faulker079

The Historical Journal recently published Kyle Gardner's "Moving Watersheds, Borderless Maps, and Imperial Geography in India's Northwestern Himalaya" . The abstract: This article uses the British colonial history of border making in northern India to examine the assumptions and contradictions at work in the theorizing, configuring, and mapping of frontiers and borders. It focuses, in particular, on the development of the ‘water-parting principle’ – wherein the edge of a watershed is considered to be the border – and how this principle was used to determine boundaries in the northwestern Himalaya, a region that had long-established notions of border points, but no borderlines. By the twentieth century, the water-parting principle would become the dominant boundary logic for demarcating borders in mountainous regions, and would be employed by statesmen, treaty editors, and boundary commissioners around the world. But for the northwestern Himalaya, a region that British...

‘A plotte of the landes about Ashebourne’, Derbyshire. 1556–1557 (Folger Shakespeare Library) One difficulty of English water-law history is the dearth of reported water cases predating the nineteenth century. Fortunately young historians are doing good work in digging up archival documentation of water litigation. We heard a few years ago from Leona Skelton about her interesting work on the Tyne River Court, and now I'd like to note Lehua Yim's work on a sixteenth century water law dispute litigated in the Court of Star Chamber:  "A Watercourse ‘in Variance’: Re-situating a Sixteenth-Century Legal Map from Ashbourne, Derbyshire" , published last year in Imago Mundi. The abstract: Law-related English local maps, especially those dating from the early- to mid-sixteenth century, remain in need of both extensive and close study. In this article, a hand-drawn sketch map in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, is re-contextualized in relation to documents connec...