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Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhg

Reviews

Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress, 2013, xii þ 493 pages, US$30 paperback.

Stuart Elden has beenwriting about the idea of territory for roughlya decade nowand this book represents an extension and deepeningof that work. A previous book, Terror and Territory: The SpatialExtent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis, 2009), and a range of articles,have explored contemporary issues surrounding re-territorialization and effective sovereignty in the post-cold warera. The present volume might be seen as a prequel, taking us backin time to trace the emergence and evolution of territory as aconcept that has been integral in the development of the modernstate system. Elden contends that territory, while being a keygeographical concept, has largely been taken for granted. He arguesthat it requires much more intensive interrogation and this is whathe most certainly does in this volume.

Elden’s analysis of territory is based on a close reading of a rangeof writings from key scholars and thinkers, as well as poets, play-wrights and religious writers where we find Shakespeare andBeowulf resting alongside Aristotle and Plato. Starting with Greekmythology and ranging through the middle ages and renaissanceperiods through to the early modern era, Elden draws on originalwritings, translations of works, and commentaries on those works.In doing so, he appears to have read just about everything! Heprovides a history of the relations between power, people and placeas it evolved over time. The result is an investigation of politicalideas from a spatial perspective traced through an eclectic set oftexts written in different political contexts. He plots the genealogyof territory by unpicking the geography inherent (or absent) withinthese varied writings, revealing the varied ways in which place andpower were thought about in particular contexts. He examines howthese ways of thinking evolved, disappeared, re-emerged and werere-worked and re-interpreted over time. In doing so, specific po-litical terms (such as territorium and imperium) are interrogatedand explained within the context of their usage at specific points intime, as distinct from how we might retrospectively choose tointerpret them. As he states, his analysis is both textual (in dis-secting the sources themselves) and contextual (in situating themwithin the time and place in which they were written). In essence,he contends that the manner in which ideas of territory emerged isbound up with particular ways of thinking about geographic space.These modes of thought are themselves linked to developments incartographic techniques and advancements in geometry andmathematical calculation. Territories are seen to be much morethan simply land or bounded geographic spaces. For Elden, territorycan be viewed as a political technology, related to themeasurementof land and the control of terrain. He suggests that both territoriesthemselves and their boundaries reflect a distinctive mode of socialand spatial organization dependent on particular ways of calcu-lating and thinking about space. While the utilization of carto-graphic techniques in the maintenance of power is well known,

Elden argues that mapping is not just a tool of power but afundamental requirement of it. Ideas of the state as a political entityemerge alongside ideas of territory, sovereignty and the demarca-tion of boundaries.

Elden’s work is restricted, as he himself points out, to WesternEuropean thought. Questions might be raised about the elite andsomewhat exclusive nature of this and the choice of texts scruti-nised. However, it is obvious that practical considerations and theavailability of source material set inevitable limits. It might also beargued that it is the present day use of territorial thinking andstrategies (issues which Elden continues to explore elsewhere) thatis of more pressing concern rather than the emergence of aparticular way of thinking. However, that is to ignore the value ofunderstanding how we have arrived at where we are today and theimportance of being aware that our ways of thinking aboutgeographic space are more historically and temporally specific thanwe might otherwise imagine. Elden’s interpretations are inevitablyselective and open to his particular reading of the sources. How-ever, he acknowledges the limitations of time period, scope andlinguistic constraints (though he appears to suffer from consider-ably fewer linguistic limits than many of us!). While the book attimes seems to veer off into wider discussions of the developmentof political theory, his chosen sources tell us something of thebroader political context and modes of thought current at that timeand, more specifically, cast light on how the relationships betweenpeople, place and land were understood in different historical andgeographic contexts.

This is a work of history, political science, law and philosophy aswell as a work of geography. In telling the story of territory, Eldenalso touches usefully on a range of other issues such as the peri-odization of history and the retrospective application of terms suchas ‘middle ages’ and ‘renaissance’. The meticulousness of theresearch is evident in the extensive footnotes, with 2750 in totaland running to almost 150 pages. The breadth of sources and therange of ideas mean that Elden is, in many respects, following on ina similar vein to many of the writers whose work he deals withhere.

David StoreyUniversity of Worcester, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.022

Veronica della Dora, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place,from Homer to World War II. Charlottesville, University of VirginiaPress, 2011, xvii þ 312 pages, US$35 hardcover.

Imagining Mount Athos is a narrative that navigates differingworlds. First, as an Anglophone scholarly presentation of the

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141 121

heartland of Greek Orthodoxy, the book offers what must eventoday be an intriguing cultural ‘other’ for much of its readership,set beyond the typical bounds of lived geographies in the dailyimagination of the West. Moreover, as a history written by awoman on the subject of a site from which women have beenexcluded for over a thousand years, the book invites attention forthe unusual (under)privileged perspective it promises on themonastic peninsula. Offering ‘imaginations’ of Mount Athos as itssubject besides, the book signals the abstract space in which itsnarrative takes place. As the narrative of a landscape on which itsauthor has not set foot, this is not a strict history of topos, but ahistory of conceptions of it. It is history which operates betweenbinaries of east and west, male and female, real and imagined; it isan account of the constructs of minds.

What ensues ‒ possibly against expectation ‒ is not primarily afeminist account, though the narratives of women’s interactionswith the peninsula make for lively reading (as in the epilogue’sdescription of the willful trespass of Queen Elizabeth of Romania),or for scenes of pathos (as in the writer Joice Nankivell’s lifetimefascination with the mountain she knew intimately as a backdropto her life, yet always from afar). But if Athos is presented as alandscape vivid in the imaginations of these women, as well asthose of the eighteenth-century Russian women patrons of Athos(chapter 3), della Dora is not offering only ‘imagination’ in termsof the ephemeral experience of a landscape generally beyondtouch. Her account also offers imaginatio in its broader, late clas-sical, sense of ‘perspective’: it provides a window onto the broadvariety of ways in which viewers of both sexes fashioned, rein-terpreted, and ultimately constructed Athos’s monastic peninsulafor themselves.

The resultant account consists of six widely ranging chapters,working thematically rather than chronologically, and offeringmaterial for every interest. Chapter one deals with Athos in itsmythical guise ‒ as the storied site for the envisioned mountain-colossus of Alexander the Great; or home of the snake-eaters,whose diet, in Pliny’s somewhat bizarre account, kept them freefor life from fleas and lice. The second chapter details Athos asutopia ‒ first desired as a retreat by ninth-century saints, and stillrepresented as an idyllic, pious enclave on maps of the dalli Sonettiin the fifteenth century, and those of Coronelli in the seventeenth.The third chapter treats Athos as an icon, with astute discussion ofthe varying strategies and priorities of images made of the ‘island’mountain ‒ of Athos as an abstracted, seemingly ‘portable’ place,generally more alive to devotees in its representation than itsphysicality. In the latter three chapters, the fourth, ‘Erudite Athos’,and the sixth, ‘Scientific Athos’, give complementary accounts oflong-nineteenth-century interests in the mountain peninsula ‒ theone, as a promised treasure trove of lost classical manuscripts(which never quite materialised) for dilettanti like Robert Curzon;the other as a (much more productive) site of exceptionally diversebotanical specimens, extolled as a natural wonder and sought afterby botany expeditionists like the German August Griesebach, andKew’s Sir Arthur Hill. Chapter five, ‘Geopolitical Athos’, offers anunusual and fascinating insight into the diplomacy of the monasticpeninsula during the second world war ‒ of monks in receptionrooms entertaining dignitaries of the invading Nazi forces, whiletheir brothers abetted the escape of Allied soldiers in the base-ments below. The apparently timeless mountain has in fact hasbeen forced to navigate the power politics of twentieth-centurywars.

The scope of material della Dora covers is impressive. Certainly,the book’s promise to cover ‘visions of a holy place from Homer toWorld War II’ is not wholly fulfilled, since Homer gets short shriftand the discussion of classical texts lacks the distance andcontextual questioning of much of the rest. But della Dora is

nonetheless to be credited for her ambitious handling of a widerange of references to Athos from classical history to the 1940s. Andin her case studies, dealing with historical accounts rather thanliterary sources, della Dora amply demonstrates her command ofdocuments drawn from more than a millennium, her mastery ofvarious modern-language sources, including Greek-language ar-chives, and her ability to highlight key moments in the imagina-tions of the landscape over its long history of reception.

If a book of such scope raises more questions than it answersthis is probably a sign of success. Occasionally more detail wouldhave been welcome ‒ was the approach of each monastery toinvading powers actually the same, for example, or did co-operation follow the unfortunate nineteenth-century tensionbetween national groups. Della Dora is (rightly) adept at exposingthe arrogance of post-enlightenment scholars towards the monkswho hosted them, but the strengths and weaknesses of themonastic host communities could have been also usefully dis-cussed. There is also the occasional tendency to binarism, be-tween the ‘orthodox East’ and ‘enlightenment West’ ‒ such thatrelevant nuance is lost.

But ultimately its strengths make della Dora’s a striking andfresh intervention into Athos scholarship. While self-consciouslyadding the latest episode in the reception of the mountainthrough her concluding affirmation of Athos’ durability as toposand icon, she also reveals the tension in play. Its bulk physicality,the consistent rules of its domain, its centuries old architecture,and daily traditions, would seem to deny the Athonite peninsulathe possibility of being a topic of historical geography. Yet dellaDora’s account reveals the life beneath the image ‒ in the make-up, needs, and exigencies facing the Athonite population, and inthe way it is seen and imagined by the world outside. Thepeninsula is changing still.

Nicola Cronin BarhamUniversity of Oxford, UK

University of Chicago, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.001

Jennifer Clark, The American Idea of England, 1776e1840. Farnham,Ashgate, 2013, x þ 232 pages, £60 hardcover.

The intellectual and cultural transformation of the United Statesfrom a loose grouping of British colonies to a unified and inde-pendent republic was neither quick nor smoothdrevolutionaryand reactionary elements fighting to redefine or retain Americanidentity and the Anglo-American relationship. Jennifer Clark’smonograph seeks to explore these first unsure steps towards cul-tural autonomy by tracing the image of England as it was under-stood in the United States from the Revolution, through the War of1812, and up until the1840s, and by mapping the extent of change,continuity, and permanence in these early relations.

Clark weaves her account with a variety of different texts,ranging from allegorical narratives to congressional speeches, fromjournalistic sniping to travelogues and early American fiction. Thework is organised both chronologically, moving from the Revolu-tion into the height of Jacksonian America, and by sourcedeachchapter being an examination, more or less, of a particular genre ofwritten work. As a result, each chapter has a feeling of complete-ness to it, satisfying the need for a conclusive ‘answer’ to eachperiod, but also encouraging readers to dip in and out of the text,rather than imbibe it cover to cover. Nonetheless, the six