Time for a new 'World'?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about our present school geography curriculum over the last few months: partly in response to some work with various publishers, and also looking ahead to the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) and sometimes this has involved a little looking back as well as forward. We still await the next step of that process but the GA and the RGS are poised and ready to support teachers through this.

Kate Stockings recently posted a plea for us to take our time in verse form.

One of the most influential school books for some decades in the 1920s onwards was 'The World', written by Dudley Stamp.

Laurence Dudley Stamp was born in 1898. 

He attended King's College, London at the age of just 15!

His biography on my GA Presidents' Blog can be read here.

One of his best-selling books is called 'The World' which was a general geography of the World and covered countries as well as comprehensive set of physical geography sections.

This review of the book was written by C.B.Fawcett (he of the UCL Fellowship name and fame).

As the review says, it was first published in 1927 for Indian schools. Check out the GA Presidents blog for more on Stamp's work in India.

In 1929 it was published in the UK, and even as late in 1977, it was still being republished and ran to 17 editions! My own copy is a hardback ninth edition from 1936.

Total sales of the book were well over a million, and Dudley Stamp enjoyed an enviable lifestyle and globe-trotting existence it seems at a time when few were able to enjoy such luxury. He was also massively prolific, including writing with his wife Elsa.

So, we are coming close to the 100th anniversary of the first editions of 'The World': a General Geography in a few year's time.

Is it time for a new 'The World' for the 21st century?

It would be interesting to divide the book up into sections perhaps and ask geographers to update the descriptions of particular parts of the world, compared to how they used to be.

I wonder how similar some of the physical geography sections of the book would end up being fairly similar, but how different the human/regional geography sections would be - as in, probably completely.

Sources:

C.B.F. Geography, vol. 15, no. 3, 1929, pp. 260–260. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40559098. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025.

Beaver, S. H. “SIR DUDLEY STAMP, C.B.E., D.Sc, D.Lit.” Geography, vol. 51, no. 4, 1966, pp. 388–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40566171. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/geography/people/peoplelists/person/2418/teaching

Will Pilfold: Sir L. Dudley Stamp (1898-1966), Geographer and Public Servant: A Critical Biography 2005. Funded by the Frederick Soddy Trust