Doing ‘Deep Big History’: Race, landscape and the humanity of H J Fleure (1877–1969)

Abstract

This article argues that current programmes in the human sciences which adopt a multidisciplinary approach to history need to be wary of treating the knowledge of the natural sciences as being independent of social influence. Such efforts to do 'Big History', 'Deep History' or co-evolutionary history themselves have a past, and this article suggests that potential practitioners could benefit from considering that historical context. To that end, it explores the career of Herbert John Fleure, a scholar whose career defied disciplinary classification, but who was concerned to understand how the human past and present could be understood as they combined in the physical and social context of their production, and what they implied for the possibility of a human future. It concludes by arguing that Fleure's major lesson for modern researchers is his confrontation of the contingent nature and political consequences of his conclusions.

The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th-century Britain

“…Geddes's own politics were complex, simultaneously radical and conservative, and the kinds of projects aligned with his encompassed a broad spectrum (Renwick, 2010). Smuts's holism was deployed in service of naturalising racial segregation, just as the regionalism of geographers like H. J. Fleure pursued a kind of co-operative socialism (Anker, 2002: 80;Rees, 2019). But all of them took place within what Grimshaw and Hart call the 'open atmosphere' of the early 20th century (Grimshaw and Hart, 1993: 25).…”