the Allied states play key roles in territorial settlements after 1918. In this context, too, the IGU became part of a move (sponsored especially by French, Belgian, and Italian geographers) to displace the prior scientific centrality of German scholars and institutions in geography. The new Soviet Union was excluded, too. Heffernan describes how the first postwar IGC would be held in Cairo in 1925. The fascinating geopolitical backdrop (when Britain was opposing Egypt joining the League of Nations and France was celebrating its prior imperial legacy in Egypt) both to this meeting and the next one, held in Cambridge, England, in 1928 (when German geographers were reinvited, but decided to boycott the meeting) are flagged in Heffernan’s chapter, along with the subsequent entanglements with European national and imperial politics through the 1930s. It is rewarding to read Heffernan’s chapter (and the following chapters, which are among the best in the book) in tandem with the late Neil Smith’s (2003, 277–85) compelling account of how the IGU’s trajectory was entangled with paradigmatic debates in geomorphology (between the U.S. scholar William Davis and the German scholar Walther Penck) and rising U.S. power. Chapters 3 (by Bruno Schelhaas) and 4 (by Vladimir Kolosov, Marek Wiȩckowski, Debin Du, and Xionghe) continue the history of the IGC, after World War II and through the Cold War. The IGU was, at first, still largely a European and North American organization—the American Geo­graphical Society would host the IGU office between 1949 and 1956. The Soviet Union joined in 1956 and eastern European countries had already played a growing role. The presence of the Global South grew slowly and unevenly.

It is not until Chapter 5 (by Trevor Barnes and Michael Roche), perhaps the most interesting in the book, that the question of the impact of the IGU on the more recent trajectory of geographical thought is foregrounded. The authors note that the key function of the early IGCs was the legitimation and institutionalization of the discipline. After the IGU was established—at first without German presence—the Congress also played a role in disseminating French regional geography. Only in the later 1930s, when the Congresses were held in Warsaw (1934) and Amsterdam (1938), did German geographers start to exert countertrends. Arguably one of the most significant roles of the IGC after World War II was to enable specialist Commissions and attendant meetings. Following a landmark IGU Urban Symposium held in 1960 in Lund, Sweden, as an ancillary to the main IGC in Stockholm, the IGU launched a Commission on Quantitative Methods. The Lund symposium yielded a key (600-page) volume of proceedings and reinforced an international network of quantitative geographers. Further meetings followed through the 1960s and 1970s, although arguably none as influential as the gathering in Lund. Barnes and Roche argue:

the IGU along with its congresses, symposia and publications were fundamentally entangled with the development and circulation of one of the most significant post-Second World War disciplinary approaches, the new geography. While the IGU did not cause the new geography, because of its existence and patterns of circulation it distinctively marked the new geography. The IGU made its applications broader, its justification more convincing, its influence wider and its effectiveness in challenging regionalism likely stronger. (p. 59)

They suggest, however, that this was the peak of the IGU’s influence on wider disciplinary change. An array of international geographical scholarly meetings, publications, and networks exist outside the IGU, and to some extent have subsumed many of its “internationalizing” roles.

Chapters 6 (by Heike Jöns) and 7 (by Joos Droogleever Fortuijn) offer valuable and data-rich considerations on the extent and nature of international representation in the IGU. Although its theme is interesting, it is difficult to discern however, what Chapter 8 (by Denise Pumain and Christine Kosmopoulos), on the role of the Internet and open access journals, adds to the history of the IGU. Neither does this chapter venture far into the political economy of publishing or the horrendous proliferation of predatory publishers. There is a useful chapter on language in the IGU and geography publishing more widely (Chapter 9, by Rindra Raharinjanahary, Nathalie Lemarchand, and Louis Dupont), that returns to familiar debates about relative Anglophone hegemony. The chapter includes a fascinating discussion of language and geography in Madagascar and concludes with a call for what the authors call “bi-national” IGU meetings (perhaps they mean bilingual or multilingual) and a suggestion to establish an IGU commission on languages and the production of geographic thought. Chapter 10 (by Rafael de Miguel González and Karl Donert) focuses on “Geography and International Education.” As the authors note, for long and in many places, geography education was fundamentally national, sponsored by national geographical societies committed to “national identity reaffirmation and by the territorial ambitions of the imperial governments funding them” (p. 138). Pedagogical themes were not very evident in in IGC meetings in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was not until after 1945 that moves to establish a Commission on Geographical Education gathered momentum within the IGU. A commission was established (initially called “on Teaching Geography”) at the 1952 IGC in Washington, DC, and it developed a relationship with UNESCO. The chapter traces the evolution of the Commission, with details of publications and declarations and the growth in the frequency of meetings and relations with related organizations, such as the European Association of Geographers (EUROGEO) that was founded in 1979. Chapter 11 (by Pascal Clerc and André Reyes Novaes) considers Global North–South dynamics. The first part of this chapter covers familiar ground about the history of the idea of North–South, in the contexts of empire and decolonization, touching on wider political and epistemic debates about indigeneity, decolonization, and knowledge. The subsequent consideration in the chapter of how this has been reflected within the IGU is tantalizingly brief, however. Chapter 12, “Gender and International Geography” (by Mireia Baylina, Maria Dolors Garcia-Ramon, and Janice Monk) is among the most valuable in the book, reflecting on how “The Commission of Gender and Geography has been the most important agent for internationalizing gender geography and counterbalancing the Anglophone hegemony” (p. 168). They describe how prospect of a group within the auspices of the IGU meetings was first raised in the early 1980s, when, “At the IGU congress of Paris in 1984, Jan Monk sent a written request (that was never answered) to the local organizers for a meeting time and space to discuss the possibility of creating a group” (p. 168). The subsequent establishment of a study group and full-fledged Commission in 1992 has seen it connect with feminist geographers and nationally organized groups. This has supported many feminist scholars across the world and helped to sustain the vitality of feminist (and allied) work in geography.

The last four chapters include one on geography’s interactions with other natural and social sciences and the humanities (by Ruishan Chen, Annah Zhu, Yingjie Li, Pengfei Li, Chao Ye, and Michael Meadows)—rather a lot for a chapter to take on, and sometimes only tangentially linked to the history of the IGU. At the time when the IGU was established, human and physical geography tended to have a closer relationship than later in the century. These scientific and institutional dynamics vary greatly across countries, though, and arguably the links between human and physical geography continue to weaken, especially in the United States (Rhoads 2022). The chapter invites further reflections. A chapter on geographical understanding as a new geographical paradigm for the twenty-first century (by Benno Werlen) reviews a 2016 IGU initiative on the theme, followed by a chapter reviewing the IGU’s sponsorship of work on geography and environmental issues (by Jorge Olcina Cantos). A chapter on geography and the information society (by Michael F. Goodchild) revisits the roots of geographic information systems (GIS), but reference to the IGU’s role is confined to a couple of sentences, which feels like a missed opportunity. A chapter on geography and social issues (by Alexander B. Murphy and Virginie Mamadouh) returns to the IGU as a sponsor of geographical education, before a concluding essay (by Ronald F. Abler) takes stock and looks forward.

There are some gems among the chapters, but others are less compelling. The book seems to rest on an implicit premise that disciplinary internationalization is invariably progressive. As Rainer and Dudek (2022) argued, such claims “should always be put in context(s) and assessed more cautiously” (308). A Geographical Century, however, references sources and contains details that would need to be consulted for any future historical work on the IGU that places the organization into wider geopolitical and scientific contexts and explores the relationships between these. The story continues. In March 2022, the IGU’s Executive Committee suspended membership of the IGU National Committee of Russia.

The histories uncovered in Recalibrating the Quantitative Revolution in Geography exemplify how the IGU was far from being the only network enabling disciplinary change in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when quantitative geography was consolidated and promoted by some as a paradigm change. As the excellent introduction by the editors describes, the quantitative revolution comprises “a history of many connections of small and large networks of traveling ideas and people and the constant transformation and translation of these ideas and concepts” (p. 2) and that:

the act of framing these diverse phenomena as a “quantitative revolution” is an essential part of a strong and clear-cut narrative, which may be massively oversimplifying and even misleading, but has been proven to be very efficient over many decades in creating a firm identity for people who either claim themselves or are claimed by others to have been the key actors in introducing a “spatial science” approach to geography. (p. 3)

They go on to note that “a critical historiography for the global history of quantitative geographies, comparable to the historiography that has been elaborated for Anglophone geographical traditions during the last two decades … is missing” (p. 3). The rest of the introduction should shape future scholarship—including textbook chronicles—on the era. It concludes, before a summary of the chapters, by stating “a need to reveal the heterogeneous realities of the ‘quantitative revolution’ to recalibrate its clear-cut narratives” (p. 7).

Chapter 2 (by Michiel van Meeteren) on the Dutch case offers a brilliant opening and example of the complexities that the introduction so usefully flags. The chapter’s richness rests on a close reading of the original publications and interviews with key protagonists. Among the insights are an account of how, although developments moved to different rhythms, visits to the United States saw Dutch geographers “socialized in the American narrative about the quantitative revolution as a fundamental break in geographical scholarship” (p. 20), and that the late 1960s student revolt created opportunities for curriculum change and for younger faculty that enabled more teaching of quantitative and computational geography. That this was the very moment and movement that helped foster radical geography in North America indicates how such situated history from elsewhere will complicate standard stories of epochal change in Anglo-American geography. Two chapters on Brazil follow, by Mariana Lamego on quantitative geographies in Brazil and by Guilherme Ribeiro on the translation of quantitative geography in two key Brazilian journals. Both are valuable, but Lamego’s chapter is especially insightful. She places the development of quantitative geography in Brazil both in the wider political context of the post-1964 military regime’s impacts on the universities and state agencies there and links Brazilian geographers established with key centers and individuals working on quantitative and computational geography in the United States and Europe. Her chapter records the role of the IGU, notably an IGU Commission on quantitative methods meeting held in Rio de Janeiro in April 1971. The connections transcended the IGU, though, and Lamego argues that:

the very geography of quantitative revolution is not expressed solely by its spatial roots and character but also by its ability to travel from one place to another as books inside the luggage, as ideas insides the heads, as technical devices inside the machines. That is why my focus will be in a tangled international network through which many human and non-human actors have circulated during the mid of the 1960s until the mid of the 1970s making possible the reception and translation of quantitative revolution of geography in Brazil. (p. 31)

A chapter on the prehistories of GIS at Harvard by Matthew W. Wilson follows. This is condensed from one of the chapters in Wilson’s (2107) book New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (the subject of an earlier review here; see Sidaway 2019), and although the story it tells is fascinating, it is rather weakly integrated into the wider frames of Recalibrating the Quantitative Revolution. This is a pity.

Ferenc Gyuris’s chapter on the histories of quantitative geography in Hungary traces the adoption of quantitative methods in the context of the state socialist regime (and some pre-World War II antecedents). He notes how from around 1960, quantitative methods found favor among Soviet geographers, which created more space for them in Hungary. It was precisely the technocratic approach and claims of objectivity (later to be criticized by Western radical geographers) that enabled this opening:

Formulas, equations, and curves were relatively easy to interpret as “value-free” and “applicable” to the Communist context. As a result, several seminal works of Anglophone quantitative geography and regional science from Walter Isard, William Bunge, Peter Haggett, Richard Chorley, and even August Lösch were published in Russian translation, just a few years after the original version, starting with 1959, through the early 1970s. (p. 91)

Olivier Orain’s social history of quantitative geography in France from the 1970s to the 1990s also describes much else—such as conservative reactions in geography after the events of 1968—whereas those advocating quantitative methods were “mostly supported by groups imbued with a collective spirit partly inherited from the events of May–June 1968” (p. 103). That this is so strikingly different from the Anglo-American trajectory leads to discussion of the distinctive tracks of French geography. Two excellent chapters on the German case follow, by Katharina Paulus and Boris Michel on how concepts of nature shifted in German geography, and by Boris Michel on how urban-focused work in Germany paved the way. The urban focus leads Michel to declare that “it is worthwhile to read the quantitative revolution through not only new geographical theories, the wider social context of the cold war or new technologies such as the computer, but through the objects of geographical inquiry (or its “epistemic things”)” (pp. 134–35). Another chapter on the Brazilian case (by Larissa Alves de Lira) and one on Italy (by Matteo Proto) are followed by chapters revisiting the work of two practitioners and advocates of quantitative (and other) methods in the United States. Trevor Barnes and Luke Bergmann write on William (Bill) Bunge (1928–2013) and Matthew Hannah on Peter Gould (1932–2000). In both cases, these biographical studies offer very rewarding, focused insights into the complex relationships between individual agency and disciplinary structures that suffuse the whole book. That Bunge later became known for radical work and Gould absorbed a wide range of theoretical influences reflects the complex stories that Recalibrating the Quantitative Revolution excavates.

Instead of a conventional conclusion, and eschewing “a futile attempt to establish one common denominator of these histories or to just repeat the diversity” (p. 207), the last chapter stages a wide-ranging “virtual discussion about the quantitative revolution’s legacy for past, present, and future,” with contributions from all of the authors. This makes for engaging reading and caps a rewarding book that will shape agendas; I wished it was longer. Indeed, apart from the treatment of changing concepts of nature in the excellent chapter by Katharina Paulus and Boris Michel drawing on the German case, there is only limited reference to physical and environmental geography elsewhere in the book. Although the idea of the quantitative revolution is much more frequently applied to the history of human geography than to physical geography, much of the original momentum cut across human and physical geography—as in the 1967, 816-page landmark Models in Geography—jointly edited by the University of Cambridge–based geomorphologist (and a Chair of the Commission on Quantitative Techniques of the IGU) Richard J. Chorley and the University of Bristol–based human geographer Peter Haggett (Chorley and Haggett 1967). We learn so much from the selected European case studies and Brazil, but other key sites, such as Australia and Sweden, are thinly considered. Yet, as an exchange between Barnes (2008) and Johnston et al. (2008) agreed, more attention to the where of the quantitative revolution illuminates questions about why and how it happened. Moreover, there is almost nothing in the book from or on Asia. Yet, today, for example, quantitative methods and analysis drawing on “big data” proliferate among Chinese geography and geographers. This is further evidence, perhaps, that geography’s quantitative revolution never really ended, although as a recent review paper signaled, relationships between past and present quantitative methods in geography are “complicated,” especially “when questions around disciplinary identity and perception are considered” (Franklin 2022, p. 278).