Whilst Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life comprise a notoriously complex document of autobiographical artifice, there is no reason to question the honesty of its revelation of his attitudes to geography and its relationship to the historian's craft. Writing of his boyhood before going up to Oxford, Gibbon commented that his

This seems a fairly direct comment on Gibbon's attitude to geography as a historian in that it is confirmed by various of his working documents and commonplace book comments not aimed at posterity and by the practice embodied in his great work that was thus targeted, the Decline and Fall. Taking Gibbon's private documents, the first manuscript we have in his English Essays, for example, is a tabulated chronology from circa 1751 when Gibbon was fourteen years old, which begins with the creation of the world in 6000 BC and runs up to 1590 BC, this being exactly the sort of material which could be commonplaced from the likes of Ussher and Prideaux. Matching this attention to chronology is a concern with geography, and indeed the two are coupled together as in his comment in the Memoirs. Thus in his Index Expurgatoris (1768–9), Gibbon berates Sallust as “no very correct historian” on the grounds that his chronology is not credible and that “notwithstanding his laboured description of Africa, nothing can be more confused than his Geography without either division of provinces or fixing of towns”.Footnote ² In this regard, Gibbon the author of the Decline and Fall was a “correct” historian, in that he was careful to frame each arena in which historical events were narrated in the light of a prefatory description of the geography of the location under discussion. This is most readily apparent in the second half of the opening chapter of the work, where Gibbon proceeds on what his “Table of Contents” calls a “View of the Provinces of the Roman Empire”, starting in the West with Spain and then proceeding clockwise to reach Africa on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, a pattern of geographical description directly mirroring ancient practice in Strabo's Geography and Pomponius Mela's De Situ Orbis.Footnote ³ But this practice of prefacing a historical account with geographical description repeats itself at various points in the work, as when, approaching the end of his grand narrative, Gibbon reaches the impact of “Mahomet, with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other” on “the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire”. Before discussing the birth of Islam, Gibbon treats his readers to a discussion of the geography of Arabia, beginning with its size and shape before moving on to its soils, climate and physical–geographic subdivisions.Footnote ⁴

Gibbon's interest in geography and its influence on his practice as a historian have already been studied at length,Footnote ⁵ but it is important to note that he was by no means breaking new ground in his attitudes to the role of geography in the practice of history. On the contrary, and very much in John Pocock's image of Gibbon as an érudit drawing on a longer genealogy of humanist scholarship, Gibbon's recorded comments and his practice concerning geography are conventional repetitions of the most common trope through which humanists depicted the scholarly function of geography; that geography, together with chronology, is the eye of history. Whilst this general depiction of geography's function clearly goes back to the classical precedents of historian–geographers such as Strabo and Polybius,Footnote ⁶ it was enshrined in Renaissance culture by the motto to the title page of Abraham Ortelius's Parergon (1592), “Historiae Oculus Geographia”. Likewise, Richard Hakluyt's influential Principal Voyages and Navigations enforced the same message. Explaining the structure of his work, Hakluyt claimed he had “referred each particular relation to the due time and place”, achieving this “by the helpe of Geographie and Chronologie (which I may call the Sunne and the Moone, the right eye and the left of all history)”.Footnote ⁷ In short, and as Gibbon suggested, humanist evocations of geography as an eye for history argued it was only through geography that the historian could see properly to order their work, exactly what Gibbon practised in the Decline and Fall and castigated Sallust for failing to do.

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Moving forward to our own age, intellectual historians of the Enlightenment seem to be reinvigorating the trope of geography being an “eye” of history. For contemporary historians (with some exceptions as will be noted later), geography no longer means the static canvas on which the narrative of historical events can be painted as it did for Gibbon and humanist historians. On the contrary, a broad swathe of recent writing, only some of it canvassed here, is developing and debating new understandings of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century which deploy different images of the spatial extent and diffusion of ideas as they construct competing visions of that hoary category in eighteenth-century studies, “Enlightenment”. This approach to the conjunction of geography and history might be termed (if a neologism is permitted) “geohistoriography” or “geonarrativization”, the use of spatial and geographical categories to create different narrative structures for the arguments of intellectual historians. The focus of this essay is “Enlightenment”, but it is by no means the only arena in which historiography is generating important new arguments in intellectual history by turning to the “geography of knowledge”. Whilst space precludes an extended confirmation of this point, we can at least gesture towards it.Footnote ⁸ In studies of the Renaissance, for example, the “new” histories of the Renaissance generated by Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine are strongly indebted to looking at wider and different spatial settings than those encapsulated in the traditional binary of “Northern” and “Italianate” Renaissances. By attending to Renaissance interactions on a broader spatial canvas, especially in the Near East, new images of that moment in intellectual history are generated. Similar comments apply to Peter Burke's The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (1998), wherein the author deliberately takes in a broader swathe of European nations in an attempt to generate a more eclectic and comprehensive image of the intellectual culture of the era.Footnote ⁹ Other works “reorienting” or “globalizing” the Renaissance adopt the same historiographical strategy, reworking “Eurocentric” (or, more neutrally, European) intellectual histories by demonstrating the intertwining of European categories with spaces and scales beyond the European arena.Footnote ¹⁰ Likewise, much of the ink spilt in recent years about the adequacy of the “Atlantic history” approach to early modern history has revolved around the spatial scale at which events really took place or can most adequately be conceptualized. For example, a recent collection of essays on Atlantic history includes an entire section where critics variously advocate instead a continental approach, a hemispheric approach and a global approach.Footnote ¹¹ In each case, it is quite rightly being suggested that different narratives are generated if one takes a different spatial scale (global or hemispheric) or a different spatial arena (continental) as one's starting point and that key elements of intellectual and social history therefore look different according to one's geographical imaginary.

To be clear at the outset, however, the trend towards “geohistoriography” discussed in this essay most definitely does not mean that geography is becoming a “master discipline” for the practice of historians. On the contrary, the quarry of those historians whose work is analysed in this essay and of those participating in the broader current which I have identified here is the reworking of the traditional fare of intellectual history and as such draws more proximately on other disciplines, such as economics, sociology and political science. Historians are not—as Gibbon did—mugging up on their geography, human or physical, nor are they delving into debates in the contemporary discipline of geography with any great enthusiasm compared to, say, the engagement of the Annales school, but rather they are using different spatial arenas and images of spatial diffusion and networking to build different narratives, different historiographical structures, through which to debate key issues in intellectual history.

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Turning to the current geohistoriography of the Enlightenment, we can start by returning to Edward Gibbon, as refracted through the lens of John Pocock's fourth volume in an ongoing series of contextual studies of him, Barbarism and Religion IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires.Footnote ¹² As its subtitle suggests, this volume concerns the historiographical meaning of “barbarian” and “savage” in eighteenth-century historical writing and their deployment in the Decline and Fall. And yet in Pocock's hands this binary immediately becomes a spatial one, for the simple reason that, as conceptual terms of the Enlightenment historian's craft, Pocock sees “barbarian” and “savage” as relating to different geographical arenas. Above all, “barbarian” is a “Eurasian” category; they are the “hostile peoples beyond and upon the frontiers of empire, and are to some extent defined by those frontiers” (11). By contrast, “savages”, whilst a category in European historiography going back to the Homeric depiction of Polyphemus, have only been encountered with the birth of modern, maritime empires, notably with the Columbian discovery of the Americas and the eighteenth century's exploration and analysis of the islands and peoples of the Pacific Ocean. Furthermore, Pocock detects that there was no smooth sequencing of these two categories in stadial theories. On the contrary, the savage is defined as incapable of societal progress: “it will be a significant modification of Locke's ‘in the beginning, all the world was America’, for the savage, unlike the barbarian, will have been defined as the human who existed before history and has been unable to set it in motion” (195). As such, in Pocock's reading, different historiographical categories applied to different parts of the globe for eighteenth-century historians. To pursue this idea, Barbarism and Religion IV develops a lengthy contrast between the historiography of the barbarian in Anquetil-Duperron, Goguet and Thomas Carte and that of the savage in William Robertson and in Raynal's Histoire les deux Indes (1780).

Pocock's analysis of the historiography of the savage in the last two parts of Barbarism and Religion IV is, of course, an analysis of a path Gibbon did not take, both because of the geographical arena he studied (the Eurasia of the barbarians) and because of the historical era upon which he concentrated (that before the age of discovery brought about European contact with savages as an empirical rather than a mythopoetic category). And yet the two historiographies do link together in Raynal, as the Histoire argued that the tragedy of the age of discovery was that its European authors were still in a semi-barbarous state themselves, and that this drove their exploitation and oppression of the places and peoples they encountered: “It is the tragedy of world history that the Europeans who broke into the world's oceans were still half barbarous and had scarcely begun to be enlightened by le doux commerce” (265). In part this was ascribed to the leading role which Spain took in the age of discovery, for, as Pocock suggests, Spain was by and large seen as outside the sphere of the Enlightenment in the imagined geographies both of Scottish moderate literati such as William Robertson and of French philosophes such as Raynal and Diderot. And yet, in Raynal/Diderot in particular, the philosophe analysis was that the encounter between the savage and the enlightened denizens of modern Europe had led to the regression of Europeans back towards the barbarism from which they had emerged. If reports generated by the traversal of geographical space were central to the Enlightenment's construction of stadial theories of society back in European salons and garrets, those who engaged in these peregrinations appeared to Raynal to be regressing: “the colonists and settlers who characteristically destroy the indigenous societies with whom they come into contact . . . [lack] the capacity to cease being voyagers and birds of passage, and become social beings contained within systems they maintain as humans” (307–8).

Reverting to the path Gibbon did take, the first two parts of Barbarism and Religion IV build a compelling picture of the spatial frameworks within which accounts of European civilization prior to 1453 operated. Indeed, Pocock shows convincingly how in the physical and settlement geography of the Eurasian land mass, the eighteenth-century historiography which Gibbon elaborated on in the Decline and Fall found an explanation for the pulses of societal construction, change and decline in European history. On Pocock's argument, Gibbon, drawing particularly on Joseph de Guignes's Histoire (1756–8), saw the fuel powering European history as provided by barbarian hordes in Central Asia encountering and rebounding from the cultural imperturbability that was China. Pulses of nomads were repulsed by China and then sought other places to settle in more westerly locations:

As such, Pocock develops here a map of the imagined geographies driving Enlightenment historiography. Above all, this imagined geography ties together the image of an eternal, unchanging China drawn from Jesuit histories with a picture of a dynamic group of nomadic barbarians who are the motor for change; they both cause the decline of the Roman Empire and sew the seeds of European modernity.Footnote ¹³ For the key to Enlightenment stadial theories is that whereas the savage is unchanging, the barbarian learns to settle and thereby build civilizations just as complex as the Chinese one which had initially rebuffed them: “history became the narrative of how shepherds had been converted into settlers, a story in which ‘savages’ could find no place” (101). Implicit here, and something Pocock elaborates on in this volume, is the extent to which Enlightenment historiography occludes as much as it includes. Whilst eschewing the language of postcolonialism, Pocock is keen to point out that this imagined geography of European civilization not only created simplistic stereotypes of various places—such as an unchanging China—but also simply ignored other histories in other arenas, notably those of lands deemed unchanging by virtue of their savage inhabitants, and also the lands of southern Asia and Mesopotamia which had no role to play in the fundamentally Eurocentric story of Rome and its decline. By attending to the historiography of the barbarian and the savage as spatialized categories, then, Barbarism and Religion IV is drawn to show us the geographical imaginaries on which eighteenth-century historical narratives in general and Gibbon's Decline and Fall in particular were grounded.Footnote ¹⁴ If Gibbon's own sense of the role of geography as the eye of history is a fairly simple descriptive one which was commonplace in his era, Pocock shows us the complexities which Gibbon and his fellow historians faced in operationalizing this commonplace as they developed convincing geographical groundings for historical events occurring on a canvas as broad in time and space as that sketched in the Decline and Fall.

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There is, however, another and much more oft-discussed interaction between geography and the historiography of Enlightenment which has run through Pocock's Barbarism and Religion series. This is the concern, most prominent in the first volume in the series, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737–64 (1999), and indeed prefigured in Pocock's writings for a long time prior to this, to suggest that there is a complex set of geographies to Enlightenment itself.Footnote ¹⁵ In different places, Pocock has suggested, Enlightenment took on different characteristics such that it makes sense, historiographically speaking, to talk of an “English Enlightenment” which is distinct from that in Lausanne or Edinburgh, for example. Returning to this theme in the pages of this journal recently, Pocock has further suggested that different Enlightenments could be occurring in the same place in different contexts, the Amsterdam Enlightenments of Pierre Bayle and of Jean Le Clerc being very different in their aims.Footnote ¹⁶ Pocock's work in this regard obviously fits into a broader landscape of studies of the Enlightenment in supranational, subnational and national contexts which began with Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich's extremely influential collection The Enlightenment in National Context in 1981 and has ramified immoderately over the ensuing three decades, detecting not only national enlightenments but also provincial Enlightenments, peripheral Enlightenments, and networked and connected Enlightenments, to name but a few of the many spatialities in current Enlightenment historiography.Footnote ¹⁷

It is against this geographically variegated image of Enlightenment functioning at different scales and in different places in different ways which Pocock has championed that John Robertson's The Case for the Enlightenment is pitched.Footnote ¹⁸ For Robertson, there were shared characteristics which are definitive of a movement and a moment in intellectual history which can be designated meaningfully as “the Enlightenment” in the singular: “the intellectual coherence of the Enlightenment may still be found, I contend, in the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world” (28). According to Robertson, these characteristics transcended location and were exhibited in a restricted timeframe in the later part of the eighteenth century (after circa 1740), their seedbed being intellectual currents in the half-century prior to that time.

To make good this case, Robertson adopts a “comparative” method inspired by Marc Bloch, looking at Scotland and the Kingdom of Naples. True to Bloch and the Annales school, this comparative method leads Robertson to a geographical approach to refuting Pocock's case for the geographical specificity of Enlightenment, but one which draws on a very different sense of what about geography might matter to the historian. Indeed, in one sense Robertson is drawn back towards Gibbon's understanding of the role of geography in a way Pocock is not; geography is a collection of physical conditions which as an assemblage set the stage on which events—social, cultural and intellectual—take place. Robertson, then, draws on the ideas of geohistory—geography as a stage and a determinant—not on what I have labelled “geohistoriography”, spatiality as a device for narrative structuring.Footnote ¹⁹ This is most apparent in the second chapter of The Case for the Enlightenment, where Robertson gives a general survey of the social and economic history of the two places in his comparison. Robertson's justification for this survey is one which resonates closely with Gibbon and the traditional trope of geography as the eye of history: “without this preliminary account . . . the reader will be missing the sense of place which is as necessary to historical understanding—even to the understanding of ideas—as the sense of time” (53). Of a piece with this, in his preceding survey of recent Enlightenment historiography, Robertson castigates Jonathan Israel for ignoring precisely these sorts of material and geographical mooring points in his monumental rereading of Enlightenment: “it is as if ideas were free to fly at will across international borders before coming down to land more or less directly in individual minds” (9). Thus, and just as Gibbon does in chapter 1 of the Decline and Fall, Robertson opens his comparative narrative by a framing geography of the Kingdom of Naples and of Scotland which acknowledges complex similarities and differences in the geographical backdrops in which economic and intellectual life took place. He starts with an enumeration of their borders, going on to show how the physical geography of the two locations strongly affected their economies in the eighteenth century. Speaking of Naples, for example, Robertson suggests that its economy was “still at the mercy of the kingdom's geography” (70) and goes on to a short piece of historical–geographical word painting showing us that the geographical imagination is as important to present-day intellectual history as it was to the projects canvassed in volume IV of Pocock's series:

Deriving from Bloch, chapter 2 in The Case for the Enlightenment bespeaks a very important and indeed unusual commitment to bringing intellectual and material history together through the rubric of the geographical survey, part of the more general diversification of approaches to intellectual history which recent surveys of the field have detected.Footnote ²⁰

In a sense, chapter 2 of The Case for the Enlightenment does come across as something of a free-standing entity in the texture of Robertson's argument, notably when the reader is then thrown into meticulous readings of the Augustinian groundings of the work of the likes of Bayle, Mandeville, Vico and Hume, all of which reads as more traditional fare for intellectual history and seems but little grounded in physical geography. We are certainly a long way from the remnants of environmental determinism in the longue durée of Braudel and the Annales school. And yet chapter 2 is every bit as integral to Robertson's approach as the preliminary “View of the Provinces” is to Gibbon's. The connection between the broader argument about the intellectual history of “the” Enlightenment and the material groundings laid out in chapter 2 is made through Robertson's recurrent interest in what we might call the shared political–geographic situation which faced Naples and Scotland. Both, on Robertson's analysis and that of the Enlightenment literati he studies, were “kingdoms governed as provinces”, and it was this which led both to the characteristic preoccupation with political economy, an inquiry Robertson depicts as paradigmatically Enlightened. As such, it was precisely “the specific political and economic circumstances of the two kingdoms, and the repeated attempts by observers within them to understand their predicament, and identify ways by which they might escape it” (379) which tied material circumstances to the path to Enlightenment inquiry.

If Pocock in volume IV of Barbarism and Religion points to the limits and occlusions in the geographical imagination of Enlightenment historiography, he himself has proved remarkably catholic and inclusive in his understanding of the geographical and conceptual arenas in which Enlightenments can be detected. Committed to a singular conception revolving around a more tightly delimited range of inquiries, Robertson's sense of the intellectual and geographical scope of Enlightenment is discernibly more restrictive. Intellectually, for Robertson subjects such as geography are clearly beyond the remit of Enlightenment as a conceptual rather than a chronological category: Enlightenment focused on “human society and the physical and moral well-being of individuals in this world” (41). This tightening of the remit of Enlightenment moves against the recent efforts of historians of geography to bring the subject within the ambit of “Enlightenment”, but these efforts have themselves been predicated on the spatially variegated historiography of Enlightenment which Porter, Pocock and others have forged and at which Robertson aims his critique.Footnote ²¹ More importantly for the present discussion, if Enlightenment was only about this limited range of intellectual activity, it was as a consequence not to be found in all societies. As such, Enlightenment emerges as a more geographically restricted phenomenon for Robertson in terms of its spatial extent. On his account, it was “confined geographically to the European world (which still included colonial America)” and furthermore, “even within Europe, the reach of the Enlightenment was uneven” (41). Thus for Robertson the Balkans and Greece had but a tenuous foothold in the Enlightenment, and the key casualty is Pocock's English Enlightenment:

Moreover, where Pocock's nexus of geography and intellectual history focuses on what I have here termed geographical imaginaries, the intellectual history of ways of imagining spaces in European historiography, Robertson's nexus is in a sense far more traditional and far more akin to Gibbon's own approach, seeing geography as he does as a set of material realities which set the conditions in which the debates and discourses tracked by intellectual history operate.Footnote ²² For Robertson the geographical is a causal category which can help to explain intellectual history (albeit a minor one when compared to economic and social history, for example), where for Pocock the geographical is itself a category which has an intellectual history.

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Robertson's approach to rewriting Enlightenment historiography is resolutely comparative as opposed to networked. In other words, and Robertson states this on several occasions, he is arguing for a parallelism of intellectual interests in Naples and Scotland, not that there was anything more than the most minor direct intellectual traffic between the two places. Obviously, books and ideas were shared in the sense that the same texts were available in both places, most notably on Robertson's account there was a shared response to the challenge posed by Pierre Bayle's writings, but it was this common but unconnected access to the same ideas, together with the shared geographical and sociopolitical positioning discussed above, rather than direct contact between the two places, which led to their similarities in terms of the fashioning of Enlightened problematics. Other historians, however, notably historians of science, have been interested in the ways in which networks of knowledge construction and circulation—the direct communication between far-flung places through travel—forged ideas, these interests deriving from an engagement with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory.Footnote ²³ In short, some of the most interesting recent Enlightenment historiography has looked to the ways in which, reciprocally, knowledge travelled geographically and geography was forged as knowledge travelled. This forms part of a more general set of arguments being developed by historical geographers and historians of science about “geographies of knowledge”: the argument that the locations where knowledge is produced, the ways in which it circulates and where it is received are important determinants of its constitution. For scholars of this persuasion, knowledge is not the same everywhere, it is not—as in Robertson's critique of Jonathan Israel—something which floats above the locative context in which it occurs, spreads and is received.Footnote ²⁴

Both Miles Ogborn's Indian Ink (2007) and Neil Safier's Measuring the New World (2008) are exemplary of the emergent concern with “geographies of knowledge” and its impact on conceptualizing the Enlightenment,Footnote ²⁵ albeit they are influenced by slightly different historiographical currents, with Ogborn's work here and elsewhere redolent of the new imperial histories model,Footnote ²⁶ whilst Safier's work seems more directly indebted to the postcolonial projects of subaltern studies. Ogborn's book is a painstaking analysis of the functioning of the East India Company. Where the bureaucratic structure of the company has been studied before, Ogborn attends to the ways in which writing had to stretch across thousands of miles to make the company function. In a world where a letter of instruction could only go out once a year and a reply could only be expected the best part of two years later, knowledge and control were directly but rather tenuously networked. Two key points emerge in Indian Ink about geography and Enlightenment. First, that the technologies of writing—both print and manuscript—were themselves actors rather than mere intermediaries in the global drama of European expansion and empire which for Raynal was the great tragedy of modern history: “writing was not simply a commentary upon what happened, it was very much part of the action” (26). Second, if knowledge is geographically determined and writing is active in the construction of power relations, then an intellectual history attentive to geography is also one which reconfigures our knowledge of power: “the geographies of texts—where they were produced, how they travelled, where they were stored, and where they were used—were crucial in these processes of making texts have effects” (272–3). As Ogborn tracks knowledge and its travels/travails in the Indian Ocean, Neil Safier looks to the ways in which French Enlightenment knowledge was created in the transatlantic context. Specifically, Safier offers a powerful rereading of La Condamine's expedition to South America. The La Condamine expedition has often been seen as an early and paradigmatic exemplar of Enlightenment travel, one which would probably meet Robertson's benchmark. Being sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences, the aim of the expedition was primarily to help to resolve the debate about the shape of the globe and determine whether Newton's arguments for an oblate spheroid were valid or whether the Cassini Survey of France was correct in its arguments for a prolate spheroid. La Condamine, then, was to contribute to rational knowledge of the globe, but was also to collect “useful” information about South America. If this enterprise has often been viewed as a triumph of Enlightenment reason, Safier paints a different picture which has more in common with Raynal and Diderot's lament about the inevitable recrudescence to barbarism amongst explorers and colonists. He does this by attending to the circulation of knowledge from France to South America and back again, to the networked geographies of knowledge production and dissemination and their vexed relations to the print culture of Enlightenment Paris. Measuring the New World shows how La Condamine managed to systematically obscure the contributions of indigenous and creole peoples to the expedition, positioning it instead as a solely European achievement in his Relation abrégée (1745). If the Relation was an occlusion conducted by one man, La Condamine, Safier shows—akin to Ogborn—just how complex the print histories of such Enlightened geographical documents were through a fascinating analysis of the Spanish American creole Pedro Maldondo's map of South America, the Carta de la Provincia de Quito (1750), which was posthumously “edited” by La Condamine. Far from being a map as Maldondo intended it, the Carta was on the contrary a complex document which was fundamentally mutated and indeed mutilated by passing through La Condamine's editorship and through the printerly conventions of French cartography:

Just as Pocock notes the occlusions in the geographical imaginary of Enlightenment historiography, so Safier shows that similar silences determined the shape of geographical knowledge as it was presented in Paris and, thereby, to the European Republic of Letters more generally. If, as Robertson suggests, the Enlightenment was a primarily European phenomenon, Safier adds two important caveats. First, that on the ground overseas, Enlightenment was no such thing, instead being deeply dependent on local knowledges. Second, the European nature of the Enlightenment as an enterprise was one which was enforced in good part by the printerly practices through which knowledge came to circulate; where manuscript maps and journals bore the marks of creole and indigenous contributions, these were edited out in the print houses of Paris. In a typically pithy aphorism, Pocock notes that Enlightenment historiography, even at its most inclusive as in Raynal's Histoire, “could deny history to others even as it asserted their humanity” (Pocock, 225). One of the great achievements of Safier's work is to allow us to hear the voices of those from the age of Enlightenment who were thus silenced. In this case, Maldondo is heard himself: “he wrote to La Condamine that the separation of Europe and the New World “makes objects seem smaller than they actually are: America is far from Europe, and the mountains of Quito are very tall compared to those in Paris and Madrid” (165). And yet it would be his correspondent, that feted representative of Enlightenment science, La Condamine, who, as Safier so elegantly shows, was to do the flattening from a European perspective.

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If Pocock depicts Gibbon as an érudit drawing on the resources of a humanist historical culture which was waning and as sceptical of trends in modern historical scholarship represented by the philosophes, parallel comments can be made about Gibbon's attitude to geography as the eye of history. For, as Chenxi Tang's The Geographical Imagination of Modernity (2008) shows, by the last years of Gibbon's life in the 1790s, a fundamentally new conception of geography, one which Tang depicts as just as central to the articulation of modernity as the more touted rise of historical consciousness, was emerging.Footnote ²⁷ This conception was being built through post-Kantian projects of German scholarship led by Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter. If for Gibbon and his humanist predecessors geography was a static descriptive tableau, for Ritter et al. it was, on the contrary, the “dynamic unity of man and the earth” (3) which geography disclosed. Herder and Schelling showed that human consciousness was not detached from place but, on the contrary varied with place and, as such, geography looked at how places moulded consciousness and consciousness moulded places. If one needed to rework the metaphorical assumptions under which Gibbon worked for the age of romanticism, geography was no longer the eye of history but became its very soul. Whilst it is not Tang's quarry in this book, impressively wide-ranging as it is in the realms of philosophy and literature, one can easily see how making geography the soul of history made for a very different connection between the two arenas of knowledge. As geography moved to centre stage, so the great geographical histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be possible, works such as Spengler's Decline of the West and, especially, Toynbee's Study of History making geography integral to their narratives rather than rendering them mere descriptive prolegomena as in the Decline and Fall.

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The works discussed here, of course, belong neither to the historiographical world of Gibbon nor to that of Toynbee in the ways they connect geography and history; geography is neither a set of facts to be learnt by rote as it was for Gibbon and late humanist historians of the Enlightenment, nor is it the soul animating history as it was in Schelling's romanticism. And yet it is fascinating to note that they each in their different ways are reviving and reworking the time-honoured trope that geography and an awareness of spatiality are part of the historian's craft. Moreover, it is interesting that this is occurring not just in areas of historical inquiry where the link with geography may seem self-evident, as in, say, environmental history. Robertson's previously cited and rather apologetic clause suggesting a knowledge of place is important “even to the understanding of ideas” (my emphasis) implies that intellectual history is the last place where one might expect to see a reforging of the connection between geography and history. And yet this is in fact precisely where some of the most interesting work on this nexus is occurring both by historians such as Pocock and Robertson and by geographers such as Ogborn and Withers. For these authors geography is neither a determinant, as it was for Toynbee and Bloch, nor a simple stage, as for Gibbon. As such, neither is geography Gibbon's “eye of history” nor are we seeing a reversion to the geohistory of a century ago. Rather, different “geographies”, by which I mean here the varied spatial scales, settings and networks in which intellectual arguments are being placed by historians, lead to differing narratives about the nature of those intellectual arguments. Different geographies in this sense become the grounds on which different narratives are forged concerning events in intellectual history, in the case of this essay, those of “Enlightenment”. Geohistory and geography as the eye of history are, then, replaced for our era by “geohistoriography”, geography as the platform for different narrative strategies. Geography here means two types of things: first, the spatial arenas and scales to study when trying to examine the meaning of a movement in intellectual history. In the case of the differences between Pocock and Robertson, for example, whether one attends to a small area, comparing the Kingdom of Naples and Scotland, or whether one takes Enlightenment as something which will be found in different incarnations everywhere one looks, leads to drastically different images of Enlightenment. Second, geography means ideas of network, circulation and comparison. Taking a comparative approach, as Robertson does, leads to powerfully different understandings of Enlightenment from those generated by deploying ideas of networking and the circulation of knowledge as master metaphors, as do Safier and Ogborn. As such, the differing geographical imaginaries of the authors under discussion here lead to very different images of Enlightenment, but none of them is in fact especially interested in geography per se. The core of the interdisciplinary interests of all the authors discussed here remains in arenas outwith geography but central to the inherited traditions of intellectual history—empire, economics and political theory are the key areas they draw on and contribute to. Imagined geographies merely provide a new historiographical tool through which to develop new arguments in these arenas. And yet this is not to belittle the importance of this turn to geography in the recent practice of intellectual history. On the contrary, the geohistoriography canvassed in this essay has promoted serious debate about the scales at which movements in intellectual history operate and concerning the linkages, modes and patterns of transmission by which ideas diffuse and mutate. Taken together, this work points to the necessarily spatial as well as historical nature of intellectual history; part of adequately identifying and characterizing a historical period, movement or current such as “Enlightenment” is locating it. “When” and “why” in intellectual history cannot be divorced from “where”. As such, geography is not a mere add-on to a conceptually rigorous intellectual history, nor is it simply a complication to be grudgingly addressed, but it is instead a necessary context in the very framing of intellectual history's core questions. Ideas took (and, reflexively for all the historians under discussion here, take) place in places, and the ways in which ideas are understood to be located and to circulate are inextricably linked to the very nature of their characterization. To the extent that the characterization of ideas is the aim of intellectual history in all its many guises, it is inevitable that geography repeatedly resurfaces and is imbricated at the core of the narrative strategies of intellectual historians. Simply put, attending to the where of ideas makes for a more rigorous form of intellectual history. What is distinctive about the debates canvassed in this essay is their willingness to see geography not as a fixed backdrop (as in Renaissance historiography), nor as a set of causal determinants of human activity (as in Braudelian history), but as a set of (often implicit) concepts and categories which both drive intellectual activity and have their own histories. Geohistoriography brings geography into the ambit of intellectual history rather than leaving it as an external and unchanging determinant of that history, and in doing so it resonates as a practice with the broad tenor of postpositivist human geography (albeit more often by elective affinity rather than by direct communication).

Taken in the round, in the maelstrom of debate about the nature(s) of (the?) Enlightenment which is currently circulating and which Robertson's introductory chapter canvasses so elegantly and concisely, geography keeps reappearing and—to a surprising degree—setting not the terms of debate (for they are driven still by the more traditional concerns of intellectual history), but helping to create the terms in which those debates are narrativized. If Pocock's “Envoi” to Barbarism and Religion IV invites the reader to travel on with him through two further volumes, those scholars who are interested in the nexus of geography and intellectual history can only thank him for the paths which he and his interlocutors have already opened up over the past decade. Geography, it seems, really has become the eye of Enlightenment historiography in the present as formerly it was the eye of Enlightenment history. Mutatis mutandis, Gibbon would surely see this as “correct” history.