SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE: HUMAN

GEOGRAPHY AND SPATIAL HISTORY IN

PASTAND PRESENT *

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Just as, in Nigel Thrift’s words, space is the ‘fundamental stuff of
human geography’, time, one might add, is the ‘stuff’ of history.1
While this separation seems neat, historians tend to study time and
place as parallel concepts; when they merge, spatial history (and
historical geography) follows. Important within spatial history are
the concepts of ‘place’ (that is, physical spaces that people
naturalize through patterns, behaviour and communications)
and ‘scale’ (the representation of any area, as produced and
defined by social process, from the smallest unit, the body, to the
largest, the universe).2 This article presents how authors within
Past and Present have studied space, place and scale. It emphasizes
that spatial history can serve as methodology, approach and object.
It contributes to a small but growing pool of articles outlining the
historiography of spatial history. By examining spatial history in
Past and Present (a journal with an explicitly social character) I show
that, while the study of human geography turned away from social
concerns from the 1940s to the 1960s, it was concern with social
history that made the space of Past and Present a place for spatial
studies. Further, the linguistic turn and postmodernism opened

* This article stems from support I received from the Past and Present Society as a

Past and Present postdoctoral fellow from 2014 to 2015. I was inspired to explore this
theme further owing to interactions with Allegra Giovine, Jennifer Keating and
William Pooley while fellows at the Institute of Historical Research. Patricia Strong
of the L. Zenobia Coleman Library at Tougaloo College also assisted me in finding the
sources necessary to complete the article. I am grateful to each of these people and
institutions.
1 Nigel Thrift, ‘Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Geography’, in Sarah L.

Holloway, Stephen P. Rice and Gill Valentine (eds.), Key Concepts in Geography
(London, 2003). For example, according to Peter Gould and Ulf Strohmayer,
‘Geography and space appear to be taking their rightful place alongside history and
time after a century of neglect’: Peter Gould and Ulf Strohmayer, ‘Geographical
Visions: The Evolution of Human Geographic Thought in the Twentieth Century’,
in Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (eds.), Human Geography: A History for the
Twenty-First Century (London, 2004), 17.
2 Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(Oxford, 1991); Jane Wills, ‘Scale’, in Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (eds.),
A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography (London, 2014).

Past and Present, no. 239 (May 2018) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2016
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtw006 Advance Access published on 17 May 2016
e24 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
the door to innovative articles that examine or employ space, place
and scale.
In looking through the pages of Past and Present, we see that it is not
just time that is the ‘stuff’ of history: frequently historical inquiry is
also concerned with space and place. The purpose of this argument
is not to propose a hierarchy between human geography and history,

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nor to suggest that one discipline gives origin to the other, is more
relevant or even is more concerned with space. Indeed, while several
Past and Present articles deal with historical geographies prior to the
linguistic turn, the number of innovative, exciting articles with a
spatial focus produced after 1980 multiplies to the point of
overshadowing previous study. Instead, this article suggests that
including social history in the historiographical narrative of
interdisciplinary approaches to space and place emphasizes the
relationship between history and human geography as an
intertwined narrative with ebbs and flows, rather than a linear
story of borrowing and gradual approximation.
After a brief historiographical presentation of human geography,
space and place, this article outlines ten Past and Present articles
that, in some way, approach space, place and scale in their study.
The articles were published from 1954 to 2014, though all but two
appeared after 1980, reflecting the linguistic and spatial turns. The
articles are not introduced in strict chronological order but are,
rather, grouped according to approach or method. In my analysis
of these articles, I emphasize the authors’ contributions to the
study of space and place. I do not dwell much on definitions
beyond those the authors offer, focusing instead on approach,
method and object of historical inquiry. As Phil Hubbard states
in his article ‘Space/Place’, ‘the key question about space and place
is not what they are, but what they do’.3

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, SPACE AND PLACE

Historiographical studies of human geography outline a
disjointed narrative: geography emerged in the early nineteenth

3 Phil Hubbard, ‘Space/Place’, in David Atkinson et al. (eds.), Cultural Geography: A

Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London, 2005), 47.

 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e25
century, characterized by environmental determinism and
historicism.4 It became an arm of European imperialism, and
fell into a crisis of disciplinary definition until the publication
of Richard Hartshorne’s ‘Nature of Geography’ in 1939.5
Hartshorne urged geographers to focus on spatial distributions
rather than time. Though some had turned to social interests, the

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Second World War, the Cold War and McCarthyism in the
United States presented significant obstacles. In the 1960s,
geography was overcome by technical, statistical and
quantitative study and did not return to qualitative methods
and a humanistic focus until the 1970s.6
In the 1970s, what Phil Hubbard has described as two ‘very
different strands of geographical inquiry’ emerged: humanistic
accounts that emphasize that different settings have a different
sense of place, and Marxist and other materialist accounts that
look at domination and resistance across varied spaces, tending to
focus on the importance of space as ‘both socially produced and
consumed’.7 The philosopher Henri Lefebvre was perhaps the
most influential of the materialist writers. Lefebvre published The
Production of Space in 1974, introducing the terms ‘spatial
practice’ (or how we move within and around space),
‘representations of space’ (the architectural plans, city plans
and other such cartographies of our everyday existence) and
‘representational space’ (or the symbolic associations that
overlay geographic spaces). Lefebvre emphasized that spaces
change over time, as do our use of them, representations of
them and symbolic associations with them. In the words of
Hubbard, in the materialist accounts, ‘place emerges as a

4 Barney Warf and Santa Arias, ‘Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the

Humanities and Social Sciences’, in Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds.), The
Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London, 2009), 1.
5 Gould and Strohmayer, ‘Geographical Visions’, 3–4; Richard Hartshorne, ‘The

Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxix, 3 (1939). Felix Driver, for
example, argued that the voyages of travellers like Henry Morton Stanley,
Livingstone, Richard Burton and Samuel Baker, often with the support of
geographical societies, helped to chart out distant territories. Yet they did not
simply ‘overcome distance’; they also created ‘imaginative geographies’ producing
‘particular ways of reading unknown landscapes’. Felix Driver, ‘Henry Morton
Stanley and his Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire’, Past and Present, no.
133 (Nov. 1991), 135–6.
6 Gould and Strohmayer, ‘Geographical Visions’, 10–15.
7 Hubbard, ‘Space/Place’, 41.
e26 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
particular form of space, one that is created through acts of
naming as well as through the distinctive activities and
imaginings associated with particular social spaces’.8 Building
on Lefebvre’s work, a number of studies reference what has
been termed ‘thirdspace’, that is, geographical imaginaries,
or space that is both real and imagined.9 Another important

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Marxist interpreter of space and place is David Harvey, who
points out a paradox: globalization depends on a sense of place,
because history, culture and landscape are ‘crucial in
perpetuating special processes of capital accumulation’.10
Meanwhile, writers of humanistic accounts, according to
Hubbard, ‘shifted the analytical focus of human geography
from social space to lived-in space’.11 The influential
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place, adds that space
does not have inherent scale but instead is created by emotional
attachment through ‘fields of care’.12 Place, on the other hand, is
imbued with meaning and, according to Tuan, how we create a
‘sense of place’ deserves focused study.13 Another humanist,
Edward Relph, urges scholars to seek a more human-centred
and empathetic understanding of ‘the lived experience of
place’. Relph stresses that there can only be a ‘sense of place’
when the bond between people and place is ‘deep-rooted’.14
Hubbard summarizes the distinction between materialist and
humanist accounts in this way:
Suggesting that (bounded) places are fundamental in providing a sense of
belonging for those who live in them, humanistic perspectives propose a
definite but complex relationship between the character of specific places
and the cultural identities of those who inhabit them. Against this,
materialist perspectives propose that cultural battles create explicit

8 Ibid., 42.
9 Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined
Places (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 56–7.
10 Hubbard, ‘Space/Place’, 45–6. See also David Harvey, The Condition of

Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1990).

11 Ibid., 43.
12 Cited ibid., 42. See also Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

(Minneapolis, 1977), esp. ch. 2.

13 Tuan, Space and Place, 4; Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Space and Place: Humanistic

Perspective’, in Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson (eds.), Philosophy in Geography

(Dordrecht, 1979), 388–90.
14 Cited in Hubbard, ‘Space/Place’, 42–3. See also Edward Relph, Place and

Placelessness (London, 1976).

 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e27
inequalities in the way that space is occupied and used by members of
different groups.15
Human geography took a postmodern turn in the 1990s,
producing a form of inquiry that tied the study of geography
with social justice and focused on pluralities, binaries,
positionalities and deconstruction. Space, in the 1990s,
appeared as a social construct in constant transformation.

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Postmodern scholars emphasized the ‘slipperiness and instability
of language’ and the impossibility of universal definitions for space
and place.16
Within the pages of Past and Present, postmodernism caused
debate, but also yielded fascinating studies in spatial history. In
1991 Lawrence Stone opened a discussion on postmodernism
and history in a closing note. His concise proposition spurred a
four-part response. Stone outlines ‘the crisis of self-confidence’
into which history was thrown by the postmodern ‘threat’ posed
by what he identifies as ‘linguistics’ (Saussure and Derrida),
‘symbolic anthropology’ (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and
Mary Douglas) and ‘New Historicism’.17 He feels that the
discipline of history — which, his note informs, is rooted in
truths that lie outside the text — is at stake, and recommends an
article by Gabrielle M. Speigel offering a ‘way out of the ever-
narrowing trap in which we historians find ourselves’.18 Stone’s
appraisal received immediate response from Patrick Joyce and
Catriona Kelly.19 In his response, Joyce recognizes the
postmodern conundrum for historical inquiry: if the ‘real’ only
exists as transmitted to us discursively, then historians have no
access to the ‘true’ past, but only have access to discursive
representations of it. Joyce proposes breaking ‘out of this
circularity and banality’ by taking the linguistic turn ‘seriously’,
that is by ‘questioning received categories of the ‘‘social’’ ’.20 Kelly
introduces to the debate the perspective of women’s history,
stating that ‘reading historical material for information about
15 Hubbard, ‘Space/Place’, 43.
16 Ibid., 46.
17 Lawrence Stone, ‘Notes: History and Post-Modernism’, Past and Present, no. 131

(May 1991), 130. It is Stone who identifies Derrida as a linguist.

18 Ibid., 131. The text Stone recommends is Gabrielle M. Speigel, ‘History,

Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, lxv (1990).
19 Patrick Joyce, ‘History and Post-Modernism, I’, and Catriona Kelly, ‘History and

Post-Modernism, II’, both in Past and Present, no. 133 (Nov. 1991).
20 Joyce, ‘History and Post-Modernism, I’, 208.
e28 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
women automatically means reading against the grain’; otherwise,
women would be left out of most historical discussion.21 Kelly
offers another option: to read texts for their language and
lexicon, but also to look into their context and intertextuality. In
doing so, we recognize texts as ‘an over-flavoured broth of dubious
provenance, whose precise quantities of ingredients must be

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established, and process of culinary preparation determined’.22
In this way, the meaning of historical texts exists both discursively
(within the text) and contextually (from without). Both Stone and
Speigel offer lengthy, sophisticated rejoinders that accept the
contributions of the linguistic turn, in that it has provided
historians with more sophisticated ways to read texts, but insist
that there must be a middle ground in which reality is not defined
only as language.23 As is revealed throughout the course of this
article, the linguistic turn and postmodernism within the pages of
Past and Present provoked innovative articles that examine space,
place and scale. Spatial social history, in this sense, owes its
existence to this kind of debate.
What scholars now refer to as ‘the spatial turn’ is ‘the perception
that social change can no longer be satisfactorily explained
without a reconceptualization of categories referring to the
spatial component of social life’.24 While many scholars have
limited their discussions of the spatial turn to methodological
questions inspired by the use of geographic information system
technologies for the study of human geography and history, the
turn towards spatial study also focuses on how spatial meaning is
constructed and how space is represented.
Now, according to the dominant historiographical narrative,
human geography exports the concept and study of space to
other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.25
Indeed, human geography and history have long enjoyed each
other’s influence. Yet, when studies of human geography veered
into a decidedly technical, statistical realm, history did not follow;

21 Kelly, ‘History and Post-Modernism, II’, 212.

22 Ibid., 213.
23 Lawrence Stone, ‘History and Post-Modernism, III’, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel,

‘History and Post-Modernism, IV’, both in Past and Present, no. 135 (May 1992).
24 Martina Löw, ‘O spatial turn: para uma sociologia do espaço’, Tempo social: revista

de sociologia da USP, xxv, 2 (2013), 17.

25 Warf and Arias, ‘Introduction’, 1.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e29
in fact, as can be seen through the very founding of Past and
Present in the 1950s, social history emerged at precisely the time
when human geography moved away from social issues. In the
introduction to Past and Present’s first issue, the editors eschew the
statistical and technical form of scholarship that overcame fields
like geography, stating that, while ‘some are no doubt

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stimulating’, these methods ‘are unable to deal with any but the
simplest forms of historical change’ and instead mislead by way of
‘technical sophistication’.26 Importantly, history in Past and
Present was to be relevant:
We should perhaps to-day rely, not on discovering past parallels, but on
understanding how change took place in the past; but we share the belief
of Polybius in the value of history for the present, and in particular his
conception of historical discipline as an instrument enabling us ‘to face
coming events with confidence’. In a generation which, as Friedrich
Mienecke demonstrated, has history in its marrow, and for which an
historical mode of thought is second nature, we believe that it is to
history that the great majority of thinking men and women look for
strength and understanding.27
History had (needed to have) value for the present. Further,
history had to encompass not just Europe or the English-speaking
world.28 Historical inquiry in Past and Present refused the
narrowing of scale that human geography underwent in the
1950s. Within issues that followed, space and place (though not
necessarily referred to in those terms) imbued urban, micro-,
regional, national, global, social and cultural histories.

II

SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE IN PAST AND PRESENT

Underpinning many articles in Past and Present’s earliest issues is
an unspoken agreement with the nation-state as container of
historical process. These articles often expose this tendency
within their title, including the name of the nation along
with an indication of the period studied. While this tendency
reflects practical intra-disciplinary divisions (as in divisions of
departments and research areas into broad geographic regions
26 Past and Present, no. 1 (Feb. 1952), pp. i–ii (editors’ intro.).
27 Ibid., p. iii.
28 Ibid., p. iv.
e30 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
within which figure our national specializations), it also reveals a
tacit agreement that national borders delimit bounded spaces
within which social and economic practices unravel.
Nonetheless, in these early issues of Past and Present, there are
deviations from this pattern. The most obvious divergences occur
in articles focused on the pre-national period in Europe, which

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refer, instead, to regional designations of space. In these articles,
the focus is on the process studied, often interpreted through the
lens of social class. These studies do not emphasize local
meaning, but instead treat the space within which processes
occur as absolute. Eric J. Hobsbawm’s work in this early period
deserves special mention, as his work focused on social processes
that crossed national borders, giving more importance to the role
of class than to the national space within which it existed.29
While Hobsbawm’s work presents an implicit tendency to look
beyond the nation as container, Geoffrey Barraclough’s
‘Metropolis and Macrocosm’, published in 1954, offers an
explicit argument for sliding the geographical scale of historical
inquiry.30 According to Barraclough, the scale and centre of
history were shifting. Prior to the Second World War, in his
assessment, the field of modern history had focused mostly on
Europe. On the rare occasion when European historians looked
beyond their continent, they considered non-European histories as
‘distinct units or spheres moving in a separate axis . . . [history]
seemed to be lost in a world of nationalities which has disintegrated
visibly before our eyes’. Fortunately, a new generation of historians
had begun to present the history of the Americas, Russia and
Western Europe as ‘directly related’ and products of a world that
‘since the Industrial Revolution, has become ever more closely
integrated’.31 As a product of this new vision, historians were
coming to accept that the ‘European age’ (1492–1914) was not
the culmination of modern world history, but rather a phase that
rested between the ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Atlantic’ ages. Further,

29 See, for example, E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, no.

1 (Feb. 1952); E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the
Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 5 (Nov. 1954); E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The
Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, II’, Past and Present, no. 6 (Nov. 1954).
30 G. Barraclough, ‘Metropolis and Macrocosm: Europe and the Wider World,

1492–1939’, Past and Present, no. 5 (Nov. 1954).

31 Ibid., 78.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e31
this new view saw no distinction between European and American
histories, recognizing instead that the European age cannot be
studied in isolation.
Barraclough dedicates most of the article to a presentation of
Walter Prescott Webb’s book The Great Frontier, recognizing it as
a ‘bold attempt’ to examine modern history through the frontier

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created by the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 and
the centuries of interaction generated by this encounter.32 For
Webb, it was Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World
that made the Renaissance and the Reformation possible, and it
was the ‘windfalls’, or commodities, produced by the European
exploitation of this frontier that created the foundation for the
Industrial Revolution, making the frontier ‘the matrix of the
modern world’.33 Barraclough does not fully agree with Webb’s
conclusions, and spends the bulk of the article offering detailed
criticism; yet, he does agree with Webb on one main point: that
the conquest of the frontier brought the world together as one,
binding the history of modern Europe to that of the Americas.34
Barraclough argues that, as the European age came to a close, the
world became ‘frontierless’, creating an environment within
which fascism and dictators, specifically Hitler, arose. Writing
during the cold war, Barraclough warns that there are only two
options for the modern world: communism (‘a plausible solution
for the countless millions of ‘‘under-privileged’’ in Asia and
Africa as well as in Europe’) or the path of conquest of ‘living-
space’ at the expense of others (‘a solution which entails famine,
bloodshed, want, destruction, and its result can only be the
survival of the least fit, the crudest, earthiest and least
civilized’).35 Barraclough’s desire to slide the scale of historical
inquiry from the national and European to an integrated, world
history was not just academic; it was a moral imperative which he
saw as having drastic consequences.
In these early years of Past and Present, writers of the Annales
school, particularly Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and Fernand
Braudel, with their focus on change over a vast period, social

32 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston, 1952); Barraclough,

‘Metropolis and Macrocosm’, 79.

33 Summarized in Barraclough, ‘Metropolis and Macrocosm’, 81.
34 Ibid., 90.
35 Ibid.
e32 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
history and geography, were highly influential.36 Albert Soboul’s
‘The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries’, for example, relied heavily on Marc
Bloch’s Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française in its
examination of the decline of the French rural community.37
Soboul recognizes work on the rural community in other

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disciplines, particularly geographical and ethnographical
studies, and urges historians to draw from related social
sciences.38 Importantly, he offers defining characteristics of the
rural community, following Bloch in accepting it as based on
collective property ownership and communal regulation of
agricultural and forestry practices.39 For Soboul, the parish and
the community ‘were the same, their boundaries and their
interests being for the most part identical’.40 He defines
the community economy as a ‘natural’ agricultural economy
that, though hierarchical, is pre-capitalist.41 He argues that,
while the French Revolution accelerated the community’s
decline, the seeds of the French rural community’s downfall
were planted much earlier with the intrusion of a capitalist
mode of production.42 In sum, it was not the fall of the old
regime that brought the French rural community to an end; it
was modern capitalism.43 Soboul’s article, then, is an example of
the materialist conception of space. The community was defined
not by sentiment or psychological bond, but by its hierarchies,
land use and mode of production. Change in any of these would
shake the community at its very definition.

36 This tendency is not limited, however, to the early years. See also James and

Elizabeth Fentress, ‘The Hole in the Doughnut’, Past and Present, no. 173 (Nov.
2001); Molly Greene, ‘Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the
Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 174 (Feb. 2002). Nonetheless, in these
later articles the tendency is to criticize or revise Braudel’s arguments. For more on
Braudel, see E.J.H., ‘Notes’, Past and Present, no. 39 (Apr. 1968); Olwen Hufton,
‘Fernand Braudel’, Past and Present, no. 112 (Aug. 1986).
37 A. Soboul, ‘The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries’, Past and Present, no. 10 (Nov. 1956); Marc Bloch, Les Caractères originaux
de l’histoire rurale française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1955–6), ii.
38 Soboul, ‘French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries’, 78.
39 Ibid., 82.
40 Ibid., 80.
41 Ibid., 83.
42 Ibid., 85.
43 Ibid., 88–9.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e33
In this sense, Soboul’s article stands in opposition to an article on
the French rural community that appeared in Past and Present
twenty-five years later. In ‘Parish, Seigneurie and the
Community of Inhabitants in Southern Central France during
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, P. M. Jones also
focuses on the notion of the French rural ‘community’.44 Jones

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attributes the weakness of prior studies of the community to
‘economic and geographical determinism’ and interpretations of
France based only on studies of the north or north-east.45 Like
Soboul, Jones points to geographers and ethnographers,
especially those who offer ‘important insights into the mental
domain’.46 With this in mind, he turns to the southern Massif
Central in south central France, describing it in terms of its
physical geography, economy, patterns of human settlement
and demographics.47 Considering the region’s varied geography
and sparse settlement, and offering convincing evidence from
letters and travel diaries, Jones finds that the contours of the
community in the southern Massif Central did not necessarily
follow ‘ecclesiastical, nor seigneurial, nor natural boundaries’.48
Jones rejects the notion that the rural community was defined by
commonly owned property, showing that in the ‘provinces of the
centre’, while sometimes lands were communally managed, they
were rarely communally owned. Further, naturally occurring
barriers of terrain often made communal management
impossible.49 Instead, Jones finds the ‘heart-beat’ of rural society
in the parish.50 The community in the southern Massif Central,
Jones argues, ‘was a spiritual or rather psychological condition’ that
‘implied a communion of the living and a communion of the living
with the dead’, with the church, the cemetery and the bell tower
figuring centrally as reference points.51 The rural community,
according to Jones, gathered in the cemetery ‘around the tombs
of their ancestors in order to consult them, commune with them
44 P. M. Jones, ‘Parish, Seigneurie and the Community of Inhabitants in Southern

Central France during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Past and Present, no.
91 (May 1981).
45 Ibid., 74.
46 Ibid., 74–5.
47 Ibid., 78–83.
48 Ibid., 83.
49 Ibid., 86.
50 Ibid., 101.
51 Ibid., 102.
e34 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
and pray for them’.52 The community, then, is a sentiment
‘emancipated from the constraints of physical space’ that cannot
be defined by the borders of a village, but instead existed as ‘a
complex of values and beliefs which can best be analysed at the
level of mentalités’.53 While, for Soboul, the community was a space
determined by geography and mode of production, for Jones it was

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a place bound to its inhabitants by sentiment, psychology and
history. Both see the parish as defining this space: for Soboul, as
boundary; for Jones, as soul.
Clearly influenced by the linguistic and postmodern turn,
beginning in the early 1990s the method of studying space and
place, whether materialist or humanist, shifts towards a historical
examination of naming and mapping. An article by Robin Okey
entitled ‘Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the
Definitions’ examines the idea of ‘central Europe’, or
Mitteleuropa, highlighting its borders as arbitrary. The centrality
of central Europe, he shows, has nothing to do with its location to
the east or west of other regions. Where central Europe begins and
ends depends on whether the scholar employs religious, social or
political criteria.54 Nonetheless, while the term ‘central Europe’
presents a ‘definitional bog’ in which ‘geographers speak with
uncertain voice’, it has entered into popular use. Some
geographers, Okey states, suggest that the murkiness of regional
definition points to ‘arbitrary’ bonds, and others suggest that the
region is a ‘concept of political will’. Okey sees in the study of
geography a way out of the definitional confusion, arguing that
central Europe should be understood as a ‘historical region’.55
Okey offers an exhaustive survey of European debates on
Mitteleuropa throughout the twentieth century. Importantly, he
recognizes that borders are arbitrary, but he still accepts and
asserts that the category of Mitteleuropa is valid.56 The question
is not whether it exists, but what factor unites and defines it. He
discards culture, religion, politics and economics as categories
52 Ibid., 103.
53 Ibid., 107.
54 Robin Okey, ‘Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions’, Past and

Present, no. 137 (Nov. 1992), 102.

55 Ibid., 103–5.
56 He states, for example, that ‘It was an idea used by different groups for their own

purposes, whether in their various searches for identity or, as in Konrad’s phrase, for
an ‘‘anti-politics’’, a symbolic challenge to the power bloc system that knew only an
east and a west’: ibid., 128–9.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e35
that could define the region.57 Instead, he finds that geographical
studies reveal ‘a transitional zone of mountains, basins and
counter-flowing river systems, shaping a pattern of ethnic
splintering implausible in the vast plains of the continental east
or extensive peninsulas of the Atlantic west’.58 These geographic
formations funnelled migrations, exposed groups in open spaces

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and led to ‘attempts of a clutch of small and medium-sized
peoples to assert their identities against more powerful
neighbours on their flanks’. These groups have consistently had
to deal with pressure from either side, pushing them into the east
or the west. Importantly, a common characteristic is that of
dominant German influence over this region. The historical
region of central Europe, then, is ‘characterized by its
fragmentation’.59 In terms of self-perception, Okey finds that
this historical region was born of ‘a sense of grievance, of
European destiny denied and merit unperceived’.60 In sum,
absolute space provides the context within which social
processes unfolded, leading to a region defined not by culture,
politics or economics, but by geography, fragmentation and a
sense of grievance. Okey’s acceptance of the arbitrariness of
borders and his method of studying spatial discourse show the
clear influence of postmodern debates, while his argument for a
historical region based on physical geography and sentiment fit
within a humanist narrative of place.
In contrast, in ‘The Power of Naming, or The Construction of
Ethnic and National Identities in Peru: Myth, History and the
Iquichanos’, Cecilia Méndez-Gastelumendi demonstrates that a
term used at times to describe a place and at others a people has no
stable meaning.61 Initially, Méndez-Gastelumendi had set out to
study the ‘Iquichano Rebellion’, which took place from 1826 to
1828 in the south central Andes, waged by a multi-class group
opposed to the newly formed republic of Peru.62 She, like other
scholars, government groups, anthropologists and novelists, had
accepted the ‘Iquichanos’ as ‘a hereditary ‘‘ethnic group’’ of the
57 Ibid., 130; see also 130–2.
58 Ibid., 105.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 130.
61 Cecilia Méndez-Gastelumendi, ‘The Power of Naming, or The Construction of

Ethnic and National Identities in Peru: Myth, History and the Iquichanos’, Past and
Present, no. 171 (May 2001).
62 Ibid., 127.
e36 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
‘‘Chanka Confederation’’ ’, a pre-Hispanic people who had
resisted Inca expansion.63 However, exhaustive archival
research in government documents, reports, maps, missionary
diaries, lawsuits, land disputes and tributary records of the
province of Huanta returned no mention of ‘Iquicha’ or its
resident ‘Iquichanos’.64 Instead, Méndez-Gastelumendi found

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the first written use of the term ‘Iquichano’ during the 1826–8
uprising.65 Further, she found that ‘Iquicha’ did not appear as an
official (or unofficial) town, community or region in these
documents.66 Instead, within the documents, ‘Iquichanos’ were
all peasants who opposed the republic.
The peasants initially resisted this definition, associated as it
was ‘with the quality of being a rebel, a ‘‘traitor to the patria’’ ’, but
this situation would change, as did the relationship between the
peasants of Huanta and the republican state.67 Méndez-
Gastelumendi explains that, beginning in 1831, nine
communities in Huanta requested exemption from paying
tribute, presenting themselves as victims of the deception of the
‘Iquichano party’, which had fooled them into rising up against
the republicans. As a result of this alleged deception, they had
participated in the rebellion; the government’s consequent
repression had left them devastated and unable to pay the
tribute. In subsequent national battles during the 1830s, the
‘Iquichano’ military achieved national glory, changing their
designation from the traitorous ‘Iquichanos’ to ‘brave
Iquichanos’, and the ‘Iquichano’ peasants finally received
exemption from paying tribute.68 Examining the history of one
village, Méndez-Gastelumendi shows that Indians migrated out
of their communities to join the ‘Iquicha’, who were exempt from
tribute. In doing so, they created an ‘inconspicuous area’ referred
to as ‘Iquicha’, which ‘had come to signify something greater and
more visible than anything it could thus far have been: a core
settlement around which groups of peoples, hitherto unrelated
to this name or place, would establish and seek to identify

63 Ibid., 132.
64 Ibid., 133–4.
65 Ibid., 134.
66 Ibid., 135.
67 Ibid., 138.
68 Ibid., 139–41.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e37
themselves’.69 Subsequently, Iquicha appears in documents as a
geographical location with political boundaries; today only a
village remains.70
The Iquichano identity ‘remained variable’, with peasants of
the province of Huanta at times referring to themselves as
‘Iquichano’ and at others using adjectives referring to more

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specific place names. Reminiscent of Jones’s study of the
French rural community in the southern Massif Central,
Méndez-Gastelumendi states that ‘in the Andes, the concept of
community has not necessarily been tied to the idea of a
contiguous territory, but rather has coexisted with notions of
non-contiguous territoriality and ever-flexible boundaries’.71
According to her,
the insistence, particularly by anthropologists and the state, that the
Iquichano are an ethnic identity, instead of a historical identity, has
modern consequences. Referring to it as an ethnic identity
inadvertently associates the group with the Inca or even the pre-Inca,
that is, with a rustic and distant past.72
As such,
it is not just a ‘chronology’ or an understanding of the past which is at stake
here, but rather the way it shapes (and is shaped by) the language with which
we perceive and define society and humanity in the present. For it is precisely
the fixation on the European conquest as the ultimate source of historical
explanations of the present that lies at the base of the binary construct which
has denied historicity to Andean peoples, while conceiving of them as
‘remnants’, vestiges, unevolved and, ultimately, ‘ethnic’.73
In sum, Méndez-Gastelumendi is not denying that the peasants
of Huanta have an ancient past; rather, she is emphasizing that it is
commonly forgotten that they also have a very modern history.74
Further, like Barraclough, Méndez-Gastelumendi sees her
interventions as having moral consequences for the present
community.
Méndez-Gastelumendi’s article shows the power of naming to
produce a sense of place, even when the physical space to which the
place name refers is ambiguous. Christine R. Johnson’s
‘Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of

69 Ibid., 144.
70 Ibid., 147–9.
71 Ibid., 146.
72 Ibid., 157.
73 Ibid., 158.
74 Ibid., 160.
e38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
America’ also takes up the subject of place naming, but does so to
show how Europeans created knowledge about what came to be
called ‘America’, arguing that ‘the reality of a New World’ was
founded within the context of cartographic, mathematical and
scientific data, theories and conventions circulating throughout
Europe in the sixteenth century.75 Johnson studies the naming of

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America through maps created in the sixteenth century, beginning
with the map drawn in 1507 by the German cartographer Martin
Waldseemüller that first gave America its name. Waldseemüller
worked in collaboration with Matthias Ringmann and Walther
Ludd, who ‘all placed their explications in the well-established
system of cosmography, that is, the mathematical description of
the universe’.76 While cartographers relied for ‘empirical
information’ on Amerigo Vespucci’s travel narrative Four Voyages
and his Mundus novus letter (both of which have since been
accepted as forgeries), such data was subordinated to
mathematical models set forth in Ptolemy’s Cosmography, which
Waldseemüller and Ringmann revised in 1513.77 The figure of
Vespucci was prominent in the map drawn in 1507, but his
‘accomplishments were seen as simply part of the whole
enterprise of discovery’ and ‘did not in any way strain the
mathematical framework of Ptolemaic cosmography’.78 The
choice of Vespucci’s name for the map, then, was due not to his
intellectual, innovative insights (as some scholars have claimed),
but to the voyager type he represented and the accessibility of his
texts at a time when ‘information was a resource both highly prized
and difficult to acquire’.79
According to the conventions of Renaissance cosmography, the
land masses needed a name. In future versions, Waldseemüller
did not use the name ‘America’; yet, where Waldseemüller
desisted, other cartographers continued to employ it in maps
and books. The name ‘America’ provided ‘a chronological and
etymological anchor’ for their maps, but also fitted into the
‘conservative nature of cosmographical publishing and
scholarship’, which found that there was no need to change
75 Christine R. Johnson, ‘Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of

America’, Past and Present, no. 191 (May 2006), 6.

76 Ibid., 11.
77 Ibid., 12–13.
78 Ibid., 18, 23.
79 Ibid., 27; see also 20, 26, 27.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e39
texts that were well received by the audience.80 Finally, Flemish
and Dutch acceptance of the name sealed its fate.81 The naming
of America, then, did not reflect group identity, nor did it create a
sense of place. It reflected cosmographical and cartographical
scholarly techniques and limited empirical data.
While Johnson studies maps and the context of their creation,

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in ‘The Geography of Revolution in Ireland, 1917–1923’ Peter
Hart creates them.82 Hart focuses on the ‘uneven geography’ of
the revolution of 1917–23 in Ireland, showing that the violence of
the revolution (which he measures in terms of ‘those killed or
wounded by bullets or bombs’83 on a county-to-county basis)
was regional, not national.84 To carry out his study, Hart
harvested data from a vast array of sources, including
constabulary reports, Royal Irish Constabulary tabulations,
military reports, casualty lists and several newspapers.85 In
doing so, he is able to apply new data to older hypotheses,
including those offered by David Fitzpatrick in a Past and
Present article published in 1978.86
Hart maps out the violence of the revolution in several ways. He
provides a table displaying data and a map showing the overall
frequency of violent acts per county. He also offers maps that
display the numbers of violent acts per county over shorter
periods. Through his analysis, he is able to show that ‘the Cork
IRA emerges as the strongest overall, chiefly in virtue of its
consistency’, while the rate of violence in other cities and
counties shifts over time. Meanwhile, ‘Munster and Dublin
bore the brunt of the revolution at every stage’.87 After
presenting this quantitative data, Hart contributes qualitative
analysis, examining the reasons that different groups gave for
the uneven distribution of violence. According to the experts of
the General Headquarters of the Irish Republican Army, the
unevenness was due to the ‘slackers’ who did not contribute but
80 Ibid., 38, 40.
81 Ibid., 42.
82 Peter Hart, ‘The Geography of Revolution in Ireland, 1917–1923’, Past and

Present, no. 155 (May 1997).

83 Ibid., 144.
84 Ibid., 143.
85 Ibid., 145.
86 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Geography of Irish Nationalism, 1910–1921’, Past and

Present, no. 78 (Feb. 1978).

87 Hart, ‘Geography of Revolution in Ireland’, 154.
e40 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
still claimed glory.88 Nonetheless, for the men in the field, it was a
lack of access to rifles and other arms, physical terrain and the
presence of the Protestants and Unionists that determined the
frequency of violent acts.89 Historians, in turn, have focused on
rurality, with Fitzpatrick claiming that the more rural the area, the
more violent, but, Hart rebukes, nearly half of the British victims

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of the revolution were produced in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.90
Further, he does not find a correlation between poverty,
prosperity, voting patterns and violence.91 Instead, agreeing
with Fitzpatrick, he finds that ‘as an organization, the IRA
tended to be more violent where the police and courts were
least effective, which in turn may have been related to a
tradition of resistance inherited from the agrarian rebels of
Victorian Ireland’.92
Hart’s study relies on quantitative data, statistical know-how
and technical map-making skill, all generally related to what
scholars have come to call the ‘spatial turn’. Yet, while Hart’s
article (along with Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit’s
Mapping Occupation project, the maps provided by the
University of Delaware’s Colored Conventions project and the
Spatial History project at Stanford University, among many
others)93 demonstrates that historical inquiry can benefit from
the inclusion of datasets and mapping technologies, spatial
history and the study of maps need not intimidate the
technophobe. In the twenty-first century, many studies in
spatial history analyse maps as texts, rather than creating them.
For example, following a method similar to that of Johnson, in
‘A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death’ David C.
Mengel studies maps that have represented the progression and
geographic reach of the Black Death alongside the texts that
accompanied them.94 Mengel traces how the scholarly
consensus that Bohemia was left unscathed by the Black Death
88 Ibid., 155.
89 Ibid., 156–9.
90 Ibid., 160, 162.
91 Ibid., 163, 168.
92 Ibid., 172.
93 5http://mappingoccupation.org4; 5http://coloredconventions.org4; 5http://

web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php4 (all accessed 15 Jan.

2016).
94 David C. Mengel, ‘A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death’, Past and

Present, no. 211 (May 2011).

 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e41
developed through ‘the most influential account of plague in
Bohemia’: a map.95 In 1962 Élisabeth Carpentier published an
article on the plague in Annales.96 She provided a map that ‘has
shaped all subsequent discussion of the Black Death in
Bohemia’.97 The map shows the march of the plague across the
Continent in six-month increments and identifies cities that were

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‘partly or entirely spared by the plague’, including Milan,
Nuremberg and Liège, parts of the Pyrenees, sections of the
Netherlands and large portions of east central Europe.
Carpentier presented the map tentatively, warning that it was
incomplete and would require further study. Despite the
creation of other maps by other scholars, her map has been
widely reproduced (without her caveat) in popular magazines,
scholarly studies and western civilization textbooks.98 The only
scholar who took issue with Carpentier’s map was František
Graus, who in 1963 objected to the ‘exceptional regions’ of
southern Poland and Bohemia.99 Graus ‘crammed the
footnotes of his dense, five-page article with fourteenth-century
evidence of plague in the Bohemian kingdom’, arguing that, while
the first appearance of the plague in Bohemia was light, there was
a second, much more destructive phase.100 Graus situated the
plague within a variety of other pestilences, emphasizing the
feudal crisis as ‘a category into which a devastating epidemic
fitted badly’. Despite Graus’s documentary diligence,
anglophone scholars ignored his work, and the only argument
that gained attention was one that he never actually made, ‘that
Bohemia escaped from plague because of its geographical
isolation’.101 Meanwhile, Philip Ziegler included Carpentier’s
map in his popular history book The Black Death in 1969,
repeating that the plague left Bohemia untouched and assuring
the fame of Carpentier’s map.102 Though Zeigler’s account drew
responses, Graus was the only scholar who effectively showed that
95 Ibid., 4.
96 Élisabeth Carpentier, ‘Autour de la peste noire: famines et épidémies dans
l’histoire du XIV e siècle’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, xvii (1962).
97 Mengel, ‘Plague on Bohemia?’, 5.
98 Ibid., 5–6.
99 Ibid., 9.
100 Ibid., 10.
101 Ibid., 11.
102 Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London, 1969); Mengel, ‘A Plague on

Bohemia?’, 12.
e42 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
the plague reached Bohemia, though in lesser extremes than in
Italy and coastal Europe. Nonetheless, he did not provide a map
and his conclusion ‘defies the clear cartographic representation
which, we have seen, effectively disseminated the belief that
Bohemia’s experience with the Black Death was exceptional’,
and so Graus’s criticism went unnoticed.103

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Mengel concludes that it is time for Carpentier’s map to retire,
but he does not offer a map to replace it. In a new map, too many
blank spaces would remain, since the additional studies that
Carpentier suggested have yet to appear. ‘Well-designed maps’,
Mengel warns, ‘communicate ideas powerfully’ and readers tend
to accept them as absolute fact.104 Any new map would risk losing
the textual caveats that Mengel would need to include, just as
Carpentier’s had.105
Each of the articles outlined thus far focuses on geographical
spaces, their associated place names, the communities that
relate (or do not relate) with them and the maps created to
represent them. However, one historical study of space in Past
and Present focuses on the spaces that lie behind closed doors.
Amanda Vickery, in ‘An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle?
Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-
Century London House’, studies privacy by examining the
domestic space of everyday Londoners.106 Vickery’s study
‘opens the door of the London house to consider how internal
space was conceptualized, demarcated and policed’.107 She
relies on criminal records from London’s main criminal court,
the Old Bailey, and examines the ‘claim and defence of private
property’ and ‘the capacity and mechanisms to achieve
seclusion and withdrawal, refuge, security and secrecy’.108
Vickery first examines the external perimeter of the household,
with the doorway as the ‘archetypal liminal boundary’.109 Legally,
an open door, open window or poorly secured latch was an
invitation to intruders, leaving the ‘classic responsibility of the
103 Mengel, ‘A Plague on Bohemia?’, 17.
104 Ibid., 8.
105 Ibid., 32–3.
106 Amanda Vickery, ‘An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle? Thresholds,

Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House’, Past and

Present, no. 199 (May 2008), 150.
107 Ibid., 151.
108 Ibid., 152.
109 Ibid., 154.
 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e43
head of household to patrol the boundaries and lock up fast at
night’.110 Vickery then turns to the interior of the home,
emphasizing that, regardless of social class, most of London’s
inhabitants lived in rented accommodation and thus shared
space with other individuals, sometimes even the same room,
leading to theft, not just from intruders, but from within.

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Furthermore, nosy landlords often found clever ways to enter
legally, or at least view, the rooms they let.111 Homes had their
own hierarchical geographies, as ‘Certain rooms became
synonymous with small incomes and struggle’.112 Among the
household residents, servants had the least personal space, often
sleeping on temporary, movable bedding and guarding locked
boxes carrying all of their worldly belongings.113 At the
boundary of the household, once over the threshold and at one’s
locked box, the key was fundamental to securing each person a
minimal amount of private space.114
Finally, Edward D. Melillo’s article ‘Global Entomologies:
Insects, Empires, and the ‘‘Synthetic Age’’ in World History’,
published in 2014, serves as a bookend to Barraclough’s piece
from 1954, with which this examination of Past and Present
articles began.115 Melillo studies the histories of shellac, silk and
cochineal, documenting ‘a series of long-standing productive
relationships between humans and insects’.116 These histories
were studied through ‘fragmented and episodic accounts’, but
Melillo urges historians ‘to transcend approaches based solely
on local or national comparisons and move towards models that
emphasize transnational connections’.117 Studying the histories of
three products produced by domesticated insects shifts our
perception of colonial spatial geographies by placing Europeans
on the ‘knowledge periphery . . . incredulous that indigenous know-
how beyond the boundaries of the Occident could be so central to
110 Ibid., 156; see also 154–6, 157–8.
111 Ibid., 158–9.
112 Ibid., 160.
113 Ibid., 163–6.
114 Ibid., 172. Of course, private space stands in contrast to public space. For a

historical treatment of public space in Past and Present, see Neil MacMaster, ‘The
Battle for Mousehold Heath, 1857–1884: ‘‘Popular Politics’’ and the Victorian Public
Park’, Past and Present, no. 127 (May 1990).
115 Edward D. Melillo, ‘Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the ‘‘Synthetic

Age’’ in World History’, Past and Present, no. 223 (May 2014).
116 Ibid., 234.
117 Ibid., 236.
e44 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 239
global commerce’.118 Melillo presents the transnational histories
of each product, the rise of synthetics, the parallel rise of toxicity
and the limits of synthetic substitution.
Studying the products within a global framework reveals as
much about the epistemological geographies of empire as about
insects. In each case, the metropole attempted to industrialize the

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domesticated insects and their production ‘through radical
simplifications of complex ecological process’. These ‘top-down
attempts’ were carried out with ‘striking ignorance of local
knowledge’, producing ‘a litany of embarrassing failures and
unmitigated disasters over the centuries’.119 Thus, the geographical
imagination created by the insects and their human cultivators
displaced European knowledge.120 Like Barraclough, Melillo
decentres a Eurocentric narrative by studying interaction and
encounter beyond the confines of national borders. The scale
shifted through this approach is not just geographic, nor merely
epistemological; it is methodological, as Barraclough and Melillo
urge us to slide the scale of historical inquiry.
In the words of the historian Richard White, spatial history
(here he is referring specifically to geographic information
systems) is not just about representing what we have learned on
a map; rather, ‘it is a means of doing research’.121 Herein lies one
important contribution of the study of place, space and scale in
Past and Present: while at times what is acquired from its historical
study is a deeper understanding of geographical concepts and
their associated processes, often it is other knowledge that is
gained. Through spatial history, we learn about the routes of
commodities and the structure of geographical knowledge. We
learn about the values and shape of a community. We learn about
privacy, plague, empire, insects, cosmography, violence and
peasants. In other words, space within the pages of Past and
Present has presented itself as an approach to history, an object
of study and a methodology (employed to learn more about a
distinct object of study). Like the field of human geography,

118 Ibid., 234.

119 Ibid., 263.
120 Ibid., 267.
121 Richard White, What Is Spatial History? (Stanford, 2010), 6, at 5https://web.

stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id¼294(accessed 15 Jan. 2016).

 SPACE, PLACE AND SCALE e45
spatial history in Past and Present responded to the influence of the
postmodern and linguistic turns, though, unlike human
geography, it never turned away from social issues and only
recently became a more technical venture. Yet, there is no
overwhelming drive towards quantitative approaches or even
mapping software that requires specific technical knowledge.122

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Instead, the articles on space, place and scale in Past and Present
have continually provoked their readers to consider how we relate
to the space around us, how we make of it our own place, what
hierarchies we create within it, how we imagine and relate it to
other places, and how we represent it to others.

Tougaloo College Courtney J. Campbell

122 Mengel, ‘Plague on Bohemia?’, 33–4.