Book Reviews: The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory

Summary

This review assesses John Rennie Short's "The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory." Employing a critical-theory approach, Short examines the production and content of national atlases as instruments of statecraft, interrogating the connections between nation-state, science, territory, and power. The book analyzes how atlases respond to "cartographic anxiety" and express national identities, and explores their representation of global discourses, the physical world, and the social world. Short argues that while the traditional national atlas has declined due to data overload, technological change, and rising costs, new technologies offer opportunities for reimagining the atlas as an interactive, participatory web-based portal to geo-information. The reviewer regards this as a provocative and comprehensive first attempt to grapple with this form of cartographic statecraft, likely to spur new research interest.