ABSTRACT
Over the past thirty years, however, a literature in historical geography has emerged that explicitly links the two fields. The most notable body of work is that of the late Andrew Hill Clark and his students at Wisconsin, who have produced many monographs of solid scholarship. Clark played a leading role in establishing the international Journal of Historical Geography and initiated the Oxford Historical Geography of North America Series designed "to provide a small library of thematic studies" by professional geographers intended
WE MUST BEGIN IN EUROPE and try to make geographic sense out of the impetus for transatlantic venturing on the part of many different peoples. And we must ask two fundamental questions: ( i) why do major cultural patterns and movements begin where they do (the problem of the "culture hearth"), and (2) how do they spread to other peoples and areas (a problem of "spatial diffusion")? Seville and Lisbon were the first great seats of American enterprise. Located in areas of creative turbulence, they became the foci where a great tradition of imperial conquest forged in the reconquest of Iberia from the Moors converged with a great tradition of commercial seafaring developed in the many cosmopolitan centers of the Mediterranean. The movements of people and the functioning of institutions can be traced to the articulation of these systems in Andalusia and Estremadura and their reach outward to a succession of Atlantic islands, to the West African coast, to the West Indies, and to Brazil. Thus, we can regard the "Latin America" created therefrom as the continuation of a great geographic process initiated by an aggressive, expansive Western Christian culture centuries before.
