In today’s world of increasing spatial inequalities, geopolitical tensions and global shifts in value chains, having a solid grasp of the spatial and multi-scalar dynamics that condition transition dynamics is of ever more importance. Initial theories of sustainability transitions have been criticised for being insufficiently equipped to assess the benefits, conflicts and unevenness that are constituted by the territorial contexts in which transitions dynamics and pathways unfold. Questions how sustainability transitions emerge across places and scales were largely off the radar. Interest and engagement with geographical dimensions of sustainability transitions grew however quickly into a prominent sub-field, characterised by a fruitful trading zone populated by geographers, transition scholars and other social scientists seeking to better account for place specificity, multi-scalarity, and spatial unevenness. This chapter outlines the contours of the Geography of Sustainability Transitions (GeoST) wider theoretical research agenda and ongoing debates, framing these specifically around conceptualisations of place and scale.

The chapter describes colonial India’s unique urbanization story. In 1750 India had big urban centres such as Hyderabad and Delhi and urbanization was close to the global average. While urbanization in India increased over the next two centuries, the increase was small compared to the rest of the world and Indian urbanization had fallen significantly below the global average by 1950. Yet the modest temporal change masks the important shift in urban centres from inland in the 1700s to the eastern and western coasts by the 1900s. As British rule expanded, the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta emerged as the new centres of administration, trade and commerce. More generally, cities close to railways grew faster than cities close to rivers. Unlike rural India, colonial towns and cities were characterized by more educated residents, more industrial and service sector jobs, male-biased sex ratios and growing political influence.

Humans are born helpless and require others to nurture and care for them for a lengthy period. This requires paid parental leave policies, which the US, almost uniquely, doesn’t have, thereby compromising our health. During our forager-hunter era, vigilant sharing took place. The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago led to a decline in health as exploitation began. This reversed only in the last few hundred years due to advances in sanitation, standard of living, and basic medical care. Population health is much more than adding up factors affecting individual health, with political context and governance being the most significant factors. Income inequality impacts health in three realms. Health promotion requires action by policy makers and national leaders. Women live longer than men. Geography matters, with a wide range of health outcomes across US counties. Culture and racism have strong impacts. Diets are less important. Physical and chemical environmental hazards impact health outcomes, mostly to a lesser degree

Chapter 1 takes stock of, and criticizes, the literature on nationalism, discussing four gaps in the literature: nonspatial theorizing, methodological statism, ahistorical modernism, and incomplete empirical validation.

This chapter traces the early economic history of Europe, focusing on the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural civilizations. It examines the emergence of cities, the development of trade and the influence of geography on European economic integration. The chapter explores how early agricultural innovations, such as the domestication of crops and animals, laid the foundation for the rise of European civilizations, particularly in Greece and Rome. It also discusses the geo-economic continuity of Europe, showing how trade fostered cultural and political integration despite frequent conflicts. Through an analysis of early European economies, the chapter highlights the role of agriculture and trade as key forces in shaping the region’s development.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

Chapter 1 addresses the geographical and economic context in which the the Kingdom of Alania emerged, and explains why this happened. It identifies the core territory of the kings of Alania as lying in the Upper Kuban region of modern Karachay-Cherkessia and eastern Krasnodar Krai. It also suggests that the Kingdom of Alania emerged because an aristocratic lineage from this region was able to leverage their transregional connections to extract recognition from the Khazar Khaqanate, granting them a ‘power of the foreign’ that no other aristocrats in the region could match.

This chapter argues that much of the complexity and rigour of Geography revolves around the sophisticated conceptualisation that is involved in thinking geographically, something that begins to develop in preschool. It is not so much what the geographer studies but the way they look at the human or physical phenomena they are exploring that makes the study of Geography what it is. This leads some to say that everything can be studied geographically or everything is geography! Going back to the discussion on the ‘grammar’ of a subject, we can again highlight that what many people perceive as geography is purely the vocabulary of the subject and what makes geography is the grammar of the subject; that is, it is the implicit conceptual thinking involved when exploring and trying to make sense of the world in which we live.

In this first full chapter readers will find a general survey of those aspects of Balkan geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic history that are most relevant for the present study, including the Balkans in relation to the Ottoman Empire. We locate the Balkans geographically, describing its physical characteristics and discussing the controversy over where its northern limits are to be located. Various other extralinguistic factors are discussed that are relevant for the linguistic situation. Most importantly, the languages of the Balkans are introduced as to their genealogical affiliation, their historical attestation, their documentation, their pertinent representation in scholarly literature, their dialectology, their social setting, and related matters, including associated writing systems. For the sake of completeness, all languages found in the Balkans, from ancient to early modern, are given some attention, creating a comprehensive account of the geographically determined languages of the Balkans; ultimately, though, the focus is narrowed to the Balkan languages, i.e. those languages in the region that significantly (or in any attested fashion) display the morphosyntactic and other convergence phenomena that are central to the concept of a contact area, i.e. to a sprachbund.

The chapter introduces Agnew’s three-fold definition of place – as location, locale, and sense of place – to structure its reflections. Over the last thirty years, a digital revolution has transformed what it is possible to map since Martin Gilbert first produced his Atlas of the Holocaust. The rich array of printed and digital maps now available serve both historiographical and memorial purposes. In terms of location, the terrain depicted has shifted eastwards in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and often homed in on meso- and micro-regions, representing spaces long neglected in older surveys. Moving on to locale, the chapter introduces recent work on the Nazi understanding of “Raum” and on the place of the Holocaust in the colonial imagination. Other studies have explored the spatial patterns of arrests and deportations, the multiple border changes of ghettos, or the creation and destruction of new kinds of spaces for concentrating and murdering human beings. Finally, historians of victim experience have used a variety of means to convey victims’ sense of place and space both at the time and as conveyed through testimony.