Lexington Books
Pages: 324
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅛
978-1-4985-9013-6 • Hardback • October 2018 • $142.00 • (£109.00)
978-1-4985-9014-3 • eBook • October 2018 • $134.50 • (£104.00)
Geoffrey C. Gunn is emeritus professor at Nagasaki University.
Introduction
1. The Classical View of the Afro–Eurasian World
2. The Islamic Crossover
3. Ptolemaic Revival and Cartographic Adjustments in a Transitional Age
4. Revisions to the Ptolemaic Template in the Age of Discovery (1300–1500s)
5. The European Discoveries and the Print Revolution Reprised (1500–1700)
6. The Ptolemaic World-in-Motion: Enlightenment Science and the Jesuit Advance on China
7. The European Framing of Ptolemy’s India Extra Gangem
8. Reimagining Ptolemy’s Sinus Magnus and the Historical Geography of the China Seas
Conclusion: Conclusion: Post–Ptolemaic Constructions of Empire and Nation-State
The way you picture the world-map doesn’t just reflect the way you think about the planet: it affects how you divide it into regions and see their relative size and importance, foregrounding some places, while others recede or shrink. But Geoffrey Gunn scans the world objectively, in a single conspectus, and appreciates ways in which every region—especially Asia—has influenced others. Always commonsensical, always fair, always rooted in careful mastery of facts, his absorbing history of a world-ranging Western tradition of mapping helps us understand why we see our Earth as we do.
— Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame
A broad and very interesting conceptualization of space in the making of ‘Asia’ as a world-region, and worth reading. Gunn is a specialist in making sense of the ‘big picture’.
— Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University
This book is the first to present in a single volume a synthesis of recent trends in the history of cartography, along with a broad picture of long-term and transnational phenomena. It provides a new view in which scholars and general readers can understand more dynamic changes in global mapping history.
— Hyunhee Park, City University of New York