Geography and Science in Britain, 1831–1939: A Study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (review)

A study of the geography of science—how its included sciences were affected by the locales where the British Association for the Advancement of Science (ba) met—ought surely to show interdisciplinary awareness. Yet, even though Withers is well acquainted with studies that emphasize social, spatial, and other nonintellectual influences on the history of science, he is cautious about pronouncing in detail on subjects other than his main concern, geography. He strongly implies nevertheless that, just as geography developed as a “civic science,” other subjects were affected as forms of “knowledge and of cultural authority” by the places in which their practitioners met (244, 245). Old-fashioned geographers might assume that “place” had something to do with geology, climate, and vegetation; Withers’ approach is, rather, a “spatially sensitive social constructivism” (67).

Except for the extent to which this strategic phrase signifies the interplay between spatial and cultural approaches, the book shows little obvious interdisciplinary research: Withers uses manuscript and printed records of the ba meetings, some relevant institutional or private papers, local and national newspapers, and an impressive range of printed primary and secondary literature. He covers half a dozen themes in geography’s development, each in a broadly chronological manner. The result is an extremely important contribution to the history of geography that challenges a good many existing assumptions; whether the lessons learned about the importance of ba meetings apply to other sciences is a question that is not fully answered in the book.

In the course of his study, Withers covers geography’s troublesome relations with other ba sections, some of whose leaders doubted whether geography was a science at all. He notes the significant influence of the Royal Geographical Society (rgs) on meetings of geography’s section (Section C until 1851; thenceforward E) and links its nineteenth-century emphasis on exploration to the way in which the subject developed. However, he makes seriously misleading assumptions about the Society and its explorers in relation to British imperialism—especially his notion that geographical exploration in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century went “hand-in-hand with territorial advances in Britain’s empire” (8). His tendency to assume that “imperialism” was an undifferentiated phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century might have been avoided with an awareness of recent works by Cain and Hopkins or Darwin.¹ On a more trivial point, Withers is unjustified in stating unequivocally that John Hanning Speke committed suicide rather than face Richard Francis Burton in the 1864 ba debate about the source of the Nile (92),

Some of the most interesting and important passages in this book are concerned to show how modern geography evolved after the doubts and difficulties of the nineteenth century. Older accounts would see Mackinder’s famous 1887 article as the key event because it showed how physical and “political” geography might conjoin to make geography a discipline rather than just an assemblage of information.² Withers argues that the real crisis in geography did not come until the years 1912 to 1914, when attempts were made to re-organize the ba sections. The problems continued into the 1930s with the formation of the Institute of British Geographers, which rivaled both the ba and the rgs. The analysis by Withers may be unduly influenced by his predilection for a geography that is essentially a “human” or social science. But might not a geography of this kind, increasingly divorced from, for example, geomorphology and other field studies, lead to the re-opening of the nineteenth-century chasm between “physical” and “political” geography? If so, will geography once more find it difficult to relate to other sciences in the ba?