Towards a World Historical Geography

Vincent J. Del Casino Jr.Departments of Geography and Liberal Studies

California State University, Long Beach

and

Tim KeirnDepartments 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Draft Paper(Please do not cite without permission of the authors)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 anintegrated world historical geography. It is organized around two major sections. The firstsection outlines the disciplines of History and Geography as well as offering an introduction tothe subfield of Historical Geography. The goals here are to suggest ways to conceptualize thedisciplinary 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 andgeographical 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 beyondthe basic disciplinary definitions, this section highlights the challenges to thinking about worldhistorical geography in a way that intellectually complicates the traditional stereotypes of howwe think about the world. Furthermore, this section opens up the key concepts used to guide aworld historical geography. As a conclusion, we offer a few substantively and theoreticallyinformed research questions that might guide world historical geographers as they trace out themyriad ways in which global processes operate at the intersections of various points in time andspace.

Disciplinary Conventions

What is History?

It is important to understand from the beginning that History is a specifically human activity anda conscious attempt to recollect, conceptualize and preserve the ‘past’ based on the examinationof evidence. Indeed, too often history is understood to be an activity that seeks simply topreserve all the human events of the past and to secure these occurrences in a sequential andproper 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 placeover the course of time. While most of the instances and events of the human past have left norecord of their existence, nonetheless, a massive volume of potential evidence of the human pastremains extant, especially as regards more modern eras. Indeed, the magnitude of this colossalvolume of facts of the past makes it impossible to manage, preserve and transcribe a record ofhuman activity. Instead the historian must make decisions concerning the selection andsignificance of a topic of inquiry, a choice of evidence, and the means of interpreting theevidence examined. All these decisions are in turn informed by the contemporary circumstancesand contexts in which the historian works.

In terms of evidence, historians work in the first instance with primary sources. Aprimary source is a firsthand account of an event. Traditionally historians work with writtenprimary sources such as government and church records, newspapers, books, letters, diaries andas we shall see maps. Increasingly, historians also work with primary sources that are material innature: buildings, clothing, tools and other sorts of artifacts and commodities. Historians of themore recent past also utilize visual imagery in the form of photographs and film as primarysources, in addition to oral testimony of firsthand witnesses of past events. Generally, thequestion that a historian asks of the past determines the type of primary sources to be examinedand 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, oncechosen, the historian must interpret the primary source judiciously and examine the strengths andweaknesses of the evidence, and account for bias. Once interpreted, the historian must also lookfor corroborating evidence from other sources to support a conclusion. This is a very importantfacet of historical methodology. Moreover, the historian must organize the material in aparticular way that not only supports the conclusion but also makes its meaning and significanceclear. These conclusions in themselves then provide a recollection, conceptualization andpreservation of the past. They are published in history books and articles that become secondarysources. In turn, these secondary sources provide the historical context in which historiansanalyze primary sources, and they also help to shape future questions and agendas for historicalresearch and in doing so create a constant dynamic of dialogue between the present and theinterpretation of the past. Finally, a third tertiary level of sources exists in the form of textbooksthat are themselves drawn from the examination of secondary sources.

New technologies and the computer in particular have allowed historians to examine agreater array of primary sources with relative ease. More significantly the computer hasfacilitated more quantitative analysis of primary sources to construct more data and statisticalevidence to corroborate conclusions about the past. Historians also apply theory to the means inwhich they both select and interpret primary sources. Theoretical understanding in many caseseases the challenge of extracting meaning from a primary source. Increasingly, and facilitated bythe introduction of new information technologies, historians draw upon the knowledge andtheories of other disciplines to interpret primary sources and to construct conceptualizationsabout the past. History as a discipline is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and theboundaries between disciplines such as history and say literature are becoming increasinglyblurred. Concurrently, researchers in disciplines other than history turn to analyzing their owndata in historical terms. The study of language and literature is increasingly explored as part of ahistorical development; physicists and astronomers are increasingly interested in the history oftime; and the rise of environmental science as a field is based to a large extent on historicalinquiry of environmental change. While historians draw upon knowledge and theory from thephysical and life sciences and literature to interpret the past, they extract most heavily from thesocial sciences in their interdisciplinary approaches. For example, economic and sociologicaltheory and application have greatly expanded our understanding of the material and familyconditions of human societies in the past. Since the mid-twentieth century this has facilitated aconcerted effort to recollect ‘history from below’ and made women and laboring people thefocus of historical research as opposed to the political elites who had been the focal point of priorhistorical analysis. It also gave rise to the development of the specific fields of economic andsocial history within the discipline and profession of history. Similarly, historians have alsodrawn from the theories and applications of geography to interpret evidence and to recollect thepast providing the parallel developments of the fields of demographic history and historicalgeography 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 haveinterests 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 geography’s interest in surficial processes as opposed to deepstructures of the earth’s crust, mantle, and core. At the center of most geographic inquiry rests aninterest in the relationship between humans and the world around them, both physical andcultural. Specifically, geographers investigate how humans shape the world around them, therelationship between humans and places (e.g., towns, cities, woodlands, savannas, etc.), and howplaces change over time. Geographers thus focus much of their attention on physical and culturallandscapes and the evolution of those landscapes. Geographers are also interested in how humansorganize particular places and how places are constituted through their relationships with otherlocations. So, geographers are very interested in the distribution of geographic phenomena, suchas cities, vegetation biomes, climatic zones, and cultural and religious practices and theinterconnections 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 toexamine geographic processes at larger scales of analysis, including regions. Regions aredefined, simply, as a series of places with similar attributes, such as climatic regions based on acertain amount of rainfall or cultural regions based on a particular lingua franca, or language oftrade. Traditionally, geographers talk about world regions and realms, in particular, as sites withsome 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 ininvestigating patterns of similarity that make the region somewhat homogeneous. It is notsurprising that geographers, therefore, like to examine patterns across space as a way to identityregional formations. For many K-12 teachers, world regions are used as the basis for geographicanalysis and for the organization of their curriculum. Thus, it is common for K-12 teaching ingeography to be structured around a few established world regions.

Geographers draw from a number of sources in understanding places and constructingregions, including demographic data, physiographic data, cultural data, and historical data, toname a few. Geography as a discipline generates both primary data from field investigations andsynthesizes data collected from other secondary sources, such as the census. Geography is aninherently interdisciplinary field, drawing from the methods utilized in history, culturalanthropology, sociology, political science on the human side of the discipline, and biology,geology, physical anthropology, chemistry, and physics on the physical side. Geographers arealso synthetic thinkers, mixing methods and data from both physical and human sources. This ismost common in the areas of cultural and political ecology as well as landscape ecology. Unlikehistory, which is predominantly the study of human activity, geographers do examine purelyphysical processes, such as fluvial (water) geomorphology (landscape components) without anydirect reference to human experience. For regional geographers, however, the goal is often tointegrate human and physical data into a systematic whole.

Traditionally, mapping has been the main methodological tools for organizing anddisseminating geographic data. Maps can take the form of scientific representations based onprojections of the world, often constructed by reference to latitude and longitude. Geographershave advanced the analysis of geographic inquiry through the use of computer technologies,including Geographic Information Systems (“mapped” databases tied to specific geocoded pointsin 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 examinegeographic representations of place, including maps, drawing from both primary and secondarysources to analyze how people experience and live in place. In this way, a map is not simply afactual representation of a particular place at a particular time. A map is also always a social andpolitical product, and we need to ask who made the map and for what purpose. Maps thus hide asmuch as they reveal, as do other geographic sources. Like history, with its increasing interest inwomen, subaltern groups, and the working class, geographers are thus also interested in howrepresentations of the world inscribe that world with meaning, creating spaces that marginalizesome while privileging others. It is necessary to examine geographic data by asking from whatsource did the data come, for what purpose were the data collected, and what are the limitationsof the data as they are presented. No map, picture, archive, or painting, for example, can be apure 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 ofHistory and Geography in the study of how humans have adapted to and modified the worldaround them in different ways across time and space. Historical geographers draw from thebreadth of primary and secondary data – written, visual, and oral – that constitute the archives ofhuman history. The difference, primarily, between History or Geography and HistoricalGeography is that the latter examines both the spatial and temporal context of and interactionbetween human activity and (physical and cultural) landscape change. Historical geographersremain true to the methodologies of both History and Geography, however. Key to any goodhistorical geography is the corroboration of sources and the presentation of that material in waysthat reflect the synthesis of multiple sources. Historical geographers thus produce both writtentext and maps in their presentation of data in ways that decipher the ways in which the world hasbeen 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 theirmeans of interpretation and presentation of the past are molded by the contemporary context andcircumstances in which they work. As such, historical inquiry and interpretation of the past isdynamic, changes over time, and mirrors to a great extent the cultural perspectives of the timeand place in which the historical literature is written. Historiography is the study of changes inhistorical 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 howchanges in historical methodology and interpretation parallel, molded by changing historicalcircumstances and contexts.

Like the aforementioned economic and social histories, world history is a specific fieldwithin the discipline of history. It is a relatively new field of historical inquiry and has itsprofessional 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, historicalinquiry was infused with nationalism and the nation state was deemed the most significant formof political and social organization and the most appropriate focus of historical study. As thedisciple of history became more specialized, historians identified themselves as for examplepolitical or economic historians but did so within the confines of nation states as ‘economichistorians of Britain’ or as ‘political historians of the United States.’ Not only was the nation thefocus of historical inquiry but it was also the imperial nations of Western Europe and the UnitedStates that predominated within historical studies and literature. However, after the SecondWorld War, a number of historians in the United States began to question the nation as the focalpoint of historical analysis. As the United States emerged as a dominant cultural, economic andpolitical global force, historians argued that American citizens needed a greater understanding ofthe world in general as opposed to the isolated knowledge of an American and WesternEuropean past. This move to world history in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was also facilitated bythe liberalization of immigration laws and demographic change within the United States. Asclassrooms became increasingly culturally diverse, a focus upon Western civilization becameincreasingly 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 thetime. At the height of the Cold War, from the Right a number of world historical studies focusedon comparative analysis to account for the industrial and economic prevalence of the West toserve as a model and to encourage the capitalist orientation of the developing world. From theLeft, their developed a world historical critique (often labeled as a world systems approach) thatargued that the rise of the West was dependent on the economic exploitation and dependency ofthe developing world and as such was an inappropriate model for ‘3rd World’ development. Inany event, much of the early development of world history was still heavily orientated towardexplaining the role of the West within either a comparative or global context and portrayed muchof the rest of the world as victims or subservient to western political and economic expansion inthe past. During this period, a few historians attempted to create a more culturally empatheticand less Eurocentric world history; nonetheless these studies treated various cultures and regionsin isolation from one another and served essentially as studies of comparative culture as opposedto world history.

In the late twentieth century, the study of world history was dramatically transformed tosuch an extent that it is often now referred to as global history or the ‘new world history.’ Withthe end of the Cold War, the spread of new information and communication technologies, andmajor increases in transcontinental migration and rapid economic growth, the world has beensignificantly transformed by unprecedented forces of globalization. Increasingly, human societyis impacted by transnational phenomena diminishing the impact of the nation state.Consequently, world historians increasingly concentrate upon transnational and cross-culturalcontact and exchange in the past. In doing so, the focus of historical study is upon the integrationand connections between cultures and states over time with specific emphasis on non-Westernagency and the early pre-European origins of transregional contact and exchange. This focusupon cross-cultural and transregional interaction nicely segues with the aforementioned growthof interdisciplinary approaches within the discipline of history. These exchanges are geographicby definition and call upon for example economic and anthropologic analysis for theirunderstanding. Currently, world historians are also increasingly interested in environmentalhistory 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 theenvironment. 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 iscommon 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 19th and early20th centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, geographers were mostly interested inphysical processes, and many who worked on human processes did so within a framework ofenvironmental determinism. These early geographers argued that the physical world actuallydetermined 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 culturalgeographers and ecologists who argued that human were not simply products of the physicalworld around them but rather that humans adapted to and modified the physical world to meettheir needs. In this new model humans molded physical landscapes creating cultural, political,social, and economic landscapes of religious icons, governmental institutions, ethnicneighborhoods, and markets and trading networks. Over time, a new core of geographers arguedthat 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 particularspaces. By the 1960s, geographers once again offered a new paradigm of geographic inquiryarguing that geography should develop geographic laws based in a positivist, empirical scienceof quantification and replicability. In this way, these new “quantitative geographers” argued thatgeography, both human and physical, should theoretically and methodologically mimic the“hard,” natural sciences, such as biology, physics, and chemistry with their emphasis onexperiment and the generation of laws governing the social world. Finally, the quantitativerevolution was challenged by the development of alternative approaches, including marxist andfeminist geographies that theorized space and spatial relations as more than simply backdrops tosocial relations. Instead, these geographers argued that the spatial organization of the world – incities, roads, neighborhoods, civilizations, rural environs – were fully imbricated in the socialorganization of daily life. Put simply, geographers are interested in how the spatial organizationof 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 bothopen up and close off dialogue between people of different classes, races, ethnicities, andgenders?

Despite the theoretical and methodological changes in the field of geography, thediscipline became fairly marginal in the academy over the 20th century. Unlike history, forexample, which remained central in the educational standards, geography fell out of favor. Tosalvage geography as a discipline and as a key component of the educational system,geographers identified the discipline’s key concepts, which could be applied in numerouseducational contexts. The “Five Themes” of Geography – location, place, human-environmentinteractions, movement, and regions – were thus born as Geography’s key concepts. The Five

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Themes became quite popular, although geographers continued to rethink the discipline and itsapplicability to teaching students. The National Council on Geographic Education thusdeveloped Geography’s 18 Standards, which expanded on Geography’s Five Themes. The 18Standards are broken down into six broad categories, including: the world in spatial terms; placesand regions; physical systems; human systems; environment and society; and the use ofgeography. The Standards, however, are meant to inform the breadth of geographic inquiry, andare 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 geographicinquiry across the physical and human sides of the discipline.

The reemergence of geography in the United States is tied, in part, to the attempts tosystematically identify the discipline’s key concepts and apply them to numerous geographicproblems. Geography has also benefited from a renewed interest in global processes andglobalization. Scholars working in multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, andhistory, now work with geographic concepts, such as those identified in the Five Themes, inconceptualizing how globalization operates to both bring the world closer while maintainingdifference at the same time. What many discovered was that despite the advance in globalmobility – transportation networks, electronically mediated communication, etc. – and individualand group movement, places, locations, and human-environment interactions still differ acrossregional contexts.

World Historical Geography Defined

In many ways, world history is always already informed by a geographic sensibility, with itsconcerns for cross-cultural exchange and contact, diffusion of ideas and technologies, andinterests in thinking through larger global processes and their local effects in comparativecontext. As such, contemporary world historians pay particular attention to the dynamics ofcultural diffusion across national and regional borders with specific attention to humaninteractions along ‘borders’ – both social and material – and cultural frontiers. These interactionsare more often than not both cause and consequence of trade, human migration, and the spatialexpanse of states. All these concepts are indeed geographic as played out across time.

Thus the embedding of historical analysis in a geographic framework – and converselygeographic concepts in a historical context –is pertinent, reasonable, and intuitive. Indeed, theability to integrate geographic and historical analysis has long been acknowledged as animportant skill and competency in primary and secondary social science education. Socialstudies curriculum and methodology at the national, state and local level consistently blends thestudy and practice of history and geography. For example, Standard 17 of the NationalGeography Standards demands that students “examine the complexity of the earth’s geographyas it changes over time.” The National Standards for Social Studies Teachers created by theNational 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 thestate 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 andAmerican 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 Themesof Geography” into all units of history instruction.

Despite the recognized pedagogic importance of melding the geographic with the historical, thishas 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 geographicanalysis in their analysis of the field’s key concepts and approach. While Environmental Historyis a growing field within the discipline, it borrows only narrowly from Geography’s coreconcepts and approaches. In contrast, Historical Geography is a recognized field within thediscipline of Geography, although it is currently a fairly marginal one. Our purpose here,therefore, is to elevate the disciplinary discourse of Geographic History and HistoricalGeography 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 thebroader 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 amore 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 exactlocation marked scientifically). Absolute location is often measured through the use of acoordinate system based on units of latitude and longitude. Location, however, is more thansimply a measure of where one finds a city on a map; it is also relative, measured in relation toother places. Location can thus also be measured in terms of both its site (physical attributes) andsituation (relationship to other locations of human activity) characteristics. Location is alsocognitive, measured not in mathematical terms across an absolute mapped space but in terms ofhow we see one place (or person or object) in relation to another. We can thus conceptualize arelative location; and we can consider how one location might be considered differently bydifferent people who come to that particular location from a different subject position (i.e., thecity might be quite different for a women who is a slave in Classical Rome verses a man who isliving as a Senator at the same time and place).

In discussing relative and cognitive location, geographers have become interested inmuch more than simply the location and site and situation characteristics they have becomeinterested in place. Geographers are interested in studying place as both an amalgamation of thesite and situation characteristics of a location as well as the ways in which human and physicalcharacteristics of that location are cognitively imagined. Put simply, geographers study places asrepresentations 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 areintentionally or unintentionally infused with cultural meaning. In the process of making the earthinto 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 havemany physical geographic attributes, including landforms, plants and animals, soils, and climaticpatterns, many of which are also given important symbolic meaning historically. In studyingplace geographers thus examine a multitude of variables and characteristics, such of populationcharacteristics, religion and language, land-use, history, and settlement patterns, to name just afew.

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 naturalphenomena. Critical to any study of human-environment interactions is an analysis of humanperceptions 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 humanadaptations, while environmental perceptions sometimes play a critical role in the organizationof cultural systems and practices.

In studying location, place, and human-environment relations we must also investigatehow spatial patterns shift over time. These shifts are often a function of movement. Movement isoften thought of as a human process, forced and voluntary migration being the most obviousexamples, although daily travel patterns involve spatial movement and therefore involve spatialinteractions. Movement can also happen on the physical level in the form of desertification asdeserts increase in size due to climate change. In fact, the physical geographies of movementshould be central to any geographic inquiry as humans have historically have been constrainedby 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 becauseof the flow of spatial relations while places at a distance tend to have less in common with eachother. Moreover, spatial interactions help create borders and frontiers as sites of exchange as wellas locations of contestation. In historical terms, borders are not defined in the absolute terms weused today, based in the use of precise measurements of latitude and longitude. Rather, mostborders are fluid, permeable, malleable, incomplete, temporary, and contested.

The movement of people and ideas, in particular, help expand the scope of interactionand thus expand similarities across space creating larger-scale regions. Regions, the final of thefive themes, are based on a set of similar criteria when differentiating the world. Regions can bebased on any number of attributes, both physical and human, or on a combination of multipleattributes. Richard Hartshorne, in the 1950s, defined geography as the study, in fact, of arealdifferentiation, or regionalization. Areal differentiation can be based on both the development offormal and functional regions. Formal regions are typically defined as having some clearlydemarcated 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 corewhere a particular set of attributes is most strongly concentrated, such as religious practices. Asone moves from the core toward the periphery, it is possible to identify both a domain and asphere, the former of which is defined by a strong sense of a particular geographic attribute whilethe sphere contains only a marginal sense of that same attribute. Conceptually, one could thing ofa 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 oftenmuch more irregular, mediated by social networks and physical geographic features, such asmountains, rivers, and other large bodies of water. Moreover, these patterns are infused withmeaning, suggesting that different spaces and spatial relations create nested layers of patternsand processes that are contradictory to and in conflict with the homogeneity of any one particularregion. That said, regions do provide some basis for analysis, although we must not think of eachregion as a distinct, independent space separate from the larger, global flows of social and spatialrelations. Regions are, like histories, human constructs. They ebb and flow over time and aredifferentially 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 ofsyncretic (blended) systems of exchange and cultural relativism at the boundaries of sometimescompeting empires, peoples, and societies.

Complicating Periods and Periodization

Historical periods are human constructs used as way of recollecting and presenting the past in ameaningful and understandable fashion. Historians are obliged to dissect the past intomanageable pieces of chronology because the entire expanses of time as they relate to humanexperience cannot be studied simultaneously. In periodizing history, historians seek to discovercommon patterns and characteristics within a given chronology and concurrently seek toestablish significant thresholds or discontinuities in these patterns or characteristics to serve asthe origins and terminus of a defined historical period. This is not a simple task and periodizationis one of the most controversial aspects of historical scholarship. The organization of time andthe discerning of patterns of continuity and the thresholds of change vary with the scale ofobservation (e.g., from local to national to regional) and the questions and significance thathistorians ask of the past (e.g., patterns of economic change may not correlate chronologicallywith patterns of political change) at any given time. The periodization of a nation’s or region’shistory contains far fewer variables, multiforms and complexities compared with theorganization of these variables on a global scale. Hence, the periodizing of World History hasproven very problematic and a number of schemes of periodization appear within the historicalliterature. Not unlike a flat map that distorts space, common to all these schemes is a distortionof the past that cannot integrate most phenomena except at the broadest and most general andleast 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 achallenge as to what to do with the region. Because regions are often fixed in space and time, byboth geographers and historians, they present a somewhat conservative way of representing theworld. But, if we conceptualize regions as fluid and always in the process of becoming, then wecan turn our attention not to the region as a fixed set of points in space but as a dynamic processdefined by a constantly evolving regionalization. What this allows us to do is to push theories ofthe global through different regions. We can compare how different global processes, such as thediffusion 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 aretheorized as dynamic and always in process then we can begin to consider the ‘big picture’ ofhow 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 anyworld historical geography, such as how we might create periods that have some continuityacross differing contexts and experiences.

Conclusions: Toward a World Historical Geography

As we believe history and geography are evolving processes it seems silly to offer anysubstantive conclusions to our discussion. Rather, what we want to suggest is a few keytheoretical 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 onalternative ways to frame your own inquiries in world historical geography.

How do people organize their place in the world in relation to their perception ofthe physical and human environment over time?

How, why, and in what ways are different places and regions distributed inrelation to each other and across time in absolute and relative terms?

How do people locate themselves and create different places in the world inrelative 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, overtime?

What do various locations, places, and regions mean to different people fromdifferent social positions over time and across space?