The Dictionary of Human Geography

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heuristics involve ‘intelligent guesswork’ based

on experience (as in games of chess) and can

involve trial-and-error procedures, moving

towards a ‘better’ solution (as withneural

networks). Heuristics are often deployed in

optimizationstudies – as with the travelling-

salesman problem – and in various forms of

classification(as inremote sensing). rj

Suggested reading

Gigerenzer and Todd (1999).

Hindutva This concept encapsulates the

cultural justification for Hindunationalism,

a ‘Hinduness’ allegedly shared by all Hindus.

Its first full articulation as a Hindu nationalist

manifesto was made by Vinayak Damodar

Savarkar in his 1923 workHindutva/Who is a

Hindu? For Savarkar,Hindutvawas the life of a

greatrace; it signified the religious, cultural

and racial (‘blood’)identityof Hindus. He

claimed that the membership of the Hindu

nation depended upon an acceptance of

India as both fatherland and holy land. The

spatial strategies ofHindutva, aimed at rear-

ticulating the link between the imagined com-

munity of Hindus and the sacred geography of

its territorial domain (the nation-space), have

had a significant impact on contemporary

Indian society and politics. sch

Suggested reading

Sharma (2003).

hinterland The tributary (or catchment)

area of a port, from which materials for export

are collected and across which imports are

distributed: its complementary area – the des-

tination for the exports and source of the im-

ports – is theforeland. In more general usage,

hinterland is deployed to describe a settle-

ment’s catchment area (or that of an establish-

ment within the settlement): it is the area for

which the settlement acts as a trading nexus

(as in the hexagonal hinterlands ofcentral

place theory). rj

historical demography The application of

demographic methods (seedemography)to

data sets from the past that are sufficiently ac-

curate for formal analysis. Such data sets may

take the form of vital records andcensuses,but

most frequently, and particularly if produced

before the nineteenth century, would not have

been created for the purposes of demographic

enquiry. Parish registers, militia and tax lists,

testamentary records and genealogies have

been the most prominent among the great

variety of documentary sources used by histor-

ical demographers (see Hollingsworth, 1969).

Demographic historymay subsume historical

demography as a field of enquiry, but it is more

wide-ranging in its subject matter, being just

as concerned with charting the impact of

demographic change on society and economy

as with the measurement and explanation of

demographic change (see Wrigley, 1969).

Historical demography first secured a formal

status in France at the Institut National

d’E ́tudes De ́mographique (INED), where

Louis Henry had begun research after the Sec-

ond World War on contemporaryfertilityand

fecundity. His investigations were handi-

capped because thosestatesthat produced the

most accurate demographic statistics were by

then all controlling their fertility by family limi-

tation, and so he was drawn to the historical

study of European populations to unravel ‘nat-

ural fertility’. Henry (1956) devised the tech-

nique offamily reconstitutionfor exploiting

genealogies of the Genevan bourgeoisie, and

then developed detailed rules offamily reconsti-

tution using parish registers. The first published

study concerned the Normandy parish of Crulai

(Gautier and Henry, 1958), but the method was

quickly adapted and modified for work on

English parish registers by historical geographer

and economic historian E.A. Wrigley (1966a).

Wrigley (1966b) undertook a reconstitution of

the East Devon parish of Colyton, where the

population appeared to have been limiting its

fertility in the late seventeenth century.

In the past thirty years, a large number of

reconstitution studies have been completed

and they have shown little, if any, evidence of

parity-dependent fertility control, although

the levels of fertility within marriage have var-

ied enormously by region. For instance, mari-

tal fertility in Belgian Flanders was 40 per cent

higher than that of eighteenth-century Eng-

land, although the two regions were separated

by only a few miles across the English Channel.

Likewise, marital fertility was almost 50 per

cent higher in Bavaria than in East Friesland.

By measuring birth intervals and relating infant

deaths to the time elapsed to new conceptions,

family reconstitution has enabled historical

demographers to show that breastfeeding prac-

tices varied greatly and thereby influenced the

tempo of conceptions (see Wilson, 1982).

Breastfeeding also correlated closely with in-

fant mortality rates, which were also revealed

by family reconstitutions to be very frequently

in excess of 300 per 1,000 in non-breastfeeding

areas and as modest, by pre-industrial stand-

ards, as 150 per 1,000 or lower in areas

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HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY