Journal of Historical Geography, 18, 4 (1992) 470-503

Reviews

IEurope

R. A. DODGSHON and R. A. BUTLIN (Eds), An Historical Geography of England and ICY&es, 2nd edition (London: Academic Press, 1990. Pp. xxii+ 589. g21.95 paperback)

The differences between the first edition of 1978 and this of 1990 are far too extensive to be incorporated within orthodox notions of what constitutes a second edition. For a start, the second is much longer, approximately 330000 words against the original’s around 200000, and with more extensive deployment of graphs, figures and maps. The first comprised fourteen chapters, by fourteen authors, starting with prehistory and with 1900 as the terminal date; the second draws on twenty-one contributors, and takes nineteen chapters to increase the coverage to the start of the Second World War. Continuities are to be found in the contributors, as-apart from the same editors- ten of the original authors write in the second edition, but the permutations of changes and continuities are too numerous to be detailed here. And only the insufferably arrogant reviewer could pretend to the equal evaluation of each component.

However, a number of points should be made. The coverage of the medieval period has changed radically. Now newcomers Campbell write on people and land, and Unwin on towns and trade across the 1066 (will nothing ever demote this chronological hmdmark?) to 1500 period, previously carved up non-thematically at 1350 between Dodgshon and Butlin. This has freed the editors to compose new essays, the former on analysing the “Changing Evaluation of Space 1500-1914”, and the latter to explore regionalism between 1600 and 1914. Other modern contributions commence in both editions at 1730. Thus the only dates in systems of periodization to survive unambiguously are 1066 and 1730, which must be when medieval and modern history respectively began. The Industrial Revolution receives a weak but implicit demotion with the replacement of Professor Pawson’s original exposition of the framework of industrial change, by his exploration of British overseas expansion between 1730 and 1914. However, the occasionally iconoclastic Derek Gregory remains on hand and in broad support of the classic concept, though not the term, with an amended essay entitled “Three Geographies of Industrialization”; herein he also seems to re-affirm the analytica validity of proto-industrialization.

All contributors have had major works to embrace. Among them is Wrigley and Schofield’s Population History of England 1.541-1871: a Reconstruction, (London 1981; 2nd edition, 1989), central to the revised essays by Smith, and Lawton. For example, in 1978 Lawton held that “reduced mortality was a more significant aspect of population change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than fluctuations in birth rate”. NOW he writes that “increased births were a significant agent of population change”, and draws on one of Wrigley and Schofield’s many tables revealing a birth-rate increase from 31.8 per thousand in 1778-82 to a peak of 41.8 in 1813-7. Other principal works have a lesser resonance in 1990; the massive, two tome, volume 5 of the Cambridge Agrarian History of England and Wales 1640-1750, is cited but four times in Yelling’s revised essay on early modern agriculture, and volume 6 in the

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same magisterial series (published in March 1989) was apparently too late to facilitate embracing by J. R. Walton on modern agriculture. The egos of certain authors who may have-in their own estimations-published significant monographs during the inter-edition years, will be dented, if the criteria is citation in the syntheses here. But, hopefully, the elevation of this form of number crunching to the status of key career determinant, will stay rooted where it took hold-on the American side of the Atlantic.

Most contributors are established authors, and the tone of most essays is relaxed, some to the degree of complacency. This journal’s present editor lamented the “little evidence of passionate debate on critical issues” between historical geographers, but the rare challenges to that perceived characteristic are perhaps fortunate. Glennie, in what appears to be a hurriedly-composed piece, makes an ill-judged attempt to intervene, rather than report, in the arguments around the concept of proto- industrialization, replete with pretentious appeals to a quarter of a century’s debate on the philosophy of natural and social sciences, and resort to ridiculous analogies enjoining primates and Neanderthal “man”.

Reviewing the first edition, the economic historian J. D. Hamshere somewhat stuffily observed that the editorial brief to synthesize and mobilize the “new” geography, had sparwned a volume in which the “work of economic historians is more prominently featured than that of the historical geographers”. The question to ask of its successor is what are the distinguishing features of the historical geographers’ approach visible aftler a further twelve years? How has it informed the interpretations available here? In which ways-if at all-has this disciplinary factor operated to produce unique visions of history which sets this enterprise firmly distinct from its hypothetical equal emanating from the collective labours of say, orthodox historians, other sub-groups (notably economic historians), or the perhaps now endangered species of Marxist historians?

If the primary concern of geography is space, and place, and human geography the role of people in space utilization and all that represents, then historical geography is focused on those phenomena across time, and its practitioners are additionally equipped with various sophisticated mapping techniques central to exposition. A handful of patently unsophisticated statements can be found here, including the advice that “an afternoon with a good atlas is a well spent preliminary to any study of historical geography”. Most contributors reveal that there are spatial and therefore specifically geographical considerations, whatever the precise subject under examination. These are largely unexceptional, though some are intensely strained-including Thrift’s statement that the introduction of the penny post was “geographically democratic- and others are hardly incisive. For example, following something of a canter through potential candidates for conceptualizing a mid-nineteenth-century revolution in government, we are informed that “faced with a rapidly changing distribution of population, the geography of administration was restructured”.

IDefenders of historical geography would identify-correctly-some topics where their specialists have made an impact, and representatives are naturally on view here. The regionalism of industrialization, and the many spatial components of the structuring of Victorian cities are principal exemplars. The latter has grown in range, as Dennis points out, embracing “labour and capital processes” in addition to the “more me:asurable and observable features” of traditional concerns, namely “residential patterns, housmg characteristics and geographical mobility”. Elsewhere, tensions are observable in these broadened briefs. Yelling’s “Agriculture 1500-1730” retains its title in 1990; Walton’s 1978 piece on “Agriculture 1730-1900” is now widened to embrace “Rural Society”. The new discussion focuses “on sources of productivity growth within agriculture”, with all the tired ring of the plough and cow school of rural historiography, relieved by such boisterous puns as “The failed Chartist land schemes testify more to the fertility of an idea than that of its associated practical agriculture”. Later nineteenth-century farmworker trade unionism warrants a single sentence, while the

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vigour of the “peasantry” across Walton’s period-spelled out in a number of seminal articles published in the 1980s by Mick Reed-is ignored. Does the answer ie in the belief that History Workshop Journal and the Journal of Peasant Studies are beyond the pale?

If one characteristic unites many of the authors writing here it is a belief that history comprises the charting of “progress”, a word-and concept-used repeatedly. The cynic might well claim that historical geography is a (last?) resort of Whiggery, and that the evidence springs promiscuously from the close-on six hundred pages of this volume. “The case of the roads illustrates how far transport in England and Wales had come-and how far it had to go”. A momentary lapse of concentration, and the reader might well forget that this statement pertains to 1730, not 1990. “In 1896 a cineomatograph had already been set up”, and “by 19 14 the cinema was already a major industry” (my italics). The later Iron Age hill fort represents “proto-urbanization” for Roberts, who is revealingly compelled to advise, when incorporating recent radical demographic re-estimations into a picture of the “well populated prehistoric countryside” and projected changes in forms of socio-political organization, that “there was no inevitable progression” to hierarchies. Equally, or perhaps an even more archaic feature of this work is precisely that “complete ignoring in the sub-discipline . . of the theoretical and empirical achievements of feminism in increasing our understanding of past societies”, articulated by apparently isolated critics in this ,journal in 1988.

In such an ambitious work, mistakes and misjudgements are bound to creep in. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is attributed to 1771, not 1776. The interwar years are bizarrely perceived as “more a period when the post Second World War period was born than a dying spasm of the nineteenth century”. In certain senses Hamshere’s criticisms of the first apply in some measure to the second edition. The contributions here are principally syntheses, and the authors’ enlarged remit dictates their dependency on the researches of social and political historians, to add to those of the economists. Nevertheless, a greater sense of confidence is currently conveyed. Paradoxically, self-perceptions of a “sub-discipline”, or the poor relation, may account for the fact that historical geographers can combine to put together such a volume. One might question whether their counterparts in faculties of arts and economics could co-operate to produce a rival tome. But then student needs are different, and this book is clearly .aimed to provide much of the historical underpinning on the English and Welsh fronts required by geography undergraduates. One doubts if another vice-chancellor could lever emulate Lord James of Rusholme in the early 1960s denying a geography Idepartment to the new University of York on the alleged grounds of inadequate disciplinary integrity. Such an attitude appears doubly dated when a previous editor Iof this journal becomes Secretary of State for Education.

Brighton Poiytechnic ROGER WELLS

SHEILACAMPBELL,BERTHALL and DAVIDKLAUSNER (Eds), HeaIth,DiseaseandHealing in Medieval Culture (London: Macmillan, 1992. Pp. xxiv + 204. f45.00)

‘The ghosts of an older generation of medical historians haunt this book. Several of the contributors make critical mention of the judgements of Charles Singer, the medical man who was recruited into medical history by Sir William Osler. Singer’s task was to create in English a literature to rival that of Germany; working in England and 4merica, he ranged boldly across the centuries, producing standard texts and works Iof reference some of which have not yet been displaced. At first adopting a more cultural approach, Singer adopted in the interwar period a set of priorities aimed