Though human geography has a very long history, it got increasing importance in the 18th and 19th centuries the view that there is close relationship between man and his physical environment was emphasized by the Greek and Roman scholars.
Herodotus, Aristotle and Eratosthenes attributed the progress of certain nations to their favourable environmental conditions.
Strabo and his contemporary Roman geographers attempted to explain the effect of geo-ecological features on the life and levels of progress of peoples.
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The Arabs, like Al-Battani, Al-Masudi, Al-Biruni, Al-Idrisi and Ibn-a-Khaldun also attempted to illustrate the relationship between physical environment and cultural characteristics of races.
The idea that environment controls the course of human action was revived in the countries of Western Europe during the Renaissance.
It received its modern credentials during the later part of the 18th century and the beginning of 19th century when Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter stressed on the relationship between social groups and their natural environment.
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The monumental work of Humboldt in the form of Kosmos and the Erd Kunde of Ritter testify the interrelationship between man and his environment.
Human geography became more popular after the publication of “Origin of Species” by Darwin in 1859. Friedrich Ratzel is, however, known as the founder of modern human geography.
His pioneer work “Anthropogeography” is considered as a landmark in the history of human geography. In this, Ratzel defined human geography as the “synthetic study of the relationship between human societies and the earth’s surface”.
In the similar fashion, Ellen Churchill Simple defined human geography as the “study of changing relationship between the unresting man and the unstable earth”. Subsequently, human geography attained great popularity in France.
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The French geographer Vidal de la Blache wrote a classic entitled Principles de Geography Humaine (published in Paris after his death in 1922 and translated into English in 1926).
Vidal stated that “human geography offers a new conception of the interrelationship between earth and man a more synthetic knowledge of the physical laws governing our earth and of the relations between the living beings which inhabit it”.
He, however, recognized that the human’s role was both ‘active’ and ‘passive’. Simple, while declaring “man to be a product of the earth’s surface, a child of the earth, dust of her dust which has entered into his bones and tissue, into his mind and soul” gave enough weight age to environmentalism which enhanced the credibility of human geography.
Else worth Huntington defined human geography as the “study of the nature and distribution of the relationships between geographical environment and human activities and qualities”.
Griffith Taylor formulated his ‘Stop-and-Go Determinism’ stating that man is able to accelerate, slow or stop the progress of a country/community’s development.
But he should not, if he is wise, depart from the direction as indicated by the natural environment.
In the 1930s, the discipline of human geography was divided into ‘cultural geography’ and ‘economic geography’ and subsequently several new branches like political geography, social geography, agricultural geography, industrial geography, settlement geography, urban geography, transport geography, crime geography, statistical geography, medical geography and geography of gender emerged out of human geography.
By the 1980s, human geography has widened to become an omnibus term, describing all those parts of geography which are not solely concerned either with the physical environment or with the technical issues dealt with under such geographical sub-fields as cartography.
The broad sub-fields of human geography are cultural geography, economic geography, historical geography, political geography, regional geography, social geography, urban geography, and medical geography, geography of administration and geography of gender. In parallel with geography as a whole, human geography is made up of three closely linked components:
(i) The spatial analysis of the human population, i.e., its numbers, its demographic characteristics, as spread over the earth’s surface;
(ii) The ecological analysis of the relations between the human population so defined and its environment, i.e., the human biosphere system; and
(iii) The regional synthesis which combines the first two themes in areal differentiation of the earth’s surface.
All these three themes are pursued at various spatial scales leading down from the macro level (that of the globe itself and major world regions) to the micro level (that of individuals and groups and their immediate local environment).
Human geography has its origin in some countries from the earth sciences and in others from the social sciences.
Human geography, however, has continuing links with physical geography. It has created acute problems of philosophical orientation of human geographers.
Some would argue that we need a much more fully specified model of human beings and their societies before the question of their geography can be understood; such an approach would point towards a more separate type of human geography, linked to social sciences.
In this view, human geography can be consistently defined as that part of the social sciences which studies people solely in relation to space and place.
It is currently dominated by several philosophical approaches, such as Marxism, positivism, radicalism, humanism, behaviouralism, realism, structuralism and functionalism, each of which leads to separate geographical research and writing.
Others would argue that it is precisely the link with the physical environment and with the analytical methods shared with other geographers that gives special character to the field, and allows it to contribute to problems which are, in the final analysis, multidisciplinary or extra disciplinary in character.
The debate is a continuing one with the bulk of opinion swinging strongly from the latter view.
Swings are partly associated with changes in scale of analysis. In both physical geography and human geography, the last four decades have seen a shift towards a concern why processes, and with this the intensive study of small geographical areas at a high level of resolution.
Such studies are typified in human geography by research on the perception of environmental hazard, on voting behaviour, and on migration patterns.
They demand a style of analysis different from the wider view of behaviour observed at the macro scale.
There are some contemporary parallels between human geography and economics. It is encouraging to note that in some parts of physical geography (notably climatology) suits of models have been developed which can take the analysis through from macrostructure at the world level, through mesostructures, to microstructures. Human geography still lacks the conceptual or technical basis for achieving this cross-scale linkage. It is likely that it will continue to be structured as a cluster of loosely related fields, i.e., economic geography, political geography, cultural geography, etc., until such suitable bases have been established.