This volume explores how India as a geographical space was constructed by the British colonial regime in visual and material terms. It demonstrates the instrumentalisation of cultural artefacts such as landscape paintings, travel literature and cartography, as spatial practices overtly carrying scientific truth claims, to materially produce artificial spaces that reinforced power relations. It sheds… Read More Nilanjana Mukherjee (2020): Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India, Routledge: New York

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A „carto-coded“ America–a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful–had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American… Read More Martin Brückner (2017): The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC

Die Materialitätsgeschichte der Aufklärung anhand der Sammelpraxis von Vater und Sohn Forster. Weltumsegler, im Feld forschende Naturhistoriker und Ethnologen, Gelehrte – Johann Reinhold (1729-1798) und sein Sohn Georg Forster (1754-1794) trugen grundlegend zur Erschließung außereuropäischer Welten bei. Durch Sammeln, Ordnen, Zeigen, Zeichnen, Transportieren und Präparieren sowie durch Schreiben und Übersetzen haben sie einen erheblichen Anteil… Read More Elisabeth Décultot, Jana Kittelmann, Andrea Thiele und Ingo Uhlig (Hg.) (2020): Weltensammeln. Johann Reinhold Forster und Georg Forster. (= Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert – Supplementa; Bd. 27), Wallstein: Göttingen.

As a continent lying to the east of Europe, Asia has been malleable to different spatial and temporal imaginations and politics. Recent scholarship has highlighted how the seemingly self-contained regional configurations of West and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia carved by the Area Studies paradigm reflect changing (geo)political and economic interests… Read More Andrea Acri, Kashshaf Ghani, Murari K Jha, Sraman Mukherjee (ed.) (2019): Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites. ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute: Singapore.

The Roman Empire traditionally presented itself as the centre of the world, a view sustained by ancient education and conveyed in imperial literature. Historiography in particular tended to be written from an empire-centred perspective. In Late Antiquity, however, that attitude was challenged by the fragmentation of the empire. This book explores how a post-imperial representation… Read More Peter van Nuffelen (ed.) (2019): Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.