Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State by Radhika Mongia, and: Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67 Stan Neal (review)

Abstract

weaved these traditions together, he also classified marvels of the natural world (p. 243). In Lost Maps of the Caliphs, Rapoport and Savage-Smith successfully reintroduce the Book of Curiosities to the history of Medieval cartographic knowledge and bring the Fatimid caliphate to the forefront of Islamic studies. In doing so, they investigate how cartographic knowledge had been adapted and transmitted from “the pre-Islamic Greek and Syriac speaking Middle East” to the eleventh century Muslim world (p. 100). Thorough descriptions and comprehensive historical and geographical analysis of maps and diagrams of the manuscript are accompanied with their colored as well as black and white reproductions. This combination allows the readers to visualize how the eleventh-century sailors navigated, imagined, and depicted the world around them before the compass. Beyond its significance for the history of cartographic knowledge, the Book of Curiosities, as Rapoport and Savage-Smith reminds us, is an indispensable source for the history of global communications. It contains a wealth of information and maps concerning navigation and communication in the East of the Mediterranean as well as East Asia and East Africa. The extend of Fatimid knowledge on the Byzantine coasts reveals the close contacts between the Muslim and Christian empires of the Mediterranean. Simultaneously, the maps of the East Africa and the trade route between India and China attest to the Fatimid aspirations to become a global maritime power.