607Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009) 603–618

origins of the new universities out beyond academic

walls, bonding them in an extended web with the min-ing, agricultural and manufacturing organizations ofthe declining Holy Roman Empire. Like them, educa-

tional institutions had to earn money, and researchprogrammes were geared towards attracting wealthystudents who would help to boost the local economy.

A well-illustrated paperback at a reasonable price,

this book is analytically innovative yet carefully editedto make it universally accessible for students andacademics from a wide range of modern disciplines. In

Werrett’s words, it responds to ‘calls for a geographyof knowledge, rather than a history of science’, becausecharting epistemological structures ‘cannot be divorced

from a mapping of the historical movements of artisansand other knowledge communities as they traveledround Europe in the early modern period’ (p. 71).

Patricia Fara

Clare College, Cambridge, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.04.008

Pierre Singaravelou (Ed.), L’Empire des geographes:geographie, exploration et colonisation, XIXe-XXesiecle, Paris, Belin, 2008, 288 pages, V24 paperback.

In our post-colonial times, it may come as a surprise thatthe story of colonization retains popular and academic

fascination in France. The Palais de la Porte Doree inParis, built for the Exposition coloniale of 1931, mayhave changed from housing the Musee National des

Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie to accommodating theCite Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, but itremains a shrine to French imperial power. The great

bas-relief on its main facade evokes the economic contri-bution of the former colonies to the Hexagon, withAsian territories depicted, appropriately, on the easternside and African colonies on the west. In the interior,

two oval salons created for Paul Reynaud (minister forthe colonies in 1931) and for Marechal Lyautey (directorof the colonial exhibition) depict the cultures and econ-

omies of France’s former African and Asian colonies. Inthe great forum, art deco frescoes display France trans-mitting the values of equality, liberty, justice and peace

to the five continents. Such was the imperial myth inits heyday.

In L’Empire des geographes, six geographers, 10 his-torians and one literary scholar explore the development

of world knowledge from the age of exploration by gen-

tlemen travellers to the emergence of academic geogra-phy and the distinctive branch known as la geographiecoloniale that flourished between the two world wars.

Four main sections deal with: the places where colonialgeography was produced; uses of geography in colonialsituations; literary and vernacular geographies; and theshift from ‘colonial geography’ to ‘tropical geography’.

Throughout the book, the emphasis is largely on Frenchexperience but historian Singaravelou and geographerDaniel Clayton draw extensively on English-language

writings. After outlining the main contours of post-colo-nial research, the editor insists on the need to researchthe men, institutions and social networks that were at

the heart of the colonial geography endeavour. He re-calls famous practitioners, such as Marcel Dubois andGeorges Hardy, as well as tracing the ideological posi-tions of various ‘anti-colonialist’ colonial geographers,

including Jacques Weulersse, Jean Dresch and evenPierre Gourou. Geographical societies in French provin-cial cities and in the colonies themselves were important

foci for accumulating knowledge that fed popular inter-est in the exotic and also supported commercial and in-dustrial ventures. Jean-Francois Klein traces the early

activities of the Societe de geographie de Lyon, originat-ing in 1874, that was patronised by the silk merchantsand missionaries based in the city. It displayed great

interest in French explorations in the Orient and intropical Africa before adopting a more academic and‘professional’ stance in the early 1900s. EmmanuelleSibeaud shows that, by contrast with this long-lived in-

stitution, the geographical society established in Dakarin 1907 lasted only a couple of years and the militaryofficers that were its driving force were sent to postings

elsewhere.Much geographical knowledge about the colonies

was assembled by occupying military forces whose offi-

cers pioneered survey and mapping work. However, des-erts and dense tropical forests proved formidablechallenges for surveyors trained in the Ile-de-France orthe French Alps. As Helene Blais shows in the context

of Algeria, the task of mapping territories controlledby non-sedentary tribes was even more daunting thanthe depiction of natural features. Despite their imper-

fections, military expeditions and later surveys by pro-fessional geographers offered information that wasessential for colonial administration. In separate essays,

Mustapha Chouiki and Jean-Yves Puyo demonstratehow Lyautey pursued a policy ‘to master societythrough the mastery of space’ in Morocco (p. 119).

Back in the Hexagon, knowledge of the exotic ‘other’

608 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009) 603–618

was transmitted in a multiplicity of ways. Claire Laux

traces how messages from missionaries reached la grandepatrie, and Pierre Guillaume demonstrates how medicalofficers were important sources of scientific information

in the colonies. Popular periodicals, such as the Journaldes Voyages, awakened a fascination for ‘otherwhereitis’.A similar role was performed by novels, as Jean-FrancoisStaszak demonstrates in an intriguing essay on the sour-

ces of information that Paul Gaugin may have usedbefore going to Tahiti.

After all these popular demonstrations of interest in

the colonies came formal courses in geographie colonialethat Colette Zytnicki traces at the Sorbonne, in severalprovincial universities, at the Ecole coloniale in Paris

and in Ecoles superieures de commerce in France’smajor ports and industrial cities. The last word in thevolume comes from veteran geographer Yves Lacostewho traces the shift after 1945 from colonial geography

to the less ideologically laden ‘tropical geography’ andthen to third world studies and the geography of devel-opment. He stresses that academic colonization did not

disappear when colonies gained their independence,since a considerable number of French geographers con-tinued to pursue their doctoral research in ex-colonial

states whilst training a generation of local geographersin their colleges and universities. His perceptive com-ments are balanced by those of Paul Claval whose

wide-ranging essay introduces the whole volume.L’Empire des geographes is a most welcome addition tothe literature on the history of geography in Franceand of colonial endeavours in its former colonial empire.

My one tinge of territorial regret is that historiansoutnumber geographers among its contributors.

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.04.009

Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: EnlightenmentScience and South America, Chicago, ChicagoUniversity Press, 2008, 428 pages, US$45 hardback.

Measuring the New World examines the Franco-Spanishgeographic expedition launched by the Paris Academy

of Sciences in 1735, most famously manoeuvred throughthe Province of Quito and the rain forest of Amazoniaby Charles-Marie de La Condamine. Closely followingCondamine and some of his contemporaries, Neil Safier,

assistant professor of History at the University of British

Columbia, shows how the production of knowledge onSouth America evolved as it went through differenthands and places from Ecuador and Brazil to Madrid,

London and Paris. The book gives an account of theexpedition, its context and its aftermaths with the helpof logs and letters written by travellers, administratorsand commentators, the maps they used and produced

along with the printed works that resulted from theirlabour, as well as the reactions prompted by these indifferent parts of the world. The focus is on how geo-

graphic and ethnographic knowledge was transformedas it was transmitted: submitted to abridgement, to theeffacement or denigration of many original sources,

and to intricate processes of reorganization and refor-mulation at the hands of numerous authors rangingfrom the most illustrious to the outright obscure. Likeother historians of science in recent years, Safier explores

the ‘itineraries’ of information through the early modernworld rather than insisting on static centre-peripheryschemes.

The first two chapters of Measuring the New Worlddeal with Condamine’s travels through the province ofQuito and the Amazon basin, as well as the making of

the 1745 Carte du Cours du Maragnon. Chapter three ex-plores the reception of Condamine’s writings in institu-tional and non-institutional contexts in Europe and

South America. The following chapter, beautifully illus-trated with little known materials from the BibliothequeNationale of Paris, analyses the triangular working rela-tionship of Condamine, his Spanish-Peruvian travel

companion Pedro Vicente Maldonado, and the Frenchcartographer Bourguignon d’Anville in the making ofthree subtly distinct versions of the1750 Carta de la Pro-

vincia de Quito. Chapter five takes a closer look at theHispanic context of Condamine’s work, revealing Quitoas ‘an unacknowledged’ – and yet remarkably sophisti-

cated – ‘epicentre of enquiry into the nature and statusof the Amerindian’ (p. 170), and throwing additionallight on the making of Enlightenment Science in Bour-bon Spain. Finally, chapter six and seven deal with the

afterlife of Condamine’s data as they made their wayinto the French translation of Garcilaso’s ComentariosReales de los Incas (Histoire des Incas, 1744) and a num-

ber of tiny entries in the Encyclopedie, to which theywere adapted through complicated typographical andeditorial manipulation that brought a new order to the

original prose.As Safier puts it, the itinerary of the book follows

a logic based on different ways of using words to de-

scribe and act upon the world – ‘inscription, narration,