From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire… Read More Shellen Xiao Wu (2023): Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China. Stanford University Press: Stanford.

This open access book explores how different spatial geographies emerged, adapted or were transformed in various occupied and colonial settings around Asia, showing how the experiences of those living under occupation shaped and was shaped by new interpretations and typologies of ’space‘. With case studies across South, Southeast and East Asia and through a variety… Read More David Baillargeon and Jeremy E. Taylor (eds.) (2023): Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia. Bloomsbury Academic: London and New York.

History has not been kind to Himalaya. Empires have collided here, cultures have clashed. Buddhist India claimed it from the south, Islam put down roots in its western approaches, Mongols and Manchus rode in from the north, and, from the east, China continues to absorb what it prefers not to call Tibet. Hunters have decimated… Read More John Keay (2023): Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World. Bloomsbury: London and New York

The area that constitutes the Austrian federal province Burgenland belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg empire until the end of World War I. This book helps us realize that geographical knowledge does not come ready-made. Instead, it is created by knowledge makers: geographers, historians, statisticians etc. This knowledge making helped to legitimatize the… Read More Ferenc Jankó (2023): The Geographical Discovery of Burgenland: Science, Geopolitics, Identity and Progress in the Twentieth Centur, Central European University Press: Vienna.

The book analyses from a comparative perspective the exploration of territories, the histories of their inhabitants, and local natural environments during the long eighteenth century. The eleven chapters look at European science at home and abroad as well as at global scientific practices and the involvement of a great variety of local actors in the… Read More Simona Boscani Leoni, Sarah Baumgartner, and Meike Knittel, (eds.) (2022) Connecting Territories: Exploring People and Nature, 1700–1850. Brill: Leiden.

When, how, and why did the Himalaya become the highest mountains in the world? In 1800, Chimborazo in South America was believed to be the world’s highest mountain, only succeeded by Mount Everest in 1856. Science on the Roof of the World tells the story of this shift, and the scientific, imaginative, and political remaking… Read More Lachlan Fleetwood (2022): Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

This book brings together ten empirically rich and theoretically informed contributions that aim to clarify both geo-historical specificities and common transnational and global features of the cultures and practices of boundary making that shaped modern statehood. Written by scholars from Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the essays included in this volume provide a… Read More Jacobo García Álvarez and Paloma Puente Lozano (eds.) (2023): Beneath the Lines: Borders and Boundary-Making from the 18th to the 20th Century. Springer: Cham:

Kyle J. Gardner reveals the transformation of the historical Himalayan entrepôt of Ladakh into a modern, disputed borderland through an examination of rare British, Indian, Ladakhi, and Kashmiri archival sources. In so doing, he provides both a history of the rise of geopolitics and the first comprehensive history of Ladakh’s encounter with the British Empire.… Read More Kyle J. Gardner (2021): The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India–China Border, 1846–1962. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

he publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state… Read More John Rennie Short (2022): The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory. Anthem: London.

Colonial Geography charts changes in conceptions of the relationship between people and landscapes in mainland Tanzania during the German colonial period. In German minds, colonial development would depend on the relationship between East Africans and the landscape. Colonial Geography argues that the most important element in German imperialism was not its violence but its attempts… Read More Matthew Unangst (2022): Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.