Towards a World Historical Geography

Vincent J. Del Casino Jr.

Departments of Geography and Liberal Studies
California State University, Long Beach
and
Tim Keirn
Departments of History and Liberal Studies
California State University, Long Beach
Draft Paper
(Please do not cite without permission of the authors)
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Introduction
This paper serves as an introduction to the theoretical approaches and methodologies of an
integrated world historical geography. It is organized around two major sections. The first
section outlines the disciplines of History and Geography as well as offering an introduction to
the subfield of Historical Geography. The goals here are to suggest ways to conceptualize the
disciplinary context for the study of historical geography as well as the ways in which historians,
geographers, and historical geographers go about collecting and interpreting historical and
geographical data. The second section provides further context for the growth of world history,
regional geography, and what we are now calling a world historical geography. Moving beyond
the basic disciplinary definitions, this section highlights the challenges to thinking about world
historical geography in a way that intellectually complicates the traditional stereotypes of how
we think about the world. Furthermore, this section opens up the key concepts used to guide a
world historical geography. As a conclusion, we offer a few substantively and theoretically
informed research questions that might guide world historical geographers as they trace out the
myriad ways in which global processes operate at the intersections of various points in time and
space.
Disciplinary Conventions
What is History?
It is important to understand from the beginning that History is a specifically human activity and
a conscious attempt to recollect, conceptualize and preserve the past based on the examination
of evidence. Indeed, too often history is understood to be an activity that seeks simply to
preserve all the human events of the past and to secure these occurrences in a sequential and
proper chronological order. In this sense, history is too often taught as one fact after the other.
Yet history is not a reiteration or transcription of every instance and event that has taken place
over the course of time. While most of the instances and events of the human past have left no
record of their existence, nonetheless, a massive volume of potential evidence of the human past
remains extant, especially as regards more modern eras. Indeed, the magnitude of this colossal
volume of facts of the past makes it impossible to manage, preserve and transcribe a record of
human activity. Instead the historian must make decisions concerning the selection and
significance of a topic of inquiry, a choice of evidence, and the means of interpreting the
evidence examined. All these decisions are in turn informed by the contemporary circumstances
and contexts in which the historian works.
In terms of evidence, historians work in the first instance with primary sources. A
primary source is a firsthand account of an event. Traditionally historians work with written
primary sources such as government and church records, newspapers, books, letters, diaries and
as we shall see maps. Increasingly, historians also work with primary sources that are material in
nature: buildings, clothing, tools and other sorts of artifacts and commodities. Historians of the
more recent past also utilize visual imagery in the form of photographs and film as primary
sources, in addition to oral testimony of firsthand witnesses of past events. Generally, the
question that a historian asks of the past determines the type of primary sources to be examined
and researched, although to some extent the volume and character of the primary sources extant
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can themselves influence the parameters of historical research. At the most basic level, once
chosen, the historian must interpret the primary source judiciously and examine the strengths and
weaknesses of the evidence, and account for bias. Once interpreted, the historian must also look
for corroborating evidence from other sources to support a conclusion. This is a very important
facet of historical methodology. Moreover, the historian must organize the material in a
particular way that not only supports the conclusion but also makes its meaning and significance
clear. These conclusions in themselves then provide a recollection, conceptualization and
preservation of the past. They are published in history books and articles that become secondary
sources. In turn, these secondary sources provide the historical context in which historians
analyze primary sources, and they also help to shape future questions and agendas for historical
research and in doing so create a constant dynamic of dialogue between the present and the
interpretation of the past. Finally, a third tertiary level of sources exists in the form of textbooks
that are themselves drawn from the examination of secondary sources.
New technologies and the computer in particular have allowed historians to examine a
greater array of primary sources with relative ease. More significantly the computer has
facilitated more quantitative analysis of primary sources to construct more data and statistical
evidence to corroborate conclusions about the past. Historians also apply theory to the means in
which they both select and interpret primary sources. Theoretical understanding in many cases
eases the challenge of extracting meaning from a primary source. Increasingly, and facilitated by
the introduction of new information technologies, historians draw upon the knowledge and
theories of other disciplines to interpret primary sources and to construct conceptualizations
about the past. History as a discipline is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and the
boundaries between disciplines such as history and say literature are becoming increasingly
blurred. Concurrently, researchers in disciplines other than history turn to analyzing their own
data in historical terms. The study of language and literature is increasingly explored as part of a
historical development; physicists and astronomers are increasingly interested in the history of
time; and the rise of environmental science as a field is based to a large extent on historical
inquiry of environmental change. While historians draw upon knowledge and theory from the
physical and life sciences and literature to interpret the past, they extract most heavily from the
social sciences in their interdisciplinary approaches. For example, economic and sociological
theory and application have greatly expanded our understanding of the material and family
conditions of human societies in the past. Since the mid-twentieth century this has facilitated a
concerted effort to recollect history from below and made women and laboring people the
focus of historical research as opposed to the political elites who had been the focal point of prior
historical analysis. It also gave rise to the development of the specific fields of economic and
social history within the discipline and profession of history. Similarly, historians have also
drawn from the theories and applications of geography to interpret evidence and to recollect the
past providing the parallel developments of the fields of demographic history and historical
geography within the broader disciplinary constructs of history and geography.
What is Geography?
Geography is a discipline that straddles the human and physical sciences; and geographers have
interests in a number of systematic subfields including political geography, physical geography,
climatology, and cultural geography. Geography is distinct, however, from other disciplines,
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such as geology, because of geographys interest in surficial processes as opposed to deep
structures of the earths crust, mantle, and core. At the center of most geographic inquiry rests an
interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them, both physical and
cultural. Specifically, geographers investigate how humans shape the world around them, the
relationship between humans and places (e.g., towns, cities, woodlands, savannas, etc.), and how
places change over time. Geographers thus focus much of their attention on physical and cultural
landscapes and the evolution of those landscapes. Geographers are also interested in how humans
organize particular places and how places are constituted through their relationships with other
locations. So, geographers are very interested in the distribution of geographic phenomena, such
as cities, vegetation biomes, climatic zones, and cultural and religious practices and the
interconnections between a city, zone, or practice and another city, zone, or practice.
While geographers are often interested in particular places, they also find it important to
examine geographic processes at larger scales of analysis, including regions. Regions are
defined, simply, as a series of places with similar attributes, such as climatic regions based on a
certain amount of rainfall or cultural regions based on a particular lingua franca, or language of
trade. Traditionally, geographers talk about world regions and realms, in particular, as sites with
some semblance of similarity. It is therefore common to discuss Europe or Northern Africa
or Southwest Asia as world regions. In all these contexts, geographers are interested in
investigating patterns of similarity that make the region somewhat homogeneous. It is not
surprising that geographers, therefore, like to examine patterns across space as a way to identity
regional formations. For many K-12 teachers, world regions are used as the basis for geographic
analysis and for the organization of their curriculum. Thus, it is common for K-12 teaching in
geography to be structured around a few established world regions.
Geographers draw from a number of sources in understanding places and constructing
regions, including demographic data, physiographic data, cultural data, and historical data, to
name a few. Geography as a discipline generates both primary data from field investigations and
synthesizes data collected from other secondary sources, such as the census. Geography is an
inherently interdisciplinary field, drawing from the methods utilized in history, cultural
anthropology, sociology, political science on the human side of the discipline, and biology,
geology, physical anthropology, chemistry, and physics on the physical side. Geographers are
also synthetic thinkers, mixing methods and data from both physical and human sources. This is
most common in the areas of cultural and political ecology as well as landscape ecology. Unlike
history, which is predominantly the study of human activity, geographers do examine purely
physical processes, such as fluvial (water) geomorphology (landscape components) without any
direct reference to human experience. For regional geographers, however, the goal is often to
integrate human and physical data into a systematic whole.
Traditionally, mapping has been the main methodological tools for organizing and
disseminating geographic data. Maps can take the form of scientific representations based on
projections of the world, often constructed by reference to latitude and longitude. Geographers
have advanced the analysis of geographic inquiry through the use of computer technologies,
including Geographic Information Systems (mapped databases tied to specific geocoded points
in space) and Remote Sensing (advanced forms of satellite imagery and aerial photography).
Geographers, however, do more than simply create maps they are also interested in
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understanding the dynamics of place and place-meaning. Therefore, geographers examine
geographic representations of place, including maps, drawing from both primary and secondary
sources to analyze how people experience and live in place. In this way, a map is not simply a
factual representation of a particular place at a particular time. A map is also always a social and
political product, and we need to ask who made the map and for what purpose. Maps thus hide as
much as they reveal, as do other geographic sources. Like history, with its increasing interest in
women, subaltern groups, and the working class, geographers are thus also interested in how
representations of the world inscribe that world with meaning, creating spaces that marginalize
some while privileging others. It is necessary to examine geographic data by asking from what
source did the data come, for what purpose were the data collected, and what are the limitations
of the data as they are presented. No map, picture, archive, or painting, for example, can be a
pure mimesis of any given place or time, and thus all geographic representations, be they maps,
articles, tables, or field notes, are always partial representations.
What is Historical Geography?
In the simplest sense, Historical Geography brings together the key aspects of the disciplines of
History and Geography in the study of how humans have adapted to and modified the world
around them in different ways across time and space. Historical geographers draw from the
breadth of primary and secondary data written, visual, and oral that constitute the archives of
human history. The difference, primarily, between History or Geography and Historical
Geography is that the latter examines both the spatial and temporal context of and interaction
between human activity and (physical and cultural) landscape change. Historical geographers
remain true to the methodologies of both History and Geography, however. Key to any good
historical geography is the corroboration of sources and the presentation of that material in ways
that reflect the synthesis of multiple sources. Historical geographers thus produce both written
text and maps in their presentation of data in ways that decipher the ways in which the world has
been socially and spatially organized over time.
The Building Blocks of a World Historical Geography
Historiography and World History
As has been noted, the questions historians ask, the evidence they choose to examine, and their
means of interpretation and presentation of the past are molded by the contemporary context and
circumstances in which they work. As such, historical inquiry and interpretation of the past is
dynamic, changes over time, and mirrors to a great extent the cultural perspectives of the time
and place in which the historical literature is written. Historiography is the study of changes in
historical methodology and interpretation of the past. It is in many ways the history of history
and a brief historiographic examination of world history provides an appropriate example of how
changes in historical methodology and interpretation parallel, molded by changing historical
circumstances and contexts.
Like the aforementioned economic and social histories, world history is a specific field
within the discipline of history. It is a relatively new field of historical inquiry and has its
professional origins after the Second World War in the United States. History as a professional
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discipline in Western culture developed in Europe in the nineteenth century. As such, historical
inquiry was infused with nationalism and the nation state was deemed the most significant form
of political and social organization and the most appropriate focus of historical study. As the
disciple of history became more specialized, historians identified themselves as for example
political or economic historians but did so within the confines of nation states as economic
historians of Britain or as political historians of the United States. Not only was the nation the
focus of historical inquiry but it was also the imperial nations of Western Europe and the United
States that predominated within historical studies and literature. However, after the Second
World War, a number of historians in the United States began to question the nation as the focal
point of historical analysis. As the United States emerged as a dominant cultural, economic and
political global force, historians argued that American citizens needed a greater understanding of
the world in general as opposed to the isolated knowledge of an American and Western
European past. This move to world history in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was also facilitated by
the liberalization of immigration laws and demographic change within the United States. As
classrooms became increasingly culturally diverse, a focus upon Western civilization became
increasingly less appropriate and created an imperative for the development of World History.
As such, the development of world history during this period reflected the circumstances of the
time. At the height of the Cold War, from the Right a number of world historical studies focused
on comparative analysis to account for the industrial and economic prevalence of the West to
serve as a model and to encourage the capitalist orientation of the developing world. From the
Left, their developed a world historical critique (often labeled as a world systems approach) that
argued that the rise of the West was dependent on the economic exploitation and dependency of
the developing world and as such was an inappropriate model for 3
rd
World development. In
any event, much of the early development of world history was still heavily orientated toward
explaining the role of the West within either a comparative or global context and portrayed much
of the rest of the world as victims or subservient to western political and economic expansion in
the past. During this period, a few historians attempted to create a more culturally empathetic
and less Eurocentric world history; nonetheless these studies treated various cultures and regions
in isolation from one another and served essentially as studies of comparative culture as opposed
to world history.
In the late twentieth century, the study of world history was dramatically transformed to
such an extent that it is often now referred to as global history or the new world history. With
the end of the Cold War, the spread of new information and communication technologies, and
major increases in transcontinental migration and rapid economic growth, the world has been
significantly transformed by unprecedented forces of globalization. Increasingly, human society
is impacted by transnational phenomena diminishing the impact of the nation state.
Consequently, world historians increasingly concentrate upon transnational and cross-cultural
contact and exchange in the past. In doing so, the focus of historical study is upon the integration
and connections between cultures and states over time with specific emphasis on non-Western
agency and the early pre-European origins of transregional contact and exchange. This focus
upon cross-cultural and transregional interaction nicely segues with the aforementioned growth
of interdisciplinary approaches within the discipline of history. These exchanges are geographic
by definition and call upon for example economic and anthropologic analysis for their
understanding. Currently, world historians are also increasingly interested in environmental
history which in turn calls upon multiple forms of interdisciplinary analysis from the sciences
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and reflects greater contemporary concerns and understanding of the human impact upon the
environment. Finally, world historians are still interested in comparative history, but less from an
us against them mentality. With the growing contemporary conceptualization of the world as a
global village, comparative historical analysis provides a greater understanding of what is
common to humanity and the human condition across both time and space.
Geography and its Defining Characteristics
Geography first emerged as a distinct discipline, in the modern sense, in the late 19
th
and early
20
th
centuries. At the beginning of the 20
th
century, geographers were mostly interested in
physical processes, and many who worked on human processes did so within a framework of
environmental determinism. These early geographers argued that the physical world actually
determined how a people might be both socially and culturally (i.e., hot climates produced angry,
heated people). These early determinists were challenged in the 1920s by a school of cultural
geographers and ecologists who argued that human were not simply products of the physical
world around them but rather that humans adapted to and modified the physical world to meet
their needs. In this new model humans molded physical landscapes creating cultural, political,
social, and economic landscapes of religious icons, governmental institutions, ethnic
neighborhoods, and markets and trading networks. Over time, a new core of geographers argued
that the key to geographic inquiry was in regional analysis and the study of areal differentiation.
Geographers, it was argued, should focus on how regions, areas of continuity and homogeneity,
emerge, highlighting the physical and human geographic processes that make up these particular
spaces. By the 1960s, geographers once again offered a new paradigm of geographic inquiry
arguing that geography should develop geographic laws based in a positivist, empirical science
of quantification and replicability. In this way, these new quantitative geographers argued that
geography, both human and physical, should theoretically and methodologically mimic the
hard, natural sciences, such as biology, physics, and chemistry with their emphasis on
experiment and the generation of laws governing the social world. Finally, the quantitative
revolution was challenged by the development of alternative approaches, including marxist and
feminist geographies that theorized space and spatial relations as more than simply backdrops to
social relations. Instead, these geographers argued that the spatial organization of the world in
cities, roads, neighborhoods, civilizations, rural environs were fully imbricated in the social
organization of daily life. Put simply, geographers are interested in how the spatial organization
of a city might actually perpetuate differences e.g., poverty or ethnic and racial difference
and facilitate the gendering of men and women. In this way, geographers are interested in how,
for example, public spaces like baths, government institutions, or parks are constructed to both
open up and close off dialogue between people of different classes, races, ethnicities, and
genders?
Despite the theoretical and methodological changes in the field of geography, the
discipline became fairly marginal in the academy over the 20
th
century. Unlike history, for
example, which remained central in the educational standards, geography fell out of favor. To
salvage geography as a discipline and as a key component of the educational system,
geographers identified the disciplines key concepts, which could be applied in numerous
educational contexts. The Five Themes of Geography location, place, human-environment
interactions, movement, and regions were thus born as Geographys key concepts. The Five
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Themes became quite popular, although geographers continued to rethink the discipline and its
applicability to teaching students. The National Council on Geographic Education thus
developed Geographys 18 Standards, which expanded on Geographys Five Themes. The 18
Standards are broken down into six broad categories, including: the world in spatial terms; places
and regions; physical systems; human systems; environment and society; and the use of
geography. The Standards, however, are meant to inform the breadth of geographic inquiry, and
are not intended to be the organizing principles for every geography lesson, course, or study.
Instead, the Standards are a broad framework for conceptualizing the totality of geographic
inquiry across the physical and human sides of the discipline.
The reemergence of geography in the United States is tied, in part, to the attempts to
systematically identify the disciplines key concepts and apply them to numerous geographic
problems. Geography has also benefited from a renewed interest in global processes and
globalization. Scholars working in multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and
history, now work with geographic concepts, such as those identified in the Five Themes, in
conceptualizing how globalization operates to both bring the world closer while maintaining
difference at the same time. What many discovered was that despite the advance in global
mobility transportation networks, electronically mediated communication, etc. and individual
and group movement, places, locations, and human-environment interactions still differ across
regional contexts.
World Historical Geography Defined
In many ways, world history is always already informed by a geographic sensibility, with its
concerns for cross-cultural exchange and contact, diffusion of ideas and technologies, and
interests in thinking through larger global processes and their local effects in comparative
context. As such, contemporary world historians pay particular attention to the dynamics of
cultural diffusion across national and regional borders with specific attention to human
interactions along borders both social and material and cultural frontiers. These interactions
are more often than not both cause and consequence of trade, human migration, and the spatial
expanse of states. All these concepts are indeed geographic as played out across time.
Thus the embedding of historical analysis in a geographic framework and conversely
geographic concepts in a historical context is pertinent, reasonable, and intuitive. Indeed, the
ability to integrate geographic and historical analysis has long been acknowledged as an
important skill and competency in primary and secondary social science education. Social
studies curriculum and methodology at the national, state and local level consistently blends the
study and practice of history and geography. For example, Standard 17 of the National
Geography Standards demands that students examine the complexity of the earths geography
as it changes over time. The National Standards for Social Studies Teachers created by the
National Council for the Social Studies asks teachers to challenge learners to examine, interpret,
and analyze the interactions of human beings and their physical environments over time. At the
state level, the History/Social Science Framework and Standards for California Public Schools
(K-12) identifies geographic literacy as a major strand to be imbedded within both a World and
American history curriculum across grade levels. Even at the local level, as evidenced within the
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Long Beach Unified District Social Studies Standards, teachers are to weave the Five Themes
of Geography into all units of history instruction.
Despite the recognized pedagogic importance of melding the geographic with the historical, this
has received little recognition in the larger disciplines and professions of History and Geography.
There currently is no Geographic History recognized as a field within the discipline of History.
Nor do the World History Standards clearly identify the importance of geography or geographic
analysis in their analysis of the fields key concepts and approach. While Environmental History
is a growing field within the discipline, it borrows only narrowly from Geographys core
concepts and approaches. In contrast, Historical Geography is a recognized field within the
discipline of Geography, although it is currently a fairly marginal one. Our purpose here,
therefore, is to elevate the disciplinary discourse of Geographic History and Historical
Geography and to do so on a global historical scale.
Challenges of a World Historical Geography
Expanding on the Five Themes of Geography
While the Five Themes form a good starting point for integrating geographic inquiry into the
broader K-12 curriculum, there are limitations as they are currently discussed and applied.
Nonetheless, it is valuable to consider these themes briefly and how we might open them up to a
more complex and useful reading in the context of world historical geography.
Resting at the heart of these themes is the concept of location. As many teachers suspect,
historical geographers are interested in where things are located in absolute space (i.e., an exact
location marked scientifically). Absolute location is often measured through the use of a
coordinate system based on units of latitude and longitude. Location, however, is more than
simply a measure of where one finds a city on a map; it is also relative, measured in relation to
other places. Location can thus also be measured in terms of both its site (physical attributes) and
situation (relationship to other locations of human activity) characteristics. Location is also
cognitive, measured not in mathematical terms across an absolute mapped space but in terms of
how we see one place (or person or object) in relation to another. We can thus conceptualize a
relative location; and we can consider how one location might be considered differently by
different people who come to that particular location from a different subject position (i.e., the
city might be quite different for a women who is a slave in Classical Rome verses a man who is
living as a Senator at the same time and place).
In discussing relative and cognitive location, geographers have become interested in
much more than simply the location and site and situation characteristics they have become
interested in place. Geographers are interested in studying place as both an amalgamation of the
site and situation characteristics of a location as well as the ways in which human and physical
characteristics of that location are cognitively imagined. Put simply, geographers study places as
representations of how humans turn the earth into a home. Places, such as towns and cities,
might be investigated for how humans construct buildings and how those buildings are
intentionally or unintentionally infused with cultural meaning. In the process of making the earth
into a home, people often become invested in their places and attach important symbolic
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meaning to them. Of course, places do not contain simply human characteristics, but also have
many physical geographic attributes, including landforms, plants and animals, soils, and climatic
patterns, many of which are also given important symbolic meaning historically. In studying
place geographers thus examine a multitude of variables and characteristics, such of population
characteristics, religion and language, land-use, history, and settlement patterns, to name just a
few.
Because geographers are interested in both the human and physical attributes of place,
they have focused a significant amount of attention on human-environment interactions,
including an understanding of how humans use, adapt, modify, and are impacted by local natural
phenomena. Critical to any study of human-environment interactions is an analysis of human
perceptions and knowledge of their environment, both physical and built. The study of human-
environment interactions is very important therefore in the study of both location and place.
Particular site and situation characteristics lend themselves to specific types of human
adaptations, while environmental perceptions sometimes play a critical role in the organization
of cultural systems and practices.
In studying location, place, and human-environment relations we must also investigate
how spatial patterns shift over time. These shifts are often a function of movement. Movement is
often thought of as a human process, forced and voluntary migration being the most obvious
examples, although daily travel patterns involve spatial movement and therefore involve spatial
interactions. Movement can also happen on the physical level in the form of desertification as
deserts increase in size due to climate change. In fact, the physical geographies of movement
should be central to any geographic inquiry as humans have historically have been constrained
by their ability to move through certain physical (and built) environments. In the simplest terms,
spatial interactions create new places everyday; and places in proximity have similarities because
of the flow of spatial relations while places at a distance tend to have less in common with each
other. Moreover, spatial interactions help create borders and frontiers as sites of exchange as well
as locations of contestation. In historical terms, borders are not defined in the absolute terms we
used today, based in the use of precise measurements of latitude and longitude. Rather, most
borders are fluid, permeable, malleable, incomplete, temporary, and contested.
The movement of people and ideas, in particular, help expand the scope of interaction
and thus expand similarities across space creating larger-scale regions. Regions, the final of the
five themes, are based on a set of similar criteria when differentiating the world. Regions can be
based on any number of attributes, both physical and human, or on a combination of multiple
attributes. Richard Hartshorne, in the 1950s, defined geography as the study, in fact, of areal
differentiation, or regionalization. Areal differentiation can be based on both the development of
formal and functional regions. Formal regions are typically defined as having some clearly
demarcated or de jure boundary, such as a modern nation-state, while functional (or nodal)
regions are constituted through spatial interactions or organization. Regions often have a core
where a particular set of attributes is most strongly concentrated, such as religious practices. As
one moves from the core toward the periphery, it is possible to identify both a domain and a
sphere, the former of which is defined by a strong sense of a particular geographic attribute while
the sphere contains only a marginal sense of that same attribute. Conceptually, one could thing of
a core-domain-sphere as a set of concentric circles with the core being the most intensely
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homogenous and the sphere the least homogenous. In reality, the geographic pattern is often
much more irregular, mediated by social networks and physical geographic features, such as
mountains, rivers, and other large bodies of water. Moreover, these patterns are infused with
meaning, suggesting that different spaces and spatial relations create nested layers of patterns
and processes that are contradictory to and in conflict with the homogeneity of any one particular
region. That said, regions do provide some basis for analysis, although we must not think of each
region as a distinct, independent space separate from the larger, global flows of social and spatial
relations. Regions are, like histories, human constructs. They ebb and flow over time and are
differentially defined based on local power relations and broader cross-cultural contact.
Moreover, while we often like to draw boundaries around particular places and regions,
particularly in our history and geography textbooks, those markings tend to be, at best,
estimations and simplifications of much more complicated processes, including the emergence of
syncretic (blended) systems of exchange and cultural relativism at the boundaries of sometimes
competing empires, peoples, and societies.
Complicating Periods and Periodization
Historical periods are human constructs used as way of recollecting and presenting the past in a
meaningful and understandable fashion. Historians are obliged to dissect the past into
manageable pieces of chronology because the entire expanses of time as they relate to human
experience cannot be studied simultaneously. In periodizing history, historians seek to discover
common patterns and characteristics within a given chronology and concurrently seek to
establish significant thresholds or discontinuities in these patterns or characteristics to serve as
the origins and terminus of a defined historical period. This is not a simple task and periodization
is one of the most controversial aspects of historical scholarship. The organization of time and
the discerning of patterns of continuity and the thresholds of change vary with the scale of
observation (e.g., from local to national to regional) and the questions and significance that
historians ask of the past (e.g., patterns of economic change may not correlate chronologically
with patterns of political change) at any given time. The periodization of a nations or regions
history contains far fewer variables, multiforms and complexities compared with the
organization of these variables on a global scale. Hence, the periodizing of World History has
proven very problematic and a number of schemes of periodization appear within the historical
literature. Not unlike a flat map that distorts space, common to all these schemes is a distortion
of the past that cannot integrate most phenomena except at the broadest and most general and
least useful levels.
Resolving the Global and the Local in World Historical Geography
When pushing toward a world (or global) historical geography, we are presented with a
challenge as to what to do with the region. Because regions are often fixed in space and time, by
both geographers and historians, they present a somewhat conservative way of representing the
world. But, if we conceptualize regions as fluid and always in the process of becoming, then we
can turn our attention not to the region as a fixed set of points in space but as a dynamic process
defined by a constantly evolving regionalization. What this allows us to do is to push theories of
the global through different regions. We can compare how different global processes, such as the
diffusion of cultural practices or technologies, are mediated by the different socio-cultural and
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political-economic configurations of various regions across space. Put simply, if regions are
theorized as dynamic and always in process then we can begin to consider the big picture of
how global forces change regions and become changed by people working through those regions.
The local in this case becomes the context for exploring the big picture questions of any
world historical geography, such as how we might create periods that have some continuity
across differing contexts and experiences.
Conclusions: Toward a World Historical Geography
As we believe history and geography are evolving processes it seems silly to offer any
substantive conclusions to our discussion. Rather, what we want to suggest is a few key
theoretical and methodological questions that might help guide a world historical geography.
These are only examples, and you should be encouraged to expand on these and reflect on
alternative ways to frame your own inquiries in world historical geography.
How do people organize their place in the world in relation to their perception of
the physical and human environment over time?
How, why, and in what ways are different places and regions distributed in
relation to each other and across time in absolute and relative terms?
How do people locate themselves and create different places in the world in
relative and absolute terms in order to distinguish their place on earth?
What are the global processes that mediate interactions at the frontiers and
borders of places and regions (read: civilizations), the local and global, over
time?
What do various locations, places, and regions mean to different people from
different social positions over time and across space?