Livingstone, David (1953–)

The history of geography was in some ways rewritten in David N. Livingstone's influential volume The Geographical Tradition (1992), which constituted both an important new disciplinary history and an attempt to write geography's history differently. Setting his work apart from textbook accounts and “in-house” disciplinary histories, Livingstone's book related the development of geography more closely to its broader social and intellectual contexts than had previous works, from Enlightenment challenges to classical authority, to the colonially acquisitive age of reconnaissance, to the age of statistics and the modern government and academic institutions of the late 20th century. Drawing on wider debates in the history of science, Livingstone demonstrated that geographical knowledge could be understood as a cultural product of, and political resource for, the times and ...