| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Brian W. Richardson. Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. $85.00.
Readers of history have been treated in recent years to numerous hyperbolically titled books promising to explain, through a single topic, how the modern world was made or changed. Brian W. Richardson's volume enters the lists by exploring the cultural significance of Captain James Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific (1768–1780). Informed more by cultural studies than by historical scholarship per se, Richardson's fluently written book argues that the Cook voyages marked a transformation in modern thinking about space, nationhood, classification, and empire.	1
Richardson's point of departure lies in the contemporary, compendious published volumes that described each of Cook's expeditions. These volumes offered their readers more than travelogue, as we might call it today; they were, among other things, ethnographies, navigational guides, natural histories, and artistic works all in one. The books were produced with the support of the British admiralty, which had sponsored the voyages in the first place, and whose involvement in South Pacific exploration has made scholars now view Cook's journeys as proto-imperial undertakings. The books were also massively popular: John Hawkesworth's account of the first Cook voyage was the most frequently borrowed title from the Bristol Library in the 1770s, ahead of the Earl of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (p. 14).	. . .

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