The central theme of this book is the changing spatial pattern of human activities during the last 2,500 years of Europe's history. Professor Pounds argues that three factors have determined the locations of human activities: the environment, the attitudes and forms of social organization of the many different peoples of Europe and lastly, the levels of technology. Within the broad framework of the interrelationships of environment, society and technology, several important themes pursued from the fifth century BC to the early twentieth century: settlement and agriculture, the growth of cities, the development of manufacturing and the role of trade. Underlying each of these themes are the discussions of political organization and population. Although the book is based in part of Professor Pound's magisterial three volumes An Historical Geography of Europe (1977, 1980, 1985), it was written especially for students and readers interested in a general survey of the subject.

A Historical Geography of Europe provides an analytical and explanatory account of European historical geography from classical times to the modern period, including the vast changes to landscape, settlements, population, and in political and cultural structures and character that have taken place since 1500. The text takes account of the volume of relevant research and literature that has been published over the past two or three decades, in order to achieve a coverage and synthesis of this very broad range of evidence and opinion, and has tried to engage with many of the main themes and debates to give a clear indication of changing ideas and interpretations of the subject.

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This book is the first historical work to examine the notion of national territories in Yugoslavia – a concept fundamental for the understanding of Yugoslav history. Exploring the intertwined histories of geography as an emerging discipline in the South Slavic lands and geographical works describing interwar Yugoslavia, the book focuses on the engagement of geographers in the on-going political conflict over the national question. Duančić shows that geographers were uniquely equipped to address the creation of the new country and the numerous problems it faced, as they provided accounts of Yugoslavia’s past, present, and even future, all of which were understood as inherently embedded in geography. By analyzing a large body of geographical narratives on the Yugoslav state, the book follows both the attempts to “naturalize” and present Yugoslavia as a sustainable political and cultural unit, as well as the attempts to challenge its existence by pointing to unresolvable, geographically conditioned tensions within it. The book approaches geographical discourse in Yugoslavia as part of a wider European scientific network, pointing to similarities and specifically Yugoslav characteristics.

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.