This wonderful book is a weighty 350 pages of always interesting text that draws from several generations of scholarship by historians and historical geographers, with a twenty-seven-page map bibliography linked to a stunning web compilation (http://mapscholar.org/empire). Some of the maps are detailed, large-scale surveys of fortifications, towns, or plantations; others are linear surveys of extensive river valleys or portrayals of vast regions. Coverage stretches from Newfoundland and the maritime northeast, a land of fish and fur, to Caribbean islands where further sugar plantations were anticipated. Edelson gives particular attention to the tricky issue of the frontier, including in his scope the Indian territories west of the Alleghany Mountains and the surveys to assess the plantation potential of the former Spanish lands in Florida. The map collection is the foundation for seven well-argued chapters.
These maps were the basis from which London’s Lords of Trade and Plantation, or the...