Ayesha Ramachandran draws on the scholarly heritage of postcolonial criticism to cast a fresh eye on the early modern period with her new book, The Worldmakers. ‘Worldmaking’, for Ramachandran, refers to early modern intellectuals’ attempts to construct an imaginative framework that would integrate the fragmented, pluralistic and chaotic realities of sixteenth-century Europe into a comprehensible, manageable and reassuring whole. In this way, these thinkers sought to reconcile the global – even the cosmic – with the local.

Ramachandran situates the worldmaking impulse in the turbulent Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when astronomical and geographical discoveries upended traditional epistemological foundations. The worldmaking project expressed a longing for a return to a more rational, comprehensible world order. At the same time, it revealed an increasing awareness among intellectuals that the world as one knows it originates in one's imagination; in a sense, human subjectivity has a divine-like power to constitute the universe. Ramachandran's argument thus complicates the definition of modernity as the separation of scientific rationalism from magical thinking, choosing instead to examine the role of the imagination in early modern attempts to integrate scientific developments into a coherent world view.

Ramachandran engages with two overlapping fields of current scholarly research. The first is what might be called modernity studies, a trend that seeks to re-evaluate the place of spirituality in the development of the modern world, thus undermining the Weberian narrative that secularism came hand in hand with the Scientific Revolution. Second, Ramachandran engages with postcolonial studies. By examining how local narratives can fit within a vision of the world as a whole, she joins the conversation on cosmopolitanism exemplified by the likes of Seyla Benhabib and Kwame Anthony Appiah. The postcolonial underpinnings of the work may initially seem surprising, given its firmly Eurocentric focus: each of the book's five chapters focuses on a specific early modern European intellectual (or intellectuals). The author acknowledges this, but explains that she aims to explore a notion of modernity ‘whose theoretical coordinates have been fixed by Europeans and exported to the rest of the world’ (p. 19).

Chapter 1 sets up the idea of worldmaking through its perhaps most apparent vehicle, cartography. It analyses Gerhard Mercator's Atlas (1595) as an exemplary attempt to unify fragments of the world into a coherent whole. Simultaneously pious and vaguely heretical, Mercator's work brings together the surveying eye of the cartographer with the all-encompassing gaze of God. The next chapter focuses on Michel de Montaigne, who takes as his main task exploring the individual subjectivity through which any world-picture must be constituted. His emphasis on self-knowledge allows Montaigne to conclude that our view of the world can only be fragmented and incomplete, because our perception is fragmented and incomplete. Nonetheless, it is a world that human intellect has the capacity to create.

Chapter 3 treats how the authors Luís de Camões and Edmund Spenser dealt with questions of reconciling part and whole while still serving the goal of glorifying empire. Ramachandran argues that Camões's Os Lusíadas (1572) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590–1596) work to situate their respective empires – a declining Portugal and a Britain on the rise – within a cosmic perspective. This shift in scale results in a simultaneous aggrandizement of empire and its relativization as one part of a much larger whole. This chapter relates the most to the post-colonial theory evoked in the introduction and conclusion, and is important for elucidating the political dimension of early modern worldmaking. However, its location as the third chapter somewhat interrupts the flow of the overall narrative, since Chapter 4 returns repeatedly to Montaigne.

The fourth chapter shows how René Descartes draws Montaigne's theme of the worldmaking intellect away from scepticism and towards near-heretical affirmation: not only is man capable of forming the world from a God's-eye perspective, but Descartes does it, at least philosophically speaking. Descartes's work implies that through the power of the imagination, one minuscule part of the universe – a man – can construct an image of the whole. Chapter 5 culminates with John Milton's daunting task of portraying a coherent cosmos post-Galileo and post-Descartes. Like these predecessors, Milton responds to the challenge by using fiction as his lens through which to interrogate the creation of the universe. His Paradise Lost (1667) illustrates how poetry and imagination are as integral to worldmaking as empirical observation.

The Worldmakers demonstrates how scientific advances in the early modern period shaped European concepts of God, nation and self. It provides a fresh perspective from which to evaluate the motivations behind the worldmaking project, and its ensuing implications for the epistemology of the modern age. Those interested in the impact of early modern science on literature and philosophy will find it a stimulating read.