Area Studies became increasingly common after World War II as a means of responding to perceived 'external threats' from the Soviet Union and China. After the Cold War and in the face of increasingly rapid globalisation, it seemed inevitable that Area Studies - institutionally and intellectually - would slowly degenerate. But this has not been the case, and there has recently been a resurgence of interest in it as an effective and positive research paradigm. Responding to this renewed interest, this book brings together an esteemed group of contributors at the cutting edge of the field to consider the state of Area Studies today and its prospects for the future. The Rebirth of Area Studies demonstrates that numerous aspects of the research paradigm in fact recommend it as well-suited for the present moment and the challenges posed by globalisation, both as a means to overcome disciplinary limitations and to increase self-reflexivity. Area Studies research is grounded in place-specific knowledge, yet by definition it transcends nation as the basic unit of analysis and thus empowers comparative and trans-national approaches. This book outlines a new, critical Area Studies for the 21st century - self-reflexive, aware of its limitations and conscious of its origins in geopolitical, strategic or ideological considerations - and is essential reading for historians, geographers and political scientists.

Contents:
Part I - The Human Geography of the UK: Some Issues 1. Approaches to the human geography of the UK 2. The UK in a global context 3. Processes of socio-economic change 4. An era of exclusion: polarisation and division 5. Cultural change 6. Political change Part II - The UK in a Period of Change 7. The UK population 8. Work 9. Consumption and leisure 10. Health and wellbeing 11. Culture and identity 12. Policy responses Part III - The UK: a Society and State Divided? 13. Constitutional and political change with Peter Shirlow 14. Geographical divisions: a tale of two regions 15. The haves and the have-nots 16: The geography of polarisation and division with Peter Shirlow

This new key textbook for introductory courses in human geography provides first and second-year undergraduates with a comprehensive thematic approach to the changing human geography of the UK at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Covering local, regional, national, European and global issues, it also explores in some detail topics which are part of the lived experience of undergraduates themselves, such as crime, unemployment, social exclusion and AIDS.
User-friendly textbook features include:
* chapter introductions, summaries and important theoretical principles
* up-to-date further reading and key on-line sources
* case studies, examples and revision questions.

This textbook documents and explains the natural climatic and ecological changes that have occurred during the past 2.6 million years. It also outlines the emergence and global impact of humans during this period. Exploring a wide range of records of climate change, the authors demonstrate the connections between the components of the Earth's climate system, show how the evidence for such change is obtained, and explain some of the problems in collecting and dating proxy climate data.
The book reveals how the rise of humankind coincided with the beginnings of major environmental changes and a mass extinction. It shows that human effects on the world are not merely modern matters but date back a million years or more.

The Great Ice Age documents and explains the natural climatic and palaeoecologic changes that have occurred during the past 2.6 million years, outlining the emergence and global impact of our species during this period. Exploring a wide range of records of climate change, the authors demonstrate the interconnectivity of the components of the Earths climate system, show how the evidence for such change is obtained, and explain some of the problems in collecting and dating proxy climate data.
One of the most dramatic aspects of humanity's rise is that it coincided with the beginnings of major environmental changes and a mass extinction that has the pace, and maybe magnitude, of those in the far-off past that stemmed from climate, geological and occasionally extraterrestrial events. This book reveals that anthropogenic effects on the world are not merely modern matters but date back perhaps a million years or more.

A splendid - and necessary - publication...a great resource Iain Sinclair Charles Booth's landmark survey of life in late-19th-century London, published for the first time in one volume. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth's landmark social and economic survey found that 35 percent of Londoners were living in abject poverty. Booth's team of social investigators interviewed Londoners from all walks of life, recording their comments, together with their own unrestrained remarks and statistical information, in 450 notebooks. Their findings formed the basis of Booth's colour-coded social mapping (from vicious and semi-criminal to wealthy) and his seventeen-volume survey Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, 1886-1903. Organized into six geographical sections, Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps presents the hand-colored preparatory and printed social mapping of London. Accompanying the maps are reproductions of pages from the original notebooks, containing anecdotes and observations too judgmental for Booth to include in his final published survey. An introduction by professor Mary S. Morgan clarifies the aims and methodology of Booth's survey and six themed essays contextualize the the survey's findings, accompanied by evocative period photographs. Providing insights into the minutia of everyday life viewed through the lens of inhabitants of every trade, class, creed, and nationality, Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps brings to life the diversity and dynamism of late nineteenth-century London.

The Roads of Roman Italy offers a complete re-evaluation of both the evidence and the interpretation of Roman land transport. The book utilises archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence for Roman communications, drawing on recent approaches to the human landscape developed by geographers. Among the topics considered are:
* the relationship between the road and the human landscape
* the administration and maintenance of the road system
* the role of roads as imperial monuments
* the economics of road construction and urban development.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203062418

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state's persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former "outer zones" in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of "all-under-heaven" to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'

First published in 1985, this Atlas uses over 50 specially drawn maps to trace the rise and fall of the railways' fortunes, and is supported by an interesting and authoritative text. Financial and operating statistics are clearly presented in diagrammatic form and provide a wealth of information rarely available to the student of railway history. Freeman and Aldcroft provide the basis for a new understanding of the way in which the railways transformed Britain by the scale of their engineering works, by shrinking national space and reorganising the layouts of urban areas. Maps show the evolution of early wagon routes into the first railway routes, the frenetic activity of the 'Railway Mania' years, and the consolidation of these lines into a national network. This exciting presentation of railway development will interest the enthusiast as well as the more general student of British transport history.

This groundbreaking volume addresses issues central to the study of prehistoric settlement including group memory, the transmission of ideology and the impact of mobility and seasonality on the construction of social identity. Building on these themes, the contributors point to new ways of understanding the relationship between settlement and landscape by replacing Capitalist models of spatial relations with more intimate histories of place.

Series Information:
One World Archaeology

Natural Environmental Change offers a concise introduction to this key topic in the study of the environment, geography, and earth science. Illustrated throughout, each chapter provides a broad spectrum of international case studies and further reading guides. Introductory chapters examine the theories of environmental change and provide a summary of Earth history. The records of environmnetal change are then explained, as revealed by data from various archives such as ocean sediment, ice core, terrestrial deposits such as glacial moraines and lake sediments, tree rings, and historical and meteorological records. Final chapters detail the changes that have occured in high, middle and low lattitudes, and the book concludes with a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current understanding. An extensive bibliography will also prove invaluable to those studying in this area.

In 1937 the Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel proposed solving the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two nation-states. The concept of partition in exchange for a state was acceptable to the Jewish Agency Executive, but not the details set out by the Royal Commission. Thus in 1937-38 the Agency formulated an alternative plan for consideration by the British authorities. At the core of the proposal was the issue of borders. However, the Agency's suggestions and preparations for a Jewish state addressed additional elements, including the question of Jerusalem; population transfer; the status of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state; and plans covering foreign policy, immigration and development, religion and state, finance and security. In this work Yossi Katz shows that the Jewish Agency Executive plans - though never implemented - was not an isolated episode, but had short- and long-term implications from the Jewish perspective.

After the Ruins uses both official and unofficial records to explore a relatively ignored aspect of recent rural history: how the fields, farms, villages and market towns of Northern France were restored during the 1920s in the aftermath of the Great War. The book contains illustrations and many detailed maps and makes use of both official reports and unofficial critical commentaries.

With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. On Sympathetic Grounds offers a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional-what Naomi Greyser calls an "affective geography." Greyser traces the intricacies attending Americans sentimental sense that bodies could merge and mutually occupy the same space at the same time. Affective geographies complicate normative, linear assumptions about intimacy and distance, and consequently compel a reconsideration of geopolitics, geophysics and the distribution of resources and care. Mapping feelings in and also about space, On Sympathetic Grounds focuses on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor, space and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others' lives and world-making projects. Bringing literary and rhetorical studies together with critical race and gender theory, cultural geography, American studies, affect studies and the new materialism, this book lays out sentimentalism's usefulness to settler colonialism and the maintenance of racialized labour. The book also carefully charts sentimentalisms value as a means of resisting geographic displacement and both physical and metaphysical dispossession. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation; Greyser treats grounds as geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical. Sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others' wellbeing. Ultimately, On Sympathetic Grounds uncovers a capacious, non-linear cartography of sympathy's vital place in shaping North America.

In Networked Nation: Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Munster's 'Cosmographia', Jasper van Putten examines the groundbreaking woodcut city views in the German humanist Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia. This description of the world, published in Basel from 1544 to 1628, glorified the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and engendered the city book genre. Van Putten argues that Munster's network of city view makers and contributors-from German princes and artists to Swiss woodcutters, draftsmen, and printers-expressed their local and national cultural identities in the views. The Cosmographia, and the city books it inspired, offer insights into the development of German and Swiss identity from 1550 to Switzerland's independence from the empire in 1648.

This atlas comprises a full guide to the history of Britain's imperial enterprise. In addition to Britain's colonial development, it touches on subjects including the changing territorial pattern of empire, exploration, trade, communications and imperial defence, war and conquest, the activities of Britain's missionaries and consuls and the spread of white settlement.

Arguing that historical analysis is an important, yet heretofore largely underexplored dimension of scholarship in animal geographies, this book seeks to define historical animal geography as the exploration of how spatially situated human-animal relations have changed through time. This volume centers on the changing relationships among people, animals, and the landscapes they inhabit, taking a spatio-temporal approach to animal studies. Foregrounding the assertion that geography matters as much as history in terms of how humans relate to animals, this collection offers unique insight into the lives of animals past, how interrelationships were co-constructed amongst and between animals and humans, and how nonhuman actors came to make their own worlds. This collection of chapters explores the rich value of work at the contact points between three sub-disciplines, demonstrating how geographical analyses enrich work in historical animal studies, that historical work is important to animal geography, and that recognition of animals as actors can further enrich historical geographic research.

Historical Geography of Crop Plants is devoted to a variety of staple and food crops, as well as fodder, fiber, timber, rubber, and other crops. The origins and histories of many of these crops have been clarified only recently by new research. The book has been arranged alphabetically by family and higher taxa for easy reference. Within families, species and cultivars are listed chronologically and geographically. The taxonomy and geography of probable wild progenitors have been outlined, and archeological evidence (when available) and historical evidence on region and domestication are traced. The subsequent evolution and spread of many domesticated species are examined, and the reasons behind the diversity in crop histories are explored. Historical Geography of Crop Plants will be a useful reference for botanists, economic botanists, ethnobiologists, agronomists, geographers, and others interested in the subject.

Maps in newspapers generated many discussions among cartographers and geographers working from different approaches and theoretical backgrounds. This work examines these maps from a historiographical as well as a historical perspective. It considers three main questions, namely how maps in the press should be conceptualized, how cartographic images in newspapers have been studied, and how these images changed over time. In order to provide a perspective on the origins, development, and impact of war maps in the press, we will explore maps representing three geopolitical conflicts for Brazilian audiences: The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), the World War II (1939-1945) and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (1994-2010). By exploring maps on these wars, we will identify specific cartographic practices used in this genre as well as the connections that this mode has with other types of map production and consumption.

Spanning the entire period from the late fifteenth century beginnings of Britain's growth as a maritime commercial power to her withdrawal from most colonial possessions and her alignment with continental Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, this atlas traces the history of Britain's changing presence overseas. Each map is accompanied by explanatory text. The shifting territorial pattern of empire over more than four centuries, from the colonization of Virginia to the dismemberment of the African empire, is naturally prominent. British exploration is also covered, showing the routes taken and discoveries made, from Frobisher and Raleigh, to Cook and Livingstone. War, conquest and non-European military resistance are touched upon, especially in the American War of Independence, the Indian Mutiny, the South African campaign of 1899-1902, and recent World Wars. In addition, the atlas demonstrates the considerable influence and power, albeit of less formal kinds and at different times, brought by Britain's trade and investments, the patterns of imperial defence and communications, the spread of white settlement, the presence of her consuls, shipping and missionaries. This book should be of i

This atlas is designed specifically to enhance the understanding of British history since 1700, as well as emphasizing social and economic change. The contributors are all subject specialists who have taught in higher education institutions, and a large proportion of both maps and text is based on their own original research. The combination of maps and text is intended to illustrate not only historical developments, such as the spread of agriculture or the growth of an integrated transport system, but also regional contrasts at points in time. The end product offers support for those historians who question the usefulness of thinking in terms of national economic histories.

The book deals with the formative years of Israel's evolving symbolic landscape (1904-1967). It covers the stories of a few dozen Jews who passed away in the Diaspora and later their remains were taken to be buried for the second time (and sometimes for the third) in Israel. These were Zionists and politicians, writers and poets, heroes and public activists whose common denominator was that they all passed away in the Diaspora, far and detached from the national homeland that they fought for before their tragic death. Only later, in an act of repair, their coffins were sent to be buried in the "sacred" Zionist soil, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Dgania. These graves became pilgrimage sites and contributed to the design of Israel's landscape. The book examines how and why such great effort was made to bring their remains to Israel for reinterment, and how the funerals and graves of the public figures became state symbols and national instruments for establishing Israeli sovereignty over the land.

Across Russia's easternmost shores and through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how, over 150 years, people turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power. Beginning in the 1840s, capitalism and then communism, with their ideas of progress, transformed the area around the Bering Strait into a historical experiment in remaking ecosystems. Rendered even more urgent in a warming climate, Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the impact that human needs and ambitions have brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet. * Shortlisted for the The Pushkin House Book Prize 2020.

This book examines recent views on the emerging settlement patterns of early medieval Britain and their relation to land use, drawing on both archaeological and documentary sources. Six essays, displaying the combined skills of historians, archaeologists and geographers, explore the evolution of the South West in rural and urban contexts across many centuries. Simon Esmonde Cleary takes the study from the later Romano-British into the post-Roman period; Christopher Holdsworth examines the re-emergence of Christianity in sixth-century England, the location of minsters and their role in the economy. The problematic theme of continuity or dislocation recurs in a number of chapters and is closely investigated by Peter Rose and Ann Preston Jones in their chapter on Cornwall, a region marginal to the main thrust of Anglo-Saxon cultural influence. Ethnicity as a factor for change is challenged and Colleen Batey, looking at Northern Britain, finds that archaeology fails to identify with any degree of certainty the specific Scandinavian house type in the uplands. Della Hooke presents a more general summary of the period across England, noting the evidence for the emerging landscape regions which were characterized by particular settlement types and field systems and, in a case study of the Failand ridge in North Somerset, James Bond sets the evidence within a much broader time scale, revealing the gaps which still caracterize our knowledge of the early medieval period.