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Title: Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography) by Matthew G. Hannah, Alan R. H. Baker, Richard Dennis, Deryck Holdworth ISBN: 0-521-66949-9 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 14 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: digging into the mastery of territory with Foucault
Comment: Matthew Hannah's "Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America" is an interesting, even intriguing work in historical and political geography. It is concerned about how power over territory is politically articulated and established through different discourses (through the writings of texts, drawings of maps and through governmental practices like censuses and administrative record keeping). Hannah focuses on late nineteenth-century America and the public career and writing of Francis A. Walker, superintendent of two national censuses (1870 and 1880) and a prominent political economist, social commentator and educator.

Hannah has two purposes of the book. The first purpose is to enrich the field of historical geography of the modern American nation-state. This is done by using Foucault's ideas about discourses and governmentality. Governmentality is here understood as "the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of ... complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security [legal power, bureaucracy etc]" (p. 22). In short, governmentality is a web of different practices, based on institutional power and various kinds of knowledge, which enables the rule of a territory and its population. The second purpose is to clarify the inherent and fundamentally spatial nature of governmentality in practice. This is done by weaving the complexity of governmentality into a geo-historical tale about industrial, urban and modern changes in the USA. But Hannah just does not point out the spatial character of Foucault's idea on governmentality. He also develops the notion of governmentality by adding a gender perspective. By identifying the gender issues in the case of the governmental restructuring of the American nation-state, by Walker among others, he shows that patriarchal construction of gender dualism and the creation of masculinity and masculine objects is very much a part of governmentality in this especially case. Hannah therefore claims that governmentality not necessarily has to be structured fundamentally by gender issues, but that "we should not be surprised to find that it often is" (p. 28).

I enjoyed reading "Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America" for several reasons. One of his purposes with the study is to challenge the intellectual aesthetic "according to which theory should be kept to a minimum" (p. 220) in historical geography. By weaving together an empirical tale and theoretical discussions, the tale becomes exiting for me (this ambition also stands for Robert Dodgshon's "Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change", also published in Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography in 1998, even if Dodgshon almost apologize for his ambition). Further, as a well-known interpreter of Foucault, Hannah succeeds in condense Foucault's writings and apply Foucault's rather abstract reasoning in an empirical full-length study. Finally, again following Foucault, Hannah is "intensive" rather than "extensive" in his use of theory, using a limited range of documents intensive instead of attempting to refer to every theoretical and historical source at hand. As the production of academic literature grows exponentially (it seems), the intensive use of theory may (and has maybe been for some time now) be the only manageable use of theory in the future. Hannah's study could be a methodological guide in such a case.

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Title: Geography and History : Bridging the Divide (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography) by Alan R. H. Baker, Richard Dennis, Deryck Holdworth ISBN: 0521288851 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 06 November, 2003