multi-volume The Corridors of Time series,might have been a way into this admittedlyvast field. There is also curiously no mentionhere of the artist Alan Sorrell, a significant fig-ure in the imaginative reconstruction of archae-ological sites, with his vivid pictures of StoneAge living and Roman camps. Sorrell rathercuts against Hauser’s point that ‘the archaeo-logical imagination does not reconstruct an ab-sent past, but reveals a consciousness of theineluctable and material immanence of thepastwithin thepresent’ (p. 32). If the latter pointstands, there are also reconstructive imagina-tions at work between 1927 and 1955 whichmight have supplemented this story. Twominorerrors are also made; the interwar CPRE is la-belled the Council for the ‘Protection’ ratherthan ‘Preservation’ of Rural England (p. 3),while EM Forster’s essay ‘Havoc’ is incorrectlyplaced within Clough Williams-Ellis’s solo 1928bookEnglandand theOctopus rather thanhis edi-ted 1937 collectionBritain and the Beast (p. 144).

Hauser’s next book, flagged in a footnote atthe end of the Antiquity chapter, will focus onCrawford, including his intriguing photo-graphic explorations of the contemporarylandscapes of Britain, Germany and theUSSR, some of which are appetisingly repro-duced in Shadow Sites. Crawford’s archaeo-logical thinking may receive further attentionthere, and the book is to be anticipated; Craw-ford’s ghost would be the ideal reviewer.

David MatlessUniversity of Nottingham, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.05.008

537Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 521–552

Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom.The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia, London, Cornell UniversityPress, 2006, xiv þ 263 pages, £14.95paperback.

Through the prism of cartography, this inge-nious, profound, and beautifully craftedwork illuminates for readers an array of newintriguing insights into significant aspects ofearly modern Russia. Already in the first fewpages of the book, the author, a distinguishedAmerican historian of Muscovite autocracyand Orthodoxy, captures our attention withan evocation of the thrilled joy she felt on firstencountering the lively and evocative hand-drawn maps that form the basis of the presentstudy: these were sources, she writes, ‘cryingout for interpretation’ (p. 1), eloquent notmerely in their visual imagery, but in thevery fact of their existence. For historiansstriving to engage with a polity and societytraditionally considered to be incurious andinarticulate, these ‘simple, brightly coloredsketch maps, adorned with trees, rivers,churches, and small houses,’ she effervesces,‘. [help] unlock the puzzle of how great is-sues in state policy or high church theology re-verberated on the ground, in the lives andexperiences of ordinary people, and, morespecifically, how geographic and environmen-tal perceptions shaped and were shaped by thesocial experiences of the population’ (p. 2).The author’s eager and reverent fascinationwith the maps and their makers animates heranalysis of these sources throughout thebook, cumulatively building the impressionof a Muscovite culture that in contrast toour preconceptions was in fact passionatelyreflexive, endeavouring both to make senseof the wide-ranging transformations it wit-nessed and encompassed, and to elaborateand communicate a new political–spiritualworldview that would embrace both the every-day concerns of the tsars’ subjects and thegrander perspectives of the state.

The defining transformations of early mod-ern Russia, argues Kivelson, were fundamen-tally concerned with ‘spatial control andconceptions of movement in space’ (p. 9). In

538 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 521–552

the Muscovite heartland peasants were turnedinto serfs owned by a master and, more im-portantly, tied to the land. A complex systemof legal principle and practice emerged to reg-ulate and arbitrate conflicts over property andpower, in which the relationship of individualsand populations to land, inhabited or empty,played the decisive role, at times trumpingeven social rank. In the first half of thebook, Kivelson directs her attention to large-scale topographic sketch maps drawn up inthe course of property litigation among noblelandowners, as a means of understanding theinterrelations among space, identity andstate-building, and the interactions of centralauthority and local interests. At first glancethese sources appear primitive and prosaic,but the author’s subtle and innovative readingof their visual form and content, underpinnedby an imaginative use of documentary mate-rials, yields rich seams of symbolism and sig-nification. The Muscovite state, Kivelsonproposes, defined both the obligations and en-titlements of each of the tsar’s subjects, notonly by their social status but also by refer-ence to their place of residence. This enabledit to minimise or at least manage spatial mo-bility, thereby more easily to control, taxand conscript its peoples. At the same time,however, this mode of rule permitted evenserfs a degree of protection from arbitrary vi-olation of their rights, and empowered themlegitimately to claim the land they tilled astheir own, to the extent that legal disputesover noble title to land would often hinge ontheir claims to ownership of the peasantswho worked it. Thanks to Kivelson’s carefuldecoding of her source maps, we perceiveMuscovy’s efforts to integrate its vast, variedand widely dispersed populations by propa-gating a discourse of spatial identity, whichassigned freedoms and burdens to subjectson the basis of their rootedness in place, viv-idly inscribed by both central agents and local

administrators in the cartographic materialssubmitted by litigants to illustrate and justifytheir accounts of the layout and division ofprovincial landscapes.

The second part of the book is devoted tovisions of the broader territories of Muscoviteimperial expansion during the same period. Tounderstand the incipient ideologies of empirethat motivated and vindicated this projectboth in the centre and on the periphery, Kivel-son here turns to smaller-scale maps of Siberia.She focuses particularly on those composed bySemen Remezov, an administrator and ferventcataloguer, chronicler and cartographer oftsarist conquest and consolidation in this re-gion, which with their delicate artistry and in-tricate detail strove to transform the openwilderness with its nomadic populations intoa stable, partitioned and settled territory. Ki-velson demonstrates how the Russian imperialproject, rather than effacing indigenous peo-ples on the map, recognised and sustained dis-tinct local identities, creating a spatial mosaicof particularity and difference unified by com-mon subordination to the tsar’s sovereigntyand administrative rule and by shared occupa-tion of a landscape that merely by dint ofRussian presence was distinguished as God’sown territory. Muscovite imperial practiceson the periphery were thus grounded in thesame notions of property, possession,entitlement, and obligation that pertained tolegal and political claims in the interior.

Kivelson’s interpretation of Muscovy’s‘highly spatialized human topography’ (p. 76)that shaped its interactions with subjects inboth the heartland and on the frontier, andwhich was incorporated, reproduced and re-ified in maps depicting both local land dis-putes and continental conquest, is brilliantlyclever, breathtakingly original and for themost part convincing. It marks an excitingdeparture not only in Russian early modernhistoriography, but in cultural histories of

journals. His book extends and consolidatesthis writing, offering a systematic attempt toextend Foucault’s ideas about governance toa colonial urban setting. In the process, ituses archival sources in both London and In-dia to tell us something new about the socialgeography of Delhi. That his concern ismainly theoretical is apparent in the introduc-tion, which surveys and assesses how Foucaultthought about power and governmentality,discusses the application of these ideas in co-lonial settings, and suggests how New Delhimight be seen through this prism.

Legg then develops his argument in threelong, thematic chapters devoted, respectively,to residential space, policing, and civic im-

539Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 521–552

cartography, landscape, imperialism and law,and is strongly recommended to all scholarsin these fields. The author’s contention that‘space offers a particularly productive andfundamental framework for making sense ofthis distant society’ (p. 210) both in its ownand in comparative terms, and the inventiveand stimulating use of spatial categoriesin her analysis, mark out this work also asone of greatest interest to all historicalgeographers.

Nick BaronNottingham University, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.05.009

Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. Delhi’sUrban Governmentalities, Oxford, Blackwell,2007, xvi þ 252 pages, £24.99 paperback.

Foucault has legs. Most recently his influencemay be seen in scholarly attempts to applyand extend the related concepts of biopowerand governmentality. The latter was Fou-cault’s term for the way power is exercisedin liberal democracies, a method expressedby Patrick Joyce in The Rule of Freedom(Verso, 2003) as ‘the absence of restraint asa form of restraint’, a paradox resolvedthrough self-regulation. Writers have long rec-ognised that social rules are at a premium inurban areas, and many discussions of govern-mentality have taken cities as their subject.Spaces of Colonialism, a case study of Delhiin the first half of the twentieth century thatis published in the RGS-IBG book series,makes a significant contribution to suchdebates.

The work of the author, Stephen Legg, willbe known to readers of this journal since hehas recently published on Foucault and/orthe history of Delhi in several scholarly

provement. In the first of these, he acknowl-edges that, typical of colonial cities but in anespecially clear way, late colonial Delhi segre-gated the coloniser — in the new city designedby Lutyens — from colonised, who at firstmostly occupied the old city. But he compli-cates this picture, noting the inter-dependenceof the two cities, arguing that they were ‘co-constitutive’, and pointing to ambiguous, hy-brid spaces occupied by the Indian elite. Hetries to blur the stereotype of a dual colonialcity into a continuum. The second thematicchapter shows this continuum was apparentin the nature and degree of policing that wasdeployed to protect persons and property.New Delhi had twice its share of police; OldDelhi barely two-thirds (p. 87), although thiswas an unstable contrast, given mounting dis-order from the 1880s through to independence.Then the British had to deploy more coercivemethods. The final thematic chapter dealswith public health and housing initiatives,these being framed under the rubric of biopo-litics. Here, too, the colonial context (includingthe restraints of colonial finance, which Leggdownplays) meant that the methods adoptedby administrators fell far short of the seamlesstechnique that the governmental ideal might