Preface

Summary

More than a century ago, H. B. George wrote a book addressing The Relations of Geography and History (Oxford 1901). He was writing as a historian working with the basic premise, stated in his opening sentence, that ‘history is not intelligible without geography’. I start as a geographer from the complementary premise that geography is not intelligible without history. My aim in this book is to explore the interdependence of geography and history, doing so as a geographer. Although much has been written on the relations of geography and history since 1901, there has not been another book-length treatment of the topic in English. Lucien Febvre's La terre et l'évolution humaine: introduction géographique à l'histoire (1922), translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (1925), came close to being so. A more recent approximation, the posthumous editing of some lectures by H. C. Darby, published almost forty years after they were written, is more concerned with the nature of historical geography than with ‘the relations of history and geography’, despite using the latter theme as the book's title (Darby 2002). The absence of a successor to George's book may be because its topic is so vast, but it may also be because its theme has been so contentious, with the persistence of what one place-sensitive historian has described as ‘the Great Divide’ between history and geography (Marshall 1985: 22). My book explores the nature of that divide and ways of bridging it.