Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian's location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain's imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0 longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had...

This book examines the history and geography of science and the science of geography in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and the British Empire. In considering the history and geography of the Association and of geography in local, national and imperial contexts, the book makes an important inter-disciplinary contribution to the history and geography of science and to the civic history of geography. Attention is paid to the Association's workings, to geography as a civic science in Britain and overseas and to the connections between education and citizenship in a period of...