History of Geography (Not Identical to Historical Geography)

Abstract

This entry does not pretend to be exhaustive in summarizing the burgeoning field of international scholarship in the history of geography. It does not even pretend to be a compendium of any possible narrative to be defined a “history of geography.” Rather, it will focus on some current methods and research tools in the broadly defined area of the philosophy and history of geography. In this way, it will provide the reader with the most relevant updates to understand why this “subdiscipline,” which is still considered a relatively peripheral one by several geographers, has been showing special vibrancy in the last few years. This renewed interest in geography's histories is based on the increasing extension of the places, periods, authors, and definitions which are currently investigated by scholars, who generally use the theoretical and methodological tools of the spatial turn and of contextual readings in the history of science that successfully challenged internalism, essentialism, and positivism in reading the geographical traditions. An important part of current scholarship is now committed to radicalize, internationalize, and decolonize the histories of geography, by increasingly addressing the richness, complexity, and diversity of a plurality of “geographical traditions” rather than one “geographical tradition.”

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