Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past by William A. Koelsch (review)

Too often, argues William A. Koelsch, historians of British and American geography present Halford Mackinder and William Morris Davis as the discipline’s founders. This ancestry reflects modern, professional geography’s view of itself as a natural science that emerged from the spheres of government and commerce. In reality, Koelsch argues in his eye-opening excavation of geography’s “forgotten past,” the discipline began its development far earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century, and with a less pragmatic disposition. At the time, a gentlemen’s drinking club based in London, the Society of Dilettanti, began funding expeditions to the Mediterranean. Motivated by a mix of noblesse oblige and a desire to upgrade London’s architecture, the Dilettanti commissioned travelers to make sketches and drawings of classical ruins. These would be used to cultivate the taste of Georgian-era Englishmen and furnish models to architects. But Society expeditionists went beyond their assigned tasks. From the 1740s to the 1760s, the likes of James Stewart, Nicholas Revett, Robert Wood, and Richard Chandler traveled to Constantinople, Palmyra, Ionia, and other locations practicing what Koelsch terms “archaeography”—the precise measurement and study of ancient ruins in their topographical and cultural contexts (10). Before Cook’s first voyage, then, the members of the Dilettanti (“mostly hedonists by instinct and scholars, if at all, only by accident,” in JM Crook’s phrase [48]) gave accidental birth to empirical scientific geography. From these ale-lubricated beginnings until the establishment of modern academic geography departments 150 years later, the ancient Mediterranean would remain a core focus of the discipline.

Koelsch’s book thus makes an astonishing point: For the entire first half of its history (as Koelsch defines it), geography was closely tied to the classical humanities. This is a connection that few geographers today appear to recognize. Humanistic geographers are no exception. They have tended to bracket their sub-discipline from its classically oriented past. Thus humanistic geography is typically presented as having arisen in the 1970s, in response to the dominance of spatial positivism, with an ancestry stretching back no further than Vidal de la Blache and the French School. The sub-discipline’s critics have likewise shown a lack of historical perspective. They have regarded it as an unwelcome intrusion—a novel, unscientific outlier among the branches of geography. Koelsch’s research offers a powerful corrective to such views. The alliance between geography and humanism is far more venerable than is usually recognized. Yet it would have been commonsense to any American or British geographer before 1900.

Geography and the Classical World offers a meticulously researched, crisply written history of the sub-discipline, from rise to decline. Koelsch uncovers a vast quantity of detail—some a bit too finely detailed for this reader’s needs, but most quite interesting—on the careers and contributions of classical geographers on both sides of the Atlantic. Koelsch delves not only into their publications, ideas, and influences upon one another, but also into a good deal of institutional history, accounting for social and professional organizations, university academic departments, secondary schools, and individual courses—mostly in classical languages and history—that contained geographical content. Indeed, for most of the period, geography owed its popularity and, in some departments, its existence, to its utility in enhancing Latin and Greek history and literature. (The book hence shows that geography’s subordinate role to history in state educational standards today is nothing new.) But by the start of the twentieth century, as higher education became democratized and oriented to meet the needs of the industrial nation-state, classics programs shriveled and the demand for ancient geography evaporated. Geography had lost its raison d’etre as part of a gentleman’s classical education.

Geography’s twentieth-century transformation brought the discipline in line with pragmatic national goals. Interestingly, however, for a not-so-brief period, classical geography had been considered practical knowledge. In post-Revolutionary America, John Adams...