William Koelsch, Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past. IB Tauris, London, 2012, 352 pages, £68.00 hardback. ISBN 9781780760643.

It has often been argued, and I have unashamedly argued so myself (Aiken, 2010), that various episodes of crucial moment in geography’s history have been neglected by historians of the subject. Some scholars have indeed sought to add a specific dimension to this bemoaned inattention to what they see as the value of key eras in geography’s past and have lately noted that the scope of our knowledge, as historians of geography, has for some time been exhibiting significant and worrying lacunae in the classical period (Mayhew, 2011). Combine this with the inviting and prophetic voice of David Livingstone who, more than twenty years ago, wrote that a full treatment of a new, contextual, history of geography must await many more ‘specialist studies’ and here we begin to set the broader scene for William Koelsch’s work about classical geography as an intellectual enterprise (Livingstone, 1992: 30).

Koelsch has produced a monumental study to help populate the landscape of the history of historical geography with figures from classical geography, showing just how recently the practice of classical geography was a concern for scholars: indeed Koelsch points out that the special interest only really met its demise around the turn of the twentieth century. In writing a history of the field Koelsch selects some ten practitioners and locales stretching from the latter part of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, and reaching across the Atlantic, giving roughly equal weight to both British and North American interests. His work is arranged around a chronological exploration of these vignettes, with constant reference to the wider contexts in which these scholars published their writings, and occasional use of archival sources.

The book is richly laden with evidence of a detailed and critical reading of the works of practitioners of classical geography and an effective and elegant weaving of the writers’ works together with important contextual incidents from their lives and the intellectual and cultural atmospheres in which they worked. The scholarship is meticulous and insightful with plenty of scope for successors to take the studies further in a variety of directions and I am confident that scholars for years to come will find inspiration in the pages of this book.

Koelsch’s telling of the story of classical geography is constantly negotiated through the desire to present it as a key intellectual ancestor of much of contemporary geography and we follow the progress of the study of ancient geography from the curiosity of the English grand tourists of the Society of Dilettanti to American scholars before and after the revolution, leading almost seamlessly to the geographies of Thomas Jefferson and his entourage. From thence we move to James Rennell and Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s careers (seeing us safely through, argues Koelsch, from amateur to professional geography); to William Gladstone whose remarkably prolific studies of Homer’s geographical activities are too-often unrecognized as geography; to the spatially-grounded works of a variety of British classicists working around the turn of the twentieth century; and from there to the Harvard and Oxford of the same period; to a brief diversion into the public and grammar schoolroom of the nineteenth century and its strange obsession with the ancient world. We finish with a study of the practice of classical geography in new American universities, involving scholars like Ellen Semple who are perhaps more familiar to contemporary geographers, thereby bringing the story up to the 1930s. Perhaps in this whistle-stop tour of the content we can see that this book sets out to achieve a lot. The narrative is prosecuted through studies of a simply vast array of people, places and ideas: it is perhaps unsurprising that at times we seem to be moved along quite quickly.

Throughout Koelsch argues that classical geography was once a vital part of the discipline of geography and that its fall from favour was as much about disciplinary, institutional and personal politics as it was about any form of intellectual evolution for its own sake. And perhaps herein we have a new presentation of a thesis that we have become familiar with: that the nature of geography is inescapably contextually contingent, even when, as geographers looking backwards, we are bemused, irritated or inflamed by the character of the circumstances that provide those contexts. Having taken us through some of the historical episodes in their disciplinary relations, Koelsch’s plea for a fresh and revitalized interdisciplinary triumvirate of geography, classics and ancient history is certainly supported by a strong intellectual foundation and it can only be hoped that before long a fresh scholarly superstructure will take shape.

Seldom nowadays does a scholar produce a work of the calibre of this book. The constraints with which we are all familiar so often mean that large-scale studies of this kind, which consume so many years of work (indeed the seeds of this book were apparently first sown in the 1950s) just do not get written. It is to the benefit of humanities scholarship that a work like this has appeared, and it is to the benefit of geography that it helps to trace geography’s history.

The debates surrounding precisely what constitutes the past of geography and which of those episodes have been most powerful in determining the practice of contemporary geography continue to be thrashed out regularly with an apparently-increasing vigour and this book has much to add to these discussions. Indeed, now that this book has been written it becomes clear just how long geographers and historians of geography have needed it: John Kirtland Wright and Clarence Glacken now have a fellow countryman who is a worthy successor. 

References

Aiken E (2010) Scriptural Geography: Portraying the Holy Land. London: I. B. Tauris.

Livingstone D (1992) The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mayhew R (2011) Nostalgia, Neglect and the Necessity of a Historicized Geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 1 169-73.