Geography's other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–c.1933

Abstract

With reference to the history of modern geography in Britain and from assessment of the archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this paper examines the role of the BAAS in promoting geography from the Association's foundation in 1831 to the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to BAAS Section E (Geography) in the period after 1851. Geography's place is considered with respect to its funding, content and relationship with other sciences, to shifts in its focus – from exploration to what contemporaries termed ‘scientific’ geography and to the attendant decline in audiences at BAAS geography sessions – and to moments of ‘crisis’ in geography's epistemological status. In examining extant work on geography's role in the BAAS, a case is made for revision of the current historiographies of ‘modern’ British geography and questions are raised about the connections between geography and science and the writing of geography's ‘disciplinary’ and institutional history in the modern period.

The ‘Map Girls’. British women geographers’ war work, shifting gender boundaries and reflections on the history of geography

“…This suggests that the history of geography would benefit from approaches that encompass more of the ‘minute’ and the ‘monumental’, individual biographies which are set within a wider disciplinary context that includes but also looks beyond academia and travel writing. Whilst institutional histories have become unfashionable in geography, such accounts do not have to be narrowly internalist and Withers et al (2006) have shown that there are still under‐utilised institutional geographical archives. This account of women geographers’ war work demonstrates there is still much to be gained from an analysis of twentieth‐century material in institutional archives.…”

Making Mobile Knowledges: The Educational Cruises of theRevue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées, 1897–1914

“…That is a task reserved to future collaboration of observers that, from every corner in the world, will come together to write the great book of human knowledge. 56 If Réclus's introductory words resonated well with Olivier's pacifist vision of science (in this case geographical science), his work also served to provide a long-standing and authoritative bibliographic source for the director of the Revue. In preparation for the cruises, tourists were strongly encouraged to read the chapters of the Nouvelle géographie related to the regions and countries they were going to visit.…”

Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth‐century British geography

“…Others have examined the cognitive content of geography’s ideas over time and in comparative context (Dunbar 2001; Livingstone 1992 2003), or addressed the connections between geography, exploration, empire and empiricism (Bell et al 1995; Butlin 2009; Driver 2001; Jones 2005). Geography’s longer‐run textual, intellectual and pedagogic genealogies have been scrutinised (Cormack 1997; Godlewska 1999; Mayhew 1998 2007 2011), and the gendering and historiography of geography’s ‘modernity’ has been studied (Domosh 1997; Maddrell 2009; Mayhew 2001 2005; Monk 2004; Withers et al 2006).…”