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History and geography or history versus geography?

So what is the precise relationship between history and geography? This a more
difficult question than it appears. It is often assumed that they are natural
bedfellows. Historian Robert Tombs says, “Geography comes before history. Islands
cannot have the same histories as continental plains.” This sounds self-evident. But
what exactly does it mean? Ian Morris has a neater formulation, “Geography shapes
history, but history changes what geography means”; yet he calls his latest book
“Geography is Destiny.”

Interest in this has been revived by Brexit. The focus is understandably on Britain and
Europe. Both Tombs and Morris are among historians* who have written Brexit-
inspired histories of Britain. They attempt to explain Brexit by relating it, in different
ways, to our “deep history” and our geographical location as “offshore islanders”.
They basically say that while the histories of Britain and Europe were closely
interwoven, some aspects of Britain’s history set it apart and “explains” Brexit*.
Brendan Simms describes how profoundly Britain was bound up with Europe, but

usually with a focus on countering threats from Europe. When the British were
offered an agreed merger by the Europeans in 1957, they were nonplussed; the old
defensive feelings came to the fore, and in 2016 they triumphed.

*Robert Tombs The Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe 2021; Ian Morris Geography is
Destiny: Britain and the World, a Ten Thousand Year History 2022; Brendan Simms Britain’s Europe:
a Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation 2016. Paul Johnson pioneered this approach in
Offshore Islanders (1972).

David Edgerton in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History
(2018) takes a different view: “Brexit is a recent phenomenon which lives in the here
and now.” It has “nothing to do with deep history.”

In general terms, geography does not tell a simple story about Brexit. Which is more
significant – that we’re islanders, geographically separate from the continent? Or

that we’re offshore, adjacent to it?

Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Just as Theresa May said “Brexit is Brexit,”
so “history is history”. Shouldn’t we study it for its own sake? Writing history
“backwards”, trying to show how a particular outcome was somehow determined by
geography or some other factors is problematical. It nearly always distorts the
evidence. This has bedevilled relations between history and geography ever since the
th
18 century. It is all perhaps the fault of Baron Montesquieu, author of The Spirit of
the Laws (L’Esprit des Lois, 1748).