Progress in historical geography II: Desperately seeking connections (again) – The mendacious,the micrological,and the mercurial

Abstract

Historical geography’s core concern with connections between the past and present is currently expressed in an age marked by a desperate search for connections. The report considers how historical geography is linked to this scene through various ‘return of history’ ripostes and via the travails of what is described as its ‘pluriverse’. Three problematics are then identified: ‘the mendacious’ (about the truth of history); ‘the micrological’ (concern with biography and ‘small things’); and ‘the mercurial’ (regarding structural problems of violence and hope). Much for the subdiscipline now hinges on how the words freedom, truth, violence, and hope are treated.

I Introduction

Times change and fields of inquiry change with them – although not beyond recognition (Clayton, 2024; Domosh et al., 2021). The sub-discipline of historical geography is richly eclectic, today spanning over 50 topics and engaging manifold literatures. But it also has some core and enduring concerns – chiefly with connections between the past and present in different spatial forms: ‘Historical geographical research is an exercise in spatial and temporal connection’ (Beckingham and Hodder, 2025: 173). My quarry here is with how this lasting interest is currently expressed in an age marked by a desperate (pressing and gloomy but also expectant) search for connections (all manner of connections, many of them bearing on how the past, present and future are related), and with H.C. Darby’s (1953: 1) quip that historical geography occupies a ‘debateable land between geography and history’ as redolent as ever. This age is delineated below using a range of literatures and theoretical reference points, and the empirical examples given, and invoked as ‘historical geography’ for short, come from work by geographers who identify themselves as historical geographers and that from other parts of the discipline which alights on questions of history and temporality. The first half of the report sketches two historical geography reposes within this scene: through various ‘return of history’ ripostes, and (at more length) via the travails of what I describe as historical geography’s ‘pluriverse’. The second half homes in on three categories of sensibility and analysis within this general picture: ‘the mendacious’ (about the truth of history – in ‘woke’ times); ‘the micrological’ (concerning scales of meaning – especially biography and a concern with ‘small things’); and ‘the mercurial’ (regarding structural and circular problems of violence and hope, and the spatial toxicity of history).

This report is, unusually, a ‘two in one’. The delay since my first report has – with the editors’ permission – led me to write a single, long report number two instead of two separate reports. This is my second and final report, therefore.

My title is adapted from a 1995 essay by Barbara Stafford, entitled ‘Desperately seeking connections’. Published in Ecumene, which helped to forge new links between cultural and historical geography, the essay thinks about what happens to history, as a craft and construct, at moments of pronounced change. Stafford asked: What might connect the Enlightenment time of reason and science that was her scholarly domain to the postmodern time in which she was working, when truth and progress were being questioned? While such moments arouse wonder about how the past ‘surprises’ (not only explains but also re-orients) the present, she argued, they also come with the ‘worry’ that historical and geographical change are not naturally or easily explained. There is no surprise, indeed no connection between the past and present, she continued, without both ‘alchemy’ (curiosity and imagination) and ‘anxiety’ (about the relevance of history, and about the present getting cut adrift by a past that looks extraneous to it) (Stafford, 1995: 280–282). As Stafford averred, questions of historical and geographical connection are rarely fully settled, or stable for long, and as I suggest here, they are powerfully in the air again.

II Desperately seeking connections (again)

Age of Anger (Mishra, 2017); The Age of Inequality (Gantz, 2017); The Disinformation Age (Bennett and Livinston, 2020); The Work of Art in the Age of Planetary Destruction (Prasad and Osrin, 2023); Digital Lethargy: Dispatches From an Age of Disconnection (Hu, 2022); and The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century (Betz, 2023): these are just some of the popular titles and disquieting epithets used to describe recent times – chiefly as uncertain and disaffected. Scientists and economists, for example, debate whether ‘uncertainty’ is a force for good (problem-solving) or a lodestar of failure (the backbone of precarious climate and financial futures). As Adam Tooze (World Economic Forum, 2023) observes, ‘polycrisis’ (after Edgar Morin, denoting disparate, interconnected, and cascading crises), ‘cognitive shock’ (of feeling accountable but not in control) and ‘liminality’ (a time of thresholds and tipping points) are other emotionally charged monikers, nervously energised by the recognition that ‘to imagine that our future problems will be those of 50 years ago is to fail to grasp the speed and scale of historical transformation’. On the other hand, Charles Taylor’s (2024: xi) Cosmic Connections, on the importance of language in this ‘age of disenchantment’, continues to seek ‘attachment across space and time’ (via Romantic poetry), as does the wide-ranging collection What is History, Now? (Carr and Lipscomb eds, 2021), covering progressive historical literatures – on anti-racism, disability, emotion, imperial and post-communist nostalgia, and the queering of history, for example.

Of history’s multiple complexions – as advancement, escape, lament, lesson, lapse, and safeguard, for instance – it is history as fracture and wreckage that currently looms large, and as Hannah Arendt (cited Cronin, 2021) submitted, this kind of past brooks the present as an ‘empty space… which can only be described in terms of “no longer and not yet”’. Cindi Katz (2018: 725) adds that Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ who ‘looks back as he is pushed forward by a strong and unstoppable wind we call progress… to gaze at the passing past, its debris piling up as catastrophe’ now looks back as ‘the angel of geography’, with catastrophe and wreckage ‘grounded’ in slews of damaged landscapes and injured lives. Data (Our World in Data, 2024) suggests that the world is generally better-off today – in terms, for example, of levels of extreme poverty, child mortality, basic education, even the prevalence of war – than at any time since 1800, and Marcel Gauchet’s (2017) L’Avènement de la démocratie rides on them. But Gauchet offers what is in many ways a last gasp attempt to give history direction as an intelligible process of change that trends – through ups-and-downs of reason, invention, and struggle (depending on one’s theory of history) – towards a basket of benefits and possessions for which people have striven and might still hold out hope: comfort, equality, fraternity, justice, peace, and security. It is now more common to run into themes of anxiety, conflict, devastation, loss, myopia, prejudice, and suffering. Benjamin Noys’ (2024) worry is that ‘we live in a perpetual present that constantly mutates but never changes’.

Massimiliano Tomba (2019: 223) argues that modern history does not ‘evolve progressively along a historical-temporal line’ and that ‘we must replace the image of linear development with that of a historical multiverse’ – or geographical pluriverse. Decolonial thinkers use the term ‘pluriverse’ to harbour diversity and ‘radical independence’, embrace discomfort, and energise disruption to capitalist, colonialist, Eurocentric, and racist logics and their planetary effects (Escobar, 2017). In a review of ‘long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history’ since the 1970s, Katja Naumann (2019: 335) suggests that historians now work in a ‘multipolar, interactive, and transcultural’ world. Yet as Don Mitchell, 2021a: 136–138) notes, if the West is now long past what Michel Foucault saw as its nineteenth-century ‘obsession’ with history, with its ‘themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past’, its besting and decentring by more ‘relational geographies’ (and histories), as elements of this pluriverse and Naumann’s world, has proved tricky.

How is historical geography positioned in this? I shall sketch two general reposes and offer them as a prequel to my three m’s.

1 The return of history

Ideas of historical recurrence have long dovetailed linear understandings of history and are resurgent today. Jennifer Walsh’s (2016: ix, 7) The Return of History looks past Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) End of History (history following the Cold War – that ‘end' being Western liberal democracy) and tracks the global return of ‘dark forces’: ‘arbitrary executions, attempts to annihilate ethnic and religious minorities, the starvation of besieged populations, invasion and annexation of territory, and the mass movement of refugees and displaced persons… [along with] cleavages within Western liberal democracies as a result of deepening economic inequality’. Martin Thomas (2024) decries how both of these surveys neglect the ways in which the world was remade by the post-war ‘end of empire’. Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum (2024) charts how dark forces move on apace, with autocracy no longer revolving around individual dictators and tyrannical states but spanning murky networks of kleptocratic finance and military incursion, and snaking surveillance and regulatory regimes, disrupting conventional distinctions between democracy and despotism.

Long drawn to Marx’s idea that history repeats itself (first as tragedy, then as farce), David Harvey (2024) sees ‘eerie similarities between current global political and economic tensions [authoritarian governance, austerity politics, market individualism, and broadening social discontent], and those of the 1930s, suggesting a potential repetition of history that could lead to World War III’. In Oceans Rise, Empires Fall, Gerard Toal (2024) reflects on how the return of great-power geopolitics and ‘strong-arm’ leaders is fast undermining the international mitigation of climate change. Danny Dorling’s Shattered Nation (2023: vii) tracks Britain's current cost-of-living crisis back into a longer history of British national decline, and considers what a post-war history of ‘hunger, precarity, waste and exploitation’ (with things improving for a while before worsening from the mid-1970s) says about the current ‘geography of a failing state’. Political rhetoric and public sentiment that things were somehow better or simpler in the past need to be questioned, he argues, especially as they feed political promises about national growth and divisive ‘if only’ ploys (all would be well ‘if only’ jobs were protected, immigration was controlled, and so on).

Federico Ferretti (2022) insists that we still need to learn from past ‘indignations’ – in this case, from 1960s anti-fascist struggles involving geographers and how they impart ‘civic virtue’. Sonia Kaufman and Lise Nelson (2024) consider the uneven application of Title IX, 1972 Federal legislation geared to preventing sexual assault on U.S. college campuses and how returning to this historical geography ‘of litigation, administrative rule-making, and feminist activism’ can help ‘to broaden the scope of what “gender discrimination” means’. Lastly in this thread, in The Personality of Paris, Alan Baker (2021) deploys the modernist refrain that history does not so much repeat itself as shuttle between realities and spectacles of upheaval and splendour to show how Paris has fascinated writers and artists because of its split personality as a city of incredible beauty and violence.

2 Trouble in the historical geography pluriverse

The Journal of Historical Geography (JHG) and International Conference of Historical Geographers both have their 50^th anniversaries this year, and the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG had its in 2023. These forums offer rich opportunities for historical geographers from different countries and institutions to converse and nurture a subdiscipline that is now more decentred (by area and archive) than ever before, currently with scholarship from and on East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America surging, and with the fortieth volume of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies the first to focus exclusively on geographers from the ‘Global South’ (Baigent and Novaes, 2022; Jöns et al., 2024).

These milestones buttress a historical geography pluriverse that welcomes new ideas and practices, and as Ferretti (2023) notes, with a baseline commitment to archival ‘rigour’ and wariness about ‘anachronism’ (the hasty projection of present-day concerns on to the past). My point here, which I shall develop first off by returning briefly to Stafford’s time, is that this pluriverse is also currently under strain.

Stafford was writing in a postmodern time of scepticism towards modernity’s grand narratives and into what some geographers at this time said was a new ‘geography of truth’ (Thrift et al., 1995). At the heart of both were critical tenets about the construction, and eo ipso contestation, of knowledge. Knowledge was deemed to be partial, situated and power-laden (rather than objective and universal). Meaning and value revolved around ‘spaces of knowledge’, and this geography of truth would ‘cede [no] more power to the powerful than is necessary’. Knowledge was treated as a grounded and practical entity and undertaking, and the idea of history as an ‘inhuman force leading to foregone conclusions’ was spent. A new ‘reflexivity of knowledge’, placing the researcher in the picture of what was researched, was also nigh, and ‘ambivalence’, harnessed through five c’s (context, contingency, construction, contestation, and contradiction), became a progressive critical watchword that could be worked through a plethora of historical geographies (Thrift et al., 1995: 1–3). The idea that geography is a ‘contested enterprise’, as David Livingstone (1992) put it, came to the fore, and with a mantra that has propelled historical geography ever since: namely, that spatial and temporal phenomena mean different things in different times, places, and projects, to paraphrase Livingstone (1992: x; and see Clayton, 2024: 1980s and 1990s).

Yet none of this expelled Stafford’s residual ‘worry’ about how the past and present are connected. Indeed, exacting scholarship, as a cement helping to lay this concern to rest, now needs to fend off what Edward Said (2004: 50) saw as the return of ‘bowdlerisations’ (simplifications, sanitisations, and distortions) of history and geography. It also now grapples with what Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (2024) term ‘overshoot’: the piercing of planetary boundaries (the Earth’s ‘safe operating space’) and scrambling of conceptual frameworks of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ history. The need to tackle climate change collectively presents what David Nally (2024) sees as both an immediate and a deeply historical ‘multispecies commons’ problem: how to embrace and link different ways of knowing time and space, land and earth, and human and non-human being. What Peter Frankopan (2021: 11) says about why global history matters, but why it is difficult to do, also applies here: while the search for ‘greater global texture’ (a more ‘plural’ and ‘inclusive’ history) is in full swing, ‘the single greatest problem’ remains ‘technical expertise’ – one’s capacity to know and link scattered sources, study them in context, and do so with patience (not simply ‘parachute’ in and ‘mine’ for data). Yannan Ding (2020: 11) relays a version of this worry, noting, with respect to China, that there are ‘language barriers’ to its historical geography’s incorporation into ‘European-American’ models, and that ‘while the history of geography could not be told apart from a history of European capitalism, empire, racism and science, China's negligible role in this process has left Chinese historical geographers deserted… and rather indifferent towards that history because it is not considered as a part of Chinese history’. Lei Zhang (2023) writes, concomitantly, of the lasting consequences of the ‘Sovietisation’ of Chinese geographers.

As things stand, the pluriverse struggles to counteract what Peter Friederici (2020: 50) dubs the ‘defusing power’ of climate inaction. What does ‘creative engagement’ with the experience of climate change in the past bring to the present (McDonagh et al., 2024)? Such apprehension flickers through David Livingstone’s (2023: ix; 26; 407) The Empire of Climate, which ventures from ancient Greece through to the ‘current ethical and emotional challenges of unbridled climate change’. He finds himself having to re-fight the beast of environmental determinism (which geography thought it had slain), and with his story about ‘an older, much deeper fear about the power that climate exerts over us’ also running into panic about life on earth running out, and into climate denialism; ‘healthy scepticism’ runs into ‘a post-truth world’, as Glen MacDonald (2016) addressed the Association of American Geographers about such matters.

As the German blog Antereisis (cited Tooze, 2022) agonises, climate breakdown ‘can only be partially and never fully compensated by linguistic articulation and rationalization. Seeing-past, hearing-past, living-past – the blindness to apocalypse – are not an expression of refusal or political passivity, but mechanical consequences of an asymmetry between universal challenges and individual coping capacities’. Ben Anderson (2023: 133–134) sees ‘boredom’ as a potent emotion performing ‘an ethically and politically ambivalent detachment from the demand to act that accompanies urgency-imbued vocabularies of crisis and emergence’, thus propelling the continuation of ‘fossil-fuelled lives and futures’. Can work on climate’s historical geographies avert boredom or denialism in a situation in which climate’s historic powers (Livingstone’s ‘empire’) are at once locked into, and increasingly immaterial to, the future? Maximilian Hepach (2022: 139–140) contends that the Anthropocene ‘stretches to the limit’ broadly accepted critical approaches to climate as a ‘mutable’ concept. Adam Sobel (2024) cautions that ‘existential fears about climate change are actually Western fears about the end of colonial power, because in much of the rest of the world – especially for indigenous people – “catastrophe has already happened”’. But where does his ‘actually’ come from? Is it meant as remorse, or as a rebounding worry about climate change bringing unto ‘us’ anxieties and sufferings that were previously visited upon ‘them’ and thus ultimately not actually about ‘them’, even if this is still about the West’s moral culpability for ‘their’ catastrophe?

Prefacing a recent JHG special issue on heritage and monuments, Stephen Legg (2025: 1–11) dwells on historical geographers’ commitment to the idea of ‘contested historical geographies’ and how it has been emboldened by the recent Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements. Yet as Nina Debruyne and Georgeta Nazarska (2024: 188–190) show in connection with war monuments in post-communist Eastern Europe, research and activism in this vein both grasps the importance of not forgetting (of ‘contesting’ physical and symbolic objects that recall dark moments and forces) and recognises the difficulties in knowing how and what to ‘monumentalize’ and ‘counter-memorialize’. How does the invocation of ambiguity and complexity aid ‘contestation’ – and might it neuter it? Does a literature that variously deals with ‘monuments to forms of contestation’, ‘how monuments have been contested in the past’, and ‘how monuments have been contested as sites of critical heritage debate and dialogue in the near-present’ contest in a concerted way, Legg (2025: 10–11) ponders – and does it need to?

Meantime, growing interest in historical geographies of internationalism proceeds, in a Taylor-like way, from values of assembly, compassion, and pacificism, asking about how and where ‘the international’ (as a category and politics) has mollified conflict and fostered ‘alliances’, ‘networks’ and ‘mobilities’, and where it has involved appeasement or capitulation (Legg et al., 2021: 9; Ferretti, 2024). International conferences (dating back to the seventeenth century), including those of the International Geographical Union (centenary in 2022), are vibrant investigative sites in this regard (see Kolosov et al., 2022). Legg’s (2023: 38, 54, 130–158, 283) Round Table Conference Geographies, on the 1930–32 British/Indian roundtables in London that negotiated India’s constitutional future, treats international conferences as ‘lived spaces’. He shows how they operated through fine-grained and often unseen organisational details, bodily interactions, seating plans, the order of motions and speakers, and the work of translators. His treatment of the ‘subaltern diplomatic graft’ that freighted complex negotiations of nation, empire, religion, ethnicity, and imperial, communalist and constitutionalist politics at these London meetings is telling and has wider resonance. The fraught praxis of face-to-face connection he tracks is vivacious at this time of digitally mediated separation and isolation.

III The mendacious

It is now 25 years since Allan Pred (2000: 57) noted that the pursuit of ‘contested historical geographies’ rested on a wager: namely that meticulous scholarship would be persuasive enough to shift public perception. His worry at the time was that this connection might be flimsy. He worried, with reference to Sweden, that ‘Racism, regardless of its form’ works by ‘tricks of metonymical magic’ that surpass study and critique:

Social constructions of difference and Otherness are—abracadabra, hocus-pocus, simsalabim—transformed to appear in the guise of the natural, of the given and immutable, of unquestionable and undeniable facts, of categorical truth(-claim)s that cannot be otherwise. Transformed, given contour out of nothingness, to appear in the guise of a sure thing. Dominant discourse, with its power to name and define, its power to categorize and (mis)attribute, the magic wand. Uncontradictably so. Even in Sweden.

Pred pointed to ‘the mendacious’ as a potent connector of past and present, and his ‘even in’ refrain haunts critical historical geography today. The mendacious fixes and fastens histories and geographies as inviolable, in a twofold way: first, in the reactionary sense that the pluriverse can be charged with making the entire archive a slippery construct in which any truth can go, creating a need to reclaim something more definitive; and second, since the mendacious makes structural violence seem even more structural (natural, fictitious, or overdetermining, depending on one’s platform and situation). In short, the mendacious is an elementary aspect of how today’s divided times polarise and provoke. Martin Jay’s (2010) The Virtues of Mendacity considers the historic phenomenon of ‘lying in politics’, and with Jay prophesising its expansion into a full-blown post-truth era; and Frank Furedi’s (2024) The War Against the Past exemplifies the waging of a now sprawling culture war on ‘woke’, pleading that the West needs to ‘fight for its history’ – one which, it is claimed, does not have a serious problem with climate, or empire, or slavery and racism after all, with ‘woke’ academia not only exaggerating such things in the name of ‘diversity’ and 'decolonisation' but also disrespecting unimpeachable essences of history and identity (also see al-Gharbi, 2024).

In Deny and Disavow (Lester, 2022), and The Truth About Empire (Lester ed., 2024: 3-7), on the current ‘history wars’ in Britain, Alan Lester insists that the public needs ‘a more realistic understanding of the past, an important part of which was an imperial project of racial supremacy’. Lester (2022: 169) argues that telling the truth about empire is vital in equipping the public to ‘be critical of our forebears and seek to improve on our record of racism without beating ourselves up’. But the backlash – and personal invective – he has received, including in ‘academic’ reviews of these books, has been disturbing (to say the least) and is a sign of the times. While Lester’s work ‘promises to be a salvo against the recent rise of “pro-empire” history’, one politer reviewer (Rubinstein, 2024) opines, ‘it often falls prey to the same ailments it accuses its opponents of suffering from: cherry picking, logical fallacies, hypocrisy, and bad history’. Lester fastidiously engages with ‘six apologists’ arguments’ for empire and musters his expertise on British colonialism to dispel the ‘abracadabra’ of being called ‘woke’. But his hope that erudition and evidence will win out is embattled. Contested geographies, spaces, environments, landscapes, and their pasts, are caught up in a fractious world of disavowal and disinformation. ‘Blast and counterblast’, as Rubinstein (2024) concedes.

Operating as both category and sensibility, the mendacious is thus as insurgent and unsettling as Tomba’s alternative modernity. Timothy Snyder (2024: 7–11) lays down a gauntlet in this regard, imploring that ‘if we want to be free, we have to affirm as well as deny’, and fight like hell for five freedoms: ‘sovereignty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘mobility’, ‘unpredictability’, and ‘factuality’. Factuality is our concern here and matters are complicated by what David Beckingham and Jake Hodder (2022: 1298) describe as the digital ‘reshaping [of] archival research in geography’ through ‘novel practices of recombination’, with digitisation enjoining researchers to ‘extract and recombine fragments of historical information, drawn across multiple periods, places, collections and contexts’. If truth comes in fragments, then how and where might a wholly or credibly ‘recombined’ truth be found? This question seems quite different today than it did when Stafford posed it in her postmodern time. An important response comes from the historical geography of science literature, where, as Simon Schaffer (2022: 829–830) glosses, recent work explores how ‘the quantitative spirit … of the politics of science’, which was formerly based on distinctions between Western ‘precision’ and ‘subaltern, past and exotic worlds, where merely provisional judgement allegedly still operated’, is now seen through ‘complex entanglements of measurement practices [… a kind of mechanical currency] circulating across very different scientific cultures’. Matthew Hannah (2024) rallies around the idea that disclosure of such entanglements can still be an effective way of tackling ‘nonsense’ – current ‘spoofs and hoaxes’ around wokery and the disguise of underlying manipulations.

Can we contest our way out of the mendacious? David Matless makes a bold attempt in About England (2023: 6–7) and England’s Green (2024), tracing ideas and images of Englishness across a wide range of media (including geography, landscape, rural and urban planning, and heritage) over ‘a sixty-year present’ (from the 1960s to now) and making England ‘a country of contested variety’. National cultures, he maintains, subsist ‘only in a deconstructive state, affirming their singular nature while at the same time revealing their relationships with elsewhere, their internal heterogeneity, and their contradictions. None of this makes singularity false but describes its condition, its predicament’; a fractious geo-cultural politics of truth is at play and Matless’s wager is that ‘the predicament of Englishness derives in part from the complexities of geographical scale and from internal varieties’ (Matless, 2023: 11–17). As these snippets suggest, the progressive armature of ambivalence he brings to this English scene veers into unease about the ‘truth’ of the predicament named. To cut about ‘the green in England’, he writes, is to raise ‘the propensity for pastoral, and for dreams’, but also ‘to carry anxieties, to cast foreboding shadows’ (Matless, 2024: 62).

IV The micrological

Biography (including autobiography) has long been a staple of historical geography and latterly key to growing ties between the subdiscipline and work on the history of geography (Cresswell, 2024; Pinnock, 2024). ‘Geographical ideas don’t have a separate life of their own, falling from the heavens ready-made’, Trevor Barnes (2025: 62) reaffirms, ‘and to say otherwise is to indulge in “fetishism”’. Christophe Guilluy (2025: 12) adds that ‘geographers’ lives and works’ are today ‘fulsomely' bound up with historical and political forces. As myriad modern observers have urged, biography, as a mode of storytelling and writing history, attains particular significance at moments – like today – when frameworks and verities of history are uncertain, and narrative artifices of fiction struggle to connect with experience and reality (Scurr, 2018). In Inventions of a Present, on the novel in its ‘crisis of globalization’, the late Fredric Jameson (2024: 28–29, 65–68, 154–158) argues that modern histories of disaffection and disorientation now reach primarily into individual lives, with hopes and fears no longer so securely anchored in canons of community, society, or national culture, and public fascination with biographies of the rich and famous, and current spectacles of leader worship, intimating both a yearning for, and the breakdown of, ‘all that is solid’. What Yuan Yang (2025), writing about ‘coming of age’ in China and other situations of repression and conformism, terms ‘private revolutions’ is also caught up in this maelstrom.

Biography still offers rewarding ways into wider complexities and predicaments, albeit with the worry today (and not just for Jameson) that such entanglements point to how people are now in the thrall of neoliberal market individualism. Biography is thus imbued with ‘scales of meaning’, both geographically (from the body to the planet, and with flight a key motif) and analytically, with questions of free will and historical determination, and the theoretical reach and empirical specificity of individual experience, the concern.

In A World Without Hunger, for example, Davies (2022a: 17) uses the biography of Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro to ‘recalibrat[e] the history of radical geography away from Anglophone and Anglo-North American histories and towards a more imbricated, anticolonial trajectory of mutual influence’. In Empire, Gender and Bio-geography, Nuala Johnson (2024) considers how Victorian naturalist Charlottee Wheeler-Cuffe and her work in colonial Burma amplifies and unsettles connections between imperial science and colonial domesticity. Karl Offen (2023: 87) enters ‘The lifeworld of Elizabeth Symons’, there to see ‘the mundanity of racialized slavery and white indenture in Georgian England’. And Miles Ogborn’s (2021: 4, 16–17) short biography of Sir William Cass (eighteenth-century London businessman and politician) and his links to the slave trade (commissioned by the Cass Charitable Foundation), explores how Cass’s wealth, city connections, involvement in the Royal African Company, and philanthropic deeds were harnessed by practices of accounting that disguised slavery (and with the Foundation itself having already ‘resolved’ to change its name and remove statues of Cass).

Yet such biographical projects often engage broader dynamics with a hefty expectation placed on the reader to join the dots between ‘small’ and ‘large’. Castro’s concern with hunger ‘had extremely variable outcomes at different scales and in different institutions and conversions’; but might this detract from Davies’ attempt to find in Castro’s story a larger and ‘defining relationship between man and nature’ (Davies, 2022b: 17, 245)? Johnson recognises that how she bridges categories of Western and Indigenous science and culture can be tracked in different directions. Ogborn (2021: 16-17) ascertains that Cass’s ‘political career and his philanthropic activities demonstrate continuity with his involvement in the slave trade rather being separate from it’. Indeed, ‘understanding of slave trading as serving the national or public interest depended on Cass and the Royal African Company treating enslaved Africans as nothing more than commodities whose lives and deaths only mattered as items in their accounts’. Yet much in this quote and Ogborn’s tone of objectivity in this ‘authorised’ biography revolves around how ‘depended’ is read – who is reading?

The biographical now splays into what Chris Philo (2021: 87–91) calls ‘the micrological’, a term he draws from Theodor Adorno’s quest for an ‘antifascist geographical imagination’. Micrological investigation values ‘the small, the marginal, the unwanted, the unloved, and their nothing-much geographies’, Philo (2021: 87) says, and with individuals and small things caught up in a positive and negative (but mostly negative) dialectics: analytically powered to dodge absorption (disappearance) into capitalist-consumerist atomisation yet unable to fully escape violent and regulatory (fascistic) forces that stifle assembly and free expression, and fan dangerous and hateful flames of affirmation and division.

The micrological brings what Philo (2021: 93) describes as a ‘tricky spatiality of relatedness’, with attention drawn to a ‘not-too-nearness’ that eschews the traps of affirmation and might ‘spiral… through the pebbly spaces-in-between’. ‘Tales From the Dirt’ (Cabral et al., 2022) is one such ‘pebbly’ story, probing how barely visible life – Brazilian ants, mosquitoes and plankton – has ‘co-produced documents, landscapes and biographies’. In ‘Imagining the Black cook in Victorian London’, on ‘the [kitchen] labour undertaken by black working-class men and women within the hierarchies of domestic labour’, and in Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, Caroline Bressey (2023) and Olga Petri (2024), respectively, show how micrological investigation needs to harness how the nameless and derided are represented from slender historical sources that twist, disavow, and regulate their experience, yet how they still make their own spaces and ecologies (however fleeting and fragile they may be). ‘The micrological’ thus poses the question: What might still happen, in a not-too-near world of small details, when biography (circled around an individual) itself fails or is not a robust enough substitute for ‘macrological’ (grand theory, bowdlerising, and indeed fascistic) narratives?

V The mercurial

We also live in an age of what Elspeth Probyn (2018) terms ‘the mercurial’. She is ostensibly concerned with ‘the production of a mercurial ocean through the production of mercury as it is taken up and transported by atmospheric and oceanic currents from artisanal mines in Asia, and transformed into methyl mercury…. [which then] enters into the food chain and eventuates in the diets of certain populations, especially those in Nordic countries, with toxic effects into future generations’. But the term brings wider questions about how history and geography, land and sea, and life and ecology are connected by potent yet capriciousness currents, and with her analysis informed by a feminist politics of what Ruth Gilmore (2022: 106) terms a ‘changing same’ (of racism, patriarchy, gender-based violence, toxicity, and planetary destruction).

The mercurial connects the past to the present through a complex and fractured world of surges and rolls (scrambling the purportedly levelling energies and interchangeable parts of globalisation) and heightens sensitivity to spatial and temporal matters of fixture and flow (continuity, loop, disjunction, recurrence, disruption, and extrication). Probyn’s mercurial angel of history and geography is not a plaintive witness to human violence and environmental destruction but a scrupulous auditor of how injury and security, exposure and immunity, and damage and resilience are linked. The mercurial denotes both the cunning (sophistications and toxicities) and capriciousness (unpredictability and dissimulation) of power. The term might be used as a shorthand for a wide range of work concerned with how history and geography are connected through quandaries of violence and hope, and dynamics of circulation and rebound.

Fixture comes in literatures on racial capitalism, settler colonialism, infrastructures of empire, the Anthropocene (and related terms of capitalocene and plantationocene), and abolition and decolonial geographies, that draw time and history through spaces and environments of abjection – the barricade, border, camp, colony, gulag, mine, plantation, prison, reservation, slum, wall, and toxic wasteland. The past is here, and now, liable to be flattened and abstracted as an indelible scene of violence, exhaustion, dispossession, alienation, and unfreedom – as of course it should be. Simpler, more stringent, pasts are needed to get at this scene. More fluid and co-eval mappings may not help (may serve harder apologetics). This ‘structural’ reading of history involves more than the potential for anachronism. Historical geographies of violence, as means of naming and arraigning persistent abuses, contaminations and injustices, necessarily distil the past to help imagine and lay the groundwork for more inclusive and less violated futures.

Cyrus Schayegh (2024: 476), for example, reviews how the concept and study of settler colonialism hinges on ‘structural continuity’ (sameness across its historical and geographical variegation). Time is telescoped and difference is condensed. The past is drawn into recurrent patterns of racialisation and dispossession, binaries of settler and native, and logics of assimilation and elimination. Work on ‘toxic geographies’ (Davies, 2022b) similarly brings structural concern to how different forms of violence (colonial, environmental, epistemic, humanitarian, mutating, racial, spatial, fast and slow, and so on) work and are connected. The plantation is invoked as an ‘ugly blueprint’ (McKittrick, 2013, cited Barua et al., 2023) for an epoch dubbed the ‘plantationocene’: a world promulgated through ‘the unending quest to produce even more commodities… [and] the violent expropriation of human labor [hinging on Black dispossession] and the unpaid work of nature’; one giving ‘the impetus for the mechanized factory production system sometimes referred to as an inflection point of the Anthropocene… [to generate the] new extractive frontiers that foster the ongoingness of plunder’; and one essential ‘for understanding the “global sickening” marked by emerging diseases’ (Barua et al., 2023). The précising of history in such terms is vital to the work of planetary appraisal and critique. As Maan Barua (2022: 13) asserts, planetary predicaments involve more than ‘the universal agency of humankind’; the plantationocene (as produced nature and historical condition) becomes the lodestar of a ‘fraught nature’ that is more-than-human, albeit with human practices and semantics of exploitation and profit integral to imagining a countervailing ‘vegetal’ historical geography.

In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron (2021) argues that the need to think about colonialism and racial capitalism in structural, or transhistorical, terms stems, geographically, from the fact that their pollution circulates across the great expanse of the mercurial ocean, and historically from the realisation that there has been much too little learning from historical geographies of toxicity. Similarly, the idea of ‘reparative futures’ (Myers et al., 2024) based on justice does not simply stem from the claim that ‘the past is present in all future making activities’ but more fully from the recognition that ‘in order to create futures characterised by justice it is essential to listen to and engage with ongoing histories of repression, violence and domination’.

Yet as Probyn highlights, contingency and context need to be kept in play if a telos of destruction and despair is to be kept at bay and we are to cut through ongoing toxicities. Craig Colten’s (2021) State of Disaster, on the historical geography of Louisiana’s ‘land loss crisis’, keeps the structural and contingent in circulation. Ogborn (2023: 81–83) reflects on how the originator of the idea of ‘racial capitalism’, Cedric Robinson (in his 1983 book Black Marxism), used ‘different historical geographies of capitalism and Black people’s resistance to oppression… to effect shifts in ways of seeing race, capitalism and politics’ and with Robinson less intent on abstracting or trans-historicising the term than some of his followers have been.

Questions of connection and circulation also have critical truck within this mercurial framework of fixture and flow. Mobile Museums (Driver et al., 2021) underscores the significance of ‘circulation’ to how museum objects and collections (mainly here natural history ones) both ‘mobilised’ imperial exchange and are now being ‘re-assembled’ (reaching and linking different places, practices, and decolonial agendas). Novaes and Lamego (2025: 87-91) ‘Oceanopolítica’ explores how Brazilian geographer Therezinha de Casto tracked the standardising/colonising lusophone mapping of the South Atlantic to ‘diverse epistemic contexts’ and across different ‘liquid and solid spaces’. Diarmaid Kelliher’s Making Cultures of Solidarity (2023: 9–12, 198) recovers connections between London and Britain’s coal communities during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike in order to question mythologies of working-class solidarity and advocate ‘a politics of class [that] does not have to be antagonistic to various forms of liberation politics’. David Featherstone (2023: 1411) examines ‘the circulation of struggles between different sites’ in the dispersed affairs of ‘subaltern seafarers’. Hannah Fitzpatrick’s (2024) Mapping Partition considers how the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan (one of the largest and deadliest forced migrations in human history) pivoted on boundary-making practices that translated the fluidities of diplomacy into the fixity of the map (partition line). In Apathy of Empire: Cambodia in American Geopolitics, James Tyner (2024: 282–286) explores how this vital 1970s moment in U.S. ‘national security’ discourse presages latter-day concern with how war and security involve ‘constant circulation’ between different economic, geopolitical, intelligence, and military means and ends. Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity (Lobo-Guerro, Presti and Reis eds, 2021: 7-21) considers the ‘connectivity effects’ of imperial cartography, with connectivity a ‘methodological device’ for examining how maps link and separate in multiple (concentrated, attenuated, alienating, distorting, presumptive, and, in all, capricious) ways, and how it is this process, rather than a cartographic ‘will to power,’ that invests maps with authority, motility, and dissonance.

The mercurial also encompasses what Gilmore (2022: 28, 39) describes as a dialectic of hope and violence – revolving around how, when, and where people ‘feel free to rise’ (or not). Madeleine Hamlin (2023) shows how the contemporary ‘abolitionist turn’ in geography is unthinkable without the historic (structural) role played by property and the state, and Mitchell (2021b: 137) adds that we are far from finished with the concomitant ‘tyrannical reign of absolute space’. Gilmore’s analysis is structured around the ‘carceral’ form and concerned with how ‘freedom is a place’ involving ‘active’, ‘quotidian’, ‘imperative’ and ‘provisional’ struggles around ‘specific categories’ – of ‘policing, immigration, terrorism, budget activism, injunctions, sexuality’, and so forth (Gilmore, 2022: 91, 126, 423). A geography pluriverse, as integral to getting free and staying safe, seeks to disassemble a diffuse carceral apparatus. Lara Choksey (2021: 82–83) emphasises, in connection with the felling of the Colston (Bristol slave trader) statue in Bristol, that struggles to ‘get free’ will be stifled – and in this case, we will be unable to ‘mourn lives that have not been permitted to live’ – if ‘the sophistication, the embeddedness of racist machinery’ today is underestimated.

In Lot, Sarah De Leeuw (2023) writes in poetic couplets to jointly disclose everyday (deep-rooted racialised and gender-based) colonial violence in the unceded Indigenous (British Columbian) land of her childhood, and reach for a new language of being with the past and present that can furnish more just shares in the future, and especially with land. She blends different ways of knowing and seeing through her geo-poetics to underscore the entanglement of structural-everyday violence and the hope (drive) for a re-imagined history and geography. In Life, Earth, Colony, Ian Klinke (2023: 10–12, 88–91, 251) recovers Friedrich Ratzel’s nineteenth-century ‘necropolitical geography’ (prescient obsession with death and decay) in part to query what he sees as the hopeful ‘temptations’ of philosophical ‘vitalism’ at work today in the ‘more-than-human geography’ literature: its expression of organic and inorganic forces (geo and bio) as ever generative and fecund, and with ‘structural violence’ thereby downplayed, at our peril.

Decolonial, abolition, Black, and Indigenous geographies work, in the above ways, both as unrelenting critiques of prevailing historical-geographical injustices and as unfinished projects of freedom-making. From an Indigenous geographies perspective, ‘constellations of peoples re-rooted into place refuse Western ideals of democracy and development and engage with one another in new arrangements based on ancestral ways of knowing’ (Hazlewood et al., 2023). ‘History is not a long march from premodern racism to postmodern pluralism’, Gilmore (2022: 106, 199) avers; ‘racialized lines continue powerfully, although not exclusively, to define freedom’s contours and limits’ (including around the ancestral). Freedom has been ‘seized’ by ‘forces of empire, imprisonment, and inequality’ – but it is a place (project, ground) nonetheless. Gilmore (2022: 122) sees all of this as rudimentary to a ‘historical geography of the present’ and the creation of new ‘historical-geographical futures’. A world of steamrollers and refusals.

VI Conclusion

Of course, history and its connections with geography are important, but how? Of course, there is hope, copious resistance, and critical acumen aplenty in the poly- and pluri- world that historical geography inhabits, but it faces some strenuous forces of destruction and disinformation. Of course, inclusion and diversity, but to what end, and attuned to weather what pressures? Freedoms and futures pivot on both progressive alliances and revanchist banalities, giving historical geography a ‘mixed and split’, rather than just eclectic, hue and challenge. Suggesting that the past is now more structurally than contingently tied to the present brings new questions about how ‘situated and contested historical geographies’ work. The question of what happens when the facts (as a byword for careful – critical and contextual – scholarship) don’t fit the political narrative or public perception of an alternative reality is now acute. What Ivan Marković (2024: 27) terms a ‘new presentism’ in historical geography, which posits that ‘the past and the future do not exist as separate categories but are always projections of specific presents’ now struggles with its prevailing theoretical grounding in ‘the partiality, situatedness and contingency of historical geographies as well as the embodied and performative nature of archival labour’. Are different politics and poetics – new evidence, archives, facts, labour practices, determinations of freedom – needed to historicise and question today’s ‘age’ of disconnection and disdain? Can the historical geographer’s pluriversal ethic continue to do good, or will it get fractured or pressed into echo chambers of the converted and unconverted? Is history, upon which this review has largely traded, now more about Stafford’s worry than about her prospect of surprise?

What is said today of its past has been written here – as others have written before (Stafford included) and historical geographers are now writing more and more – in what Mitchell (2021b: 370) describes as ‘the present tense about a tense present’: ‘Located somewhere between the time it takes to read this sentence and the collective insanity Friedrich Nietzsche ascribes to an epoch, it [writing, representation] is an impossible or at best an experimental project, constantly overtaken by events that require rethinking and rewriting in real time’. Much of the above involves an ‘overtaking by events’. Yet Mitchell would not demur from the sentiment that there is also collective insanity in not recognising, and still needing to fight like hell to break the chains of, Gilmore’s ‘changing same’. There are many questions for the subdiscipline right now about how and from where historical geography seeks connections between the past and present. Much in its investigative armature now seems to hinge on how the words freedom, hope, truth, and violence are conceived, written about, and acted upon.