doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0518

MATTHEW G. HANNAH, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory inNineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 262.£45.00 hardback. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 32)

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At a time when North American geography departments are graduating few Ph.Ds inhistorical geography, and then hiring few of these, it is important to pay particularattention to the work of young scholars who have managed to survive these perilouscircumstances. Matthew Hannah is one such, and his book, beyond its intrinsic merits, issome measure of where one young and talented historical geographer would take the®eld, and of the value of going there. Hannah describes the changing relationshipbetween government and territory in the United States during the last decades of thenineteenth century. To do so he draws heavily and explicitly on Michel Foucault,particularly Foucault's early writing on discursive formations and archaeologies, and hislate work on governmentality. Governmentality, in Hannah's rendering of Foucault, isconceived as a national form of biopower directed not so much at the management ofindividual human bodies as at populations and their territories. Hannah knows theFoucauldian literature, and elaborates his theoretical position in a substantial ®rstchapter. So armed, he turns to government and territory in the United States, which herepresents, on the one hand, by the tenth census of the United States (1880) and, on theother, by the man who directed it, Francis A. Walker. This is not as preposterous as itseems. The tenth census was a huge compilation assembled over a period of months andpublished in parts through much of the decade. At a time when government was comingto rely on statistics and the specialists who interpreted them, the census was becoming aparticularly forward instrument of social and territorial control. AndWalker, consideredin his day one of the most knowledgeable men in America, was a huge ®gure in Americanacademic and governmental circles: brigadier general in the Civil War, head of theBureau of Indian Affairs, president of MIT, president of the American EconomicAssociation, author of an enormously in¯uential text in political economy, thinker aboutAmerican society, and con®dant of the powerful. Hannah sees him as a ®gure poisedbetween an America run by its `̀ best men'', of whomWalker was pre-eminently one, andanother run by experts, in whom Walker was greatly interested. In effect, Hannahemploys two ®gures of speechÐsynecdoche and personi®cationÐto focus his interest inAmerican governmentality in the late-nineteenth century. The context of both census anddirector, in Hannah's analysis, was a changing relationship between government and thegoverned, and the changing character of government itself. New `̀ governmental objects''were emerging as new `̀ grids of speci®cation'', such as the census, brought populationsand territories into view in ordered systems of social differentiation based, for example,on race, gender, nativity, or morbidity. In effect, here was a new `̀ surface of emergence''susceptible to statistical analysis and expert interpretation by quali®ed social scientists.But this new, rather faceless expertise, backed by specialized training, statistics, and anunderstanding of social laws, challenged the position of the ``best men'' as arbiters of thesocial order. The image of these menÐtheir courage, strength, intelligence, sel¯essness,and capacity to comprehend the whole horizon and make balanced judgmentsaccordingly (like a good general on the ®eld of battle)Ðwas increasingly compromisedby a social order that now appeared to be too complex to be discerned from any onevantage point, by specialized training that many of the older elite did not have, and by thechanging nature of urbanizing and industrializing work. In such ways, ``governmentalsubjectivities'' and ``governmental objects'' were both changing. These discursiveformations identi®ed, Hannah turns to the census and to Walker's involvement withit. Drawing in part on James Scott's Seeing Like a State (NewHaven 1998), he deals withstatistics as a form of abstraction and of sorting that reinforced central power at theexpense of the local. The census is interpreted neither as a record of existing social

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realities nor as an innocent inventory of information, but as an active agent of socialformation. Its biases are revealed: it favoured native Americans over foreign born, menover women, the rural over the urban, andwhites over all others.Walker himself is shownto become increasingly driven by simple solutions for intricate social issues. He struggledwith the economic advantages of labour mobility (which he thought had discouragedclass formation inAmerica) and the social advantages of stability, and concluded that thenuclear family (where the sedentary female balanced the mobile male) represented thebest accommodation of the two. He became increasingly concerned about the dilution ofnative America (by which he meant the largely Anglo-Saxon population of Teutonicorigin) by those he considered feckless. Indians should be contained on a few large,isolated reserves to minimize miscegenation. Immigrants from southern and easternEurope could not be so segregated, andWalker eventually concluded that they should bekept out altogether. He associated them with poverty, ®lth, and radicalism, and came toconclude that their children presented such an image of squalour and destitution that thenative American male was losing interest in reproduction. American manhood was beingcompromised by the debilitating spectacle of the lazy immigrant poor.With the decline ofAmericanmanhood, inWalker's view, went the dynamic at the heart of American societyand the basis of American exceptionalism. Hannah explores these relationships as theyworked themselves out in the census, in the mind of its director, and, by extension, in theparticular cast of American governmentality. In conclusion, he emphasizes the advan-tages of a historical geography committed to social theory (as opposed to `̀ letting thefacts speak for themselves''), the contributions his study has made to the conceptualiza-tion of governmentality (particularly to its gendering), and its contribution to a spatialunderstanding of American state formation. He suggests that the state-consolidatingtendencies he has considered within America have colonial counterparts elsewhere, andfavours more comparative studies.

What to make of this complex book? It is, ®rst of all, a highly intelligent andsophisticated work that deserves to be widely read. It is provocative at several levels:among others, as a courageous and relatively concrete elaboration of Foucault'ssomewhat tentative ideas about governmentality, as a vigorous account of latenineteenth century American state formation, and as an example of a way of doinghistorical geography. Much of its momentum stems from its theoretical engagement;even so, I ®nd it too aggressively theorized. I am not convinced that the emphasis Hannahgives Foucault's thought about archaeologies and discursive formations really advanceshis case. His claims for governmentality are stronger, although many of the issues heconsiders have an effective presence in the interdisciplinary literature without any explicitFoucauldian reference. It might be said that some of Foucault's thought has now becomepart of our intellectual furniture and no longer requires explicit acknowledgement, but Ithink, rather, that the difference is between theory used quietly and suggestively in thebackground, and theory that is foregrounded and employed deductively. Hannah'sinclination is toward the latter. The result is a bold book with an obviouslypre-determined edge. There is no `right' balance between theory and more empiricalwork (itself a misleading distinction). An author's choice in this regard has something todo with personality and intellectual predilection, with respect for readers, and with theattempt to claim neither more nor less than one's analysis deserves. In this book theclaims are more pushed than withheld. I was also struck by the relative weakness ofHannah's treatment of spaceÐby his relatively weak presence as a geographer.Geography has no monopoly, of course, on the concept of space, but if one is makingexplicit claims for a type of historical geography, then the distinctively geographicaldimensions of the work probably do need to be fairly clear. James Scott, professor ofpolitical science and anthropology at Yale whose most recent book I mentioned above,writes on some of the new `̀ surfaces of emergence'' (without using the phrase) in modernstate formation with far more attention to nature, landscape, space, and place than ischaracteristic of most theoretically-informed human geographers, Hannah among them.

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Human geographers need to consider the implications of this situation. Finally, Hannahis certainly right about comparative opportunities, and some will say that his explicitlytheoretical focus brings them more clearly into focus. This book will elicit a range ofresponses. I doubt that it points towards a more enthusiastically received historicalgeography, but it tackles many complex issues well, and reveals a good deal about thecontemporary challenge, especially for the young and thoughtful, of writing historicalgeography.

University of British Columbia COLE HARRIS

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0519

GREG HISE and WILLIAM DEVERELL, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted±BartholomewPlan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Pp. vii� 314. $17.95 paperback)

Eden by Design, according to the authors, is a study of urban archaeology. The heart ofthe book is a reproduction of the 1930 planning document Parks, Playgrounds, andBeaches for the Los Angeles Region created by the landscape architecture ®rms ofOlmsted Brothers and Bartholomew and Associates. This remarkable 178-page regionalplan (which was never put into place) has languished in the archives since its publication;in this book, Hise and Deverell present it to a wider audience for the ®rst time. Thereproduction of the planning document is sandwiched between a lengthy introductionand an extended interview with landscape architect Laurie Olin (conducted by theauthors) that serves as an afterword. The book leads readers through a reconstruction ofthe southern California past. The authors invite us to revisit the social conditions that ledto the inception of the Olmsted±Bartholomew plan. They challenge us to imagine a LosAngeles that never was. They take us along in search of any legacy of the plan that mightbe recognizable in the urban landscape of Los Angeles today. They ask us to ponder thepolitical state of affairs that caused the plan to be scuttled and led, ultimately, to the LosAngeles that is. The Olmsted±Bartholomew plan is an intriguing document. On one level,its collection of photographs and thematic maps provides an invaluable window into theactual urban geography of the region in the late 1920s. On another level, its compre-hensive and con®dent recommendations for an integrated system of public beaches, cityparks, regional preserves, parkways, and ridge top drives provide a grand vision of whatsort of place Los Angeles might have become had this framework been established beforethe explosive growth of the post-war era. The format of the plan will be familiar tostudents of the history of planning and landscape architecture. It follows the `surveybefore plan approach', presenting a thorough assessment of the region's recreationalneeds and potential growth problems before moving on to a detailed description of anexpanded regional park and transportation system complete with suggestions forinstitutional arrangements to govern park management and ®nance. The content ofthe plan will also be familiar. Though adapted to the broad scale of southern California,its essential features are drawn from a template established in the ambitious progressive-era urban landscape plans enacted in such cities as Boston, Brooklyn, and Kansas City.

Many questions arise from reading this long-neglected document. The most obviousemerge from the exercise of puzzling through how this plan would have changed therelationship between the city and its natural environment in southern California. Butthere are other important questions. Who initiated this planning process, and for whatreasons? Why was the plan never acted upon? And, why did this planning effort notcrystallize until the late 1920s, when other US cities were attempting to address urban