In this chapter we explore the textual and material evidence for the transformation of the city of Antioch in northern Syria from the seventh through ninth centuries. Through observations of the environmental shocks, including the Justinianic Plague, which first arrived in AD 542, as well as the effects of a series of major earthquakes, we assess demographic changes that likely accompanied these events. Following this, we explore some possible reconstruction of the population of Antioch and its hinterland. In the early medieval period, a reassessment of the material evidence, read together with descriptions from medieval texts, demonstrates that a level economic and social activity, probably significantly exceeding previous estimates, persisted through the ‘Dark Ages’ of the seventh-ninth centuries.

The Introduction chapter reviews recent literature on the history of nineteenth-century meteorology, particularly as it relates to weather observation. It sets out the book’s argument that projects to establish meteorological observatories should be treated as observatory experiments. The chapter explains that the book presents four historical geographies of meteorological observatories: ships at sea, colonial buildings, huts on mountain tops and suburban back gardens. The remainder of the chapter considers the following questions in relation to debates in the relevant literature and in the context of the nineteenth century: What counted as a meteorological observatory? What was the right way to observe the weather? How were observatory networks configured? How were weather data managed? And what were the ends of observatory meteorology?

This chapter situates the present rise of far-right intimidation and attacks against social justice movements in Oregon within the state’s history of white supremacist violence. Utilizing archival research, it elucidates the presence of vigilante activity at the heart of Oregon’s early development, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the exclusion of Black people and the persecution of people of Chinese origin. The article then sheds light on a leading exponent of those efforts to create a “white utopia”: the Klan’s idea of securing a white supremacist “Realm” through a complex understanding of vigilantism that includes policing groups, bodies, and space. The chapter further discusses the subsequent development of the City of Portland’s large fascist movement during the 1930s. Lastly, the chapter shows how the growth of the post-war Patriot movement out of the failed interwar fascist movement developed along the same porous boundaries between policing and vigilantism, on the one hand, and Conservative and fascist, on the other, enabling paradoxical partnerships engaged in an increasingly conflictive relation to the state.

Historical geography is one of the disciplines associated with toponymy and historical toponomastics. It aims to investigate the settlements and land uses of a place with evidence from archival sources and can help to analyse the remote origins of place names. This is evident in the example of Bistagno, a village located in Piedmont, northwest Italy. A number of scholars have used historical-geographic methods and sources to account for its name, with varying degrees of success. Methods and sources from historical geography can also be used in more contemporary contexts. For example, another case study shows how written records and newspapers were utilised to study the many toponyms renamed after Romania turned Communist – with the aim of celebrating the Communist ideology, figures, and worldview. This was followed by an extensive renaming in Romania’s post-Communist/post-Socialist era, when the new leaders removed links to Communism. In the case study of Singapore, the authors trace the names and naming processes connected with three toponyms in the relatively young nation, by using maps, archival documents, and books. The new field of study, historical geographic information systems, brings a new tool to the historical analysis of environments and geographic areas.

The conclusion examines comparative images of mountains in European atlases, particularly those of Heinrich Berghaus. This allows for a reprise of the key arguments by showing how remaking the Himalaya as globally commensurable necessarily meant erasing scientific uncertainties, failures of practice and dependence on indigenous expertise and labour. These are linked to broader issues in the histories of science, empire and geography to expose the assumptions that underlay the making of allegedly universal categories. The conclusion then briefly considers the trajectory of scientific practice in the Himalaya later in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, it argues that the comparison of uplands was central to the process of ‘othering’ that confirmed the mountains as the margins. Whether in applying horizontal divisions of latitude to vertical changes in vegetation or delineating ‘normal’ bodily reactions to the atmosphere, the lowlands always remained the point of reference. As a result, the conclusion argues that the notion of ‘the global’ itself needs to be understood as a powerful tool of empire, and calls for innovative new approaches to global history and the history of science.

This chapter examines the impact of Roman imperial expansion on the Atlantic rim of the Roman empire, an “ecological frontier,” so the chapter argues, that traced a natural arc encompassing southern Ireland, southwest Britain, the whole Atlantic coast of Gaul from the Cherbourg Peninsula to the Pyrénées, most of the Iberian Peninsula, and the far northwestern corner of the African continent. A set of case studies illustrates how the territories, resources, and peoples of this ecological frontier zone were integrated into a Roman imperial system centered on the Mediterranean basin. The chapter argues that this Atlantic rim was integrated in a highly differentiated way that not only shattered a preexisting Atlantic world that had been bounded and unified, but also reordered its constituent parts in the service of empire. The chapter’s central thesis, seemingly paradoxical, is that imperial integration and regional fragmentation went together.

Chapter 2 leaves the rural rainforests of the northern Pacific lowlands for its two small urban frontier towns: Nóvita—the capital of Chocó before independence—and Quibdó—the capital of Chocó afterward—where the majority population of white slaveholders and mineowners lived alongside the entrepreneurial merchants from Jamaica, France, and Italy who began to settle in the Pacific lowlands after independence. Based on tax records, wills, travelogues, and other archival sources, this chapter offers a door-to-door geography of Quibdó after the Wars of Independence and explores the small-scale slaveholding central to its households. Despite slavery’s slow destruction under gradual emancipation rule, the local trade in slaves and Free Womb children paradoxically remained as active as ever in Chocó well into the 1830s and 1840s.

Exploring the concept of India, the absence of a continuous tradition of urbanism there was due to general environmental instability. The important long-term secular development that lay at the foundation of Indian civilization was not urbanization; it was agricultural expansion and the rise of peasant villages. This process occurred relatively late. Not until the early medieval centuries does agricultural expansion become truly significant anywhere in India or the “Indic” realm that comprised South and Southeast Asia. The ancient Indian empires of the Mauryas and the Guptas were in no way the counterparts of the Roman and Achaemenid empires but, in contrast, mostly ideological, vaguely Buddhist constructions of ritual sovereignty providing only loose, extensive, and horizontal modes of integration along nodal points of long-distance trade. There was no prehistoric or ancient urban and imperial heritage that shaped the historical development of the Indo-Islamic world in medieval and early modern times. This sets it apart from the Islamic Middle East.