David Livingstone MRIA, geographer and historian
Professor Livingstone is interested in researching the connections between the history of ideas and geographical thought; how history can be radically different from what people presume must have been the case; the role of place and space in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge; and how the consequences of climate determinism in relation to race, empire, health, wealth and war in the past offer warnings about the toxic directions in which the climatic interpretation of history can drift.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
David N. Livingstone MRIA, is professor emeritus of geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Social Sciences in 2008.
A good deal of my research dwells on connections between the history of ideas and geographical thought. While I was still in school, an extraordinary English teacher first opened up to me the power of ideas, not least in literature, to change the world. I found it exhilarating. Later, as an undergraduate student in geography, I was captivated by a two-year course on the history of ideas about nature and culture since ancient times. Since then, I’ve devoted a good deal of my time to thinking about space and thought in one way or another.
My first book, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the culture of American science (University of Alabama Press, 1987) grew out of my doctoral thesis and focused on the life and thought of an American earth scientist and public intellectual in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It became clear to me that Shaler’s science could not be divorced from the wider social and political context within which he worked at Harvard in the half-century or so after the American Civil War. So, I found my way into the history of ideas about race relations and scientific inquiry, about the destruction of natural resources, about the connections between science and religion, and about science and social thought. While putting the finishing touches to that volume, I began writing another book—Darwin’s forgotten defenders (Scottish Academic Press & Eerdmans, 1987) —which examined the surprisingly positive evaluations of Darwinian evolution by a significant number of prominent religious believers at the time, both in Britain and America. This alerted me to the ways in which history can be radically different from what people presume must have been the case.
What would science itself look like when examined from a geographical perspective? Science was conventionally taken to be a placeless enterprise, devoid of local particularities, and trading in universal truths. But was that in fact the case? What role did place and space play in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge?
Over the next few years, I worked on a history of geographical ideas that culminated in The geographical tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise (Blackwell, 1992). What I wanted to do here was to write a history of geographical knowledge that engaged with currents of thought in intellectual history and the history of science. Most of the geographical histories available at that stage seemed to me to proceed in isolation from wider historiographical considerations. Around that time, it struck me that there was another side to all of this. What would science itself look like when examined from a geographical perspective? Science was conventionally taken to be a placeless enterprise, devoid of local particularities, and trading in universal truths. But was that in fact the case? What role did place and space play in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge? I tried to answer that question in Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. In the years that followed, I wrote a couple of other books: one dwelt on the cultural politics of human origin theories— Adam’s ancestors: race, religion and the politics of human origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); another, based on my Gifford Lectures for 2014, focused on the role of location in shaping dialogues between religion and Darwinism—Dealing with Darwin: place, politics and rhetoric in religious engagements with evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
My hope is to … [alert] readers to the consequences of climate determinism in relation to race, empire, health, wealth, and war in the past… [and] the toxic directions in which the climatic interpretation of history can all too easily drift.
To bring the story up to date, I have just published a book on the history of ideas about climate: The empire of climate: a history of an idea (Princeton University Press, 2024). My interest here is in probing the ways in which climate has often been taken to determine everything from human health and the decline of civilisation to the advent of war and the afflictions of the modern psyche. What has animated my interest in this subject is the way in which scientists, journalists and politicians routinely instruct us on the inevitable ramifications of changed climatic conditions for human life. These contemporary concerns turn out to have a lengthy and sometimes dark history, especially in the West. My hope for this book is that by alerting readers to the consequences of climate determinism in relation to race, empire, health, wealth and war in the past, I might provide some warnings about the toxic directions in which the climatic interpretation of history can all too easily drift.
