Dr. Peter Hugill

Research

Dr. Hugill’s primary interest is in the historical relationship between people and their environment as mediated through technology. This finds particular expression in his books on the role of transportation systems and telecommunications in the World-System. This work has strong implications for geopolitical models. He also has an ongoing interest in the role played by agricultural commodities in defining world trade flows, industrial development, and consumer markets. Dr. Hugill’s primary research region and the area in which he most commonly directs theses and dissertations is Anglo-America and its relationships to Europe as mediated through the above forces. Of late he has been increasingly interested in the transformation from British to American hegemony in the World-System. He has subsidiary interests in the use of the landscape for communicating social status and manipulating social conduct; the landscape as gesture and as the product of social action.

Selected Publications

• Hugill, P. (forthcoming) Historical Geographies of Trade, Transport and Communications. In Rob Kitchin & Nigel Thrift, eds., The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.
• Hugill, P. 2009. The Geopolitical Implications of Communication Under the Sea. In Bernard Finn & Daqing Yang, eds., Communications Under the Sea: The Evolving Cable Network and its Implications. Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press, pp. 257-277.
• Hugill, P. 2009. The American Challenge to British Hegemony, 1861-1946. Geographical Review, special issue to honor D. W. Meinig, 99(2): 403-425.
• Hugill, P. 2009. Transitions in Hegemony: a theory based on State Type and Technology. In William Thompson, ed., Systemic Transitions: Past, Present, and Future, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 33-54.
• Hugill, P. 2008. German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914. Geographical Review 98(1): 1-23.
• Hugill, P. 2006. The Geostrategy of Global Business: Wal-Mart and its Historical Forbears. In Stanley R. Brunn, ed., Wal-Mart in the World-Economy. Routledge, pp. 3-14.
• Hugill, P. and V. Bachmann. 2005. The Route to the Techno-Industrial World-Economy and the Transfer of German Organic Chemistry to America before, during, and immediately after World War One. Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 3(2): 159-186.
• Hugill, P. 2005. Le comunicazioni mondiali dal 1844: Geopolitica e tecnologia. Bologna: Fetrinelli, (translation of Global Communications).
• Hugill, P. 2005. Trading States, Territorial States, and Technology: Mackinder’s unexplored contribution to the discourse on state types. In Brian W. Blouet, ed., Global Geostrategy: Mackinder and the defence of the West. London: Frank Cass, pp. 108-125.
• Hugill, P. 2004. Good Roads and the Plains. Invited entry in David J. Wishart, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. University of Nebraska Press.
• Hugill, P. 2004. Telecommunications. Invited entry in Colin E. Hempstead & William E. Worthington, eds., Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Technology, Volume 2. New York: Routledge, pp. 801-805.
• Hugill, P. 2003. Technology, its innovation and diffusion as the motor of capitalism, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 1:93-117.
• Hugill, P. 1999. Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Hugill, P. 1995. Upstate Arcadia: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Triumph of Social Differentiation in America. Rowman & Littlefield.
• Hugill, P., K. E. Foote, K. Mathewson, and J. M. Smith, eds. 1994. Re-Reading Cultural Geography. University of Texas Press.
• Hugill, P. 1993. World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.