Human Geography

Preface to the Fifth Edition

Geographical dictionaries have a long history. A number were published in Europe in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a few – mostly those with greater pretensions to providing

conceptual order – were described as ‘Geographical Grammars’. The majority were compendia of

geographical information, or gazetteers, some of which were truly astonishing in their scope. For

example, Lawrence Echard noted with some asperity in his 1691 Compendium of Geography that

the geographer was by then more or less required to be ‘an Entomologist, an Astronomer, a

Geometrician, a Natural Philosopher, a Husbandman, an Herbalist, a Mechanik, a Physician, a

Merchant, an Architect, a Linguist, a Divine, a Politician, one that understands Laws and Military

Affairs, an Herald [and] an Historian.’ Margarita Bowen, commenting on 1981 on what she took to

be Geography’s isolation from the scientific mainstream in Echard’s time, suggested that ‘the

prospect of adding epistemology and the skills of the philosopher’ to such a list might well have

precipitated its Cambridge author into the River Cam!

It was in large measure the addition of those skills to the necessary accomplishments of a

human geographer that prompted the first edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography. The

original idea was John Davey’s, a publisher with an extraordinarily rich and creative sense of the

field, and he persuaded Ron Johnston, Derek Gregory, Peter Haggett, David Smith and David

Stoddart to edit the first edition (1981). In their Preface they noted that the changes in human

geography since the Second World War had generated a ‘linguistic explosion’ within the discipline. Part of the Dictionary’s purpose – then as now – was to provide students and others with a

series of frameworks for situating, understanding and interrogating the modern lexicon. The

implicit model was something closer to Raymond Williams’ marvellous compilation of Keywords

than to any ‘Geographical Grammar’. Certainly the intention was always to provide something

more than a collection of annotated reading lists. Individual entries were located within a web of

cross-references to other entries, which enabled readers to follow their own paths through the

Dictionary, sometimes to encounter unexpected parallels and convergences, sometimes to encounter creative tensions and contradictions. But the major entries were intended to be comprehensible on their own, and many of them not only provided lucid presentations of key issues

but also made powerful contributions to subsequent debates.

This sense of The Dictionary of Human Geography as both mirror and goad, as both reflecting

and provoking work in our field, has been retained in all subsequent editions. The pace of

change within human geography was such that a second edition (1986) was produced only five

years after the first, incorporating significant revisions and additions. For the third (1994) and

fourth (2000) editions, yet more extensive revisions and additions were made. This fifth edition,

fostered by our publisher Justin Vaughan, continues that restless tradition: it has been comprehensively redesigned and rewritten and is a vastly different book from the original. The first

edition had over 500 entries written by eighteen contributors; this edition has more than 1000

entries written by 111 contributors. Over 300 entries appear for the first time (many of the most

important are noted throughout this Preface), and virtually all the others have been fully revised

and reworked. With this edition, we have thus once again been able to chart the emergence of

new themes, approaches and concerns within human geography, and to anticipate new avenues

of enquiry and new links with other disciplines. The architecture of the Dictionary has also been

changed. We have retained the cross-referencing of headwords within each entry and the

detailed Index, which together provide invaluable alternatives to the alphabetical ordering of