Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
investigations into agricultural and agrarian crises.
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That would be a
loss. On the positive side, the analysis of census records and agricultural
statistics in a GIS can provide the broader paterns needed for situat-
ing case studies and rich qualitative evidence in their proper historical
context.
Spatial history ought to do more than examine questions about geo-
graphic distributions over time, as when we use shaded thematic maps
to show percentage change in wheat cultivation in Dorset and the Côte-
d'Or. Identifying such spatiotemporal paterns is a good irst step. To go
further, spatial history should concern the study of spatial relationships
and of spatial interconnectivity over time, that is, the degree to which a
change in one part of an interrelated system alters other parts in turn.
How did the arrival of rail transport in agrarian regions affect produc-
tion and land use in those districts? How were districts closer to major
markets, districts that heretofore enjoyed the advantage of proximity to
large and growing numbers of urban consumers, affected by the expan-
sion of rail transport into more remote regions? Or, as so concerned Jef-
feries, how did the expansion of rail transport in America affect farmers
in Britain?
The geographer's concept of “scale” and historian Marc Bloch's con-
ception of comparative history should also be components of spatial
h istor y.
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Incorporating multiple scales of geographic resolution and
their interrelationships brings out the interconnectivity of change - or
persistence - at different levels of human activity and natural forces. In
the case described here, interconnectivity was significant at the global,
national, and local levels of activity. American farmers harvesting wheat
in Nebraska and the Dakotas were ultimately influential in decisions
about agricultural land use in Dorset County and in the Department of
the Côte-d'Or, just as bad weather and poor harvests in the American
Great Plains could result in higher wheat prices in Liverpool.
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In the
1890s, as American wheat farmers themselves came to suffer from falling
prices, they came to believe that the Liverpool market set the low prices
that threatened their livelihoods.
40
Another task in spatial history is to tease out links between temporal
and spatial change.
41
Although only briefly treated here, the expansion of
rail transport and its effects on agriculture provide a revealing example
