Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between… Read More Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.) (2025): Habsburg Natures Imperial Governance and Environment in Central Europe, 1850-1918. Berghahn: New York and Oxford.

Using a transdisciplinary approach, this book examines how scientific understanding of the Earth has been created, transformed, and shared across time – combining perspectives from the history of science, sociology of knowledge, and cultural studies to explore the evolution of Earth sciences. Focusing on the practices, actors, and socio-cultural contexts that have shaped knowledge production,… Read More Norman Henniges, Johannes Mattes, Marianne Klemun (eds.) (2026): Earth–Knowledge. History of Science as Histories of Knowledge? Routledge: London and New York.

n the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation,… Read More Robert Shields Mevissen (2025): The Danube Empire: An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

What is commonly thought of as the centuries-old field of “the history of cartography” was invented after World War II through incomplete historiographies by Cornelis Koeman, Armando Cortesão, R. A. Skelton, and J. B. Harley. This monograph begins to replace those misleading historiographies with an empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which early maps… Read More Matthew H. Edney (2025): Comparative Map History and “the History of Cartography” Methodologies, Institutions, and Idealizations. Leiden: Brill.

Maps have played a central role in our understanding of what and where defines the North. At the same time, the northernmost reaches of our world have, for much of history, been difficult to navigate and verify, from the mythical islands on medieval maps to the itineraries of Arctic explorers in the nineteenth century. This… Read More Charlotta Forss (2025): Mapping the North: Myth, Exploration, Encounter. Bodleian Library: Oxford.