David Livingstone occupies an enduring place in the popular memory of Victorian exploration, and in the history of the British in Africa. Many authors have described – often eulogized – his reforming vision, missionary zeal and Boy's Own personification of manly courage. Henry Morton Stanley's apocryphal greeting, when he eventually found the man in a remote African village, six years lost and almost dead, is the stuff of legend. His posthumous apotheosis left many inspired to achieve even greater heights in the exploration and conquest of southern Africa – all in the name of ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilization’. Yet, in his own lifetime, Livingstone was widely criticized – for his arrogance, for his obsessive self-righteousness and for what were conspicuous failures – most notably to miss the source of the Nile. Expectations raised by his early African forays in the 1840s, which he passionately recorded in his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa in 1857, were disappointed by his second great foray – known to history as the Zambesi Expedition.

This government-funded effort – involving Admiralty cooperation, Royal Navy ships and a self-built steamer to explore an uncharted river; to establish a commercial outpost in a place beset by danger and disease; to ‘explore’ a district already well known to Africans, slaves and settlers; and to create a British missionary presence within what was formally a colony of Portugal – was in itself a fair measure of British self-confidence. In one sense, we are reminded, it was the ‘first foray of modernity to central Africa’ (p. 30). Alas, despite high-minded intentions, and an unusually cooperative Treasury, it proved what the Examiner in 1863 called a ‘hopeless enterprise’ (p. 150). The expedition failed to open new trade routes, or make any conclusive geographical discoveries. Its failure to achieve its principal objectives was a blow – not only to British prestige, but, worse, to British commerce.

Still, it seems, not all was lost. On the contrary, if the Zambesi Expedition fails to rank as one of Britain's finest, it nevertheless holds important lessons for British field science and its historians. For, as Lawrence Dritsas shows, the expedition conveys several levels of meaning. Livingstone's geographers and natural historians were to gather empirical data, certainly to inform science, but they had to do so in such a way as to demonstrate the competence (even, at times, the superiority) of local knowledge, sometimes in defiance of, certainly in deference to, a distant metropolitan community commanding far greater resources which held the power to bestow recognition, status and preferment. The expedition thus becomes, far from being a failure, a compelling exhibition of what Latour has called ‘science in action’.

In seven well-written chapters, Dr Dritsas describes the people, places and context that are key to an understanding of the expedition, its enabling (and ultimately limiting) technologies, and its importance to Victorian fieldwork as practice. Scouring the archives of the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Natural History Museum of London, the museums of Edinburgh, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the author tells his story within the narrative of ‘expeditionary science’, but does much more, informed by recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, turning this neglected episode into a thoroughly ‘spatialised historiography of scientific practice’ (p. 43). Summarizing each chapter before drawing overall conclusions, a story of heroic setbacks becomes an introduction to ‘trading zones’ occupied by prominent personalities, pressures and pretensions. A ‘failed’ expedition becomes an intellectual enterprise, adding much to what we know about the methods of the field sciences, the use of ships as laboratories, and the role of local voices in establishing what Clive Barnett has called ‘narratives of possession’ (p. 191). In passing, Dr Dritsas illuminates the official narrative, retrieves the neglected insights of European (German and Portuguese) and local observers, and explores the reasons why the expedition has been allowed to slip from public memory.

Given its origins in a doctoral thesis, the book might have been even better, had it spent a little time telling its less well-informed readers something more about David Livingstone, the intricacies of whose life will not be familiar to all (especially non-British) readers. Overall, the story becomes one of Hamlet almost without the prince, and has more to do with his supporting actors, including David's brother Charles, Thomas Baines, Richard Thornton and John Kirk, each of whom gives a different gloss to the term ‘heroic’. One might quibble with a few points of interpretation and emphasis – e.g. the role of the X-Club, the absence of African voices, and the witness of other Europeans. Nevertheless, the book will commend itself to a wide readership. Apart from its inherent interest for historians of exploration and British Africa, it persuasively demonstrates how, in capable hands, the sociology of scientific knowledge can greatly illuminate research and writing in the history of science.