Joseph E. Schwartzberg (February 5, 1928 – September 19, 2018) was an American writer, peace activist, and a world federalist, who was a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota. Author of numerous books, he was the editor and principal author of the Historical Atlas of South Asia, which in 1980 won the Watumull Prize of the American Historical Association. In 1984 the American Association of Geographers honored him with their annual award.Honors of the American Association of Geographers from American Association of Geographers His several substantial chapters in Book One of Volume Two of The History of Cartography were instrumental in that work receiving the R. R. Hawkins Award for Best Scholarly Book for 1992 from the Association of American Publishers. He served on the board of directors of the World Federalist Association, has chaired its Policy and Issues Commission, and is President of the Minnesota chapter of Citizens for Global Solutions.
Biography
Early life Born in Brooklyn, New York on February 5, 1928, Schwartzberg was the second of four children of Philip and Frances Schwartzberg. He, his older brother and two younger sisters were born within a span of less than six years. All six members of the family participated in the operation of their small clothing store. They lived in two rooms behind the store during the bad years of the depression and in an apartment immediately above it when times were good. Schwartzberg graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1945 and in 1949 from Brooklyn College (cum laude), where he majored in geology. For parts of three summers during his high school years he worked on farms to aid the war effort; but, as the war drew to a close in the summer of 1945, he hitchhiked to and through Mexico, as far as the Pacific coast town of Acapulco. In college he joined and ultimately became president of a then rare inter-racial service fraternity.J.E. Schwartzberg Autobiography (in third person) at the American Association of Geographers
Shortly after earning his B.A, Schwartzberg took a position as a geographer with the Map Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Map Service in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and simultaneously worked for his M.A. at the University of Maryland. His master's thesis, Old Order Amish and Stauffer Mennonite Communities in Southern Maryland, was based on field research among the communities named. This work instilled in him a love of fieldwork and an abiding interest in "plain people" and, more generally, in communities with life styles deviating from established norms. Around the same time, through Washington's First Unitarian Church, he became familiar with the then burgeoning World Federalist movement. He has maintained his allegiance to the "one world" ideal ever since.
Following the outbreak of war in Korea, Schwartzberg was drafted into the U.S. Army. Although he anticipated that he would be sent to Korea immediately on conclusion of his infantry basic training, he was assigned instead to a topographic engineering battalion headquartered in the Presidio of San Francisco. After nine months in that unit he accepted a commission as a 2nd lieutenant and was transferred to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he trained for work in a newly created terrain intelligence unit that was dispatched to Heidelberg, Germany in December 1952. His duties entailed extensive travel in Germany and many opportunities to improve his language skills.
Conclusion of the Korean War led to a major reduction of the pool of junior army officers, enabling Schwartzberg, by then a 1st lieutenant, to accept an early overseas discharge. Thus began a period of nearly three additional years of foreign travel and residence. This period included four months in Seville, Spain (then still under the rule of Franco) in early 1953; eight months in Paris in 1953–54, studying French language and civilization at the Sorbonne (courtesy of the G.I. Bill of Rights); travels in many other parts of Europe; a month in Israel; brief sojourns in many Islamic nations in North Africa and the Middle East; a half-year touring India and other countries of South Asia (marked by visits at a number of Gandhian ashrams and government-managed community development projects; and by the start of a decades-long friendship with an itinerant holy man [sadhu]); several months in Southeast Asia; and a month in Japan.
During his stay in Paris, Schwartzberg drew up a rough draft of a World Constitution, many of whose ideas were incorporated in articles and books published decades later. His federalist thinking was reinforced by his experience in India, the world's most populous federal polity. Considering that, despite its many serious problems, meager resources and incredibly diverse population, India was able to maintain a viable democracy convinced him that a federalized world, with vastly greater resources, could do so as well.
In September 1956 Schwartzberg embarked on study for a doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin. He had by then decided to specialize in either South or Southeast Asia, and chose as his advisor the renowned geographer, Richard Hartshorne, notwithstanding the fact that Hartshorne had no Asian experience. That somehow did not matter. In 1958 Schwartzberg was awarded the first of two year-long fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the first for field work in India, the second for support while writing his dissertation His field work entailed thousands of miles of travel by bicycle (accompanied by Indian interpreters) to 200 villages throughout India. His dissertation, Occupational Structure and Level of Economic Development in India: A Regional Analysis, completed in 1960, was later published as monograph no. 4 of the 1961 Census of India.
Professional life In 1960, Schwartzberg accepted a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, joining the Wharton School's Department of Geography and Industry and the Department of South Asia Regional Studies, the first such regionally specialized program in the United States. His contacts in the latter department greatly expanded his multi-disciplinary understanding, not only of South Asia, but also of regional studies in general. Several relevant papers on regionalism ensued, as did two seminal papers on the geography of the Indian caste system.
In 1962 Schwartzberg was appointed to train, at the University of Pennsylvania, the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to be sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He accompanied that group to Ceylon for a final month of training, following which he spent almost a year in India as a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies. For most of this period he expanded his research of the year 1958–59. He also worked, pro bono, for the Indian Census, drawing up detailed templates for the series of national and state atlases that thereafter formed components of the nation's decennial censuses.
During this year he met Monique Ribaux, a Swiss medical lab technician working for the malaria eradication program of the World Health Organization. They were married in Geneva in December 1963, subsequently had two sons, Philip (b. 1964) and Paul (b. 1966). They were divorced in 1998.
In the spring of 1964, Schwartzberg learned of a proposal to create a Historical Atlas of South Asia at the University of Minnesota, following the bequest to that institution of the magnificent Ames Library of South Asia. Excited by that challenging initiative, he wrote a lengthy memorandum to its two principal faculty supporters specifying what he thought such an atlas should contain. This resulted in an invitation for him to come to Minnesota to join the Geography Department and edit the work. He accepted the offer, effective that December.
The atlas project took much longer than anticipated, entailing numerous research grants, and requiring roughly 85 person-years of work from a multi-disciplinary team of specialists. First published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978, the work was reissued in an updated edition by the Oxford University Press in 1992, and in a digitized edition by the University of Chicago in 2006. It won the Watumull Prize of the American Historical Association, as the best work on Indian history of the 1978-79 biennium and an outstanding achievement award from the Association of American Geographers. In 1981 David Watumull observed: “Over the years, since 1946 when this Prize was instituted, I can … say, without a doubt, that this is the finest and most worthwhile book to be selected.” What makes the work unique is its presentation, not only of the findings of modern historians of South Asia, but also its recreations of the ways in which aspects of that region were made known by numerous actors – both South Asian and outsiders –over more than three millennia.
Publication of the atlas led to Schwartzberg's role in what was to become an even larger (and still on-going) project, the preparation of a multi-volume History of Cartography, prepared by the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Apart from offering advice in planning the work, he was asked to write an article on the traditional cartographies of South Asia, a subject on which there was then virtually no extant literature. However, years of research in South Asia and neighboring regions – in libraries, museums and private art collections, as well as in the field – uncovered a vastly larger corpus of cartographic and cosmographic artifacts than one might have anticipated. Schwartzberg was to become the principal author and an associate editor of two volumes of the history: the award-winning Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, and Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 and 1994 respectively). Both volumes are available for free access at History of Cartography Online.
Schwartzberg's additional writing in his years at Minnesota (1964-2000) took numerous forms: scores of book reviews, essays in political geography, editorials on contemporary issues and events, numerous articles on the Kashmir dispute, work on folk regions in South Asia, a short monograph relating to the history of exploration, various spin-offs from his work on the history of cartography, and major contributions to several encyclopedias, including the lengthy article on the “Physical and Human Geography [of India]” for the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on whose advisory board he subsequently served.
Schwartzberg's writings on Kashmir were focused on promoting a peaceful resolution of the multi-partite disputes over that region. They were based largely on his visits – in 1993, 1994 and 1997 – to all parts of that contested, ethnically diverse state. He conducted interviews, on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani line of control, with a wide range of political actors (UN personnel, civil administrators, military officers, party leaders, dissidents [some in hiding], businessmen, journalists, victims of violence, and others). While his tours in 1993 and 1994 were largely self-financed, that of 1997 was as part of a fact-finding team sponsored by and drawn from the Kashmir Study Group (KSG), a think tank made up mainly of scholars and retired diplomats, established in 1996 by Farooq Kathwari, a wealthy Kashmir-American businessman. Though the published findings and recommendations of the KSG (to which Schwartzberg was a principal contributor), were widely discussed in diplomatic circles in South Asia, North America and Europe, hawkish nationalistic spoilers ultimately prevented their adoption. The KSG still exists, but is less active than in its early years.