In the first book of its kind to appear in the English language, two of France's leading scholars trace the historical geography of their country from its roots in the Roman province of Gaul to the present day. They demonstrate how, for centuries, France was little more than an ideological concept, and examine the relatively late development of a more complex territorial geography, involving political, religious, cultural, agricultural and industrial unities and diversities. Their conclusion is that it is only recently that France has achieved its territorial unity, and has overwritten the...

All of the agricultural pressure groups in early modern France were important in shaping the evolution of French farming in this century. The transformation of an isolated peasantry into highly efficient agricultural producers, the role of the state in influencing agricultural modernization, and the place of the European community in French political and agricultural life have been affected by an increasingly complex network of organizations that are the subject of Cleary's book. Their history and geography is a revealing indicator of the social, cultural, and economic evolution of rural...

The Irish experience of the Great War, and its commemoration, is the setting for Nuala Johnson's pioneering examination of "the landscape of the national imaginery." Her study represents a major contribution to cultural geography and to the historiography of remembrance. The book combines theoretical perspectives with original primary research revealing how memory literally occurred in post-1918 Ireland, and the various conflicts and struggles that were both cause and effect of the process.

Environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire forest in 1855 in British India. During the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust. The empire forestry movement spread through India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S. and to other parts of the world. Gregory A. Barton's pioneering study views the origins of environmentalism in global perspective.

Alan Baker considers locational geographies and spatial histories, environmental geographies and environmental histories, landscape geographies and landscape histories, and regional geographies and regional histories. Seeking to bridge the "Great Divide" between history and geography, Baker identifies basic principles relating historical geography not only to history but also to geography, a reworking which signifies a "new beginning" for this scholarly hybrid.

Alan Baker considers locational geographies and spatial histories, environmental geographies and environmental histories, landscape geographies and landscape histories, and regional geographies and regional histories. Seeking to bridge the "Great Divide" between history and geography, Baker identifies basic principles relating historical geography not only to history but also to geography, a reworking which signifies a "new beginning" for this scholarly hybrid.

Bruce Campbell's book is the first single-authored treatment of medieval English agriculture on a national scale. Methodologically innovative, it deals comprehensively with the cultivation carried out by or for lords on their demesne farms, for which the documentation is more detailed and abundant than for any other agricultural group either during the medieval period or later. A context is thereby assured for all future scholarship on the medieval and early agrarian economies. The book also makes a substantive contribution to ongoing historical debates.

To contemporaries the nineteenth century was 'the age of great cities'. As early as 1851 over half the population of England and Wales could be classified as 'urban'. In the first full-length treatment of nineteenth-century urbanism from a geographical perspective, Richard Dennia focuses on the industrial towns and cities of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and South Wales, that epitomised the spirit of the new age. In recent years urban historians and geographers have produced a wide range of detailed studies, both of particular cities and of specific aspects of nineteenth-century urban...

In this collection of innovative essays an international team of contributors provides theoretical, methodological and substantive empirical analyses of a long-neglected topic in Latin American research. The essays are written from a multi-disciplinary perspective and thus provide data and novel interpretations that represent an important step forward in colonial Latin American studies. The picture that emerges is one of colonial Spanish America in a state of continual flux: spatial mobility was no less pronounced than social and racial change. Covering countries as varied as Bolivia and...

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Amur region had been a virtual terra incognita for the Russian public. However, the region's annexation succeeded in stirring the dreams of the country's most outstanding social and political visionaries, who declared it "civilization's most important step forward." A decade later, this enthrallment and optimism had evaporated. Mark Bassin examines Russia's perceptions of the new territories, placing the Amur enigma in the context of Russian Zeitgeist mid-century, and offers a new perspective on the relationship among Russian nationalism, geographical...