Geography and geographers in the Netherlands since the 1870s
serving colonialism, education, and the welfare state
pp. 153-190
in: Gary S. Dunbar (ed), Geography: discipline, profession and subject since 1870, Berlin, Springer, 2001Abstract
More than the natural sciences, geography was and is a field of scholarship that is bound to a country and a linguistic area. Geography's dependence on diverse national contexts explains why nothing much is ever written about the history of the field: geography is "a form of situated knowledge" (Livingstone 2000, 7) and "has meant different things to different people in different places' (Livingstone 1992, 28; cf. Heslinga 1978a and Taylor 1996).