Historical region

Historical regions (or historical areas) are geographic areas which at some point in time had a cultural, ethnic, linguistic or political basis, regardless of latterday borders.[1] They are used as delimitations for studying and analysing social development of period-specific cultures without any reference to contemporary political, economic or social organisations.

The fundamental principle underlying this view is that older political and mental structures exist which exercise greater influence on the spatial-social identity of individuals than is understood by the contemporary world, bound to and often blinded by its own worldview - e.g. the focus on the nation-state.[2]

Definitions of regions vary,[3] and regions can include macroregions such as Europe, territories of traditional states or smaller microregional areas. A geographic proximity is the often required precondition for emergence of a regional identity.[3] In Europe, the regional identities are often derived from the Migration Period but for the contemporary perspective are often related to the 1918–1920 time of territorial transformation, and another in the post-Cold War period.[4]

Some regions are entirely invented, such as the Middle East in 1902 by a military strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, to refer to the area of the Persian Gulf.[5]

See also

• List of historical regions of Central Europe
• Historical regions of the Balkans
• Country subdivision

References

1. p. 332, Kotlyakov, Komarova (entry 2781)
2. p. 151, Tägil
3. xiii, Tägil
4. p. 82. Lehti, Smith
5. p. 65, Lewis, Wigen

Works cited

• Sven Tägil, (ed.), Regions in Central Europe: The Legacy of History, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1999
• Marko Lehti, David James Smith, Post-Cold War Identity Politics: Northern and Baltic Experiences, Routledge, 2003 ISBN 0-7146-5428-0
• Compiled by V. M. Kotlyakov, A. I. Komarova, Elsevier's dictionary of geography: in English, Russian, French, Spanish, German, Elsevier, 2006 ISBN 0-444-51042-7
• Martin W. Lewis, Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, University of California Press, 1997 ISBN 0-520-20743-2

Further reading

• Susan Smith-Peter, Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Brill, 2017 ISBN 9789004353497