ABSTRACT
The field of historical geography emerged in the border spaces between the disciplines of history and geography. The complementarity of history and geography has been widely appreciated since the Enlightenment, not least by Immanuel Kant, who was explicit in his insistence on their interdependence as well as their propaedeutic relevance for all knowledge. Since the eighteenth century, this perspective has been contested generally or reformulated in a variety of ways, and historical geography specifically has been annexed very differently by the two disciplines. The result is that ‘historical geography’ has alternated – and on occasion even competed – with a ‘geographical history’ of similar inspiration. All this serves to underscore the more fundamental problem in geography for the place and relevance that it should grant to the historical process. The status of historical geography is a problem that has persisted for more than two
centuries, sustained by its connection to the more fundamental epistemological problem of the significance and power accorded to time in geographical explanation. This connection, however, is only partial. Because temporality also relates to explanation in terms of processes (physical or otherwise), such as those utilized in the mathematical models developed by geographers, the question of time goes beyond that of the simple historicity of phenomena. In anchoring its approach in this historicity of phenomena, however, historical geography does not necessarily privilege temporality as a part of explanation or involve the adoption of grand theories or philosophies of historical evolution. In fact, historical geography has been deployed in a number of ways. It has been
treated as a discrete and autonomous sub-discipline in the geographical pantheon or has appeared as a transection cutting across all geographical inquiry regardless of specific theme. The research approach can be synchronic, as in the reconstruction of landscapes or regions at particular historical moments (Darby 1977), diachronic, if a process of evolution and development is stressed (Vidal 1917; Fleure 1947), or both, when a series of period-specific reconstructions are juxtaposed to illustrate the historical flow (Broek 1932). Whatever form it takes, the central question involves the position
landscape or region at a given moment in the past, the epistemological issue is less significant, for the problem relates principally to the use of archival sources. If, on the other hand, it is a question of using history in order to shed light on the evolution of phenomena, the problem becomes one of interpreting the causalities which unfold in the course of time (Sauer 1941; Sorre 1962; Hartshorne 1959; Driver 1988; Berdoulay 1995a).
