The Dictionary of Human Geography

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where women breast-fed well into the second

year of the child’s life (see Knodel, 1988).

Such techniques have also made it possible to

cast light on the geography of marriage and to

test an important thesis about the distinctive-

ness of marriage patterns in north-west

Europe proposed by Hajnal (1965), who ar-

gued that females married uniquely late in life

and that a large proportion remained entirely

out of marriage. Hajnal discovered this pattern

from census data of the nineteenth century,

and family reconstitutions of France and

England, southern Scandinavia and much of

the German-speaking areas of Western and

Central Europe showed this marital geography

to have been firmly embedded before 1600

and hence not derived fromurbanizationor

industrialization, and common to both

Protestant and Catholic areas (Smith, 1990).

The Cambridge Group for the History of

Population was the first centre of research

exclusively devoted to historical demography,

and it developed techniques for the study of

early censuses and aggregative counts of bap-

tisms, burials and marriages to recreate demo-

graphic processes without employing the time-

consuming method of family reconstitution.

One such technique – generalized inverse pro-

jection – is a technique that projects back from

a census providing accurate data on age struc-

tures and so making it possible to obtain age

structures, population sizes,emigrationrates,

and measurements of fertility and life expect-

ancy. This technique was first applied to

English data and showed that fertility changes

were considerably more important in deter-

mining demographic growth rates from

c.1600, and to some extent endorsed the

more optimistic view of Malthus as presented

in the second edition of hisEssay(Wrigley and

Schofield, 1989 [1981]; see malthusian

model). As research by historical demograph-

ers accumulated, it became apparent that

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European

demographic patterns, even in the area of the

so-called north-west European marriage and

household formation systems, varied greatly

(see Wrigley, 1981). Furthermore the exten-

sion of formal historical demographic enquiry

toasia, utilizing early listings of inhabitants

and population registers, has cast doubt on

the assumed uniqueness of certain features

frequently supposed to be peculiar to historic

europe(Lee and Feng, 1999). rms

Suggested reading

Hajnal (1965); Smith (1990); Wrigley and

Schofield (1989 [1981]).

historical geography A sub-discipline of

human geographyconcerned with the geog-

raphies of the past and with the influence of

the past in shaping the geographies of the pre-

sent and the future. Before the twentieth cen-

tury, the term ‘historical geography’ was used

to describe at least three distinct intellectual

endeavours: the recreation of the geographies

described in the Bible and in ‘classical’ Greek

and Roman narratives; the ‘geography behind

history’ as revealed by the changingfrontiers

andbordersofstatesandempires; and the

history ofexplorationand discovery (Butlin,

1993, pp. 1–23). Fragmented and incoherent,

these early writings had little impact on contem-

porary historical geography, whose intellectual

roots can be traced to the late-nineteenth-

century writings on regional landscape forma-

tion by French geographers such as Paul Vidal

de la Blache (whose influence spread into

Britain through the work of H.J. Fleure and

A.J. Herbertson) and by the German school of

anthropogeographyled by Friedrich Ratzel

(a perspective successfully promoted in the

USA by Ellen Semple).

Historical research onlandscapechange

received a powerful stimulus after the First

World War, when the reorganization of na-

tional boundaries ineuropeand the creation

of new ones in themiddle eastre-focused

attention on regional landscapes as products

of long-term economic, social and political

evolution that could be analysed by the scien-

tific interrogation of archaeological and histor-

ical evidence. The study of landscape change

varied in different national contexts and was

by no means always described by the term

‘historical geography’. Continental European

research on regional, especially rural, land-

scape change continued without embracing

a new disciplinary terminology. In inter-war

France, the annales school produced a

body of interdisciplinary research that might

reasonably be described as historical geog-

raphy, but that is more usually regarded as a

distinctively French style of History. Likewise,

in Germany, historical research on rural settle-

ment change was generally seen as continuing

an existing tradition of research on thecul-

tural landscaperather than blazing a new

trail in historical geography.

The situation was different in the UK,

where the term ‘historical geography’ was

deployed more frequently under the charis-

matic influence of H.C. Darby. Darby’s vision

of historical geography exhibited many simi-

larities with research carried out simultan-

eously on the history of the English

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HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY