Bücher der Reihe Historical Geography and Geosciences

This book explores various approaches to reconstruct the spatial and temporal distribution of historical farmland in China. Almost all available historical data about farmland such as historical documents, archives, taxation records, statistics and research outcomes have been collected to reconstruct the amount of historical farmland.

This book discusses the influence of Friedrich Ratzel's ideas in more contemporary geopolitical analytical systems and the geodeterminism commonly attributed to him.

This edited volume discusses scientific and technological aspects of the history of the oil and gas industry in national and international contexts.

This book illustrates how literature, history and geographical analysis complement and enrich each other¿s disciplinary endeavors. The Hun-Lenox Globe, constructed in 1510, contains the Latin phrase 'Hic sunt dracones' ('Here be dragons'), warning sailors of the dangers of drifting into uncharted waters. Nearly half a millennium earlier, the practice of ¿earth-writing¿ (geographia) emerged from the cloisters of the great library of Alexandria, as a discipline blending the twin pursuits of Strabös poetic impression of places, and Herodotus¿ chronicles of events and cultures. Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria, and the mathematician Ptolemy employed geometry as another language with which to pursue ¿earth-writing¿. From this ancient, East Mediterranean fount, the streams of literary perception, historical record and geographical analysis (phenomenological and Euclidean) found confluence. The aim of this collection is to recover such means and seek the fount of such rich waters, by exploring relations between historical geography, geographic information science (GIS) / geoscience, and textual analysis. The book discusses and illustrates current case studies, trends and discourses in European, American and Asian spheres, where historical geography is practiced in concert with human and physical applications of GIS (and the broader geosciences) and the analysis of text - broadly conceived as archival, literary, historical, cultural, climatic, scientific, digital, cinematic and media. Time as a multi-scaled concept (again, broadly conceived) is the pivot around which the interdisciplinary contributions to this volume revolve. In The Landscape of Time (2002) the historian John Lewis Gaddis posits: ¿What if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping?¿ He links the ancient practice of mapmaking with the three-part conception of time (past, present, and future). Gaddis presents the practices of cartography and historical narrative as attempts to manage infinitely complex subjects by imposing abstract grids to frame the phenomena being examined¿ longitude and latitude to frame landscapes and, occidental and oriental temporal scales to frame timescapes. Gaddis contends that if the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it, then it follows that pattern recognition constitutes a primary form of human perception, one that can be parsed empirically, statistically and phenomenologically. In turn, this volume reasons that literary, historical, cartographical, scientific, mathematical, and counterfactual narratives create their own spatio-temporal frames of reference. Confluences between the poetic and the positivistic; the empirical and the impressionistic; the epic and the episodic; and the chronologic and the chorologic, can be identified and studied by integrating practices in historical geography, GIScience / geoscience and textual analysis. As a result, new perceptions and insights, facilitating further avenues of scholarship into uncharted waters emerge. The various ways in which geographical, historical and textual perspectives are hermeneutically woven together in this volume illuminates the different methods with which to explore terrae incognitaes of knowledge beyond the shores of their own separate disciplinary islands.

This monograph gives a comprehensive but in-depth analysis of the territorial development of Croatia and historical processes of significant spatial impact. It covers the millennial time span ¿ from prehistory till the present, through relevant periods, e.g., prehistory, antiquity, Middle Ages, period of Ottoman progression and retreat, Post-Ottoman period of development of the Central European railway network, the period of South Slavic political associations (old and new Yugoslavia), and the post-Yugoslav period of independent Croatia. The book is highly illustrated with maps and figures. It is written by scholars from the region, based on the original research and the vast body of literature. It is one of the only books in English that interprets the overall development of the territory and cultural landscape of Croatia. Its scientific but comprehensive approach makes it of use to scholars, students and anyone interested in historical and geographicalprocesses and features of Croatia and the Balkan region.

This book describes the 1873 voyage of the British explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith, based on the diaries and photographs of Lieutenant Herbert C. Chermside, who joined the expedition of the seas around Svalbard. Chermside¿s photographs, long believed lost, have recently been uncovered in Sweden and are being curated there by the Grenna Museum. The three unpublished diaries of Herbert Chermside were lent to the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1939 by Mrs. Benjamin Leigh Smith. For the first time, Chermside¿s diaries are published in their entirety, with the original photographs shown alongside modern images of the same locations. This includes the first photographic record of the north coast of Svalbard, images that are today being used as comparative data for the study of climate change in the archipelago.The diaries have been fully transcribed and edited. Introductory chapters are included, written by specialists in the history of exploration, history of science, and the history of photography from Penn State University, the University of Gothenburg, and UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, as well as contributors from the UK and Germany.This volume is published in association with Grenna Museum, which will present Chermside¿s photographs in a 2022 exhibit on Leigh Smith and A.E. Nordenskiold.

This book brings together ten empirically rich and theoretically informed contributions that aim to clarify both geo-historical specificities and common transnational and global features of the cultures and practices of boundary making that shaped modern statehood. Written by scholars from Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the essays included in this volume provide a comparative international perspective on the processes of border formation, as well as an integrative approach that seeks to strengthen the links between renewed geo-historical studies and more contemporary-oriented border studies. The book is addressed to a wide range of researchers, including geographers, historians, political scientists and specialists in geopolitics and the history of international relations.

This book presents the work of Gianfranco Battisti, on Geopolitics and Border Geographies in north-eastern Italy, Europeanization, and Globalization, contributing to debates on the inclusion of non-English speaking scholars in international geography. It highlights the institutions and cultures that shaped more than fifty years of his writing, as they emerged through his biography, theoretical contributions, and methods. Battisti uses historical geographies as tools to explain contemporary geopolitics while maintaining a high attentiveness to data-driven research. He applies these tools to investigate ¿geographical facts¿ at the local, regional and global scale, viewed from the distinctive viewpoint of the city of Trieste, a laboratory of geopolitical change for more than two centuries.To better understand the importance of place in the production of geographical theories and methods, this book discusses Battisti¿s biography in the context of the Triestino School of geography that started from the same French and German classics that shaped Anglo-American geography in the 19th century to later express original features. This book explains such features by introducing the concept of Geography as an industry that operates in a local and global context. It then deploys the methods Battisti developed within his school to discuss the realities and problems of borderlands in a historic and local context during the first and second World Wars and the geopolitical rationale that shaped the times between. The book continues to give an outlook, on how Europe reconstructed itself geopolitically, the implications thereof, and a comparison of how this fits in with geopolitical agendas on a global scale.

Mining and geological survey work in Jamaica goes back several hundred years and was initiated by the Europeans when they colonized the Island. The year 2019 marked 160 years since the first Government-commissioned Geological Survey of Jamaica. This is one of the oldest survey activity of this type in the World! This book seeks to commemorate this heritage. It is one of the first books of its kind examining the evolution of the mineral sector and geological survey work of Jamaica, set in the framework of the Country's history of over 500 years. The Reader will explore a relatively unfamiliar side of the Country's development, linked to popular historical stories that shaped the Nation. The information presented are mostly documented in dated academic literature that are not gauged for a wide audience. This book however, aims to make this information accessible for a wider readership such as students, amateur scientist, non-professionals or anyone who wishes to learn about the rich history and heritage, and the contributions to national development from Europe and much later, North America.

This monograph explores traditional farming communities in French-speaking areas of the western Alps for the period 1500-1914 and how they endured in such an environment despite the many problems and risks which it posed for their subsistence and welfare.