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Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a famous 18th century lawyer and

political philosopher. He suggested that geography was the key to history. Christian
opinion objected to this because it seemed to downgrade the importance of religion.
But historians also objected (and still do) for a different reason. Montesquieu is
accused of geographical determinism. Determinism of any kind – the idea that some
particular factor of other determines history - is a grave offence among modern
historians. They say it denies the true nature of history.

History, according to the modern consensus, is unpredictable, random, and

influenced by individual choices. Determinism ignores history’s finite variety and
complexity. History only seems to have a pattern after it has happened; hindsight, as
the saying goes, is a wonderful thing. In all these respects, history resembles life
itself. Indeed, it is the main value that can be claimed for history as a subject;
hindsight gives historians unique insights. All this was well summarised by historian
Frederic Maitland: “We should always be aware that events now long in the past
were once in the future.”* Historical outcomes are always unpredictable.

Determinism denies this.

*Novelist William Faulkner put it even more boldly: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Other examples of determinism are Marxism (economics determines history) and Tolstoy who
believed that big historical forces swept along individuals, even great ones like Napoleon.

The point is that Montesquieu made historians wary of geographers. “Historical
geography” emerged as a flourishing sub-discipline but it tends to be practised by
geographers. It has had difficulty in agreeing an underlying philosophy or
methodology. Despite this, interesting work has been done, mostly led by
geographers. Historians, as they often do, have tended to bunker in.

The geographical endowment
One recent exception is writer Robert Winder. In The Last Wolf: the Hidden Springs of
Englishness (2017), Winder argues that England’s landscape and physical geography
shaped our history more that historians realise. He begins in 1290 when a famed
hunter from Shrewsbury called Peter Corbet killed the last wolf in England. The
significance of this was that it made the country safe for sheep-farming, to which the
northern and western highlands were ideally suited. Other geographical advantages

were a temperate climate, moderate rainfall, good soil, plentiful rivers (transport,
water-mills) and a “ring road” of a long coastline. All these plus sheep and coal
brought prosperity, trade, and eventually the industrial revolution.

Winder says, “Englishness was the product not of racial or political factors, but the
tantalising outcome of many natural forces: the island location, its mild marine