Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688–1815 by Jeremy Black

As a geographer specializing in the European region, I had hoped that reading this book would augment my understanding of the British Empire, including its expansion, territorial control, relationships to subjugated peoples, and role in global trade. Instead, Black's book uses "imperial power," broadly defined, as the backdrop for a study of the ways in which the British created and deployed geographical knowledge. His lens is focused mainly on British culture and society, but British colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia make occasional appearances as well. Although billed by the publisher as "world history," the book is potentially of interest to geographers because it is about how such geographical knowledge functions "in establishing and ordering reality, experience and imagination" (274, italics original).

Black is a professor of history at the University of Exeter who has authored nearly one hundred books. His specialty is eighteenth-century British history, but he has also written about the world wars, the American Revolution, tourism, and Brexit. His encyclopedic knowledge challenges the reader. The present volume presumes a thorough existing knowledge of British history (especially military history) and geography; those who do not have it will need to commit to some supplementary reading in order to follow along. Moreover, readers will struggle to identify Black's major arguments and how they are connected. In part, this is due to the structure of the book. The ten chapters are organized neither chronologically nor thematically; Black's method is to take up multiple themes in each chapter in order "to capture the simultaneity of circumstance and experiences facing contemporaries" (xi). Last, the style of writing is a challenge. Black often uses the passive voice or expletive constructions ("this was," "there are," etc.), leaving the reader scratching his or her head as to who might be doing what in any given sentence. (Not so in his other books. I found his George III: America's Last King [Yale University Press, 2006] to be a clear and engaging read.) All these make the reader's work much more difficult than it needs to be.

That said, the breadth and depth of knowledge on display in this book are impressive. Black draws extensively on scholarship in other fields as diverse as cultural studies, landscape history, and cartography, as well as British history. (A greater engagement with the best scholarship in political geography would help make his ideas more accessible to geographers.) Although he uses some primary sources like newspaper accounts and personal letters to support his ideas, most of the book draws on the scholarship of others. The chapter endnotes are worth further study, and a short list of selected further reading is a generous and helpful addition.

Black aims to place eighteenth-century British geographical practice within a new intellectual movement fed by Enlightenment ideas about empirical "ways of knowing" and narratives of human progress. The first three chapters catalog the various maps, gazetteers, and travel narratives that catered to a new public thirst for geographical information; tie this emerging geographic knowledge to its military and strategic deployment; and inventory the state of cartography in the period.

The next two chapters set out to show how various kinds of public discourses shaped Britons' understanding of power at different scales. Topics in succession include reshaping the landscapes of the landed gentry, London as the center of a national market economy, local electoral politics, museum displays, pictorial representations of cities in North America, and the role of tourism in shaping national identity. These chapters would benefit from some overarching claims to integrate and connect the eclectic mix of topics.

Chapters 6 and 7 concern British responses to changes in global geo-politics, including the rise of the Russian state, fears about the potential spread of revolutionary French radicalism, adjusting to the existence of the new American state, and the struggle to "place" South Sea islanders and Indians within British conceptions of religious and cultural order. All this is set in the context of flows of information across space. For example, on the latter, he writes, "There were also attempts to advance a cultural dominance over non-Western peoples and to frame, discuss, and use information accordingly" (216).

Chapter 8, "Responding to Coal and Commerce," turns attention back to Britain. Black describes the improvements in transportation infrastructure that supported the Industrial Revolution and how both surveying and advertising were necessary precursors for the new roads and canals that increased the availability of goods and boosted the development of a consumer mentality. This chapter will perhaps be the most interesting to geographers because it clearly connects a natural resource with changes in technology and the role of a free and entrepreneurial press in disseminating valuable economic information.

Chapter 9, "Geographies in Retrospect," compares eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical geography with current preoccupations in the discipline. Black criticizes the environmental determinism of the earlier period, but notes approvingly that it also encompassed a fine-grained subregional understanding that has since been lost. (His treatment of differing scales of analysis [in his terminology, "levels"] in geographical knowledge is a particular strength of this volume.) He seems to be of two minds on the importance of the workings of power as a lens through which to understand geography. On one hand he acknowledges the usefulness of poststructural and other critical theory, but on the other hand he denigrates its pervasiveness: "At times, indeed, the academics' emphasis on power has been somewhat crude, reductionist, mechanistic, and instrumental" (258). I wished that Black had placed this chapter earlier in the book in order to orient the reader to his own intellectual framework.

Overall, this book points to both the possibilities and the pitfalls of finding ways to work across disciplinary boundaries. It illustrates some of the problems scholars encounter if they intend to write for a disciplinary audience other than their own. Disciplines have different vocabularies, methodologies, and canons, and bridging the gaps between them is essential in interdisciplinary work. Black argues that historians could—and indeed should—be making more contributions to the subfield of historical geography. Why indeed should geographers "own" historical geography? This is an excellent question worthy of debate across the disciplines, but unfortunately this volume shows that both fields have some distance to go in being able to communicate meaningfully with one another.