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his forced, folksy style. Remarkably, there is no single account of the Lewis and ClarkExpedition in the book, although Vestal sprinkles a few tales about Sacajawea andothers throughout the text as if they came from some mythical source. He pays scantattention to interregional connections and, indeed, Vestal’s tribute to the Missouri Riveris an analogue of the “great man” version of history—essentially a “great river” versionof geo-history. Vestal’s strongest original contribution might have lain in his presentationof oral history, but his untrustworthy reportage of even well-known historical eventsrenders his use of the oral tradition suspect. For example, he devotes a chapter to the“Gypsies of the Upper River”, meaning the Metis of the western Canadian Plains. Hissources of information for this chapter are oral history mixed with details from the1926 North Dakota Historical Quarterly. Vestal’s interpretation is that these “amateurIndians” from Canada “made heavy inroads on the buffalo herds” and then becauseLouis Riel “led” these “breeds” to rebel against the British they were forced to stopcoming over the border into the United States. Nowhere in the text does Vestal discussthe massive inroads made on the buffalo herds by commercial hunters from the UnitedStates or the development of the Canadian frontier.

Although such major historical gaps appear, Vestal manages to fill the book withwhat he intends to be humorous anecdotes. Misogyny is a leitmotif throughout thetext. He makes an interesting comparison of Native American stories about Coyotewith Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoons. While this might be a good point ofdeparture for an analysis of Walt Disney productions, instead Vestal presents it in amanner to depreciate Native American myths. His confused populism boxes the compassfrom being as idiotically trivial as his consistent trumpeting of masculinity to assurprisingly refreshing as a discussion of Black jazz in Kansas City. Unfortunately, thehighlights are too infrequent to justify a search for them. Perhaps the most vexingquestion to arise from this book is: ‘why did the University of Nebraska Press chooseto reissue it?’ There is merit in republishing primary historical documents, but Vestal’saccount of the Missouri Valley in 1945 is not like Captain John Smith’s account ofNew England in 1624. There is acknowledged merit in the re-publication of creativewriting from a given era, but if one wants to gain access to a ‘western’ mentalite in theearly 19th century, one would probably be better off settling down with a ZaneGrey novel than Vestal’s account of the Missouri Valley. University presses have aresponsibility to provide worthwhile material for the public. The re-issue of this bookserves only to perpetuate misinformation and a tradition of bad regional studies.

Universite Laval B H. R

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0224, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

P C, Histoire de la geographie francaise de 1870 a nos jours (Paris: Nathan,1998. Pp. 543. 245 Francs paperback)

Professor Claval has written over 30 books ranging from economic and social geography,through regional studies, to systematic discussions of cultural geography and geopolitics.Running parallel with these concerns is his fascination with the theories and practicesof geography. His early book on the evolution of human geography (1968) was followedby a text on the ‘new geography’ (1977), edited volumes on the influence of Vidal dela Blache (1993) and geographical research in the first half of the twentieth century(1996), and a succinct discussion of the history of geography (1995). The present volumedraws on a lifetime’s reading, reflection and discussion to produce a comprehensive

2000 Academic Press

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analysis of how geography was fostered in France after 1870, and how it flourished inthe first half of the twentieth century before entering a phase of crisis in the 1960s toemerge revitalized and receptive to innovation in the 1980s. As well as identifyingtrends and coping with chronology, Claval examines the role of key personalities. Hiswritten style is direct and attractive. Seventy pages of notes incorporate an enormousand remarkably up-to-date bibliography.

Claval begins by showing how, over the past quarter of a century, French geographershave researched the production of knowledge and how academic geography hasdeveloped in relation to trends in other disciplines. Initial chapters examine howacademic geography was promoted following the Franco-Prussian War. Knowledge ofthe world, and especially of France, was judged vital for training military commandersand making good citizens. The famous Tour de France de deux enfants (1877) tracedthe imaginary travels of two orphans who escaped from the lost province of Lorraine.Schoolchildren studied its 200 maps and pictures depicting both the internal diversityand the essential unity of France. To satisfy the general public, publishing housesproduced travel guides describing the landscapes and customs of individual pays.Popular geography was accompanied by academic geography, with Vidal inspiring thenext generation of scholars through his teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure andthe Sorbonne, his textbooks, maps and atlases, his journal articles, and his majesticTableau de la Geographie de la France (1903). His disciples wrote the first suite ofresearch monographs before the Great War, establishing regional synthesis as thepreferred model of geographical scholarship and proclaiming the identity of geographyas a coherent discipline. The Great War sacrificed a generation of young Frenchmen,devastated northern France, and undermined the cohesive logic upon which earlyregional monographs had been founded. The later work of Vidal acknowledged theimportance of towns in shaping spatial systems, while the political and industrialcharacteristics of the postwar world were depicted by Demangeon, De Martonne andothers. As the community of geographers in France increased, so systematic specialismsmultiplied. Nonetheless, the holistic regional monograph remained the pinnacle ofgeographical writing between the wars.

In Chapter 8 Claval emphasizes that the world changed profoundly as a result ofWorld War II, but some mandarins in France were reluctant to move from research ingeomorphology and rural geography, and from emphasizing regional study, physicalgeography and mapwork in their teaching. New approaches were outlined by MaxSorre, who adopted ecological principles, and especially by Pierre George, whoseclear teaching and numerous publications drew attention to many pressing questions.Espousing Marxist principles, his disciples would have a lasting influence on un-dergraduates and doctoral students. As Chapters 10 and 11 demonstrate, the politicalevents of 1968 stimulated profound changes in French universities. Academic geographyentered a new phase, as many young lecturers were hired. More geographers becamedissatisfied with traditional regional studies and came to appreciate developments inother disciplines in France and in the various brands of geography emerging in theAnglo-Saxon world. New journals were founded which diffused the ideas of innovatorssuch as Bertrand, Roger Brunet, Dollfus, Fremont, Lacoste and, of course, Claval. Atthis time of renaissance, new groups of disciples were assembled whose existence impartsa distinctive power structure to French academic geography.

By the 1980s, geographical curiosity was blossoming in France, with environmentalstudies, quantitative and cartographic techniques, geopolitics, and cultural geographydemonstrating exciting developments that were shared with geographers in continentalEurope but remain relatively unknown elsewhere. French geographers look outwardsbut few Anglo-Saxon colleagues look to French geographers for inspiration. (Theirfascination for the work of French philosophers, sociologists and historians—whose

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books are translated into English—is quite another matter.) Like their counterpartselsewhere in the world, French human geographers are attempting to understand theworld and are venturing along the several paths of cultural geography in that quest.As the twentieth century draws to a close, many of the innovators of the 1970s havereached retirement age and a new generation of even more internationally-mindedleaders is emerging.

In this ‘history’ Paul Claval stresses his own views and those of the Espace et Cultureresearch group which he founded, but also evaluates the contributions of other keyscholars of his generation, including Brunet and Lacoste. As a cross-channel observerof French academic geography, I found the book to be compelling reading by virtueof its structure, clarity of expression and inclusiveness. Without doubt, Claval hasproduced a tour de force which will be required reading for advanced students andprofessional geographers in France. His book also has much to convey to those outsidethe Hexagon who seek to understand the production and diffusion of geographicalknowledges beyond the confines of their home country or primary language group.

University College London H C

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0225, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

N C (Ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 1: The Originsof Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xx+533. £30.00 hardback); P.J.M (Ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 2: The EighteenthCentury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi+639. £30.00 hardback)

These two books are the first parts of the five volume Oxford History of The BritishEmpire being produced by Oxford University Press under the general editorship ofWm. Roger Lewis. The series as a whole comes nearly 50 years—and a process ofdecolonization if not quite the end of empire—after the Cambridge History of theBritish Empire was published and is intended to set down another benchmark forimperial history. As well as the volumes reviewed here there will be one each for thenineteenth and twentieth centuries and, finally, a volume that covers historiography.What form then does this imperial history take and how does it differ from the concernsof historical geographers who have begun to consider empire? Although these volumesare collections of chapters by a range of authors—21 chapters in Volume 1 and 26chapters in Volume 2—great care has been taken to ensure the coverage of subjectmatter, time and place via essays which deal with broad themes, those which are surveysof specific regions in particular periods, and those which are an inevitable combinationof the two. Therefore, Volume 1 contains essays on the themes of legitimacy (AnthonyPagden), warfare (John C. Appleby), naval power (N.A.M. Rodger), literature (DavidArmitage), internal colonization (Jane Ohlmeyer), the old world and the new (NicholasCanny), war, trade and settlement (Michael Braddick), Native Americans and Europeans(Peter Mancall), trade (Nuala Zahedieh), continental perspectives (Jonathan Israel) andthe Glorious Revolution (Richard S. Dunn), as well as regional surveys of the Chesapeake(James Horn), New England (Virginia DeJohn Anderson), the Caribbean (Hilary McD.Beckles), West Africa (P.E.H. Hair and Robin Law), Asia (P.J. Marshall), Ireland (T.C.Barnard), the Middle Colonies (Ned C. Landsman) and the Carolinas (Robert M.Weir). These are introduced via a wide-ranging essay on the origins of empire byNicholas Canny and rounded off by a chapter on “Navy, State, Trade and Empire” by

2000 Academic Press