Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141 133

geopolitician, his activities during the 1930s, and then the waryears. What is genuinely new here is the richly-detailed discussionof Haushofer’s period in Japan between 1908 and 1909. Haushoferkept daily diaries of his activities and impressions, a source ofwhich Spang makes full use. The author brings out clearly howimportant this experience was in strengthening the globaldimension of Haushofer’s world view, an aspect that would shapehis subsequent geopolitical theories. Haushofer’s contacts withAdolf Hitler are fully detailed, from their first meeting in 1921 downto an encounter on the eve ofWorldWar Two, when Haushofer washonored with a Reichsadlerschild signed personally by the Führer.The important role of Haushofer’s wife Martha, whose superiorlinguistic skills allowed her to translate key works for him, is alsoemphasized.

The book’s second section deals with the development ofHaushofer’s ideas, and the effect they had in Germany. The idea of aKontinentalblockdan alliance of Germany, the USSR, and Japan inorder to resist the maritime hegemonialism of Britain and theUnited Statesdwas consistently at the center of Haushofer’sthinking, and he agitated ceaselessly for it throughout the 1930s.Spang describes how Haushofer’s expertise on East Asia and Japanwas appreciated by the Nazis, but his geographically-basedperspective was at odds with Hitler’s racial categorizations. Thehigh point for Haushofer came in 1939 with the non-aggressionpact between Germany and the USSR, which he saw as the firststep in building the Kontinentalblock. His euphoria came to an un-happy end in June 1941, when German forces invaded the SovietUnion. After this, Haushofer lost whatever influence he had andceased to play any official role.

The third section of the book considers Haushofer’s role asVermittler, or bridge, between Germany and Japan. Haushofer wasdispatched to Japan as a military observer from 1908 to 1910. Hewas highly impressed with the country’s dynamic developmentsince the mid nineteenth century, and he saw Japandfresh from itsvictory over the Russian navy in 1905das a sort of military modelfor Germany. Haushofer developed extensive military, diplomatic,and academic contacts in Japan, a network which subsequentlyenabled him to play a role in the development of GermaneJapaneserelations in the Weimar Republic.

The concluding section of Spang’s study considers the influenceof Haushofer’s Geopolitik on the development of geopolitics andexpansionist doctrines in Japan. Japanese geopolitics took shapeonly in the late 1930s, when the outbreak of Japan’s war with Chinaserved to heighten military interest in geopolitical perspectives.Through his personal contacts, as well as his contributions togeopolitical theories, Haushofer was able to exert a certain influ-ence in this process. Two of Haushofer’s concepts in particular wereimportant in this. One of these was the Kontinentalblock vision, thearguments for which the Japanese eagerly took up and indeedsupported longer than the Germans themselves. The other was thenotion of the geographical unity of the so-called ‘Monsoon lands’that Haushofer developed in writings on South and East Asia. As itturned out, this notion served eminently well as a rationalizationfor Japan’s program of imperial expansion and the creation, from1940, of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Spang detailsthe emergence of an academic school, or schools of geopolitics inJapan, all of which worked directly and closely with the militaryestablishmentda collaboration which, contrary to popular belief,had never been the case in Germany.

Spang’s work makes an immense contribution to a sub-jectdHaushofer and Japandabout which almost nothing is known.He has marshalled a truly vast range of published and archivalsources, and has left no avenue unexplored in his evaluation ofHaushofer’s activities, thinking, and influence. Thus, the book’sappendices provide lists not only of which of Haushofer’s published

works are in which Japanese libraries, but also what booksHaushofer read in preparation for his trip to Japan in 1908. The bookgive us a very full sense of the important role Haushofer had in theevolution of JapaneseeGerman relations between the wars, andalso in the emergence of Japanese geopolitics. In regard, however,to the book’s other concerndHaushofer’s activities and ideas inGermanydan evaluation of its contribution requires rather morenuance.Without any question, Spang’s book delivers the fullest andmost authoritative account of Haushofer’s life and thinking that wehave to date, and indeed it is hard to imagine that it will be sur-passed anytime soon. Given that there is already a considerableamount of serious literature on this subject, the book’s achieve-ment in this respect is all the more impressive.

At the same time, however, the fact that so much is alreadyknown about Haushofer in the German context means that thebook provides rather fewer genuinely new insights. Readers com-ing from a background in Anglo-American geopolitics will learnthat, while Haushofer certainly studied Halford Mackinder and hisnotion of a Heartland-Outer Crescent union, this was an idea thatthe former had developed independently as a result of his travels toAsia, which included an extended journey on the Trans-Siberianrailway. In regard to the essential question of Haushofer and theNational Socialists, Spang presents a wealth of detail which bringsout Haushofer’s opportunism and insincerity rather more sharplythan earlier accounts, but does not really alter existing conclusionsthat Haushofer’s influence was essentially marginal, and evapo-rated entirely after 1941.

These points notwithstanding, Karl Haushofer und Japan is aunique achievement: a product of immense scholarly labor and avast repository of information and analysis. All those interested inthe many topics the book addresses will study it to their benefit.

Mark BassinSödertörn University, Sweden

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.006

Sanjeev Sanyal, Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’sGeography. New Delhi, Penguin, 2012, xi þ 331 pages, IndianRs. 399 / US$20, paperback.

This book explores India’s history and geography from pre-historictimes to the present in a concise and lucid manner and providesinteresting insights into Indian culture, history, and geographyusing a wide range of historical texts, travellers’ accounts, scholarlytexts, and personal experiences. While not quite a traditionaltreatise on ‘historical geography’, the book nevertheless provides anarrative of accumulating and competing geographical knowledgeabout the Indian subcontinent over the millennia.

The book begins with the continental drift theory of the Indiansubcontinent and then surveys the knowledge about ancienthumanmigrations through recent advances in the genetic sciences.The next chapter deals exclusively with the geographical extents ofthe Harappan civilization (c.3000e1500 BC) and the implications ofthe drying of the Saraswati river in the northwestern regionsknown as the sapta-sindhu or the land of the seven rivers. The thirdchapter, ‘The age of lions’, describes the geography of the Indiansubcontinent through a reading of the famous epicsdRamayanaand Mahabharatadand the Mauryan empire (c. 320e180 BC). Hereit outlines the importance of lions (rather than tigers or elephantsas is commonly argued) in the cultural memory of the subconti-nent. Lions were important symbols of royalty in India as in manyother countries, and were depicted on edicts and pillars by rulers

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141134

throughout India’s history. TheMauryan lions are an integral part ofthe national emblem of India and the Sanskrit word for liondsimhaor singhadis the root of words such as singhasan (throne), sinhala(Sri Lankan ethnic group) and Singh (common North Indiansurname).

Two chapters deal with ancient trading routes (especially withSoutheast Asia), indigenous geographical knowledge, and the fateof Delhi, and bring the story up to the early modern era. A chapteron ‘The mapping of India’ outlines the first European efforts tomap India and the ‘war of maps’ among aspirant colonists.Another chapter, based largely on the work of Susan Gole and JohnWilford, describes mapping in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies with crisp biographies of Colonel James Rennel, whoproduced the Bengal Atlas, and William Lambton, Superintendentof the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. There follows a dis-cussion of railway construction in the late nineteenth century, themapping of Tibet, and the drama surrounding the 1947 partition ofIndia and the integration of the princely states with the IndianUnion.

The author, an Indianwhowas educated in Britain andwho nowdivides his time between India and Singapore, effectively covers ahuge geographical and historical span, and his book’s majorachievement is to provide a grand synthesis of important eventsand phenomena over several millennia in clear prose. It is rich inanecdotesdfor instance, that the Hindukush mountain rangederives its name (which means ‘killer of Hindus’) from the harshwinters of the Afghanmountains that led to highmortality of slaveswho were forcibly taken through them on their way from India tocentral Asia. It does not miss out on ironiesdthe decline of thefamous Nalanda University in northern India is juxtaposed with therise of the University of Oxford (the author’s alma mater) in thesame time period. A strength of the book is the attention it pays toSouth India: both general historical texts and research studies havetended to focus on northern areas. The author’s base in Singaporeenables him to bring fresh insight into maritime, military, andtrading connections between South India and Southeast Asia, whilehis extensive travels and first-hand knowledge of India make hisinsights into cultural phenomena valuable.

The book inevitably has its limitations. Other than a conjectureon the region known as the sapta-sindhu that is plausible but de-serves detailed historical research, and interesting explanations ofcultural oddities, it offers few original arguments on historical ge-ography. By focusing almost exclusively on urban areas, it ignoresagriculture and its development. Some of the most importantregional variations in Indian culture are often attributed togeographical differences and agriculture, in particular the rice-wheat divide (see David Sopher’s An Exploration of India:Geographical Perspectives on Society and Culture (New York, 1980));but there is hardly any discussion of the geographic distribution ofrainfall, arguably the most important aspect to be considered in anystudy of Indian geography, or of Cauvery and Krishna, two of theseven rivers depicted in the book’s cover illustration. The scholarlyapparatus of bibliography, map, and index are welcome, but it isregrettable that there are not more maps, especially for those basedoutside India, and that the bibliography makes no mention ofimportant scholarship, for example, the pioneering studies of Jo-seph Schwartzberg and Irfan Habib, or the important recent studiesof Matthew Edney, Ian Barrow, Kapil Raj, and Dilip Chakrabarti.

These limitations should not distract from the fact that this is ahighly readable and recommended book that serves as an excellentnon-technical introduction to the evolving field of Indian historicalgeography. The book aims for an Indian audience, but, beingavailable through Penguin USA at a reasonable rate of $20, it canalso serve as a useful text for courses on Indian historicalgeography.

Chinmay TumbeEuropean University Institute, Florence, Italy

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.005

Elizabeth A. Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa. Farnham,Ashgate, 2012, xvi þ 276 pages, £60 hardcover.

Elizabeth A. Sutton’s book is a very welcome addition to the liter-ature on the history of European visual representations of Africa.Suttonmakes a particular contribution to the study of early modernpictorial representations of Africa: a field of research that hasremained nearly untouched, with the exception of Siegfried Hui-gen’s 2009 volume Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-CenturyTravellers in South Africa, and Stephanie Leitch’s Mapping Ethnog-raphy in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (2010).Sutton’s book analyzes Dutch printing culture at the turn of theseventeenth century, with a particular focus on Pieter de Marees’Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea,initially published in Dutch in 1602 by Cornelis Claeszdone of themost important and prolific book and map publishers inAmsterdam.

De Marees had probably visited Africa several times during thelate 1590s, most likely, as Sutton suggests, in the role of physician orsurgeon. De Marees’ travel account gives a detailed description ofthe region and the inhabitants of coastal West Africa and is theearliest illustrated Dutch account on Africa. One of Sutton’s mainarguments is that Claesz’s publishing business existed at a criticalepistemological moment when the processes of Dutch nationalidentity formation coincided and intertwined with a new spirit ofempiricism and new strategies for knowledge production. Suttonperceives that de Marees’ Descriptionwas a particularly noteworthytravel account in this context on account of its illustrations andethnographic emphasis. The book included highly-detailed de-scriptions of the customs and the appearance of Africanpeople, thusmarking an important shift towards eyewitness reports within thegenre of travel literature. De Marees’ text included twenty copper-plate illustrations produced by engravers commissioned by Claesz.

There are no known drawings by deMarees, nor any in the othertravel accounts published by Claesz. Sutton assumes that the en-gravings were almost certainly created by artists in theNetherlands, who would have interpreted the author’s textual de-scriptions. Due to this technique of image production, there was astrong correlation between the text and images. Illustrations intravel accounts have often been associated with authoritativeknowledge and eyewitness veracity. In contrast to the earlymodernperiod, many nineteenth-century illustrations had a connection tothe sketches, drawings, and photographs that were made duringthe journeys of exploration. As visual documentationwas often oneof the scientific tasks of the journey, visual images also had a moreindependent documentary role and were not always very tightlyconnected to the textual parts of published travel accounts. AsSutton suggests, early seventeenth-century travel illustrationscould also be used to verify the information given in the form of thetext. It would have been fascinating to read more about the ques-tion of authenticating images that had no real connection to Africa.

Sutton provides a convincing analysis of the birth of illustrationsat a critical moment in European history, when classical visualtraditions were increasingly being challenged by new empiricalinformation. Drawing up approaches from art history and bookhistory, the author shows how early-modern illustrations of Africanpeople were constructed by copying and imitating earlier visualsources, such as those in emblem books, atlases, and costume