Abstract
Regions within the Pale differ in their physical geographies supportive of human geographies. Each region has its own internal physical variations as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2002), 14. Also see Robert E. Mitchell’s, “Antebellum Farm-Settlement Patterns: A Three-Level Approach to Assessing the Effects of Soils,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Winter 2011).
- 2.
See Kollmann’s first chapter, “Land, People, and Global Context,” for how the geographical and physical foundations of Imperial Russia influenced agricultural output and expansion. She adopted Hechter’s “Internal Colonisation” theme in interpreting how Russia ruled its constantly expanding land acquisitions. Nancy Shields Kollmann, The Russian Empire 1450–1801 (Oxford, 2017). Man–land relationships involving different kinds of land are overlooked in the historical literature.
- 3.
There were Jewish farm owners and farmers , as will be mentioned again later. And individual Jewish families living in shtetlach had vegetable gardens as well as dairy cows, small ruminants, and fowl feeding off of common lands.
- 4.
I do not know if there is a land registry that can be used by economic historians of the area.
- 5.
Ellsworth Huntington and W. W. Cushing, Principles of Human Geography (Wiley, 1922).
- 6.
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin Books; Revised edition, 2011).
- 7.
Among Robert Kaplan’s, many publications is The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House, 2013). I also cover the influence that soils and vegetation hand on the settlement of America. See my “Antebellum Farm-Settlement Patterns: A Three-Level Approach to Assessing the Effects of Soils” as well as my forthcoming, The Closing of Michigan’s Farm Frontier.
- 8.
Russell Fifield, a political scientist who taught economic geography at the University of Michigan in the 1940s and 1950s, would tell his students about an exam question used by a British government agency to weed out applicants for certain international relations positions. They were asked to track an English freighter leaving London for a worldwide trip dropping off and picking up cargo at all ports along all the continents’ seashores on the way back to London. Candidate-applicants also had to name the bays and rivers for each port. This was a good introduction to worldwide economic geography . The professor also reported that the interviewees typically failed one port: Calcutta. It is on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges.
- 9.
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) as well as individual countries (including the US government) have agricultural and other maps covering the Pale. See, for example, http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/soils/docs/Soil_map_FAOUNESCO/new_maps/V_petit.jpg.
- 10.
http://www.britannica.com/place/Poland/The-Sudeten#toc28227. Significant areas of some states in American Old Northwest Territory had major water drainage problems that took time, technology and funding to resolve. Also cultivation technologies (for example, plows) improved over time adding to the productivity of individual farms and the sector more generally. I do not know if there is a history of Russian agricultural and land-management developments as they affected per-acre yields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- 11.
My paternal grandparents’ village on the border with the then-East Prussia was on Lithuania’s deepest lake, the Vištytis.
- 12.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Vistula-River. This article also covers Polish hydrology, drainage, physiography, economy, history, and more. For comparable information on the Oder River, see https://www.britannica.com/place/Oder-River. And for maps of the Polish river systems, see https://www.google.com/search?q=river+systems+of+poland&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjboKjs6ZHOAhWGaD4KHdreDSoQsAQIUw&biw=1008&bih=520 and http://www.mapsofworld.com/poland/poland-river-map.html. Three of the major rivers converge just north of Warsaw.
- 13.
For a terrain map and further physical geography information, see https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/images-videos/Ukraine/61889 and https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine.
- 14.
The orientation of rivers can have both commercial and military significance. During the American Civil War, the rivers in the western front (the North–South Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri rivers , and others) facilitated the movement of Northern troop and materials whereas the rivers in Virginia ran West-to-East. They served as barriers to the Yankee troop movements. Some of the significant Second World War battles involved crossing European North–South rivers that in peace time were and still are major transportation thoroughfares.
- 15.
Paul Britten Austin, 1812 Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (Greenhill, 2000—A Compilation of Three Separate Books), 59, 61, 109, 115.
- 16.
The area was populated by private landlord towns.
- 17.
Op. cit., 37.
- 18.
Few readers are likely to find the above descriptions especially relevant to their own historical and genealogical interests. These readers are interested in historical events and their own individual shtetl .
- 19.
Carey Lifton, Social Soundness and WID Analysis for USAID Legal Reform Project Paper (1991). Also see Robert E. Mitchell, From Close-Out to Model Program: Lessons Learned from Two Decades of USAID in Guinea-Bissau (Guinea-Bissau: United States Agency for International Development, September 1995), available online at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABX606.pdf. For a more recent comparative ethnographic perspective that includes Guinea-Bissau, an Indonesian island and even Jeffersonian Virginia, see Eric Gable, Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2011).
- 20.
Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts. Also see my forthcoming, The Closing of Michigan’s Farm Frontier.
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Annex: Soil Maps for Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine
Annex: Soil Maps for Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine
Soil Map of Poland
Source http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/Y4620E/y4620e05.htm
Soil Map of the Ukraine
Source http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/Counprof/Ukraine/ukraine.htm
Source http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/use/?cid=nrcs142p2_054012
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Mitchell, R.E. (2019). The Physical Geography of the Pale. In: Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99145-0_2
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