(Le texte original anglais n'a pas été traduit pour respecter les propos de l'auteur.)

Jock Galloway

Over the last several decades Professor Jock Galloway’s contributions to Historical Geography have been outstanding and, without question, he is one of the leaders in the field. Quite early in his career he developed an interest in the sugar cane industry. 

Subsequently, through his research on sugar, based on searching out and using a great variety of archival sources, dedicated field studies, competence in relevant languages and a commanding knowledge of the literature, Galloway has attained international recognition. Scrupulously and thoroughly researched, his work on sugar is strong on the details of the industry, including local natural conditions and technology, yet always situated in a carefully thought out global perspective. His book, a work of stunning range in time and space, and other papers have made Jock Galloway a world expert on what was probably the most important of the many trades associated with European overseas expansion. Reviewers, strongly interdisciplinarian in scope, have been uniformly enthusiastic about his publications.

There are good reasons for Canadian geography as well as for Jock Galloway to feel pleased by these assessments.  Galloway is unflinching in his identification of himself as a geographer and in his commitment to the discipline. The encompassing sweep of his vision as he seeks to understand the sugar cane industry from a geographical perspective, his quest for grounded concrete explanations and his respect for empirical evidence have burnished the reputation of the discipline as a field capable of making an important contribution to scholarship through its distinct perspective on the world.

Although sugar has been at the focus of Galloway’s work, he is by no means a narrow one-dimensional scholar. The very considerable number of books on a wide range of topics that he has been invited to review, reflect a broad intellectual compass. The confidence he brings to the lecture hall deriving from the scope of his research combined with his great enthusiasm for the topic at hand has made him a superb teacher.  In recognition he was given in 1999 the Outstanding Teaching Award in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. As a former editor of the Canadian Geographer and with his long service on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Geography, Jock Galloway has done much to strengthen the status of geography.

Jock is a thorough and eminently sound scholar whose forte is neither theory nor debate. Scholarship of his type will have far more staying power than much of the contemporary research. It is rather a pity that there are not more of his kind around and about.