Reviews: Des Oppida aux Métropoles

402 REVIEWS

wet-field rive in Jiangnan during the Ming and Qing Dynasties” is another example.For a period and region boasting considerable historical records, the difficulty for theauthor is not the collection of original data, but how to make these pre-modern andvery rough estimates quantitative or at least comparative. The complicated relationshipbetween climate, land, and patterns of human effort—such as techniques of cultivation,cropping systems, rice productivity—can then be revealed. On the contrary, “Man’simpact on the vegetation and landscape in the Inner Himalaya and Tibet”, by WolfgangHotzner and Monida Kriechbaum, covers an area of virgin land with very sparsepopulation, so direct information from the people or from literature are scarce. Theauthors collected indicators and traces pointing to the activities of people and theirlivestock, in addition to a phytosociological analysis of the vegetation. This mix ofmethodologies is of great significance for many similar areas in China and for manyperiods where documentation is scarce for the conceptual reconstruction of vanishedlandscapes. As a historical geographer and researcher of population history, I particularlyenjoyed Shiba Yoshimobu’s “Environment versus water control: the case of the southernHangzhou Bay area from the Mid-Tang through the Qing” and Liu Ts’ui-jung’s “Hanmigration and the settlement of Taiwan: the onset of environmental change,” whichare both based on the authors’ characteristic research for many years but have alsoexpanded into new realms. I was somewhat disappointed by Eduand B. Verneer’s“Population and ecology along the frontier in Qing China” because whilst it seems adetailed collection and good summary of the research in this field it does not providea new argument or reconstruction.

Among the 22 authors only one is from Mainland China and three from Taiwan.For a conference, this limitation might be unavoidable. For the further study of theenvironmental history of China, I am certainly not satisfied with this situation and Ihope that more papers and works by scholars in China will be introduced.

Fudan University, China J G

A, Des Oppida aux Metropoles (Paris: Economica, 1998, Pp. 280. FF 198,paperback)

To what extent do geographers communicate with archaeologists, and to what extentdo they work together? This collection of essays by quantitative and theoreticalgeographers in Paris, spatial archaeologists in Sophia Antipolis and Paris, and historiansin Franche-Comte provides a positive response on the first count and a partial affirmationon the second. Operating under the umbrella of the Archaeomedes project, funded bythe European Union’s Mediterranean environmental programme, members of thisgroup of scholars have sought to explore the large question of how patterns of settlementand human occupation evolve through time, using various components of the Rhonevalley as their laboratory. The objective is not to provide a complete history of settlementchange, but rather to explore theories and models against sets of empirical evidence,ranging from the results of excavations to census data. The whole exercise bears ampletestimony to established work in this field of spatial analysis undertaken by archaeologistsin Britain and the United States. Geographer Denise Pumain and archaeologist SanderVan der Leeuw offer a broad-ranging introductory essay on the sustainability of spatialsystems, which is followed by reflections on the temporal legacy to patterns of humansettlement by quantitative geographer Francois Durand-Dastes. Francois Favory andhis archaeological colleagues at Sophia Antipolis trace the dynamism of Gallo-Romansettlement in the lower valley of the Rhone, before Madame Pumain and Lena Sandersexplore spatial expressions of the transition from pre- to post-industrial times. A finalessay by Favory reviews the major themes of determinism and chance in the formulationof settlement patterns and numerous theories put forward to explain them. Certain

403REVIEWS

periods, notably the medieval, are not covered with the degree of detail afforded toGallo-Roman or recent times. The text is illustrated by excellent maps both in blackand white and in colour, and is supported by a useful bibliography with many non-French items. Des Oppida aux Metropoles provides a clear exemplification of the creativestimulus that a multi-disciplinary meeting of minds can bring, and suggests a way forthat creativity to be channelled into interpretative action.

University College London H C

L B. C, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities,1580–1620 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+281.$23.95 paperback)

The remarkable proliferation of interest in Tudor and Stuart geography in recent yearshas invariably taken place at the level of small-scale interpretative studies by the likesof Richard Helgerson, John Gillies and William Sherman. However, most, if not all,of these studies remain deeply indebted to the classic historical account of the geographyof the period, E.G.R. Taylor’s Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography 1583–1650, firstpublished back in 1934. Since Taylor’s study the field has lacked a revisionist historyof Tudor and Stuart geography in the light of new approaches to the discipline. Thisnew book by Lesley Cormack therefore comes as a welcome elaboration on Taylor’sstudy, examining new sources and incorporating new ways of analysing the significanceof the flowering of English geography in the late sixteenth century.

Cormack’s book is particularly ambitious in its scope. As well as offering an archivallyexhaustive account of the rise of English geography at Oxford, Cambridge and GreshamCollege in London, Cormack sets out to argue that “[n]ot only did it help create ashared ideology of the nascent English empire, but geography also provided a meetingplace for mechanics and philosophers, helping to change the protocols and values ofthe study of the natural world” (p. 229). As a result, Cormack’s book situates the riseof English geography as constitutive of the development of the Scientific Revolutionof the later seventeenth century, and the consequent rise of the British Empire by theend of the nineteenth century. The substantive body of her study, however, lies withinthe analysis of the scope and shape of geography as it emerged within the Englishuniversities from the 1580s onwards. Arguing that the development of geographyemerged alongside the gradual reformation of the English university system itself,Cormack challenges the assumption that English scholars showed little or no interestin geographical enquiry prior to the seventeenth century. Retracing Taylor’s footsteps,Cormack offers a scholarly account of the range of geographical books, both printedand in manuscript, which were available to scholars at the colleges of Oxford andCambridge. Cormack proceeds to explore the social contexts of geography as anintellectual discipline in its own right, before breaking her analysis of the development ofEnglish geography down into three sub-disciplines: mathematical geography, descriptivegeography, and chorography, before finally considering the ways in which these sub-disciplines informed the creation of Gresham College in London in 1597. Starting fromthe assumption that the study of geography began to shape a “shared worldview”(p. 146) amongst English scholars, Cormack proceeds to argue that each discrete areaof geography defined not only an intellectual and national sense of England’s role inthe wider world, but that they also provided scholars, diplomats and merchants withthe conceptual “tools” (p. 223) to embark upon a vigorous campaign of imperialexpansion. Cormack’s consultation of the university archives suggests that this de-velopment was coextensive with the gradual rejection of older cosmological andmythological approaches to the study of the natural world, in favour of more secular