In Geographies of an Imperial Power, Jeremy Black traces the role of geography, broadly construed, in the British Empire between 1688 and 1815. To do so, he explores a wide array of topics, including the press, travel narratives, religion, military strategy, maritime exploration, cartography, stadial theory, and foreign policy. Interestingly, Black's methodology precludes the inclusion of images of maps. While Black sees some utility in brief discussions of the content of maps, his work is more about their role as a source of geographic information in society; maps are a genre whose spread is to be observed and not a text to be read. The meaning of “geography” here is expansive, and never directly defined. It encompasses two things, a “real” geography influencing events as seen by the historian, and the geography that people of the British empire perceived, analyzed, and mapped. By seeking to address both, Black presents a complex and ambitious work.
While both geographies are present throughout the work, Black focuses on the ways that the British understood geography and treated it as an important form of knowledge. Even in this subset of his work, geography remains a broad and encompassing concept. He describes the importance in British life of both “physical” and “political” geography. Evidence of this impact can be found in maps, travel narratives, diplomacy, surveys, charts, newspaper accounts of military campaigns, and the electoral layout of the nation.
Black divides the book into thematic chapters that cover topics, including the different ways cartographers conceptualized and visualized Britain, the development of new forms of geographic knowledge and analysis during oceanic exploration, and growing national focus on geopolitics during times of war. Black intentionally makes the chapters wide-ranging in order to “capture the simultaneity of circumstance and experiences facing contemporaries, which is an element that can be readily lost if a rigid classification and firm typology are adopted in the coverage” (xi). The penultimate chapter stands out from the others, situating Geographies of an Imperial Power among studies on British geography starting in the 1840s. Black notes that the early historiography focused on physical geography as an explanatory factor for national development. Black sees great utility in these older works, noting that the contemporary approach “on consumption, on women, on contemporary perceptions, on international links, and, as here, on aspects of power” has lost something (248–49). Black also meditates on the utility of counties as the proper unit of analysis for historical geography.
Black has carefully chosen the title for this work. The location of the word “power” is precise. In what he perceives as a challenge to postmodern and postmodern-influenced thinkers ranging from Foucault to J. B. Harley, Black argues that geography is not only about power, however it was central to the culture and development of Britain as “an Imperial Power.” His reference to “geographies” both describes the multiple ways of understanding geography he sees, while also alluding to a trendy term of the cultural turn. All this is not to say that Black ignores power in his own analysis. He frequently discusses “geopolitics” and the ways that geography was central to diplomacy, economic development, and warfare. In his critique of the use of power, Black posits that geography had a “range of contexts and meanings” and that a monolithic perspective is not appropriate (258). This somewhat unfair assessment of the works of previous historical geographers helps explain Black's wide-ranging chapters, an attempt to show a range of context.
Several issues diminish Geographies of an Imperial Power. The citations often disappoint, and Black regularly quotes material he found in recent secondary sources instead of going to the original. Taking a synthetic approach, Black relies heavily on secondary research for some chapters, while others include significant archival sources. However, beyond showing where factual information was extracted from, the notes give little sense of the existing secondary literature on the diverse topics that Black touches upon. There is also a plethora of block quotes, including one over a page long (128–30). More significantly, Black ranges so broadly that it at times brings into question whether he is actually addressing spatial or geographic topics or if he is just examining political and social developments only tenuously connected to geography. For example, in chapter 5, Black refers to a “double spatial perception” that perceived a Catholic Europe versus a Protestant Europe. While this could have a spatial element that Black has not actually explored, it could just as easily be understood as a simple religious difference between people (156). Similarly, Black notes that the public became engaged with geography during Russia's rise. Much of his evidence focuses on British fear of Russian expansion, which while technically spatial, required little sense of geography or the spatial to grasp. Instead, much of what Black discusses seems more about politics, broadly defined. Perhaps Black could have avoided this confusion with a clearer conversation about what geography is and what makes something spatial.
Unsurprisingly from someone who has published several books on similar topics, one of the greatest strengths of Geographies of an Imperial Power is Black's familiarity with a significant variety of sources, including a plethora of different styles of maps. Indeed, the press and maps are clearly his expertise, representing the strongest parts of this work. Regarding maps, while Black does not explore cartographical printing methods in depth, he does understand the different traditions they originated from and the diverse purposes they served. Black uses these sources as the backbone of his ambitious work, which spans more than a century of history in a growing empire. However, Black's reasoning behind making his chapters “range widely” does not obviate their lack of structure and the unwieldy sentences that obfuscate his broader points.
