Tauris Historical Geographical Series – serie

Imagining the Arctic explores the culture and politics of polar exploration and the making of its heroes. Leading explorers, the celebrity figures of their day, went to great lengths to convince their contemporaries of the merits of polar voyages. Much of exploration was in fact theatre: a series of performances to capture public attention and persuade governments to finance ambitious proposals. The achievements of explorers were promoted, celebrated, and manipulated, whilst explorers themselves became the subject of huge attention. Huw Lewis-Jones draws upon recovered texts and striking images, many reproduced for the first time since the nineteenth century, to show how exploration was projected through a series of spectacular visuals, helping us to reconstruct the ways that heroes and the wilderness were imagined. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, Imagining the Arctic offers original insights into our understanding of exploration and its pull on the public imagination.

Botanical gardens brought together the great diversity of the Earth's flora. They displaced nature from forest and foothill and re-arranged it to reveal something of the scientific principles underpinning the apparent chaos of the wild. Through a study of three botanical gardens, belonging to the University of Cambridge, the Royal Dublin Society and the Belfast Natural History Society, this book shows how the design and display of such gardens was not determined by scientific principles alone. It explores how the final outcome involved a complex interplay of ideas about place, identity, empire, botanical science and aesthetics, creating spaces that would educate the mind as well as please the senses. This highly engaging book offers a wealth of fresh insights into both the history and development of botanical gardens as well as connections between science and aesthetics.

Scientific culture was one of the defining characteristics of the English Enlightenment. The latest discoveries were debated in homes, institutions and towns around the country. Enlightenment, Modernity and Science provides the first full length study of the geographies of Georgian scientific culture in England. The author takes the reader on a tour of the principal arenas in which scientific ideas were disseminated, including home, town and countryside, to show how cultures of science and knowledge varied across the Georgian landscape. Taking in key figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Abraham Bennett, and Joseph Priestley along the way, it is a work that sheds important light on the complex geographies of Georgian English scientific culture.

"Zambesi" tells the story of David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition. It exposes the rivalry among some of Victorian Britain's leading establishment figures and institutions - including the Foreign Office, the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, British Museum, Kew Gardens and the Admiralty - as abolitionists, scientists, and entrepreneurs sought to promote and protect their differing interests. Making use of letters, documents and materials neglected by previous writers and researchers, the author reveals how tensions arose from the very beginning between those in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the proponents of the civilizing missions who saw scientific knowledge as the utilitarian means to a social end. The result is an exciting story involving one of England's most feted Victorian heroes that offers important new insights in the practice and politics of expeditionary science in Victorian England. This is the definitive account of the expedition to date.

For nineteenth century scholars the Holy Land was not just a region of the globe, it was an idea, an intellectual and a moral space charged with the heat of debate between those trying to understand the religious, social and scientific upheavals of the time. Edwin Aiken explores the various ways in which geographical knowledge was used in these debates and shows how religious writers called upon geographical knowledge to the benefit of their readers. The result is an original and stimulating work of scholarship that demonstrates the significance of the geography of the Holy Land in Western thought and argument, and makes important contributions to the history of geography, the nature of Orientalism, and to the evolving relationship between religion and science.

In the eighteenth century a new subject emerged that was to capture the interest and imagination of scholars and the educated public for the next 150 years. Called 'ancient geography' or 'classical geography', its focus was the geographical study of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Geographers, explorers, classicists and historians all contributed to its rise, as it flourished in both Britain and America. Yet in the 1920s the subject began to decline, so that its story has been lost. This pioneering volume is the first full-length study to explore the emergence of classical geography and its role in both the geographical and classical traditions. The author begins with the expeditions sponsored or undertaken by the members of the Society of Dilettanti in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Expeditions by such figures as Richard Chandler, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Sir William Gell, Robert Wood and William Martin Leake, marked a new and more serious study of Greek and Near Eastern landscapes.At the same time, in post-Revolutionary America the Founding Fathers felt it important that Americans should know something of the history and geography of the ancient world, and leading figures such as Thomas Jefferson - a lifelong reader of the classics and a founding father of American geography - and Benjamin Franklin, ensured that classical geography became part of both the school and university curriculum. Professor Koelsch gives equal prominence to the story as it unfolded in both Britain and America. He explores the impact and influence of key figures and institutions over a period of almost two centuries. They range from William Ramsay, Edward Herbert Bunbury, John Linton Myres, Henry Fanshawe Tozer, William Gladstone, Edward Augustus Freeman, and Halford Mackinder in England, to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Ellen Semple, and John Kirtland Wright in America.The author relates the part that classical geography played in the rise of British geography, through the Oxford School of geography, and in the story of the early American institutions such as the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) as well as later universities such as the University of California, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. In recovering the trajectory of classical geography from its adventurous beginnings, through its heyday and later decline, the author restores this almost forgotten part of the geographical and classical tradition. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that will interest historical geographers, classicists, historians and all students of the classical tradition.

In the eighteenth century a new subject emerged that was to capture the interest and imagination of scholars and the educated public for the next 150 years. Called 'ancient geography' or 'classical geography', its focus was the geographical study of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Geographers, explorers, classicists and historians all contributed to its rise, as it flourished in both Britain and America. Yet in the 1920s the subject began to decline, so that its story has been lost. This pioneering volume is the first full-length study to explore the emergence of classical geography and its role in both the geographical and classical traditions. The author begins with the expeditions sponsored or undertaken by the members of the Society of Dilettanti in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Expeditions by such figures as Richard Chandler, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Sir William Gell, Robert Wood and William Martin Leake, marked a new and more serious study of Greek and Near Eastern landscapes.At the same time, in post-Revolutionary America the Founding Fathers felt it important that Americans should know something of the history and geography of the ancient world, and leading figures such as Thomas Jefferson - a lifelong reader of the classics and a founding father of American geography - and Benjamin Franklin, ensured that classical geography became part of both the school and university curriculum. Professor Koelsch gives equal prominence to the story as it unfolded in both Britain and America. He explores the impact and influence of key figures and institutions over a period of almost two centuries. They range from William Ramsay, Edward Herbert Bunbury, John Linton Myres, Henry Fanshawe Tozer, William Gladstone, Edward Augustus Freeman, and Halford Mackinder in England, to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Ellen Semple, and John Kirtland Wright in America.The author relates the part that classical geography played in the rise of British geography, through the Oxford School of geography, and in the story of the early American institutions such as the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) as well as later universities such as the University of California, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. In recovering the trajectory of classical geography from its adventurous beginnings, through its heyday and later decline, the author restores this almost forgotten part of the geographical and classical tradition. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that will interest historical geographers, classicists, historians and all students of the classical tradition.

Through a detailed study of the work of three of the leading figures of the era - Augustus Petermann, Physical Geographer Royal to Queen Victoria; cartographer Charles Meredith van de Velde, who produced the finest map of the region at the time; and Edward Robinson, founder of modern Palestinology - the authors explore the complex cultural, cartographic and technical processes that shaped and determined the resulting maps of the region. Making full use of newly discovered archival material, and richly illustrated in both colour and black and white, Mapping the Holy Land is essential reading for cartographers, historical geographers, historians of mapmaking, and for all those with an interest in the Holy Land and the history of Palestine.

Imagining the Arctic explores the culture and politics of polar exploration and the making of its heroes. Leading explorers, the celebrity figures of their day, went to great lengths to convince their contemporaries of the merits of polar voyages. Much of exploration was in fact theatre: a series of performances to capture public attention and persuade governments to finance ambitious proposals. The achievements of explorers were promoted, celebrated, and manipulated, whilst explorers themselves became the subject of huge attention. Huw Lewis-Jones draws upon recovered texts and striking images, many reproduced for the first time since the nineteenth century, to show how exploration was projected through a series of spectacular visuals, helping us to reconstruct the ways that heroes and the wilderness were imagined. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, Imagining the Arctic offers original insights into our understanding of exploration and its pull on the public imagination.

Central Europe is one of the key notions of classical geopolitics yet it has always been a somewhat elusive concept. Originally perceived as a plan for a German dominated political and economic union, it subsequently emerged to threaten leaders in the East and West in a variety of forms. Otilia Dhand provides a critical examination of the concept of Central Europe, from its early inception to the present day. Making extensive use of archival material, she shows how successive manifestations of Central Europe - of whatever vintage - have failed to bring about their intended changes on the international structure, and how customary claims about Central Europe are not supported by the original source material. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that advances our understanding of regionalism and geopolitics in Europe.

Central Europe is one of the key notions of classical geopolitics yet it has always been a somewhat elusive concept. Originally perceived as a plan for a German dominated political and economic union, it subsequently emerged to threaten leaders in the East and West in a variety of forms. Otilia Dhand provides a critical examination of the concept of Central Europe, from its early inception to the present day. Making extensive use of archival material, she shows how successive manifestations of Central Europe - of whatever vintage - have failed to bring about their intended changes on the international structure, and how customary claims about Central Europe are not supported by the original source material. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that advances our understanding of regionalism and geopolitics in Europe.

"Zambesi" tells the story of David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition. It exposes the rivalry among some of Victorian Britain's leading establishment figures and institutions - including the Foreign Office, the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, British Museum, Kew Gardens and the Admiralty - as abolitionists, scientists, and entrepreneurs sought to promote and protect their differing interests. Making use of letters, documents and materials neglected by previous writers and researchers, the author reveals how tensions arose from the very beginning between those in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the proponents of the civilizing missions who saw scientific knowledge as the utilitarian means to a social end. The result is an exciting story involving one of England's most feted Victorian heroes that offers important new insights in the practice and politics of expeditionary science in Victorian England. This is the definitive account of the expedition to date.

For nineteenth century scholars the Holy Land was not just a region of the globe - it was an idea, an intellectual and moral space charged with the heat of debate between those trying to understand the religious, social and scientific upheavals of the time. Edwin Aiken explores the various ways in which geographical knowledge was used in these debates. In particular he shows how religious writers called upon geographical knowledge to the benefit of their readers. The result is an original and stimulating work of scholarship that demonstrates the significance of the geography of the Holy Land in Western thought and argument, and makes important contributions to the history of geography, the nature of Orientalism, and to the evolving relationship between religion and science.

For many the dawn of the twentieth century ushered in an era where the world map had few if any blank spaces left to discover. The age of exploration was supposedly dead. "New Spaces of Exploration" challenges this assumption. Focusing specifically on exploration in the twentieth century, the authors demonstrate how new technologies and changing geopolitical configurations have ensured that exploration has remained a key feature of our rapidly globalizing world. Ranging widely in their geographical focus - from the Europe and Asia to Australia, and from the polar regions to outer space - they demonstrate the increasing diversity of modern exploration and reveal the continuing political, military, industrial and cultural motivations at play. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of exploration in the twentieth century. The contributors include: E. Baigent, C. Collis, K. Dodds, F. Driver, M. Godwin, J. Hill, F. Korsmo, F. MacDonald, S. Naylor, J. Ryan, N. Thomas, and K. Yusoff.

Scientific culture was one of the defining characteristics of the English Enlightenment. The latest discoveries were debated in homes, institutions and towns around the country. But how did the dissemination of scientific knowledge vary with geographical location? What were the differing influences in town and country and from region to region? Enlightenment, Modernity and Science provides the first full length study of the geographies of Georgian scientific culture in England. The author takes the reader on a tour of the principal arenas in which scientific ideas were disseminated, including home, town and countryside, to show how cultures of science and knowledge varied across the Georgian landscape. Taking in key figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Abraham Bennett, and Joseph Priestley along the way, it is a work that sheds important light on the complex geographies of Georgian English scientific culture.

In the nineteenth century The Dead Sea and the Tigris-Euphrates river system had great political significance: the one as a possible gateway for a Russian invasion of Egypt, the other as a potentially faster route to India. This is the traditional explanation for the presence of the international powers in the region. This important new book questions this view. Through a study of two important projects of the time - international efforts to determine the exact level of the Dead Sea, and Chesney's Euphrates Expedition to find a quicker route to India - Professor Goren shows how other forces than the interests of empire, were involved. He reveals the important role played by private individuals and establishes a wealth of new connections between the key players; and he reveals for the first time an important Irish nexus. The resulting work adds an important new dimension to our existing understanding of this period.