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

geopolitician, his activities during the 1930s, and then the war
years. What is genuinely new here is the richly-detailed discussion
of Haushofers period in Japan between 1908 and 1909. Haushofer
kept daily diaries of his activities and impressions, a source of
which Spang makes full use. The author brings out clearly how
important this experience was in strengthening the global
dimension of Haushofers world view, an aspect that would shape
his subsequent geopolitical theories. Haushofers contacts with
Adolf Hitler are fully detailed, from their rst meeting in 1921 down
to an encounter on the eve of World War Two, when Haushofer was
honored with a Reichsadlerschild signed personally by the Fhrer.
The important role of Haushofers wife Martha, whose superior
linguistic skills allowed her to translate key works for him, is also
emphasized.
The books second section deals with the development of
Haushofers ideas, and the effect they had in Germany. The idea of a
Kontinentalblockdan alliance of Germany, the USSR, and Japan in
order to resist the maritime hegemonialism of Britain and the
United Statesdwas consistently at the center of Haushofers
thinking, and he agitated ceaselessly for it throughout the 1930s.
Spang describes how Haushofers expertise on East Asia and Japan
was appreciated by the Nazis, but his geographically-based
perspective was at odds with Hitlers racial categorizations. The
high point for Haushofer came in 1939 with the non-aggression
pact between Germany and the USSR, which he saw as the rst
step in building the Kontinentalblock. His euphoria came to an unhappy end in June 1941, when German forces invaded the Soviet
Union. After this, Haushofer lost whatever inuence he had and
ceased to play any ofcial role.
The third section of the book considers Haushofers role as
Vermittler, or bridge, between Germany and Japan. Haushofer was
dispatched to Japan as a military observer from 1908 to 1910. He
was highly impressed with the countrys dynamic development
since the mid nineteenth century, and he saw Japandfresh from its
victory over the Russian navy in 1905das a sort of military model
for Germany. Haushofer developed extensive military, diplomatic,
and academic contacts in Japan, a network which subsequently
enabled him to play a role in the development of GermaneJapanese
relations in the Weimar Republic.
The concluding section of Spangs study considers the inuence
of Haushofers Geopolitik on the development of geopolitics and
expansionist doctrines in Japan. Japanese geopolitics took shape
only in the late 1930s, when the outbreak of Japans war with China
served to heighten military interest in geopolitical perspectives.
Through his personal contacts, as well as his contributions to
geopolitical theories, Haushofer was able to exert a certain inuence in this process. Two of Haushofers concepts in particular were
important in this. One of these was the Kontinentalblock vision, the
arguments for which the Japanese eagerly took up and indeed
supported longer than the Germans themselves. The other was the
notion of the geographical unity of the so-called Monsoon lands
that Haushofer developed in writings on South and East Asia. As it
turned out, this notion served eminently well as a rationalization
for Japans program of imperial expansion and the creation, from
1940, of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Spang details
the emergence of an academic school, or schools of geopolitics in
Japan, all of which worked directly and closely with the military
establishmentda collaboration which, contrary to popular belief,
had never been the case in Germany.
Spangs work makes an immense contribution to a subjectdHaushofer and Japandabout which almost nothing is known.
He has marshalled a truly vast range of published and archival
sources, and has left no avenue unexplored in his evaluation of
Haushofers activities, thinking, and inuence. Thus, the books
appendices provide lists not only of which of Haushofers published

133

works are in which Japanese libraries, but also what books

Haushofer read in preparation for his trip to Japan in 1908. The book
give us a very full sense of the important role Haushofer had in the
evolution of JapaneseeGerman relations between the wars, and
also in the emergence of Japanese geopolitics. In regard, however,
to the books other concerndHaushofers activities and ideas in
Germanydan evaluation of its contribution requires rather more
nuance. Without any question, Spangs book delivers the fullest and
most authoritative account of Haushofers life and thinking that we
have to date, and indeed it is hard to imagine that it will be surpassed anytime soon. Given that there is already a considerable
amount of serious literature on this subject, the books achievement in this respect is all the more impressive.
At the same time, however, the fact that so much is already
known about Haushofer in the German context means that the
book provides rather fewer genuinely new insights. Readers coming from a background in Anglo-American geopolitics will learn
that, while Haushofer certainly studied Halford Mackinder and his
notion of a Heartland-Outer Crescent union, this was an idea that
the former had developed independently as a result of his travels to
Asia, which included an extended journey on the Trans-Siberian
railway. In regard to the essential question of Haushofer and the
National Socialists, Spang presents a wealth of detail which brings
out Haushofers opportunism and insincerity rather more sharply
than earlier accounts, but does not really alter existing conclusions
that Haushofers inuence was essentially marginal, and evaporated entirely after 1941.
These points notwithstanding, Karl Haushofer und Japan is a
unique achievement: a product of immense scholarly labor and a
vast repository of information and analysis. All those interested in
the many topics the book addresses will study it to their benet.
Mark Bassin
Sdertrn University, Sweden
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.006

Sanjeev Sanyal, Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of Indias

Geography. New Delhi, Penguin, 2012, xi 331 pages, Indian
Rs. 399 / US$20, paperback.
This book explores Indias history and geography from pre-historic
times to the present in a concise and lucid manner and provides
interesting insights into Indian culture, history, and geography
using a wide range of historical texts, travellers accounts, scholarly
texts, and personal experiences. While not quite a traditional
treatise on historical geography, the book nevertheless provides a
narrative of accumulating and competing geographical knowledge
about the Indian subcontinent over the millennia.
The book begins with the continental drift theory of the Indian
subcontinent and then surveys the knowledge about ancient
human migrations through recent advances in the genetic sciences.
The next chapter deals exclusively with the geographical extents of
the Harappan civilization (c.3000e1500 BC) and the implications of
the drying of the Saraswati river in the northwestern regions
known as the sapta-sindhu or the land of the seven rivers. The third
chapter, The age of lions, describes the geography of the Indian
subcontinent through a reading of the famous epicsdRamayana
and Mahabharatadand the Mauryan empire (c. 320e180 BC). Here
it outlines the importance of lions (rather than tigers or elephants
as is commonly argued) in the cultural memory of the subcontinent. Lions were important symbols of royalty in India as in many
other countries, and were depicted on edicts and pillars by rulers

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

throughout Indias history. The Mauryan lions are an integral part of

the national emblem of India and the Sanskrit word for liondsimha
or singhadis the root of words such as singhasan (throne), sinhala
(Sri Lankan ethnic group) and Singh (common North Indian
surname).
Two chapters deal with ancient trading routes (especially with
Southeast Asia), indigenous geographical knowledge, and the fate
of Delhi, and bring the story up to the early modern era. A chapter
on The mapping of India outlines the rst European efforts to
map India and the war of maps among aspirant colonists.
Another chapter, based largely on the work of Susan Gole and John
Wilford, describes mapping in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries with crisp biographies of Colonel James Rennel, who
produced the Bengal Atlas, and William Lambton, Superintendent
of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. There follows a discussion of railway construction in the late nineteenth century, the
mapping of Tibet, and the drama surrounding the 1947 partition of
India and the integration of the princely states with the Indian
Union.
The author, an Indian who was educated in Britain and who now
divides his time between India and Singapore, effectively covers a
huge geographical and historical span, and his books major
achievement is to provide a grand synthesis of important events
and phenomena over several millennia in clear prose. It is rich in
anecdotesdfor instance, that the Hindukush mountain range
derives its name (which means killer of Hindus) from the harsh
winters of the Afghan mountains that led to high mortality of slaves
who were forcibly taken through them on their way from India to
central Asia. It does not miss out on ironiesdthe decline of the
famous Nalanda University in northern India is juxtaposed with the
rise of the University of Oxford (the authors alma mater) in the
same time period. A strength of the book is the attention it pays to
South India: both general historical texts and research studies have
tended to focus on northern areas. The authors base in Singapore
enables him to bring fresh insight into maritime, military, and
trading connections between South India and Southeast Asia, while
his extensive travels and rst-hand knowledge of India make his
insights into cultural phenomena valuable.
The book inevitably has its limitations. Other than a conjecture
on the region known as the sapta-sindhu that is plausible but deserves detailed historical research, and interesting explanations of
cultural oddities, it offers few original arguments on historical geography. By focusing almost exclusively on urban areas, it ignores
agriculture and its development. Some of the most important
regional variations in Indian culture are often attributed to
geographical differences and agriculture, in particular the ricewheat divide (see David Sophers An Exploration of India:
Geographical Perspectives on Society and Culture (New York, 1980));
but there is hardly any discussion of the geographic distribution of
rainfall, arguably the most important aspect to be considered in any
study of Indian geography, or of Cauvery and Krishna, two of the
seven rivers depicted in the books cover illustration. The scholarly
apparatus of bibliography, map, and index are welcome, but it is
regrettable that there are not more maps, especially for those based
outside India, and that the bibliography makes no mention of
important scholarship, for example, the pioneering studies of Joseph Schwartzberg and Irfan Habib, or the important recent studies
of Matthew Edney, Ian Barrow, Kapil Raj, and Dilip Chakrabarti.
These limitations should not distract from the fact that this is a
highly readable and recommended book that serves as an excellent
non-technical introduction to the evolving eld of Indian historical
geography. The book aims for an Indian audience, but, being
available through Penguin USA at a reasonable rate of $20, it can
also serve as a useful text for courses on Indian historical
geography.

Chinmay Tumbe
European 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 276 pages, 60 hardcover.
Elizabeth A. Suttons book is a very welcome addition to the literature on the history of European visual representations of Africa.
Sutton makes a particular contribution to the study of early modern
pictorial representations of Africa: a eld of research that has
remained nearly untouched, with the exception of Siegfried Huigens 2009 volume Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century
Travellers in South Africa, and Stephanie Leitchs Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (2010).
Suttons book analyzes Dutch printing culture at the turn of the
seventeenth 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 the
most important and prolic book and map publishers in
Amsterdam.
De Marees had probably visited Africa several times during the
late 1590s, most likely, as Sutton suggests, in the role of physician or
surgeon. De Marees travel account gives a detailed description of
the region and the inhabitants of coastal West Africa and is the
earliest illustrated Dutch account on Africa. One of Suttons main
arguments is that Claeszs publishing business existed at a critical
epistemological moment when the processes of Dutch national
identity formation coincided and intertwined with a new spirit of
empiricism and new strategies for knowledge production. Sutton
perceives that de Marees Description was a particularly noteworthy
travel account in this context on account of its illustrations and
ethnographic emphasis. The book included highly-detailed descriptions of the customs and the appearance of African people, thus
marking an important shift towards eyewitness reports within the
genre of travel literature. De Marees text included twenty copperplate illustrations produced by engravers commissioned by Claesz.
There are no known drawings by de Marees, nor any in the other
travel accounts published by Claesz. Sutton assumes that the engravings were almost certainly created by artists in the
Netherlands, who would have interpreted the authors textual descriptions. Due to this technique of image production, there was a
strong correlation between the text and images. Illustrations in
travel accounts have often been associated with authoritative
knowledge and eyewitness veracity. In contrast to the early modern
period, many nineteenth-century illustrations had a connection to
the sketches, drawings, and photographs that were made during
the journeys of exploration. As visual documentation was often one
of the scientic tasks of the journey, visual images also had a more
independent documentary role and were not always very tightly
connected to the textual parts of published travel accounts. As
Sutton suggests, early seventeenth-century travel illustrations
could also be used to verify the information given in the form of the
text. It would have been fascinating to read more about the question of authenticating images that had no real connection to Africa.
Sutton provides a convincing analysis of the birth of illustrations
at a critical moment in European history, when classical visual
traditions were increasingly being challenged by new empirical
information. Drawing up approaches from art history and book
history, the author shows how early-modern illustrations of African
people were constructed by copying and imitating earlier visual
sources, such as those in emblem books, atlases, and costume