The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography eds. by Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, and Charles W. J. Withers

Abstract

Reviewed by: The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography eds. by Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, and Charles W. J. Withers Robert Rundstrom The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography. Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. 2 vols. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020. Pp. l+1066, black & white illustrations, tables, photographs, maps, notes, references, index. $410.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-5264-0455-8. $246.00, eBook, ISBN 978-1-5297-3866-7. SAGE Handbooks are reference works comprising a multitude of chapters commissioned to review, audit, or account for a discipline or subdiscipline, and to provide both breadth and depth in illuminating for novices key questions animating a given field or topic. They can be especially useful for students. A search on SAGE's website returned 3,016 entries currently available in print or as e-volumes. Such a record of mass dissemination is advantageous for a publisher seeking to define academic disciplines, but it also leads inevitably to works of uneven quality. This SAGE handbook is no different. The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography is composed of two volumes divided into nine parts: Histories and Geographies, Land and Landscapes, Property and Money, Population and Mobility, Territory and Geopolitics, Environment and Nature, Science and Technology, Meaning and Communication, and Studies in Practice. Each part contains a short introduction and five or six individual chapters. Most of the forty-nine chapters are twenty to twenty-five pages long and include three to five pages of references gathered together at the end of the chapter, a wise practice for which users will be very grateful. Each chapter provides a historiography of the chosen topic, fleshes out empirical and conceptual contributions from contemporary research, and speculates fairly ambitiously about what the future holds. The editors/authors accomplish this by combining, on the one hand, different places and time periods considered at multiple scales, and on the other the historical and geographical processes that authors consider characteristic or formative. This novel approach yields an unprecedented range and depth for a handbook in this field, one of the editors' stated goals. [End Page 77] The introduction lays out the other aims for the book. Most are fairly standard: highlight the diversity and strength of scholarship; show ways that theory and forms of evidence are used; and provide grounds for further debate in historical geography. Authors' self-reflections on questions of positionality was another requirement, but one achieved unevenly in the result. Finally, and perhaps most peculiarly, the editors were wary of "privileg[ing] geographical dimensions at the expense of interdisciplinary connections" (xlii). In their terms, the goal was to promote "geographically-informed histories" as much as "historically-aware geographies" (xlii). Fuzzy wordplay aside, questions about disciplinary boundaries can be important, especially in countries like the US where geography is often understood by academic administrators as GIS and little else, and is therefore a target when financial cuts are made. Users of this handbook will have to decide for themselves how important such boundaries are. This handbook achieves these goals by and large, resulting in a grand array of possibilities for studying historical geography. Almost anything is conceivable, from speech to engineering, from global cityscapes to the circumpolar north, from the ideas of H. C. Darby and Alan Baker to those of Carl Sauer and Bill Bunge, from weather watching to critical military geography, from our climatic crises to our big data avalanche, from historical geographies of a geocentric cosmos to commodification and the space age, and much more. The range covered here should fuel almost any interest. Appropriately, received wisdoms about resilience, environmental vulnerability, resource scarcity, and of course knowledge itself are succinctly interrogated. Overall, the text is rightly tilted toward critiques of capitalist impulses and scorn for militarism, scientism, and blind technophilia. I was relieved to find the editors and authors never lost sight of the basic questions about their impacts: who has benefited and who has paid the cost, and what was materially changed for better and worse. Naturally, users will have their own preferences among the many substantive chapters. For me, the following were the most worthwhile: Veronica della Dora's concise summation of the concept of landscape deployed by...