Humphrey Southall
Great Britain Historical GIS Project, University of Portsmouth, UK

New approaches to the study of history using techniques derived from GIS technology may appear unrelated to traditional historical scholarship. This view is mistaken, but the mistake is easily made because most presentations on historical GIS concentrate on the technology, not on research questions. This paper reviews the development of British historical geography, and of regional and local approaches to economic and social history, over the last eighty years, and shows how GIS-based techniques enable us to extract new meaning from historical sources and answer research questions which could only be imperfectly explored with traditional techniques. The Great Britain Historical GIS Project is used extensively for examples.

The first part of the paper reviews the work of Clifford Darby and his associates, beginning with his "An Historical geography of England before A.D. 1800" (1936). The work of this school was generally driven by the systematic interpretation of particular documentary sources, Darby's work centering on his sequence of Domesday Geographies (1952-75) while other related scholars made very extensive use of the nineteenth century census (see Darby, ed., "A New Historical Geography of England after 1600" (1976) and Baker et al, "Geographical Interpretations of Historical Sources (1970)). Two general criticisms of these studies are developed: firstly, that while great attention is paid to the source document, far less attention is paid to the spatial framework; secondly, that systematic comparison of sources is both enormously time-consuming and dreadfully crude. This latter point is exemplified by one of Darby's final pieces of work,'The changing geographical distribution of wealth in England 1086-1334-1525' (Journal of Historical Geography, 1979). GIS-based approaches can address these failings.

While most recent writing in historical geography has adopted a post-modern perspective, emphasising the cultural and the most recent past, British social, economic and demographic historians have increasingly emphasised the regional and the spatial. This is particularly true of recent interpretations of the industrial revolution; Hudson ("Regions and Industries", 1989) argues that industrialisation in Britain and elsewhere occurred first and foremost within regions rather than within nations as a whole." Some of the resulting studies simply substitute regions and regional elites for nations and their ruling classes in otherwise traditional studies, but others attempt to study systems of regions interacting economically and socially. Two classic examples are Basil Johnson's pioneering study (1951) of the iron mining and manufacturing complex operated by the Foley Partnerships in the late 17th and early 18th century, both intensely local yet national in scope, and Langton's classic paper "The industrial revolution and the regional geography of England" (1984). While these studies are arguably far more grounded in geographical context and more sophisticated in their jutaxposition of different sources than the studies discussed in the first part of the paper, the sheer complexity of the material makes the argument hard to follow when the evidence is presented purely linearly,on paper. Modern GIS-based visualisation techniques assist both the historical writer and his or her readers.

Related URL: http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis/

International Workshop on Historical GIS Fudan University, Shanghai, August 23-25, 2001