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In this essay we will discuss about the development of geography in Great Britain.
Development of professional geography in Great Britain took place much late as compared to Germany and France. This is because it lacked people like Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter and Vidal de la Blache who laid the foundation of modern scientific geography in their respective countries.
As a result, there was no conceptual revolution in geography in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, as had occurred in Germany and France. Delayed development of professional geography may also be attributed to the lack of ‘academic entrepreneurship’ among the British scholars in the nineteenth century.
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The extension of knowledge of the Earth’s surface through exploration and research appeared to have continued to be a major concern of British geographers and of British geographical societies. A large part of the papers published in British geographical periodicals dealt with reports of explorations of the still relatively unknown parts of the Earth.
Thus, too much of dependence on reports of voyages, expeditions and explorations in the nineteenth century prevented individual attempts to give the subject an organised and professional outlook.
Nevertheless, the collection and classification of information about ‘unknown’ parts of the Earth was undertaken by geographers. Many of their expeditions were financed through the geographical societies established during the nineteenth century. They obtained money from commercial and philanthropical sources, for the information gathered were of great value to the mercantile world.
The Royal Geographical Society of London took special initiative in the development of teaching geography at England’s two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The importance of exploration declined as geography matured in its new academic-discipline status during the early twentieth century, although in 1899, Halford Mackinder felt it necessary to establish his credentials as a geographer by becoming the first person to climb Mt. Kenya.
One of the earliest amateurist geographers was Mary Somerville, who read widely and was in close touch with the leading scholars of her time. Her book on ‘Physical Geography’ appeared in 1848. It discussed the surface features of the land, the oceans, the atmosphere, plant and animal geography, and one of the most revealing themes about man being an agent of change of the physical features of the Earth.
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It may be noted that the identical theme was long developed by Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle which was published in four volumes between 1749 and 1804. Somerville’s ‘Physical Geography does not make any reference to Humboldt’s Cosmos which was published in 1845. However, she made little impact on geography in Britain.
Another amateurist geographer was Francis Galton who served on the council of the Royal Geographical Society from 1854 to 1893. He was the first to make a weather map of Britain in 1861, based on reports from 80 stations. He was the first to point out that weather patterns could be revealed by plotting lines of equal air pressure on a map (isobar), and pointed out the nature of air circulation around a center of high pressure. He also prepared a map of the world showing lines of equal travel from London (an isochronous map) in 1881. He made a map showing the spatial distribution of female beauty in Great Britain.
In his ‘Notes on Modern Geography’, Galton defines geography as ‘a peculiarly liberalizing pursuit, which links the scattered sciences together and gives to each of them a meaning and significance of which they are barren when they stand alone’.
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At the time when Somerville and Galton were making their contributions, there was no professional organisation of scholars to carry forward their ideas. Physical geography was very much a part of geology in Great Britain and it was within the domain of the geologists to carry on studies regarding the influence of physical features on human beings. However, it is with the appointment of a geographer at Oxford in 1887, and at Cambridge in 1888, that the era of professionalism in British geography began.
In Britain, the first personal chair of geography was held by Captain James Machonochic at University College, London, from 1833 to 1836, but permanent university teaching dates from the appointment of Halford J. Mackinder to a readership at Oxford in 1887 and the establishment of the first British department there in-1900.
Yule Oldham was appointed to the chair of geography at Cambridge in 1893. In 1889, the Oxford School of Geography was founded by Halford J. Mackinder and A. J. Herbertson who became an assistant to Mackinder.
The regional trend continued in Great Britain quite for some time, however, in the form of an applied approach (in planning) and that involved non-geographers also. It is often assumed that stimulus to the development of regionalism in Britain during the inter-war period was provided by broadcasting which gave impetus to the growth of a regional consciousness, quite distinct from the old county spirit. In 1939, England and Wales were divided into 11 Civil Defence regions, and Scotland formed a twelfth region.
The first kind of regional study leads to the Civil Defence regions which were of much geographical interest and this sort of regionalisation was devised to meet the threat of invasion. When the war ended, the Civil Defence Regional system was soon withdrawn. This form of regionalism may have been the ideal divisions in war-time, but that does not mean that they are also the best possible areas for planning in time of peace.
E. G. R. Taylor attempted to divide England and Wales into planning regions regardless of the existing administrative boundaries (second kind). But the division was based on geographical conditions because it was done after careful consideration of all geographical factors. Gilbert offered a planning regionalisation for England and Wales in 1941.
It was a modification of the earlier Civil Defence regions which usually consisted of groups of counties and that tended to infringe the county network. It was, therefore, decided to devise a sounder grouping of the counties than that of Civil Defence and at the same time, to rationalise the counties by dividing them in certain cases where it was inevitable. In the regional scheme, the changes in county boundary were reduced to a minimum, and had been adopted only where they would greatly help to produce more rational areas.
Third kind of regional study leads to regional specialisation, when an individual geographer devotes a large part of his professional life to studying different aspects of some part of the world. This appears to be a form of applied study, because each of the publications deals topically with some aspects of the area.
One of the concepts derived from the work of Geddes was that of the regional survey of potential land quality and land use as a basic input to plans for economic development. It was L. Dudley Stamp who organised and directed the first British land utilisation survey during 1930s employing school children in the mapping of landuse on a scale of 1/2500 in their home districts under the supervision of school and university teachers.
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The importance of these maps was quickly recognised as essential data for the programme of food production necessitated by the German blockade. The first Land Use Survey eventually formed the basis for an official agricultural regionalisation of Britain.
It was largely due to the effort of Stamp that the International Geographical Congress in Lisbon in 1949, resolved for the establishment of a World Land Use Survey, and for that an international commission under the International Geographical Congress was-set up to supervise the work.
In Britain, applied geography—as information gathering and synthesizing—has a long and substantial record. Stamp’s land utilisation survey of Britain in the 1930s, his involvement in the preparation for post-War land use planning, and the use of geographical material in that preparation, provide a major example of a tradition of ‘liberal contribution’ by a geographer.
Logical positivism seemed to be inherent in the conceptual framework of Stamp’s land utilisation survey because it was concerned with empirical question (i.e. with a factual content)—the economic depression of 1930s that largely accentuated the effects of long-term economic changes which created marked divergences of economic development and distress in Britain.
The regional paradigm was dominant in the years before and just after the Second World War. By the 1950s, disillusionment with the empiricist philosophy of the regional paradigm led to the dominance of the topical specialisms and the regional synthesis was ignored. British geographers seemed to have been less concerned with philosophical and methodological debate than their American counterparts during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
They did not elevate the regional doctrine as much as did their American counterparts. Nevertheless, ‘the aim of regional geography is to gather up the disparate strands of the systematic studies, the geographical aspects of other disciplines, into a coherent and focused unity, to see nature and nurture, physique and personality as closely related and interdependent elements in specific regions’.
Only since World War I has a movement appeared to enhance the emphasis on historical geography in Great Britain. Mackinder is credited with having laid the foundation of historical geography. He pointed out that history without geography was a mere narrative and that since every event occurred in a particular time at a place, history and geography, which deal respectively with time and place, should never be separated.
He also insisted that a geographer should find out suitable historical paradigms to recreate the past geographies and show how sequences of change have led to the present observable features. Though large numbers of British geographers have made many important contributions to historical geography, but special mention must be made of Darby, Kirk and Brookfield.
The idiographic method and the humanistic way of thinking began to be strongly criticised in the 1950s. A new and dynamic school was developed and new methods brought into use. There was much talk of paradigm crises and revolution in the contemporary British school of geography.
By the early 1960s, the quantitative and theoretical revolutions were having considerable impact on the British geography, and overlapping the regionalism of the post-World War second period came geography as spatial science, followed sequentially by overlays of the behavioural and radical structural approaches.
Regional paradigm seemed to be inadequate in the light of the nature of problems that accumulated, which raised serious doubts about the relevance of the ruling paradigm leading to a crisis phase in the contemporary British school of geography. Quantification, statistical description of pattern and statistical manipulation and testing of hypothesis tended to inaugurate a revolutionary phase leading to a new paradigm.
The acceptance of statistically-based new paradigm was revolutionary because it attracted the allegiance of the younger research workers, such as Richard J. Chorley, David Harvey and Peter Hagget in opposition to established scientists.
Richard J. Chorley was a geomorphologist and had spent some time studying in the United States. Harvey, a graduate of the Cambridge, joined the Johns Hopkins University in 1969, and became an Anglo-American geographer. He was one of the forerunners of modern American geography and made significant contributions to both positivist geography and critical geography.
Peter Hagget was trained in human geography and had visited the United States and experienced the development there. Chorley and Haggett worked on the adaptation of certain statistical techniques to geographical (both physical and human) ends, but their most lasting contribution was probably in editing two collections of papers which resulted from courses that they directed, aimed at introducing the new geography to teachers—Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (1965) and Models in Geography (1967).
Frontiers in Geographical Teaching are a collection of articles that tend to focus on methodological innovations and revolution in the field of geography. In one of the articles, Wrigley discusses the changing philosophy of geography and the increasing use of statistical techniques as the contemporary development of singular importance.
Pahl introduces the models of the Chicago School of Urban sociologists and suggests a social geography in which the prime factor is distance. Hagget writes on the use of models in economic geography. His chapter on scale problems illustrates methods of sampling and map generalisation from samples. Timms demonstrates the use of certain statistical techniques for the analysis of social patterns within cities.
‘The sciences concerned with the study of social variation have as yet produced few models which can stand comparison with the observed patterns or which can be used to predict those patterns. Prediction rests on accurate knowledge of the degree and direction of the interrelationships between phenomena.
This can only be attained by the use of techniques of description and analysis which are amenable to statistical comparison and manipulation. If the goal of geographical studies be accepted as the formulation of laws of areal arrangement and of prediction based on those laws, then it is inevitable that their techniques must become considerably more objective and more quantitative than heretofore’.
Models in Geography (1967) presents a synthesis of most of the work completed before the mid- 1960s by adherents to the quantitative and theoretical revolutions. In this book, Hagget and Chorley used the Kuhnian concept, in a normative sense, as part of an argument for, a revolution in geographical methods.
They identified an inability of the then dominant paradigm to handle both the explosion of relevant data, for geographical research and the increasing fragmentation and compartmentalisation of the sciences. They proposed a new ‘model-based’ paradigm. Model is a widely used term, being given a variety of meanings.
There are two functions of a model:
(a) As a representation of the real world, such as a scale model, a map, a series of equations and some other analogue; and
(b) An ideal type, a representation of the world under certain constraint conditions. Both are used in the positivist method to operationalise a theory, as a guide to the derivation of testable hypotheses.
Haggett and Chorley (1967, 20) presented the model as ‘a bridge between observational and theoretical levels, concerned with simplification, reduction, concretization experimentation, action, extension, globalization, theory foundation and explanation’.
Individual authors were asked to discuss the role of model building within their own special fields of research. Haggett and Chorley distinguished between the varieties of models- those that are deterministic in that if specified conditions exist at an earlier time or will exist at a later time; and stochastic, which specify sequences of events within a certain range of probability. The approach in the book is strongly nomothetic and that attempts at changing British geography towards a more scientific approach.
Chorley has made another significant contribution to the new scientific geography in Great Britain. His Geomorphology and General System Theory, published in 1962, represents a great step forward in the development of paradigm-based modern scientific method in geography, for it was the first major paper exclusively on a system theme and on the framework of general system theory.
By interpreting the Davisian cycle of erosion in system terms, Chorley provides a valuable example of these points and incidentally demonstrates that knowledge of these frameworks of thought is as important to the interpretation of the theoretical deductive system of enquiry as to any empirical inductive one.
He distinguished between open and closed systems and the application of these ideas to geomorphology. He concluded that an open system framework is more applicable to geomorphology and would lead to several major advantages. The most important of these would be to focus attention on the multivariate nature of most problems, and on the relationships not only between form and stage, but between process and form.
Stoddart reintroduced the ecological approach. He justified the ecological approach not by empiricism, but on methodological grounds, on the creation of a framework of concepts. Recognition of the ecosystem implied that man, the environment and the flora and fauna are brought into one monistic framework. This framework is structured in a particular way and it is the elucidation of this structure, together with the functional relationships of the whole system that represent the focus of enquiry.
It is admitted that a multitude of structures and relationships can be recognised in any ecosystem, but the potential value of the concept depends on the correct selection of the components to deal with the situation. Moreover, particular attention must be paid to the appropriate scale of investigation of the problem when these components are analysed. Stoddard pointed out that the ecosystem is a form of general system and its properties may be compared with the system derived by information and communication theorists and from these comparisons fruitful lines of further investigation may be suggested.
British geographers in recent periods have also shown interest in the studies of public policy, welfare and the social good, especially that of a social action organisation. The positivist based spatial- science methodology, according to them, may be inappropriate for such studies.
House (1973) has reviewed the tradition of involvement in public policy by British geographers, and Stoddart has identified the late nineteenth century views of Reclus and Kropotkin as the origins of a socially relevant geography—the latter was discovered by the ‘radicals’.
Santos (1974) has reminded English geographers of the Marxist inspired works of Jean Dresch on capital flows in Africa and of Jean Tricart on class conflict and human ecology, both prior to the Second World War. Keith Buchanan is known for his left-wing opinions in New Zealand during the 1960s, and called for the need for studying geographical primacy of the state, especially in the non-West world.
The British journal ‘Area’ seemed to have specialised in studies of major societal problems during the early 1970s. Chisholm attempted to identify differences between governments, with their interests in cost-effective research and their primacy in decision-making and academies.
Eyles pointed out that the focus of relevant research should be some of the social and spatial inequities in society, and the challenge is to study the distribution of power in society, which is the mechanism that allocates scarce resources. Research would then identify the disadvantages of relative powerlessness and would provide the base for policy which redistributes resources.