Accepted: 20 January 2019

DOI: 10.1111/tran.12294

THEMED INTERVENTION
REAPPRAISING DAVID LIVINGSTONE'S THE GEOGRAPHICAL TRADITION: A QUARTER OF A CENTURY ON

Reappraising David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition:

A quarter of a century on

Mark Boyle1 | Tim Hall2 | James D. Sidaway3

1
Heseltine Institute for Public Policy,
The quarter of a century since the publication of David Livingstone's The Geo-
Practice and Place, University of
Liverpool, Liverpool, UK graphical Tradition in 1992 provides an apt moment to reflect on the book's the-
2
Department of Archaeology, ses, lacunae, and legacies, and to take stock of the ways in which its provocations
Anthropology and Geography, University and reception might instruct the wider project of rendering the discipline's history.
of Winchester, Winchester, UK
3
In framing this themed intervention, we engage the assertion that contextualisers
Department of Geography, National
University of Singapore, Singapore need contextualising; there exists scope to heighten awareness of the location
within time, space and culture from which contextualist historiographies of geog-
Correspondence
Mark Boyle
raphy are written. We call attention to the meaning and implications of the partic-
Email: mark.boyle@liverpool.ac.uk ular and situated contextualist methodology mobilised and executed in The
[Correction added on 15 April 2019 after Geographical Tradition.
first publication: the reference list has
been updated and corresponding citations KEYWORDS
added in this version.] classics, David Livingston, empire, Geographical Tradition, historiography, science

1 | INTRODUCTION
Framed by a striking cover‐image of a painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (that also appeared on the cover of Nor-
ton, 1984) depicting a 17th‐century geographer at work (titled The Geographer and signed and dated 1699, see Figure 1),
David Livingstone's (1992) The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise quickly became
a milestone, shifting the ground in scholarship on the history of geography.
Livingstone detected two critical flaws in existing historiographical accounts: “presentism” or interpreting past geograph-
ical ideas by the (scientific, moral, and aesthetic) standards of today, and “internalism” or construing the evolution of the
discipline in terms of interior drivers of change (scholarly fields, their champions, spats, alignments, and plays). Refusing
to label and police the boundaries of his alternative approach too strictly, he invoked the simple yet powerful idea of “situ-
ated messiness”: all academic endeavour, including the act of creating, disseminating, and ingesting geographical knowl-
edge, is best thought of as a situated social practice inextricably embroiled in the wider social, economic, political, and
intellectual dramas of the day. In particular, the history of geography could not be told apart from a history of European
capitalism, empire, racism, and science. There followed a polymathic reading of over 500 years of “episodes in the history
of a contested enterprise,” incorporating, among other things, geography's entanglements in: the age of reconnaissance; the
scientific revolution and its alter ego, alchemy; the European enlightenment and age of reason; the pre‐Darwinian expedi-
tion tradition; Darwinism and the institutional politics of the 19th‐century European academy; European imperial expansion,
colonisation, and scientific racism; shifting understandings of the nature/culture nexus; and technological change and the
quantitative revolution.
Amongst the blurb endorsements, Peter R. Gould (1932–2000) wrote that this is the “book that will become the core of all
courses and seminars in the history and philosophy of our field.” And given the status it quickly acquired, it is unsurprising
that The Geographical Tradition has inspired periodic re‐reading and reappraisal as well as celebration. Werrity and Reid
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2019 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

438 | wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2019;44:438–443.

BOYLE ET AL. | 439

F I G U R E 1 Johannes Vermeer, “The Geographer” 1669. Städel Musuem, Frankfurt am Main.

Source: Photo © Städel Musuem‐ARTOTHEK as reproduced on the front‐cover of The Geographical Tradition [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

described it as a book that could “send one running down the corridor doing cartwheels” (1995, p. 196). For Spedding, “The
history of Geography often, thought of as the poor relation to ‘proper’ contemporary research, received a major boost” (2008,
p. 160). Mayhew observed that responses “came from scholars across the spectrum of human geography, rather than being
restricted to a coterie of historians of Geography” (Mayhew et al., 2004, p. 228). The Geographical Tradition has shaped sub-
sequent histories of the discipline, including later editions of one that first appeared 13 years before it was published (Johnston
& Sidaway, 2016). Without prejudice to the rich diversity of scholarly reflection it has provoked, other noteworthy engage-
ments include: David Hooson's book review in Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Gillian Rose's book
review in History of the Human Sciences, and Gregory Good's book review in ISIS: A Journal of the History of Science Society
(all 1993); Driver et al.'s (1995) edited “open‐ended discussion of the possibilities and limits of thinking about [and transform-
ing] ‘traditions’ of geographical enquiry” (p. 403) published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; a set of
reviews and a response (Withers et al., 1996) published in Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies); an interview with David
Livingstone conducted by Hoyler et al. (2002) in Heidelberg following his 2001 Hettner Lecture; and Mayhew's (2015) reflec-
tions on canonical texts in human geography published in the Journal of Historical Geography.
Prior reviews and several of the essays that follow signal the significance of the fact that The Geographical Tradition
arrived at a moment when, in the wake of all kinds of turbulence, geography was again having to struggle for identity,
coherence, and sometimes existence. Such struggles in the past, as in the post‐war elimination of geography at Harvard
(Smith, 1987), arguably fed into the discipline's drive to re‐make itself as scientific. Later struggles (from the 1990s
onwards), centred often around managerial efforts to rebrand and rename departments and schools of geography, wrestled
with questions about geography's purpose, marketability and focus, and spurred defensive turns to relevant or applied
research putatively high in impact (Castree, 2011; Frazier & Wikle, 2017; Hall et al., 2015; Lahiri‐Dutt, 2018). In these
contexts, Livingstone's rich historiographical account has surely provided useful reassurance to many geographers. The
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| BOYLE ET AL.

book was both scholarly and yet accessible enough to garner wide readerships. It could be read as an advanced‐level text-
book (a mark of its origins, as Livingstone reveals below) and as a powerful research monograph: a rare combination (Sid-
away & Hall, 2018). In both capacities it profiled and itself displayed scholarly intensity and intellectual gravitas in/for
Geography; a path to legitimacy and influence. The Geographical Tradition has existed as a point of reference in a sea of
change. Moreover, Livingstone's celebration of diversity, fluidity, plurality and entangled traditions – “messiness” – ges-
tures in an inclusive way to the scholarly merits of multiple geographical traditions.
We use the occasion of the book's 25th anniversary to reflect once more on its virtues, vices, and ongoing significances.
Certainly, this anniversary begets curiosity about the longevity and resilience of the text and its capacity to remain vital.
But our purpose is to do more than celebrate a birthday. While not alone, The Geographical Tradition proved key in
advancing the case for historicising, relativising, and provincialising geographical philosophies and practices – indeed some-
thing called Geography period – and giving scholarly and eloquent expression to the kinds of archival methods, analytic
instruments, and modalities of narration such a project might demand. Of course, no single book can bear the weight of
responsibility for a historiographical method and no historiographical method ought to be held accountable on the basis of
a single book. However, it is our supposition that the quarter‐century since The Geographical Tradition was published pro-
vides an apt moment to reflect not only once again on the book's core theses, lacunae, and legacies, but also to take stock
of the ways in which its provocations and reception might instruct the wider project of rendering the discipline's history
contextually.
The papers that follow began life in London at a panel session of the 2017 annual conference of the Royal Geographical
Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). We asked panellists to consider earlier engagements with the book, to
revisit as well as to bring updated and perhaps even some fresh perspectives to bear. The conference theme in 2017 was
“Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world,” a theme that elicited an early response,
probing “why this pursuit of critical consciousness via a decolonial approach could do more harm than good, in a discipline
that may not be ready to, or even capable of, responding to the challenge of decolonisation” (Esson et al., 2017, p. 384). In
setting the scene we were also mindful of feminist and queer theory confrontations with human geography's masculinist,
metropolitan and imperial theoretical and methodological inheritances. We were also alert to the ongoing reconfigurations
of geography in and through fiscal crisis, post‐crash neoliberalism redux, a fourth (cyber‐physical, AI, and digital) industrial
revolution (succeeding, steam, electric and electronic ones) and attendant socio‐spatial shifts; climate change, accompanied
by reworked environmental determinisms, as Livingstone and the late Doreen Massey (2004) noted in a wide‐ranging dis-
cussion; post‐imperial migration corridors, right‐wing populism, historical and contemporary imaginaries of “race” (on
which The Geographical Tradition provided a detailed exposé of geography's complicity) and the reworking of and chal-
lenges to racism in geography; and further “quantitative revolutions” in geographical science wrought by big data, geo‐
computation, and cartographic innovations (geo‐visualisation).
In framing the set that follows, we also want to re‐awaken the distinction between “analytical reason” and “dialectical
reason.” The former, a remnant of the “long 18th‐century” European Enlightenment construes reason as positivist and inde-
pendent of any particular rational system; the latter, rooted in historical materialism holds reason to be historically embed-
ded, relative to a socially constructed system of logic and therefore constituent. Contextualist framings of the history of
Geography have helped scholars of the discipline to better understand that all reason is produced within history; lacking in
self‐understanding, analytical reason is simply a form of dialectical reason that is unconscious of its own historicity. We
better appreciate the significance of placing geographical traditions: how these traditions emerge in time and space and bear
the imprint of the worlds in which they emerge, dwell, flourish, and wither. But by extension, constituent reason can only
be understood historically: all acts of contextualising themselves need contextualising if their analytic rationalities, cultural
frames, and politics are to be fully grasped. While widely acknowledged, perhaps this observation warrants more intensive
interrogation than has been the case thus far.
In this introduction, and with respect to The Geographical Tradition, we call attention to the impact of the proximity of
historians in time, space, and culture to the geographical traditions about which they write, especially as this proximity
bears on their capacity to apprehend particular traditions contextually, the choices they make concerning which voices best
articulate traditions and therefore whose biographies merit contextualisation, and the ends to which they dedicate their
endeavours to locate, situate, and place traditions.
The Geographical Tradition undoubtedly broke new ground in its relentless scrutiny of the reciprocal constitution
of text and context and its sustained contextualist interrogation of Geography, geography and geographers. For Withers
(2001, p. 4) a key to The Geographical Tradition was Livingstone's “insistence that we must situate geography histori-
cally and geographically.” Still, below Van Meeteren (2019) contends that Livingstone applied his contextualist
methodology with varying degrees of intensity between chapters and in particular only lightly in his chapter on
BOYLE ET AL. | 441

Geography's “spatial science” tradition. Falling prey itself from “internalism,” this chapter, he asserts, would have bene-
fited from a more thoroughgoing historicisation and politicisation. It is at once glib but also accurate to assert that par-
ticular challenges attend to the production of histories of the present. Certainly, Van Meeteren's critique is especially
significant in the light of the urgent need to place geography's most recent turn to big data, geocomputation, and spa-
tial statistics, within the context of new waves of science predicated on data‐intensive scientific discovery and the rise
of data‐driven economies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and smart and automated systems. But his interven-
tion also begets a larger question: do there exist historical, analytical, or political reasons for supposing that some epi-
sodes in the history of Geography are more difficult to contextualise than others? Or to put it another way, do
particular subject positions make it harder to provincialise certain geographical traditions?
The Geographical Tradition is littered with allusions to its inescapable partiality and bias: by explicit self‐admission
this was Livingstone's constitution rather than reconstruction of the history of Geography; his episodes and narrative
thereof. It is unfair and undoubtedly frustrating for Livingstone then when critics expose the partisanship of the book
as a significant shortcoming, succumbing themselves on occasions as he notes both elsewhere and below (Livingstone,
2019) to presentist readings of the text. Still, it is worth recalling Anne Godlewska's observation in Geography
Unbound: “Taking a history of ideas approach to the concept of ‘tradition’ as does Livingstone – following a particu-
lar line of descent – de‐emphasizes the exclusions, the contestations, the lulls, the gaps, and the collapses in the his-
tory of Geography” (1999, p. 315). Contextualist approaches need to turn methodological principles such as “situated
messiness” more forcibly back against themselves and reflect on the ways in which they too are conjuring historiogra-
phies of the discipline within history. And so we are forced to confront the limits, omissions, and exclusions inherent
in the contextual reading offered in The Geographical Tradition. Below, each of Craggs (2019), Ferretti (2019), Mad-
drell (2019) (who builds on a key feminist critique of The Geographical Tradition by Rose, 1995, that also appeared
in Transactions) and Van Meeteren (2019) identify absent figures, texts, and voices – adding to those identified in
previous engagements – which in their view skew the narrative developed in the book, a wider issue for histories of
geography, that is perhaps more often reiterated as a problem than resolved (Keighren, 2018). Similarly, Scott Kirsch
(in Keighren et al., 2017, p. 255) notes how The Geographical Tradition had “served to open the subject” and had
been “personally radicalizing in some ways,” but how “today, to a more diverse and international graduate student
population, and with situated histories of science becoming more or less mainstream, The Geographical Tradition
seems helplessly Euro‐centric.” Indeed. Engaging the book, one of us angrily asked “what still makes ethnically
cleansed histories of geography possible?” (Sidaway, 1997, p. 77).
To what other ends should contextualist histories of geography be mobilised? Or as Clive Barnett (1995) puts it more
bluntly, why should we awaken geography's dead? As the promises of modernity ebb to exhaustion, the West stumbles
from one crisis to another and end of history arguments seem ever more incredulous, the possibility of progress in human
geography too attracts ever‐greater suspicion. Livingstone (2019) himself detects an unresolved tension between Whiggism
and relativism in historiographical accounts. Of course, Barnett's question too can only be answered within history. Histo-
ries of geography are energised by time‐ and place‐specific cultures of time consciousness and futurity (Hayes, 2018). Per-
haps an advance of sorts may be found in some postcolonial, feminist, and queer ontologies of time; here, while the
meaning of history is conceived variously, the idea that history is simply teleology becoming conscious of itself is con-
tested by the claim that history is better considered as claims of progress becoming conscious of their geographies.
“Geographising Geography,” to use Livingstone's own phrase, indeed has an ongoing critical role. Only by understanding
our biography will we understand the exceptional peculiarity of our lens and the potentialities and compromises which this
lens affords and furnishes. And in this, in disentangling the making of some of those geographies, The Geographical Tradi-
tion is likely to continue to instruct and provoke.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While the usual disclaimers apply, we thank Simon Naylor and the anonymous referees for their encouragement and com-
ments on earlier drafts of this introduction and the set that follows. Ron Johnston and Henry Yeung also helpfully commen-
ted on an earlier draft. We are grateful to authors for their willingness to convert comments from what began as a
conference panel session into the written texts here. We thank the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group
and the Race, Culture and Equality Working Group (both of the Royal Geographical Society, with the Institute of British
Geographers) for sponsoring the panel at the 2017 Annual Conference of the RGS‐IBG. Finally, we dedicate the set to the
memory of John Davey (1945–2017) – the far‐sighted publisher who guided The Geographical Tradition and many other
noteworthy publications into print (Haggett, 2018).
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ORCID
Mark Boyle https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9882-3907
Tim Hall https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2160-9152
James D. Sidaway https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-3566

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How to cite this article: Boyle M, Hall T, Sidaway JD. Reappraising David Livingstone's The Geographical
Tradition: A quarter of a century on. Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2019;44:438–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12294