Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 40 (2013) 109e121 115

encouragement from the somewhat older André Cholley e DeMartonne’s successor at the Sorbonne. French physical geographybecame increasingly process-orientated and quantified, with fieldwork being followed by laboratory analysis, and specialist branchesof physical knowledge proliferating under the direction of youngerpatrons. Despite this growth, Broc concludes his ‘long history’ on aless than optimistic note. By 1970 physical geography in France facedchallenges from ecology and environmental science, and manyFrench geographers (and their students) saw themselves as socialscientists. In 1990 the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (thenational funding council for research) disbanded its ‘Geography’section (32), with physical geographers joining various other sec-tions, and human geographers joining ‘Espaces, Territoires, et Sociétés’(section 39). In a final section Marc Calvet and Christian Giusticonsider the changing fortunes of physical geography in France inthe first decade of the twenty-first century. The proportion of Frenchgeographers defining themselves as ‘physical geographers’ fell from30 percent in 1967 to 20 percent in 2007, and many of them refo-cused their attention on major environmental challenges.

This is a masterly history of academic geography in France,notable for its breadth, for setting geographers’ work in its intel-lectual context, and for its humane vision, shown, for example, inits reference to the young physical geographers killed in the GreatWar. There are of course some omissions, but this, Broc’s last work,brought to completion only withMarc Calvert’s help, is a fitting endto a distinguished career.

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.009

Gavin Bowd, Un géographe français et la Roumanie; Emmanuel deMartonne, 1873e1955. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012, 218 pages, V23,paperback.

Despite being a relatively unknown name to most readers of thisjournal, Emmanuel de Martonne had a long and influential careerthat made its mark on geography and geopolitics. Born into anacademic family, he excelled at the Ecole Normale Supérieure inParis, being greatly impressed by the teaching of Paul Vidal de laBlache. In 1899 deMartonne obtained his first university post and ayear later married Vidal’s daughter, Josephine. In 1902 hecompleted his first doctorate, a regional monograph dealing withthe Wallachia region of Romania. His career never looked back. In1909 he brought out amajor textbook on physical geography, whichwent through many editions, and moved to the Sorbonne where hesucceeded his father-in-law as professor of geography and head ofthe Institute of Geography, a position he held until retirement in1944. He was long serving co-editor of the Annales de Géographieand a driving force behind the Association de Géographes Français,and the preparation of the Atlas de France. In 1931e1932, hebrought out a two-volume work on L’Europe centrale, as part of thegreat Géographie universelle series conceived by Vidal. At this time,de Martonne was secretary general (1931e1938) of the Interna-tional Geographical Union, later becoming president (1938e1949)and honorary president (1949e1955). In 1942 his volume on thephysical geography of France appeared as one of the final parts ofthe Géographie universelle, and the Société de Géographie de Pariswas under his chairmanship from 1947 to 1952. He taught gener-ations of undergraduates at the Sorbonne, mentored an importantcohort of doctoral students, made research visits to many parts ofthe world, and published a large number of articles and reviews.

In addition to all his responsibilities, de Martonne had a strongcommitment to studying Romania, to promoting geography in thatcountry whose boundaries were subject to repeated change, and todefending Romanian language and culture. During the first worldwar, he undertook intelligence work for the Service Géographiquede l’Armée, participated in the Comité d’Etudes from 1917, andprovided geographical and cartographic information for the terri-torial commission of the peace conference that traced the bound-aries of new states and revised the limits of existing ones. Notsurprisingly, he displayed a particular interest in Romania andprepared a distribution map of Romanians that, through the dataselected and the cartographic devices employed, served to favourthe expansion of Romania at the expense of neighbouring states,particularly Hungary. It seems that de Martonne preferred to teachgeomorphology rather than discussing geopolitical work with hisstudents, but in recent years a number of French geographers andhistorians have investigated this aspect of his career. Gavin Bowdadds substantially to this body of knowledge with the appearanceof the present monograph and two preparatory articles in 2011. Heis primarily a specialist in French language and civilization, but hasan additional interest in Romanian and has published on severalaspects of that country. His very detailed study of de Martonne isinformed by archive and library work in Bucharest and Cluj, as wellas by investigations in France, the USA, and UK.

Un géographe français comprises three long chapters dealing withde Martonne’s involvement in the cause for creating a ‘greaterRomania’ at the conclusion of the first world war; his return visits tothe country between the wars and his promotion of geographicalteaching at Cluj andBucharest; and the subsequent replacementof his‘bourgeois geography’ that was overtaken in Romania during thecommunist period by alternative brands of the discipline, directed toresource management and economic development, which emanatedfrom Moscow. However, the intellectual legacy of de Martonnereappeared in the late 1960s when three FrancoeRomaniangeographical conferences were held. The centennial of his birth in1973 was celebrated not only in Paris but also in various cities inRomania. Gavin Bowd has assembled some fascinating detailregarding de Martonne’s many visits to Romania, his fieldwork andinvolvement with geopolitics, and the ways in which ‘French geog-raphy’was accepted between the wars only to be rejected after 1945.During the 1920s and1930s, deMartonne taught in several Romanianuniversities, took young French scholars to Romania, and acceptedselectedRomanianstudentsat theSorbonne. Fiveofhisownadvancedstudents undertook doctoral research in Romania but only RobertFicheux (1898e2005) completed a thesis e at the age of 98. His oldfashionedmonographwas published in Bucharest in 1996. Thenamesof the four other French students (Odette Girard, Geneviève Vergez-Tricom, André Nordon, and François Weymuller) may be found inspecialized bibliographies, but otherwise have disappeared from thegeographical record. Much to the irritation of local scholars whopreferred a Romanian candidate, Ficheux was appointed professor ofgeography at the university in Cluj in the late 1930s, before returningto Paris in 1939 and to the life of a schoolmaster.

In 1973 Ficheuxwrote a very informative biographical essay on deMartonne for a Romanian journal in which he provided an even-handed evaluation of the rigorous work and cold personality of hisinfluential mentor. Curiously, Bowd does not cite this article but I amnot aware of any other source about de Martonne’s devastating caraccident in 1953 that is mentioned there (p. 180). Bowd declares deMartonne to have been rather sympathetic to the cause of MarshalPétain during the German occupation but gives no substantiatingevidence (p. 153). On this point, I would have welcomed at least onesupporting reference. I rather regret that Bowd relies entirely onfootnotes rather than listing a bibliography. I would have preferred alittlemore contextual information on deMartonne’s life and career in

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 40 (2013) 109e121116

general to complement the sharp focus on his Romanian connection.Itwould have been helpful to indicate thatGaëlleHallair’swork ondeMartonne and central Europe (with many contemporary photo-graphs and maps) is available in electronic form. A map or twoindicating the changing configuration of Romania during de Mar-tonne’s lifetimewould have assisted readers ofUn géographe français.However, these are minor quibbles. Without doubt, Gavin Bowd hassucceeded in casting fresh light on the activities of a largely forgottenFrench scholar who not only contributed massively to the develop-ment of academic geography in France, Romania, and internationally,but also used geographical knowledge and cartographic techniquesto help shape the political map of Europe.

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.010

Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, andthe Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870e1950. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 2011, xiv þ 496 pages, $29 paperback.

In the late 1930s Hailey’s African Research Survey set out to addresswhat was perceived in Britain as a disorganised and insufficientbody of knowledge about its African territories. This book takesHailey’s project as a focus around which to explore how scientificwork in Africa had been taking place, and how it changed in theearly twentieth century. In order do justice to colonial science,Tilley suggests, we need to shift our understanding of field sciences.Rather than reading them as passive, descriptive practices we needto see them as experimental and interventionist in ways moreusually associated with the laboratory. We might also reconsideraccounts that suggest that colonial scientists merely reproducedpolitical attitudes. In fact they highlighted the destruction causedby European farmers, dislodged hierarchical racial physiognomies,and dispelled views of the tropics as inherently fertile locations.Scientific investigations that were intended to magnify the state’sability to intervene in colonial territories instead ended up chal-lenging the state’s authority and eroding epistemological andmoralcertainties. By further destabilising schemas where the metropolefigures as source and centre, Africa as a Living Laboratory makes anexcellent addition to work on colonial and imperial circuits.

The book begins with a chapter exploring the networks ofknowledge, and the presence of scientific practice in late nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century Africa. What were the im-peratives for ’knowing’ Africa? How to go about it? Chapter twoaddresses the origins of the African Research Survey, its interestsand dynamics. The four following chapters focus on four particulardisciplines: environmental science, medicine, racial psychology,and anthropology. Tilley illustrates developments in the researchconcerns and methods of each of these using a selection of projectsand debates. Chapter three looks at the birth of environmentalscience. Here she demonstrates how the foundations of theNorthern Rhodesia Ecological Survey lay within the context of localworries about agricultural methods. Chapter four deals primarilywith the East African medical research institutes, and links thenature of these institutions to the specific difficulties of under-standing the vectors of disease transmission through both naturaland social processes. Chapter five frames academic studies of raceand intelligence in Kenya within debates about access to highereducation and white-collar posts. Chapter six investigates howacademic anthropologists and colonial administrators encounteredmagic, and how divergent research shaped the limits of each of

those professions, as well as legal decisions. Chapter seven bringstogether the themes of the book, and sets out some of the structuralchanges that emerged at the end of the period.

Interwoven into Tilley’s sensitive portraits of experts in Africaare two secondary theses. The first argues that problem-solvingspecific to the region necessitated an interdisciplinary approachthat was less frequently seen in the metropolitan environment. Anew perspective emerged from the African colonies that saw thesocial and natural as interconnected in complex ways. Africabecame an important arena for developing Arthur Tansley’s visionof an ecosystem that included human activity in its scope. Thesecond thesis is a defence of the impact of what she entitles’vernacular science’. In each of the projects she describes shecarefully picks out the ways in which science allowed indigenousagency and knowledge to be translated for the state.

While many might contest her generosity towards colonialscience, Tilley convincingly argues that wemust see it as more thanthe tool of a clumsy state. She clearly demonstrates where re-searchers stepped beyond that role. However, her interest in thevoices of particular pioneering scientists, such as the ecologist ColinTrapnell, the naturalist Charles Swynnerton, or the anthropologistMargery Perham, casts the scientific communities as perhaps justslightly too autonomous. The work of these researchers success-fully counters the mindset of the metropole, but appears to flourishonly when aims happen to coincide e how far can the notion ofindependence extend? Likewise, Tilley lauds the African Survey forits recognition of a diversity of scientific work in the Africa of the1930s, but an important consequence of that report was the cen-tralisation of research policy back to London and away from theterritories in question. The book acknowledges this fact, but doesnot explore it. There are few details about the beginning and end ofthe given period, and the reflections in chapter seven are too briefto allow the reader to draw more profound conclusions on thelegacy of interwar research.

Finally, the book draws the ’development state’ back into theearliest years of colonial Africa, arguing that these British colonieswere ’designed to be development states: their telos, from the start,was focused on resources, revenue and production rather thanpolitical participation’ (p. 17). It vividly relates how local employ-ment and resource questions influenced scientific research, andhow they served to structure the ‘living laboratory’. In herconclusion, Tilley suggests that it might be productive to extend thedefinition of ‘laboratory’ even further to embrace recent de-scriptions of European colonies as the ‘laboratories of modernity’.However, she largely represents economic concerns and pressuresthrough governmental archival material, which obscures the role ofcapitalist enterprise in colonial development. One wonders whatfresh insights might come from redefining ‘experiment’ to includecommercial scientific research and entrepreneurial ventures.

Despite these problemsof emphasis, the bookbrings together andanalyses avast range of sourcematerial. Tilley re-assembles statisticaldata regarding funding and employment, follows networks throughpersonal and professional correspondence, and locates policy de-cisions in theminutes of a host of institutions. She uses them to drawintricate connections among individuals, government bodies, andother groups involved in these projects. The range and depth of casestudies successfully carry through an extremely ambitious compar-ative project. Those interested in colonial science cannot fail tobenefit fromher exploration of the common ground and divergencesbetweenmetropolitanpolicy, scientific interest, and colonial realities,and the jostling of various forms of bureaucracy and expertise inresolving these differences. Finally, for those interested in the geog-raphies of science, this book provides an outstanding demonstrationof the means by which British colonial Africa generated localisedforms of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, reviews the