The Traditional Association of Geography and History

Written by Dyami Millarson

Traditionally, geography used to be married to history and people mentioned the two in close association as they spoke of “geography and history.” Take note of the exact order of the pair: geography generally came before history, people usually did not speak of “history and geography.” There were a couple of book titles in the 19th century where the order of the pair was reversed, but the usual order in that century was the one where geography was mentioned first. Such stylistic preference speaks volumes about the importance that people traditionally assigned to geography. Both geography and history used to be subjects held in high esteem in earlier modern times.

Whenever I speak of traditional, I take the 19th century as example because that is the earliest age that we could consider truly modern, as it is culturally and technologically similar to ours. The modern world…