Peter Hugill

Peter Hugill

Professor Emeritus

  pjhugill@tamu.edu

  (979) 845-7106

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. He recently complete a book on Cotton in the Global Economy since 1771 and is currently completing a book on 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; and the link between children’s literature and imperialism.

 

 

Selected Publications

Refereed Articles & Book Chapters (last ten years)

  • P. Hugill. 2014. “Petroleum Supply, Marine Transportation Technology, and the Emerging International Order of the Post World War One Period.” In Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, & Ruth Knoblich, eds, The Global Politics of Science and Technology. Volume I, Concepts from International Relations and Other Disciplines. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 141-159 pp.
  • P. Hugill. 2012. “The Shrinking Victorian World.” Chapter 3 of Martin Hewitt, ed., The Victorian World. London: Routledge, 73-89 pp.
  • P. Hugill, J. Agnew, L. Dowler, M. Hannah, J. Sharp, and G. Kearns. 2011.“Reading Gerry Kearns’ Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder,” in Political Geography 30(1): 49-58.
  • P. Hugill. 2011. “Re-Making America: Soil Mechanics, Earth Moving, Highways, and Dams.” In Stanley Brunn, ed., Engineering Earth: the Impacts of Megaengineering Projects. New York: Springer, 1395-1408 pp.
  • P. Hugill. 2010. “The Shaping of the American Empire.” In Journal of Historical Geography 36(3): 261-265.
  • P. Hugill. 2009. “Historical Geographies of Trade, Transport and Communications.” In Rob Kitchin & Nigel Thrift, eds., The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 338-344 pp.
  • P. Hugill. 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, 257-277 pp.
  • P. Hugill. 2009.The American Challenge to British Hegemony, 1861-1946.” In Geographical Review, special issue to honor D. W. Meinig, 99(2): 403-425.
  • P. Hugill. 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, 33-54 pp.
  • P. Hugill. 2008. “German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914.” In Geographical Review 98(1): 1-23.
  • P. Hugill. 2006. “The Geostrategy of Global Business: Wal-Mart and its Historical Forbears.” In Stanley R. Brunn, ed., Wal-Mart in the World-Economy. Routledge, 3-14 pp.
  • P. Hugill, 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.
  • P. Hugill. 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, 108-125 pp.

Books

  • P. Hugill. 1999. Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • P. Hugill. 1995. Upstate Arcadia: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Triumph of Social Differentiation in America. Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.
  • P. Hugill, K. E. Foote, K. Mathewson, and J. M. Smith, eds. 1994. Re-Reading Cultural Geography. University of Texas Press.
  • P. Hugill. 1993. World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • P. Hugill, D. Bruce Dickson, eds. 1989.The Transfer and Transformation of Ideas and Material Culture. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.

Education

Ph.D. Syracuse University, 1977

Awards

College-Level Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching, Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University, 2012

Student Led Award for Teaching Excellence (SLATE), Texas A&M University, 2009

Dean's Distinguished Achievement Award -- Faculty Teaching, College of Geosciences, Texas A&M University, 2007

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