Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History

Humanities

PART ONE

Deepening Scholarship: Developing Historiography through Spatial History

HISTORICAL GIS PROJECTS TYPICALLY GO THROUGH A NUMBER of phases of which perhaps three can be identified: database development, exploration and enhancement, and topic-led questions. The database development phase, in which the database is constructed, is usually the most time-consuming, which in turn tends to make it expensive in terms of both academic time and frequently the grant income required to make it happen. Perhaps ironically, it is also the phase for which the academic or academics concerned will receive the least credit, even though it frequently involves a major scholarly effort.

The exploration and enhancement phase has a number of aspects of which only a few may be relevant to a particular project. In most projects this phase will be concerned with producing initial results from the database using a data-led perspective in which the researcher discovers the information provided by the database. This stage may also involve developing new methods for enhancing the database, interrogating the data, or disseminating the data electronically, perhaps by putting the database on the Internet to allow other users to explore it.

In the third stage, research shifts from being concerned with the data and what can be done with them to taking a more traditional approach of choosing a historical topic and developing research questions about it. The GIS database is used as the main source with which to further develop the historiography concerned with that particular topic. In other words, at this stage the researcher moves from having to have the skills of a data analyst to being a more traditional historian. This is also, as we have seen, the most important phase for the long-term success of the field, as its audience moves from being relatively narrow specialists – members of the HGIS community – to being historians in general interested in a wide range of possible topics.

The three essays in part 1 belong in this final stage of conducting spatial history. They cover three very different topics: railways and agriculture in Britain and France, racial segregation in the urban United States, and religion and conflict in Ireland. Beyond this, however, there are some clear similarities. First, as was discussed in the introduction, these three essays all follow social science–based approaches to quantitative sources, reflecting the origins of HGIS and the length of time that it takes for a large project to move to this third stage. Second, all are based on very large, national-scale databases, but in all cases the databases are only of passing interest, relevant only because they allow the subsequent research to take place. In several cases significant methodological work has also taken place (e.g., to allow data that show changing administrative boundaries to be directly compared), but again, this process is only of passing interest in these essays. Instead, all three chapters are concerned with a particular applied research question or set of questions within their topic, and each topic has a distinct geographical focus. Schwartz and Thevenin are concerned with the importance of the distance that farmers had to cover to transport their goods to market as the railway networks developed in Britain and France. Both Beveridge and Cunningham focus on the geographical segregation between different communities: black from white in urban America and Catholic from Protestant in Ireland, respectively. Third, in approaching these topics all three essays combine a broad geographical scope – all of Ireland, Britain, and France and comparisons of major U.S. cities – with a thorough exploration of the detailed geographical patterns revealed by GIS-based analyses. All three also cover long time periods of between half a century and two centuries. Beveridge and Cunningham bring their work as close to the present as currently available sources allow. They were able to do so because of the ability of GIS to integrate data from different sources, in most cases censuses from different dates. While there are similar sources for different dates, Schwartz and Thevenin and also Cunningham were able to integrate other sources that would seem to be unrelatable to their main source because all of the material is located in space. Schwartz and Thevenin were able to compare information on the location of railway lines and stations with local administrative areas, allowing them to explore the importance of distance from rural parishes to the main transportation network on agriculture. Cunningham was able to compare data on the locations of killings during Northern Ireland’s Troubles with census information on the populations in which these killings occurred.

Thus, although these three chapters are concerned with very different topics, bringing them together illustrates the ways in which HGIS databases and techniques can be used to conduct applied works of spatial history.

ONE

Railways and Agriculture in France and Great Britain, 1850–1914

ROBERT M. SCHWARTZ AND THOMAS THEVENIN

Losses year after year and increasing competition indicate that the crops now grown are not sufficient to support the farmer. When he endeavors, however, to vary his method of culture, and to introduce something new, he is met at the outset by two great difficulties…. The first [is] the extraordinary tithe … ; the second is really even more important – it is the deficiency of transit… .

It is not too much to say that three parts of England are quite as much in need of opening up as the backwoods of America. When a new railroad track is pushed over [American] prairie and through primeval woods, settlements spring up beside it. When road trains [in Britain] run through remote hamlets, those remote hamlets will awake to a new life.

RICHARD JEFFERIES,

Steam on Country Roads, 1884¹

AFTER REFLECTING ON AMERICAN AGRICULTURE AND RAILROADS, Richard Jefferies, an agricultural journalist, saw one thing clearly: Britain must catch up. Goods trains in agrarian America, he wrote, stopped not merely at stations but virtually anywhere along the line where there were grain and produce to pick up. The British farmer, alas, enjoyed no such convenience. To get crops and produce to market was a struggle. First, he had to cart them to a railway station – a slow journey of up to ten miles. Then, at the station, he faced a long wait, eventually surrendering to the middleman to get his goods to market.² British trains went from town to town, but they needed to go to the farms and the crops.

Road trains, Jefferies argued, were the solution. These redesigned steam-powered trains would run not along rails but on country roads, stopping at each farm and loading at the gate of the field.³ Railways, he granted, would still be essential for long-haul shipments, but the road trains would bring much-desired change. With speedy transit at hand, farmers, he continued, would plant perishable fruits and vegetables on unused plots, the rural population would grow, and British farmers would recapture revenue that was going to the Continent and America for imports. To break open rural isolation, daily road trains for passengers would connect villages with market towns. Remote hamlets would spring to life.

Casting his eye across the Channel at old rival France was no consolation. France was moving ahead of Britain, too: We have lately seen the French devote an enormous sum to the laying down of rails in agricultural districts, to the making of canals, and generally to the improvement of internal communication in provinces but thinly populated. The industrious French have recognized that old countries, whose area is limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlimited, by rendering transit easy and cheap. We in England shall ultimately have to apply the same fact.⁴

Jefferies’s lament takes us back to a period of crisis and adjustment in the international division of labor and sets the scene for something new: a comparative spatial history that bridges the gap between two research areas typically treated in isolation from one another, one on railways and the other on agriculture. What we discover is a better understanding of change over space and time between rail transport and agricultural production. Although rural rail service was a boon to farming by opening distant urban markets, it also pinched farmers where it hurt, bringing intensifying international competition in foodstuffs to the farm gate. Still, even as competition grew and the agrarian depression of the 1880s and 1890s struck agrarian economies, accessible rail transport often helped farmers adapt to the new market conditions of the globalizing world of the late nineteenth century. Jefferies was unable to see this, even though he accurately depicted the general crisis of confidence in European farming.

HISTORICAL GIS AND SPATIAL HISTORY

Farmers of the period knew very well that their fortunes increasingly depended upon railways and their freight charges. Today, few scholars doubt that railways and agriculture were linked and interdependent, and yet historians concern themselves almost exclusively with one or the other subject. Rare exceptions to this offer valuable insights that we can improve upon in several ways. GIS and spatial analysis make it possible to study larger and more complex bodies of evidence at different scales and over time. Here, our georeferenced evidence comes from large databases on railways, population, and agriculture for Great Britain and France from the 1830s to the 1930s. Another improvement is our use of a comparative approach to investigate patterns of change within and between states the better to identify and explain both similarities and differences in countries that had differing political economies, a difference reflected in agricultural policy by British free trade and French protectionism. In this period of globalizing markets, comparative history is all but indispensable for understanding the position of any geographical area and its producers in its relation to the shifting international division of labor – a need underscored by its absence in much of the literature on the agrarian depression of the late nineteenth century.⁵

Among historians of British agriculture there is a consensus that the depression in Britain was not a general crisis in agricultural output but one that varied by region and that struck the cereal-growing regions of the south and southeast much harder than elsewhere in England and Wales. Debate continues, however, as to whether or not British agriculture failed to meet the challenges of intensifying foreign competition. Pessimists point to the demise of large, more productive farms, a lack of innovation and entrepreneurial savvy, and the government’s complacent dependence on imports from the bountiful agricultural resources of the United States and Britain’s colonies.⁶ As more regional research is undertaken, optimists argue that resilience, not failure, characterized English farming in difficult circumstances.⁷ The role of rural rail transport in response to the agrarian depression in this literature, whether it is optimistic or pessimistic, is usually absent or mentioned only in passing.⁸

The same is true in research on French agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. By and large, studies of agricultural performance and the depression in particular concern themselves with the national level alone, and studies of specific regions are only beginning to appear.⁹ Meanwhile, debate over French agriculture echoes that over British farming. French pessimists marshal evidence old and new to demonstrate that French agriculture lagged behind Britain and most of western Europe.¹⁰ Optimists respond with new data and arguments that the French system of small farming was more rational and productive than commonly thought.¹¹ Within France itself, a long-held generalization is that in agriculture – as in industry – the country was divided between the developed north and the less developed south. On the issue of regional disparities, new opportunities for comparative spatial history abound, thanks in part to Jean-Claude Toutain’s work on regional variations in productivity growth from 1810 to 1990.¹² One major finding was that north-south disparities narrowed after 1860 and that growth rates in the two regions converged at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, owing in large part to the increased productivity of the wine and market-gardening sectors in the south. Toutain’s data and argument bring welcome attention to the issue of agricultural restructuring after 1850 and renew debate. One recent article, for example, argues, rather unpersuasively, that regional specialization of the kind that developed in Britain was largely absent in France from 1870 to 1914.¹³ In fact, the issue calls out for further research. In our larger work we answer the call, showing that the geographic restructuring of French agriculture was much facilitated by railway expansion. Although we do not pursue the broader patterns here, our analysis of the Department of the Côte-d’Or in Burgundy illustrates our