The Relations of History and Geography: Studies in England, France and the United States

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Darby, Henry Clifford. The Relations of History and Geography: Studies in England, France and the United States. With contributions by Michael Williams, Hugh Clout, Terry Coppock, and Hugh Prince. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Henry Clifford Darby (Sir Clifford in his later years) was—and arguably remains—Britain’s most well known historical geographer. The Relations of History and Geography consists of a dozen chapters, arranged as three sets of four essays that focus on England, France, and America. To give Darby his due, one needs to appreciate the uncertainties and boundary-riding propensities of most geographers in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Many of the discipline’s gatekeepers and practitioners wrestled with the “but is this geography?” question, and by and large they gave time to history and claimed space for geography. Darby sought to fight the boundary-riders on their own turf, to hold open a narrow space for time (or historical rather than strictly contemporary inquiry) within geography. This won grudging acceptance of the notion that geographers might appropriately seek to describe the geography (spatial pattern or areal differentiation) of a particular territory at some specific historical period. The dozen chapters at the heart of this book provide a window onto Darby’s views of historical geography, as a field of inquiry, in the three realms over which he cast his gaze. (Text adapted from an H-Net review by Graeme Wynne.)