Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014) 175e192 179

army was deployed on the streets of Ulster from 1969, so theofficial commemorations of the rising in Dublin were toned down.The traditional Easter Sunday parade was abandoned from 1972and Taoiseach Jack Lynch persistently refused to ‘summon up theghosts of 1916’ (p. 284). Republican paramilitaries filled the vac-uum, portraying themselves as the true heirs of the rebels, tolegitimize their armed struggle. McCarthy draws parallels betweenthe public reactions to the deaths of the Maze Prison hunger-strikers in 1981 and the executions of the 1916 rebels. Both Pat-rick Pearse and Bobby Sands were idolised as martyrs, while GerryAdams assailed the government in Dublin as complicit in erasingthe rising from public consciousness. Another complained that‘the guts, blood and the very soul of Ireland is being swept underthe carpet’ (p. 318), as 1916 was downgraded within thecommemorative calendar. Public revulsion against violence meantthe rising was out of fashion.

Nevertheless, as McCarthy elucidates, the 1998 Good FridayAgreement and the recent thawing of AngloeIrish relations, hascreated space for the surprising rehabilitation of the 1916 legacy. Ina remarkable turn of events Bertie Ahern reinstated the officialmilitary parade on Easter Sunday 2006 e the ninetieth anniversaryof the rising and the first parade for 35 years. As he wrote in hisautobiography, ‘I was determined to take 1916 back from both theIRA and the revisionists for all the people of Ireland’ (Bertie Ahern,2009, p. 293). Ahern’s attempt to reclaim the spirit of 1916 wasderided by some as ‘political opportunism’ and ‘a gimmick’, usingthe army as a pawn in party politics and national commemorationas a ‘political football’. Unionists declined to take part, but 100,000spectators, including the British ambassador, turned out to watchthe parade and fly-past. In the words of The Sunday Times, it was anattempt ‘to reclaim ownership of Irish nationalism from the blood-spattered hands of Sinn Féin’ (pp. 353, 356e357). Tony Blair re-flected that Ahern was ‘free of the shackles of history . he was astudent of history, not its prisoner. he chose repeatedly to put thefuture first’ (A Journey, 2010, pp. 167e168). But it also confirmedAhern’s reputation as a canny political operator and Fianna Fáilromped home at the next general election. Community reconcili-ation by means of shared remembrance was high on the agenda.The queen’s visit to Dublin in May 2011, the first by a Britishmonarch in over a century, included a wreath-laying at the Gardenof Remembrance. President Mary McAleese proclaimed: ‘while wecannot change the past, we have chosen to change the future’ (p.449).

Heritage campaigners and tour guides have been quick to tapinto the tourism potential of 1916. Rising memorabilia can attracthigh prices at auction, while festivals, dance shows, walking-tours,and re-enactments are increasingly popular e a phenomenongently mocked by McCarthy as ‘histotainment’ (p. 18). As the oldwounds disappear further beneath the ‘shifting sands of memory’(p. 420), he argues that 1916 is achieving the permanent status of acommemorative pageant, much like Bastille Day or the Fourth ofJuly e an excuse for a national party, no longer encumbered bypolitical tensions. With all eyes now on the 2016 centenary,McCarthy is optimistic that the building-blocks are securely inplace for a ‘dignified, inclusive, and open-minded commemorativeheritage’ (p. 451). Cultural commentators, politicians, curators,heritage advisers and historians of modern Ireland will enjoy thispatiently researched and stimulating analysis.

Andrew AtherstoneUniversity of Oxford, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.10.009

William A. Koelsch, Geography and the Classical World. London,New York: I.B. Tauris, 352 pages, £65.00 hardcover.

William Koelsch’s career has spanned some six decades, as pro-fessor of history and geography at Clark University, Massachusetts,from the 1960s, and professor emeritus for the last fifteen years.The present volume is the culmination of many decades of researchon the history of geographical interest in the classical world. Itcharts the emergence of the geographical study of ancient Greeceand Rome in the eighteenth century, and its development there-after in Britain and the USA.

Resisting the common perception of the field of classical geog-raphy as all but ‘comatose’, as one commentator put it in 1979 (p.349), Koelsch offers a fresh presentation of its lively scholarly his-tory. Beginning with the early years of the Society of Dilettanti inthe eighteenth century and their desire ‘to note “every Circum-stance which [would] contribute toward giving the best Idea of theancient and present State”’ of Greece (p. 28), Koelsch focuses onearly figures who stand out for their serious geographic purposeand emergent scientific methodology (as well as, in some cases,their idiosyncrasy and rather daring expedition methods).

What emerges is a historiography of approaches to classicalgeography, painted through ten discrete episodes from the disci-pline’s development in the nineteenth century, and the decadeswhich immediately framed it. Koelsch develops his theme withnarratives ranging from social histories (such as that of the role ofclassical geography as a civilising marker in post-revolutionAmerica (chapter 2)), to expeditionary accounts, including thepioneering work of ‘boots on the ground geographer’ Henry Fan-shawe Tozer (1829e1916), an Oxonianwho spent his long vacationsin the wilds of Asia Minor trying to reconstruct Xenophon’s travelsfrom topographical details, and flora and fauna (chapter 4). Koelschalso offers a detailed history of classical and geographical educationon both sides of the Atlantic during the long nineteenth century,chronicling classical geography’s pride of place in the foundation ofThomas Jefferson’s ideal university in antebellum Virginia (chapter3), and its decline in the face of pedantry and the rote-teaching ofnineteenth-century schoolmasters (chapter 9). On the other side ofthe Atlantic Koelsch notes how classics offered an importantnursing ground for the discipline of geography in Thomas Arnold’sOxford of the 1830s (chapter 6) and Halford Mackinder’s Oxford ofthe 1910s (chapter 8). Koelsch offers carefully researched bi-ographies of pioneers of classical geography, and hence of historicalgeography more broadly, including classicists such as Harvard’sCornelius Conway Felton (chapter 7), and unexpected amateurs asprominent as William Gladstone (chapter 5). The work of EllenChurchill Semple, the last prominent advocate of classical geogra-phy as a subject in the 1930s, offers the closing episode in Koelsch’stale of classical geography’s wax and wane in academic focus andsocial stature (chapter 10).

It is somewhat refreshing to read a positive assessment ofSemple’s contributions to geography, as the first woman fullprofessor of geography at an American graduate degree grantinginstitution. More could perhaps have been said however, of thepossible relationship between her interest in the classical world asa cultural archetype, and her better known anthropogeographicviews. Koelsch argues that Semple was beginning to move awayfrom anthropogeographic methodology in her later work, butmore could have been done to demonstrate the extent to whichthis was, or was not, the case.

There are, inevitably, some other shortcomings to the volume:the images are very poorly reproduced, occasionally their purposeis unclear (e.g. plate 15), andmore could have beenmade of them inthe text. There are also moreminor infelicities, including a sentencewhich stops mid flow (p. 340) and a mistake in the Latin (p. 3).

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014) 175e192180

Yet despite these factors, Koelsch’s volume cleverly uses hishistoriography of classical geography to demonstrate the subject’svitality. He states in his preface that ‘my interest in writing thisbook is not in reviving the field’ (p. xxii). Indeed, Koelsch'sdemonstration that nineteenth-century classical geography was aphenomenon of its time makes such a project all but unimaginable.Yet, there is an apologia here. By creating a mirror in which thepresent discipline can see its past, Koelsch’s historiographic over-view shows that the present neglect of the classical period in his-torical geography is quite as much a socio-political phenomenonand product of its period as was its earlier celebration. Twentieth-century geographers demonstrated the scope and strength of theiremergent discipline by casting off the old authority of the classicsand positioning their discipline as an alternative. But does such arejection make sense for the long term? In two respects Koelschsuggests that it cannot. First, through accounts of the research ofprevious centuries, Koelsch points to the richness of the remains ofthe classical world and the geographic interest they offer. There ismuch more material and textual evidence for the societies ofGreece and Rome than for almost any other ancient civilization, andfor many more recent ones besides. Second, in the epilogue’s dis-cussion of recent research by classicists applying geographicalconcepts to ancient contexts (p. 352 ff.), often in collaboration withgeographers, Koelsch shows classical geography to be a growingarea of inquiry. With cities networked into Roman administrationstretching from Britain to Syria, from Morocco to the western coastof what is now Saudi Arabia, and encompassing everything in be-tween, this area carries clear potential as a dynamic ground forinterdisciplinary collaboration.

Koelsch’s book demonstrates the enduring pull of the geographyof the ‘classical’ world through the stories of those who haveworked on it, and lays down the gauntlet to others to take up andcontinue the narrative. Undoubtedly there is great potential fornew research to highlight the actual alterity of these cultures andtheir interaction with the landscape, and change the face of whatwe think we know of the ancient Mediterranean and the landsbeyond it. Koelsch’s challenge, set in the latter years of a longcareer, is a provocative one. Perhaps now is the time for historicalgeographers to take it on.

Nicola Cronin BarhamUniversity of Chicago, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.10.010

Hans Gebhardt, Rüdiger Glaser and Sebastian Lentz (Eds), Europa:eine Geographie. Berlin and Heidelberg, SpringereSpektrum, 2013,520 pages, V69.95 hardcover.

The Germans are famous for their historical atlases and for goodreason. First conceived more than fifty years ago, the updatedPutzger Altas und Chronik zur Weltgeschichte atlas (2009) continuesto be the first port for pupils, students and university teachers alike.The Bavarian Grosser Historischer Weltatlas (1976) is a worthy andalmost equally useful rival. Both are far superior to their two En-glish counterparts, the Times Atlas of World History (1st ed. 1978)and the Hamlyn Historical Atlas (1981), and they also have the edgeover the fuzzier atlas published by Le monde diplomatique: Atlas derGlobalisierung: Die Welt von Morgen (Paris, 2011). This is becausethe German product specialises not in the portrayal of trends orprocesses, though these are not excluded, but of concrete bordersand facts; the dynamic element is provided by the ubiquitous dates,which indicate when a given territory changed hands.

So the omens are good for Europa: eine Geographie, which drawsmore heavily on the Putzger atlas than on Le Monde diplomatique,thoughboth influences arepresent, andrightly so. TheeditorseHansGebhardt, Rüdiger Glaser, and Sebastian Lentz e have assembled aformidable team of experts mostly from universities in the German-speakingworld. The result, let it be said at the outset, is an extremelyvaluable companion bringing together a wealth of information andinsight in a series of crisp, and generally well-dovetailed, text con-tributions supplemented by numerouswell-drawnmaps, tables, andother visual aids. The main focus is on central Europe, but dueconsideration is given to eastern, southern, and western Europe aswell, aswell as to the criteria bywhich these regions are so classified.

The chapters on the physical world include information on tides,flooding, vegetation, forests, forest fires, tectonic plates, erosion, nat-ural catastrophes, climate, and much else. Those on the ‘human’ environment tell us about trade patterns, noise pollution and, of course,territorial transformations over time. The dividing line between thephysical and the human is very fluid, of course, and the atlas fully re-flects this. There are particularly interesting passages on the history ofclimate, the ways in which the classification of the natural world isdriven by cultural and political factors, and on the vexed question ofhow large Europe actually is compared to the ‘rest’ of the world(though, curiously, there isnodiscussionhereof thePetersprojection).

The core of the non-physical sections are the chapters on thepolitical geography of contemporary Europe, where the atlas goeswell beyond what is already available in other volumes. There aremaps and discussions of alliance systems, investment patterns,industrial locations, growth and shrinkage by region, theme parks(!), transports grids, internet use, energy supply and energy secu-rity, migration, and many other things. At the centre of it all areextensive critiques of the geopolitical discourses that have framedour understanding of the European space, past and present, espe-cially the geopolitics of Friedrich Ratzel, Halford Mackinder, KarlHaushofer, Samuel Huntingdon, and the various protagonists of arevived Mitteleuropa (often overlooked in English-language dis-cussions). Once again, the authors demonstrate that what we see orthink we know is as much a creation or imagination as objectivefact. If the volume has an overall theme it is this.

Inevitably, in a volume of this size and scope there are someproblems. The map of the greatest extent of Muslim expansion inEurope (p. 20) appears toconflate twochronologically quite separateperiods e the medieval caliphate of Cordoba and the early modernOttoman empire. Historians will jib at the rather clichéd view of theWestphalian settlement as the first step towards a ‘sovereign na-tional state’ (p. 152) when it actually limited princely sovereignty inimportantways. Sometimes evidence ismisinterpreted, for examplewhen a contemporary electoral map of the Ukraine (p. 199) is takento reflect socio-economic divides rather than ethnic ones. In fact, thewesternUkrainian voters against the trend are not somuch urban asRussians from (the formerly Czechoslovakian) sub-Carpathian Rus.The constant problematising and questioning sometimes becomes abitwearisome. I supposeone canspeakof ‘“illegal” immigration’, butsince it is indeed against the law, why not leave out the invertedcommas e or else place almost every other term under a questionmark aswell? Someoverlap of content is, of course, tobe expected insuch an atlas, but the duplication between chapters 3 and 4, whichboth broadly deal with conceptions of Europe, seems unnecessary.These are, however, mere quibbles.

The broader global context perhaps needed more attention,especially in the ‘historical’ parts. The authors have made someeffort to embed their story and their picture in the context of the‘rising’ or ‘emerging’ extra-European powers. What is rather short-changed, though, is what used to be called the ‘Expansion ofEurope’e voyages of ‘discovery’ (those inverted commas again) andthe territorial expansion overseas. This is a pity because themotives