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Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World
116
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
understand how ideas about drink have been liable to change. Rolf Lessenich provides a welcome look at the origins of temperance through a discussion of eighteenth-century radicalism and religious dissent, for example, while Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter examine shifting medical attempts to grapple with drinking and drunkenness. Such ideas were just as liable to travel as commodities, of course, but Reinarz and Wynter also attend to the significance of locally contingent knowledgedsuch as the importance of where medics were traineddin the emergence of new ideas about drinking. Jayne, Holloway, and Valentine’s call for work on the scalar relations of social practices finds an admirable historical response in Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, a volume which helps us better understand the relations between the messy materialities of drinking practices and their representations in and across time and space. David Beckingham University of Cambridge, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.005
Dane Kennedy (Ed), Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii þ 236 pages, US$99/£64 hardcover. Dane Kennedy’s collection, Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, marks an important moment in an ongoing reassessment of the European project of exploration. Looking simultaneously backwards and forwardsdtracing the development of current research avenues and gesturing towards new lines of enquirydthe book investigates the ‘epistemological foundations’ and ‘ideological agendas’ of expeditionary culture and the resulting encounters with non-European peoples and places around the globe (p. 2). Since popular literature persists in writing the history of exploration as the story of heroic and individualistic pioneers, this book provides a much-needed antidote. On reading the essays assembled in Kennedy’s volume, the range of disciplines that have contributed to this revisionist enterprise is immediately striking. Imperial history, history of science, historical anthropology, historical geography, book history, and literary criticism are just some of the fields that have participated in complicating simplistic narratives. The emergence of interdisciplinary ‘area studies’ and the rise of transdisciplinary intellectual currents like postcolonialism have also been significant in disrupting Eurocentric perspectives. An interesting feature of the book is its acknowledgement that exploratory activities have not been the prerogative of Western societies alone. As Michael F. Robinson argues in the book’s first chapter, it might be possible to reframe exploration as ‘a global activity’ rather than delimiting it as solely a Western cultural practice (p. 31). For instance, in her piece on the Pacific, Jane Samson points to indigenous voyagesdexhibiting considerable navigational skilldthat preceded the well-known European journeys. Likewise, Gordon Stewart observes that when Europeans came to Central Asia there was already a ‘thick layer of prior discovery’ that had resulted in an extensive body of Chinese travel literature dating back over a thousand years (p. 197). Recovering and recalling these episodes both tames grandiose European claims and serves as a salutary reminder of other histories. While casting light onto some of these prior histories, however, the primary terrain of the book lies elsewhere. As Kennedy points out, although other societies engaged in ‘what can be broadly construed as exploration’ the task of his
collection is to interrogate its status in ‘the European historical experience’, as ‘a concept and a practice that carries a particular set of cultural, social, and political valences’ (p. 1). Following this mandate, the first section of the book is devoted to studies of various important themes. Michael F. Robinson, for instance, begins by examining exploration’s interrelations with science in the first and second ages of ‘discovery’ and beyond. Arguing that these enterprises shaped one another mutually, Robinson discusses both ‘exploration’s role in changing the content of knowledge’ and the way in which scientific preoccupations ‘infused’ exploratory culture (pp. 22, 25). Another chapter, by Philip J. Stern, takes up the theme of ‘Enlightenment’. In a similar vein, we see how the Enlightenment influenced the course of exploration and, reciprocally, how expeditionary encounters gave direction to Enlightenment projects. What emerges from these contributions is that we should not conceive of exploration as autonomous. Rather, as Harry Liebersohn argues, it is important to recognise that it ‘overlaps with other kinds of ventures’ (p. 39). Exploration was never a homogenous enterprise, nor hermetically sealed, but one that intersected with a wide range of activities. Liebersohn’s chapter addresses one of the major themes pervading the collection: cultural encounter. Tracing the historiography of exploration from one that focused on the acts of heroic individuals to one that has introduced a host of ‘narrative voices’ and historical actors, Liebersohn argues for a nuanced ‘multidimensional’ account of cultural interaction (p. 49). This acknowledges, of course, that indigenous cultures did not passively receive European presence. Rather, local groups were actively involved in shaping encountersdoften holding the balance of powerdand negotiating their own history. In fact, a fundamental purpose of Kennedy’s volume is to foreground the role that indigenous peoples played in European expeditions. A range of ‘intermediaries’, including translators, guides, and porters were indispensable but have tended to receive little acknowledgement (p. 3). Several of the authors thus aim, as Stephen J. Rockel puts it, to ‘decentre’ narratives of European travel (p. 172). In so doing, they seek to uncover what Felix Driver and Lowri Jones have elsewhere called the ‘hidden histories of exploration’ (Hidden Histories of Exploration, 2009). While the essays participate in shifting focus to silenced participants, some famous travellers receive renewed examination. Rather than focusing on their specific exploits and character, attention is directed instead to the figure of the explorer as a cultural phenomenon. As Clare Pettitt points out in her chapter, explorers were among the first to be ‘accorded a modern celebrity status’ thanks to media developments in the nineteenth century (p. 82). But, as Berny Sèbe reminds us, if they were celebrities, they were also heroes who generated powerful legends. They often became national representatives ‘of exemplary value’, whose reputations could have instrumental political power (p. 109). For Sèbe, it is important to acknowledge the ‘sociological function’ of explorers and the ways in which they were later commemorated (p. 110). The second section of the collection develops many of these themes. It also turns in the direction of specific territories. William Sunderland, for instance, focuses on imperial Russia from the Petrine era onwards, addressing some of the particularities of exploration in a continental empire. Moving into the Pacific world, Jane Samson draws attention to unofficial explorersdsuch as sailors, missionaries, traders, and various indigenous groupsdwho have increasingly been granted attention by academics in Pacific Studies. Despite this, she argues, the scholarship has still been too restricted to predictable figures like Captain Cook, who have received more than their fair share of attention. Stephen J. Rockel takes us into East Africa, contending that European journeys there can only be understood in terms of the pre-existing ‘caravan
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
system’ (p. 172). Scientific travellers relied heavily on a complex and well-established ‘spatial infrastructure of route networks, market towns, caravan stops, and provisioning systems’ (p.172). In the following chapter on Central Asia, Gordon Stewart draws our attention to the connections between exploration and archaeology on the Silk Road, where many objects from ‘sand-buried’ cities were recovered and then removed to European and North American museums (p. 202). Discussing the British use of indigenous ‘pundits’ as cartographers and spies in the Survey of India, moreover, Stewart also addresses the imbrications of ‘exploration and espionage’ (p. 206). Closing the volume is Stephanie Barczewski’s examination of the Antarctic. The changing ways in which that continent has been written about, she argues, tend to reflect ‘broader developments in world politics’ (p. 216). By concentrating on the connections between the historiography of Antarctic exploration and the political environment that produced it, Barczewski’s chapter serves as a cautionary reminder that historical narratives are almost inevitably ideologically embedded. From the summary above, it is clear that Kennedy’s collection has commendable chronological length, regional breadth, and thematic depth. It makes a strong case that European exploration had a ‘disproportionate historical impact on the modern world’ and was fundamental in shaping the West’s encounters with different cultures, peoples, and environments (p. 7). The book addresses the link with empire, acknowledging it as a forerunner of imperial expansion and globalisation. Yet the essays do so without assuming a simplistic or direct relationship. Exploration consisted of too many projects, made up of different and competing agendas, to settle for easy historical typecasting. Indeed, the book is concerned with complexity, refusing to adopt unilaterally ‘celebratory or denunciatory’ perspectives (p. 15). More work, of course, remains to be done. As Kennedy himself acknowledges, the volume might have visited other territories or included more on themes ranging from gender to biography and cartography. More space could also have been granted to what Simon Naylor and James Ryan have elsewhere identified as the ‘new spaces of exploration’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (New Spaces of Exploration, 2010). No book, however, is a total project and this excellent volume combines an important reassessment with an invitation to future scholarship. Justin D. Livingstone University of Glasgow, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.018
Ben Maddison, Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750e1920. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, xii þ 247 pages, £60 hardcover. Aided by a recent wave of anniversaries, the history of Antarctic exploration has become a lively scholarly field. The central contention of Ben Maddison’s book is that this literature has neglected the working-class individuals who made up ‘the biotic base that sustained those higher up the pyramid of Antarctic exploration’ (p. 1). Expedition leaders stood atop that pyramid, obscuring the contributions of those below and the colonial infrastructures (from ships to supplies to markets) that made their iconic feats possible. Maddison defines his goal as one of placing existing facts within new analytic contexts, and in this he generally succeeds. No new
117
empirical sources are introduced; rather, the secondary literature is read and interpreted in new ways. This includes extensive use of published diaries (of which more seem to become available with every passing year) and a good grasp of the secondary literature, even if the coverage of twentieth-century expeditions is not entirely comprehensive. Some of the sources that Maddison correctly characterizes as a problematic canon of Antarctic historiographydworks that established and perpetuated a narrative that privileges the summit of the class pyramiddare also called upon to provide the empirical base for analysis, although reading against the grain allows these works to retain value as sources. The first section, titled ‘Colonialism, Capitalism and the Discovery of Antarctica’, brings the history of eighteenth-century European colonial expansion (especially British and French) into dialogue with the early history of Antarctic exploration. Maddison’s central argument is that the same capitalist impulses that drove European activity around the globe also shaped the Antarctic activities of explorers such as James Cook and Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen. He is right to emphasize ‘circuits of necessity’(first introduced on p. 10)dthe journeys that ships working in Antarctic waters were required to periodically make for provisions, fuel, and replacement labourers. Such connections linked activities in the far south with process much further north, in terms of material support in addition to political and economic structures. The reach of European colonialism was truly globaldAntarctica included. The second section, ‘Class and Antarctic Exploration, 1750e1850’, brings the experiences of those who toiled in and around the Antarctic into focus. Most striking are the vivid descriptions of labour at sea. From the exhausting task of ‘watering’dcollecting ice for drinking waterdto the harshness of life below decks in cold climates, Maddison paints a distinctly unglamorous picture of Antarctic exploration that forces readers to reimagine the nature of these voyages. One feels he is most in his element when demonstrating that expeditions were the product of coordinated human labour. The work of Marcus Rediker is frequently (and fruitfully) employed in this analysis. This is to my mind the strongest section of the book, driven by an enthusiasm for recovering and describing the ordeals that working men experienced in the service of feats that became synonymous with their leaders. Maddison also provides a valuable reminder of how intimately sealers knew Antarctic waters and islands through their work. Part of his mission is to foreground the labour of individuals whom history has forgotten, and thereby to question the validity of the heroic pantheon of Antarctic exploration. At least as important is the historiographic shift he advocates toward recognizing the Antarctic as a commercial frontierdlike so many places elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial world. The third section, ‘Imperialism in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, 1890e1920’, juxtaposes narratives of geographical conquest with the first Antarctic whaling boom. Maddison’s contention that the watershed in modern Antarctic history was the British annexation of the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1908 provides a provocative counter to the privileging of exploration over exploitation. Many expeditions in this period were indeed constructed as ‘free-standing middle-class achievements’ (p. 167), especially British expeditions in which class-bound command structures were most apparent. But the established social structures that characterized life at sea became less relevant as Antarctic exploration increasingly took place on the continent, not always under the leadership of men from nautical traditions. A nagging feeling remains that after the early twentieth century class becomes a less powerful mode of analyzing Antarctic exploration. The ‘binary divide along the lines of class’ (p. 8) that Maddison sees so
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
understand how ideas about drink have been liable to change. Rolf Lessenich provides a welcome look at the origins of temperance through a discussion of eighteenth-century radicalism and religious dissent, for example, while Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter examine shifting medical attempts to grapple with drinking and drunkenness. Such ideas were just as liable to travel as commodities, of course, but Reinarz and Wynter also attend to the significance of locally contingent knowledgedsuch as the importance of where medics were traineddin the emergence of new ideas about drinking. Jayne, Holloway, and Valentine’s call for work on the scalar relations of social practices finds an admirable historical response in Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, a volume which helps us better understand the relations between the messy materialities of drinking practices and their representations in and across time and space. David Beckingham University of Cambridge, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.005
Dane Kennedy (Ed), Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii þ 236 pages, US$99/£64 hardcover. Dane Kennedy’s collection, Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, marks an important moment in an ongoing reassessment of the European project of exploration. Looking simultaneously backwards and forwardsdtracing the development of current research avenues and gesturing towards new lines of enquirydthe book investigates the ‘epistemological foundations’ and ‘ideological agendas’ of expeditionary culture and the resulting encounters with non-European peoples and places around the globe (p. 2). Since popular literature persists in writing the history of exploration as the story of heroic and individualistic pioneers, this book provides a much-needed antidote. On reading the essays assembled in Kennedy’s volume, the range of disciplines that have contributed to this revisionist enterprise is immediately striking. Imperial history, history of science, historical anthropology, historical geography, book history, and literary criticism are just some of the fields that have participated in complicating simplistic narratives. The emergence of interdisciplinary ‘area studies’ and the rise of transdisciplinary intellectual currents like postcolonialism have also been significant in disrupting Eurocentric perspectives. An interesting feature of the book is its acknowledgement that exploratory activities have not been the prerogative of Western societies alone. As Michael F. Robinson argues in the book’s first chapter, it might be possible to reframe exploration as ‘a global activity’ rather than delimiting it as solely a Western cultural practice (p. 31). For instance, in her piece on the Pacific, Jane Samson points to indigenous voyagesdexhibiting considerable navigational skilldthat preceded the well-known European journeys. Likewise, Gordon Stewart observes that when Europeans came to Central Asia there was already a ‘thick layer of prior discovery’ that had resulted in an extensive body of Chinese travel literature dating back over a thousand years (p. 197). Recovering and recalling these episodes both tames grandiose European claims and serves as a salutary reminder of other histories. While casting light onto some of these prior histories, however, the primary terrain of the book lies elsewhere. As Kennedy points out, although other societies engaged in ‘what can be broadly construed as exploration’ the task of his
collection is to interrogate its status in ‘the European historical experience’, as ‘a concept and a practice that carries a particular set of cultural, social, and political valences’ (p. 1). Following this mandate, the first section of the book is devoted to studies of various important themes. Michael F. Robinson, for instance, begins by examining exploration’s interrelations with science in the first and second ages of ‘discovery’ and beyond. Arguing that these enterprises shaped one another mutually, Robinson discusses both ‘exploration’s role in changing the content of knowledge’ and the way in which scientific preoccupations ‘infused’ exploratory culture (pp. 22, 25). Another chapter, by Philip J. Stern, takes up the theme of ‘Enlightenment’. In a similar vein, we see how the Enlightenment influenced the course of exploration and, reciprocally, how expeditionary encounters gave direction to Enlightenment projects. What emerges from these contributions is that we should not conceive of exploration as autonomous. Rather, as Harry Liebersohn argues, it is important to recognise that it ‘overlaps with other kinds of ventures’ (p. 39). Exploration was never a homogenous enterprise, nor hermetically sealed, but one that intersected with a wide range of activities. Liebersohn’s chapter addresses one of the major themes pervading the collection: cultural encounter. Tracing the historiography of exploration from one that focused on the acts of heroic individuals to one that has introduced a host of ‘narrative voices’ and historical actors, Liebersohn argues for a nuanced ‘multidimensional’ account of cultural interaction (p. 49). This acknowledges, of course, that indigenous cultures did not passively receive European presence. Rather, local groups were actively involved in shaping encountersdoften holding the balance of powerdand negotiating their own history. In fact, a fundamental purpose of Kennedy’s volume is to foreground the role that indigenous peoples played in European expeditions. A range of ‘intermediaries’, including translators, guides, and porters were indispensable but have tended to receive little acknowledgement (p. 3). Several of the authors thus aim, as Stephen J. Rockel puts it, to ‘decentre’ narratives of European travel (p. 172). In so doing, they seek to uncover what Felix Driver and Lowri Jones have elsewhere called the ‘hidden histories of exploration’ (Hidden Histories of Exploration, 2009). While the essays participate in shifting focus to silenced participants, some famous travellers receive renewed examination. Rather than focusing on their specific exploits and character, attention is directed instead to the figure of the explorer as a cultural phenomenon. As Clare Pettitt points out in her chapter, explorers were among the first to be ‘accorded a modern celebrity status’ thanks to media developments in the nineteenth century (p. 82). But, as Berny Sèbe reminds us, if they were celebrities, they were also heroes who generated powerful legends. They often became national representatives ‘of exemplary value’, whose reputations could have instrumental political power (p. 109). For Sèbe, it is important to acknowledge the ‘sociological function’ of explorers and the ways in which they were later commemorated (p. 110). The second section of the collection develops many of these themes. It also turns in the direction of specific territories. William Sunderland, for instance, focuses on imperial Russia from the Petrine era onwards, addressing some of the particularities of exploration in a continental empire. Moving into the Pacific world, Jane Samson draws attention to unofficial explorersdsuch as sailors, missionaries, traders, and various indigenous groupsdwho have increasingly been granted attention by academics in Pacific Studies. Despite this, she argues, the scholarship has still been too restricted to predictable figures like Captain Cook, who have received more than their fair share of attention. Stephen J. Rockel takes us into East Africa, contending that European journeys there can only be understood in terms of the pre-existing ‘caravan
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
system’ (p. 172). Scientific travellers relied heavily on a complex and well-established ‘spatial infrastructure of route networks, market towns, caravan stops, and provisioning systems’ (p.172). In the following chapter on Central Asia, Gordon Stewart draws our attention to the connections between exploration and archaeology on the Silk Road, where many objects from ‘sand-buried’ cities were recovered and then removed to European and North American museums (p. 202). Discussing the British use of indigenous ‘pundits’ as cartographers and spies in the Survey of India, moreover, Stewart also addresses the imbrications of ‘exploration and espionage’ (p. 206). Closing the volume is Stephanie Barczewski’s examination of the Antarctic. The changing ways in which that continent has been written about, she argues, tend to reflect ‘broader developments in world politics’ (p. 216). By concentrating on the connections between the historiography of Antarctic exploration and the political environment that produced it, Barczewski’s chapter serves as a cautionary reminder that historical narratives are almost inevitably ideologically embedded. From the summary above, it is clear that Kennedy’s collection has commendable chronological length, regional breadth, and thematic depth. It makes a strong case that European exploration had a ‘disproportionate historical impact on the modern world’ and was fundamental in shaping the West’s encounters with different cultures, peoples, and environments (p. 7). The book addresses the link with empire, acknowledging it as a forerunner of imperial expansion and globalisation. Yet the essays do so without assuming a simplistic or direct relationship. Exploration consisted of too many projects, made up of different and competing agendas, to settle for easy historical typecasting. Indeed, the book is concerned with complexity, refusing to adopt unilaterally ‘celebratory or denunciatory’ perspectives (p. 15). More work, of course, remains to be done. As Kennedy himself acknowledges, the volume might have visited other territories or included more on themes ranging from gender to biography and cartography. More space could also have been granted to what Simon Naylor and James Ryan have elsewhere identified as the ‘new spaces of exploration’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (New Spaces of Exploration, 2010). No book, however, is a total project and this excellent volume combines an important reassessment with an invitation to future scholarship. Justin D. Livingstone University of Glasgow, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.018
Ben Maddison, Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750e1920. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014, xii þ 247 pages, £60 hardcover. Aided by a recent wave of anniversaries, the history of Antarctic exploration has become a lively scholarly field. The central contention of Ben Maddison’s book is that this literature has neglected the working-class individuals who made up ‘the biotic base that sustained those higher up the pyramid of Antarctic exploration’ (p. 1). Expedition leaders stood atop that pyramid, obscuring the contributions of those below and the colonial infrastructures (from ships to supplies to markets) that made their iconic feats possible. Maddison defines his goal as one of placing existing facts within new analytic contexts, and in this he generally succeeds. No new
117
empirical sources are introduced; rather, the secondary literature is read and interpreted in new ways. This includes extensive use of published diaries (of which more seem to become available with every passing year) and a good grasp of the secondary literature, even if the coverage of twentieth-century expeditions is not entirely comprehensive. Some of the sources that Maddison correctly characterizes as a problematic canon of Antarctic historiographydworks that established and perpetuated a narrative that privileges the summit of the class pyramiddare also called upon to provide the empirical base for analysis, although reading against the grain allows these works to retain value as sources. The first section, titled ‘Colonialism, Capitalism and the Discovery of Antarctica’, brings the history of eighteenth-century European colonial expansion (especially British and French) into dialogue with the early history of Antarctic exploration. Maddison’s central argument is that the same capitalist impulses that drove European activity around the globe also shaped the Antarctic activities of explorers such as James Cook and Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen. He is right to emphasize ‘circuits of necessity’(first introduced on p. 10)dthe journeys that ships working in Antarctic waters were required to periodically make for provisions, fuel, and replacement labourers. Such connections linked activities in the far south with process much further north, in terms of material support in addition to political and economic structures. The reach of European colonialism was truly globaldAntarctica included. The second section, ‘Class and Antarctic Exploration, 1750e1850’, brings the experiences of those who toiled in and around the Antarctic into focus. Most striking are the vivid descriptions of labour at sea. From the exhausting task of ‘watering’dcollecting ice for drinking waterdto the harshness of life below decks in cold climates, Maddison paints a distinctly unglamorous picture of Antarctic exploration that forces readers to reimagine the nature of these voyages. One feels he is most in his element when demonstrating that expeditions were the product of coordinated human labour. The work of Marcus Rediker is frequently (and fruitfully) employed in this analysis. This is to my mind the strongest section of the book, driven by an enthusiasm for recovering and describing the ordeals that working men experienced in the service of feats that became synonymous with their leaders. Maddison also provides a valuable reminder of how intimately sealers knew Antarctic waters and islands through their work. Part of his mission is to foreground the labour of individuals whom history has forgotten, and thereby to question the validity of the heroic pantheon of Antarctic exploration. At least as important is the historiographic shift he advocates toward recognizing the Antarctic as a commercial frontierdlike so many places elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial world. The third section, ‘Imperialism in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, 1890e1920’, juxtaposes narratives of geographical conquest with the first Antarctic whaling boom. Maddison’s contention that the watershed in modern Antarctic history was the British annexation of the Falkland Islands Dependencies in 1908 provides a provocative counter to the privileging of exploration over exploitation. Many expeditions in this period were indeed constructed as ‘free-standing middle-class achievements’ (p. 167), especially British expeditions in which class-bound command structures were most apparent. But the established social structures that characterized life at sea became less relevant as Antarctic exploration increasingly took place on the continent, not always under the leadership of men from nautical traditions. A nagging feeling remains that after the early twentieth century class becomes a less powerful mode of analyzing Antarctic exploration. The ‘binary divide along the lines of class’ (p. 8) that Maddison sees so