Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141 137

different times well into the second half of the nineteenth century;the distribution of time from the Greenwich and Paris observatoriesacross the English and French capitals was gradual, erratic, anddependent on public and private financing, on the one hand, andthe precision and regularity of different technologies, notablyelectricity and compressed air. We might ask, therefore, to whatextent was this idealisation part of the colonisers’ response to theanxieties prompted by their encounter with difference, confrontingthem with fundamental questions of the kind that Vespucci mighthave experienced two centuries before them.

These reservations are not pointers to flaws. For those of us wholive in capitalist societies, time keeping and time observance arepillars that structure our everyday lives. Nanni’s thought-provokingbook is a reminder of one very significant moment in history whenthose pillars were defined by reference to a particular kind ofcolonial encounter, which is something that will be of interest tostudents of empire, historians of time, and postcolonial scholars.The colonisation of time in nineteenth-century Victoria and CapeColony shows how fraught, oppressive, and one-sided theencounter was, and how much it was part of the coloniser’s sub-jection of people to a capitalist logic. Nanni invites us to raise aquestion: To what extent has the nature of these encounterschanged, especially in relation to the expansion of capital?

Carlos López GalvizSchool of Advanced Study, University of London, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.009

Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (Eds), Slavery and the BritishCountry House. Swindon, English Heritage, 2013, xv þ 180 pages,£56 hardcover.

This beautifully-produced and richly-illustrated collection of essaysmarks the fruition of efforts made to assess the connections be-tween slavery and the British country house. Questions about‘Whose Heritage?’ have been around for some time now, but thebicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 provided aparticular impetus to investigate the links between the slaverybusiness, in all its manifestations, and the country housedone ofthe most striking symbols of the wealth and power of Britain’sruling classes. English Heritage and the National Trust bothlaunched projects at that time, which are represented in thiscollection, in an effort to reassess something of the histories of theproperties for which they are responsible and to think about newways of representing those histories. Much work remains to bedone if the assumptions as to the relationship between Britishness,whiteness, and the country house are to be seriously disrupted, butthis volume undoubtedly marks a good beginning.

Madge Dresser, well known for her extensive work on Bristoland slavery, and Andrew Hann, one of English Heritage’s specialisthistorians, have together edited a collection which is richer thancan be documented fully here. The editors clarify in their intro-duction the two key questions addressed by the volume’s authors:What are the links between the wealth derived from slavery andthe country house? and What are the implications of this in termsof how such properties should be represented? Eric Williams, theTrinidadian historian, in his famous work Capitalism and Slavery(1944), initiated the controversy, which continues to this day, as tothe contribution of the fruits of the slavery business to the devel-opment of modern industrial Britain. Re-modelled, rebuilt, andrefurnished country houses were one of those fruits. As NicholasDraper argues in the volume’s opening essay, the moment of

abolition, and the payment of compensation to slave-owners, offersan opportunity to track connections between large sums of moneybeing paid out by the government and investment in new prop-erties or the re-modelling of the old. Draper introduces the sys-tematic research made possible by teamwork on thesecompensation records, now available at the Legacies of BritishSlave-ownership website (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/). Taking thecase of Antigua, Draper demonstrates connections between thirty-six country houses and slave owners or other beneficiaries ofcompensation.

Simon D. Smith’s case study of the connections betweenplanters in St Vincent and the Grenadines between 1814 and1834dand what he defines as ‘prestige buildings’ in Britaindoffersa yet more detailed example. Smith finds links between twenty-sixBritish prestige buildings and plantationsdabout one third of thecolony’s plantations can be associated with this kind of investmentand consumption ‘at home’. It is, however, a complex and usuallyimpossible task to track the flows of capital with any precision.Sheryllynne Haggerty and Suzanne Seymour provide contrastingaccounts from their studies of Bolsover Castle and BrodsworthHalldresearch initially commissioned by English Heritage con-cerning the differences between direct connections and indirectconnections to slavery. Haggerty and Seymour show that it wasprofits from financing slave-related production, and purchasinggoods for barter for enslaved people on the African coast, that feddirectly into Peter Thellusson’s purchase of Brodsworth Hall. TheDuke of Portland’s Bolsover Castle, by contrast, had no direct con-nections to slavery. Yet, as a leading aristocrat and successfulpolitician, there were indirect associations, since the Duke’s atti-tudes to property and authority drew on his assumptions aboutenslaved others. Haggerty and Seymour conclude that it is‘impossible to assess exactly the extent towhich involvement in theslave trade and slavery helped the two men financially, preciselybecause slavery was such an inherent part of the British economy’(p.88). This statement might well act as an epitaph for the wholebook: slavery was simply part of British society, and was entirelyordinary.

Different methods can be used to explore the issues with whichthe volume is concerned. As Madge Dresser’s essay on the WestCountry demonstrates, a regional approach, starting sometimeswith individuals, sometimes with houses, and sometimes with aparticular parish, opens up ‘a very pervasive and multi-layeredpattern of involvement of country house proprietors in Atlanticslavery interests’ (p. 30), while Jane Longmore’s investigation of therural retreats of Liverpool slave traders shows just how much canbe discovered with the use of old photographic archives. Liverpooltraders, Longmore concludes, preferred to remain in the centre ofthe city for their working lives and showed little interest inbecoming country gentlemen. Nuala Zahedieh’s research on asample of seventeenth-century colonial merchants shows, how-ever, that ‘those patricians who accumulated sufficient wealthdisplayed an almost universal desire to align their families with thelanded estates’ (p. 71).

Given the complexities of the kinds of connections, both directand indirect, that are being revealed between slavery and countryhouses, what forms of representation are appropriate now? Caro-line Bressey’s essay on Kenwood and Osborne House offers onepossible route. She takes us walking round these houses with her,pointing out the unanswered questions, the missing captions, thenot-so-hidden histories that could have been explored. As shenotes, heritage collections need to be reassessed; new researchneeds to be done; re-hanging and re-labelling could make a bigdifference. The clues are all theredit is a matter of following themup. The British landscape was never simply white. Natalie Zacek’sessay on Dodington House and the Codringtons offers another way

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014) 120e141138

in, contrasting the myths that can so easily be produced with themore complex histories that need to be understood if we are tomove from the blunt assertions that either ‘Britain is built on theback of the enslaved’ or ‘It was all so long agowhy dowe need to gothere?’ to a more nuanced grasp of the layers of oppression andexploitation that went into the creation of the country houses of awhite ruling class. Victoria Perry’s essay offers a third way in. Herdiscussion of slavery and the sublime is illuminating about thecreation of a particular ‘natural landscape’ (p. 101) on the banks ofthe Wye and the way in which that transformation was dependenton Caribbean wealth. The most British of sites, it turns out, oftenhave colonial stories to tell.

This collection has much to offer geographers, historians, and allthose in the business of heritage. The question of ‘Whose Heritage?’is far from resolved.

Catherine HallUCL, UK

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.010

William C. Wooldridge, Mapping Virginia: From the Age ofExploration to the Civil War. foreword by John T. Casteen III.Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2012, xv þ 376 pages,US$94.95 hardcover.

What would we know about the past if maps provided the onlyevidence for history? William C. Wooldridge, in his book MappingVirginia, provides a case study of this question. A career lawyer andrailroad executive, Wooldridge began collecting maps in 1969 andsoon found that his ‘wonder at the revelations and beauty of.maps propelled [him] through forty years of study and collecting’(p. xi). The result e an assemblage of more than three hundredmaps of Virginia from the era of exploration through the AmericanCivil War and their publication with his own commentary in thisbook e is infused with this sense of wonder at the craft of cartog-raphers and a profound appreciation for the beauty of their art. Butit is the geographer’s good fortune that Wooldridge is no historianand that his book is no history of Virginia merely illustrated inmaps. It is, instead, a magnificent exhibition of all the most sig-nificant early maps of Virginia and their numerous derivativesenlivened throughout by a wide variety of cartographic ephemera.Unencumbered by either the apparatus of scholarship or the manychestnuts of Virginia’s popular history, the text relates what a sig-nificant collector learned about the commonwealth in the red heatof collecting.

So, what do maps by themselves say about Virginia? At itsinception in the imperial imagination of sixteenth-century Europeand in the cartographic depictions of Giovanni Verrazano, ThomasHariot, John White, and Theodore de Bry, it was a ‘new Eden,inhabited by uncorrupted natives who lived in a peaceful state ofnature’ (p. 12). This unbounded Arcadia soon became the ‘idea ofVirginia’ in which Wooldridge realized that the ‘direction in whichthe maps were taking’ (p. xi) himwas toward a bounded polity in achronology laid out by themaps of John Smith, John Senex, HermanMoll, and JohnThornton. Thornton’smapby itself ‘summarizeswhatwas knownof Virginia, and howEnglishmen saw it, at the beginningof the eighteenth century’ (p. 94). This series culminates in thevarious versions of the mid-eighteenth-century map by Joshua Fryand Peter Jefferson in which Virginia emerges as a ‘fully developedpolitical entity’ (p. 108) and an ‘autonomous realm’ (p. 153).

Various other stories emerge in maps published between theAmerican Revolution and the Civil War. Wooldridge testifies that at

the outset of the Revolution, maps depict ‘Virginia’s leaders [as]suspicious of England and determined to resist any interferencewith local prerogatives’ (p. 153). But by its outcome, however, mapsportrayed the ‘momentous triumph of the American cause’ and the‘transports of joy’ (p. 181) with which Americans celebrated victory.Cartographic themes such as republican simplicity and the ‘ideathat Virginia’s power and influence were waning’ (p. 202) from theera of Bishop Madison’s famous 1807 map through antebellumperiod are covered by the map of Herman Boye (1827) and itsreissue by Ludwig von Bucholtz in 1857. One of Wooldridge’s mostintriguing arguments concerns the extraordinary number e almost1700 e of informal, quickly drawn maps published between 1862and 1865 in both northern and southern newspapers that speak toa widespread and passionate interest in the geography of theconflict and a broad, popular map sense, or cartographic literacy,among the American people.

Is any of this useful to geographers, historians, and otherscholars? Much is, of course, missing from Wooldridge’s account.There is little biographical information on mapmakers and pub-lishers, although the book amply treats major developments inmapprinting across a two-hundred-and-fifty-year span of time.Focusing on the maps themselves as documentation for their ownhistorical context allows Wooldridge no opportunity to explore thepolitical, imperial, economic, or intellectual forces at work in theAtlantic and North American worlds that created a demand for themaps he so lovingly collected. Andwho consumed thesemaps? Andwhy? These questions go unanswered along with a more complexquery concerning how patterns of popular consumption influencedand shaped the cartographic process. Some of Wooldridge’s con-clusions, moreover, appear to trivialize the past and overinflate keyfigures in it. Maps of Yorktown, for instance, celebrate GeorgeWashington’s ‘talismanic quality. [as] the American paladin’(p. 181).

Deficiencies and exaggerations aside, the maps stand alone asthe most significant private collection of Virginia cartography inprint and available to a wide audience. The University of VirginiaPress deserves commendation and acclaim for bringing the bookout and investing it with very high standards for design and full-color map reproduction. And in the final analysis, Wooldridge’shighly personalized deductions, conclusions, inferences, and in-sinuations about Virginia history can be taken as caring, creative,and, at times, pioneering insights into what maps as both artifactsand texts e not illustrations e tell us about the past.

Warren R. HofstraShenandoah University, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.025

Patrick Vinton Kirch, A Shark Going Inland is My Chief: The IslandCivilization of Ancient Hawai’i. Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress, 2012, xvii þ 346 pages, US$45 hardcover.

In summarizing his lifetime of research in the Hawaiian Islands,archaeologist Patrick Kirch tells both his and Hawai’i’s story in AShark Going Inland Is My Chief. Packaged for the general reader, thisbook is at once a summary of all the conclusions he has drawn fromhis decades of research, as well as a personal narrative of his life’swork and the discipline in which he has flourished. The result is ahighly readable and informative overview of the state of Hawaiianarchaeology and the conclusions he has drawn from it.

Isolated from the rest of the world for half a millennium, theHawaiian Islands offer the only case in which the rise of an archaic