The Sage Handbook of Historical Geography

Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of study within modern geography, with strong interdisciplinary connections with the humanities and the social sciences. The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides an international and in-depth overview of the field with chapters that examine the history, present condition and future significance of historical geography in relation to recent developments and current research.

The Handbook is in two volumes, divided across nine parts. Volume One includes commentaries on the history and geography of historical geography, and reviews how historical geographers have considered the appropriation, management and representation of landscape, the changing geographies of property, land, money and financial capital, and the demographic, medical and political analysis of the world’s growing and mobile population.

Volume Two shows how historical geographers have made significant contributions to geopolitical debates about the relationships between nation-states and empires, to environmental challenges posed by human interaction with the natural world, to studies of the cultural, intellectual and political implications of modern science and technology, and to investigations of communicative action, artefacts, performances and representations. The final part reviews the methodological and ethical challenges of historical geography as a publicly engaged research practice.

Part 1: Histories and Geographies

Part 2: Land and Landscapes

Part 3: Property and Money

Part 4: Population and Mobility

Part 5: Territory and Geopolitics

Part 6: Environment and Nature

Part 7: Science and Technology

Part 8: Meaning and Communication

Part 9: Studies in Practice

Professor Charles W J Withers is Ogilvie Chair of Geography and Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a professor in Edinburgh since 1994. He is a fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and the Royal Historical Society. In 2008, he was awarded the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in recognition of his ‘outstanding and sustained contribution to historical geography, the history of cartography and to the history of geographical knowledge’. In 2012, he was awarded the Founders’ Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. This, one of the Society′s two Royal Gold Medals, was given in respect of his ‘world-leading encouragement and development of historical and cultural geography’.

        Professor Withers′ research and teaching interests centre on the historical geography of science and the Enlightenment, the historical geographies of print and exploration, and the history of cartography. He is the author or co-author of ten research monographs, and a further nine co-edited volumes, in addition to numerous scholarly articles and essays. His co-authored Scotland: Mapping the Nation (written with Chris Fleet and Margaret Wilkes), which was published in 2011 by Birlinn Press in association with the National Library of Scotland, was the Scottish Research Book of the Year in the Saltire Society Literary Awards for 2012.

        His most recent book, co-authored with Innes Keighren and Bill Bell, is Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859′. This was published by the University of Chicago Press in May 2015. In 2015, he was appointed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to the position of Geographer Royal for Scotland, the first person to hold this title as a personal honorific for 118 years. He is currently writing a historical geography of the Prime Meridian, a narrative for which we know the solution (‘Greenwich, from 1884’) but not the problem.

Mona Domosh is the Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr. 1933 Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College.  Recent publications include ‘Historical geographies of, and for, the present’, Progress in Human Geography 44, 2020, 168-188, with Levi Van Sant, Elizabeth Hennessy, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Nathan McClintock, and Sharlene Mollett, and ‘Race, biopolitics, and liberal development from the Jim Crow South to postwar Africa’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 43, 2018, 312-324.

Michael Heffernan is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. Recent publications include Geographies of the University (Springer 2018), coedited with Peter Meusburger and Laura Suarsana, and Locating Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), coedited with Stephen Legg, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe.