Historical Geography

GEOGRAPHERS SEEK TO understand the world by examining spatial relationships. The types of questions they might ask are: Why are things located where they are? How are places different from each other? How are places like each other? How are places interconnected with each other? How do people affect their natural environment and how does the natural environment affect people? In many instances, the answers to these questions are related directly to what the world is like today.

For historical geographers, these questions are adapted to consider the role of time. For example, a historical geographer might ask questions such as: How did people, things, and landscape elements come to be located where they are? How did a place come to be like other places? How did it develop differently from other places? How have people been affected by the natural environment? How have they altered the environment as well? In short, historical geography might be described as the study of past places. Some of the earliest attempts at what might be considered historical geography are rooted in ancient GREECE. Although typically identified as a historian, Herodotus has often been regarded by geographers as one of their own. Based upon his own extensive travels and keen observations, Herodotus developed a sophisticated understanding of how the processes of physical geography played out over extended periods of time, resulting in what was his contemporary landscape.

While individual travel and exploration aided in the development of the historical geographies of Herodotus, the expansion of Islam further developed the field of historical geography. By the mid-8th century C.E., religious conquests had brought northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic control. What transpired was an exchange of ideas between East and West. At the same time, Muslim concepts such as the use of the decimal system made their way into Europe, and Greek and Roman texts were translated into Arabic for the first time. Like the Greeks, Muslim scholars such as Al-Biruni incorporated the role of time within the processes of physical geography. In his study of India, Al-Biruni attempted to explain the formation and distribution of alluvial deposits, predating the development of similar ideas in Europe by centuries. Considered perhaps the most significant historical geographer of the medieval Muslim world, Ibn-Khaldun has been cited as the first to explicitly link the physical environment to human activity and culture through time—thereby establishing the human-environment connection so crucial to the broader field of geography as well.

Nineteenth-century European historical geographers continued to study the relationship between humans and the natural environment with respect to time, but were furthered in their research by theoretical developments in the biological and social sciences. In 1859, Charles Darwin introduced the notion of natural descent in his historic volume, The Origin of Species. Drawing in part upon Thomas Malthus’s ideas concerning population growth and the limitations of the natural environment, Darwin concluded that environments were capable of supporting a limited number of organisms and only those organisms best biologically suited to an environment would be able to remain in that environment and successfully reproduce. Those less well suited to the environment would ultimately face extinction because of competition from better adapted organisms.