This volume sets out to examine the ‘geography of science and the science of geography’ (p. xv) through the activities of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The first of these endeavours is almost intrinsic to any study of the BAAS which, from its foundation in 1831, was a mobile organization, holding annual meetings in different towns and cities each year. As Withers points out, however, not much research has been done on the impact of meeting location on the shaping of the scientific business of the BAAS, and this study thus has a very important contribution to make to what some scholars refer to as the ‘spatial turn’ in science's history.

Examining in particular the business of the British Association's Geography Section (Section E), the author shows how place could directly influence the science content of the annual BAAS meetings, from the topics addressed in papers to the excursions to sites of local interest. At Manchester in 1861, for example, delegates visited a range of industrial premises, from mines to chemical works, where they could see science in action. At Hull in 1922, the town's position as a port and the proximity of the North Sea loomed large in papers presented to the Geography Section. The overseas meetings, too, which commenced with the visit to Montreal in 1884, gradually became showcases for the science of the colonies. Papers and excursions at these foreign meetings provided delegates with the opportunity to study the traditions and customs of indigenous peoples as well as to analyse flora, fauna and climate in a colonial setting.

Withers's attention to the overseas meetings and the development of the BAAS in the twentieth century makes this volume a particularly valuable addition to the literature on the British Association which, as the author notes in his introduction, has tended to focus more on the ‘early years’ from the 1830s through to the mid-Victorian period when the BAAS meetings were lavish spectacles of civic celebration as well as scientific endeavour. Meticulously researched from the institutional archives of the BAAS, as well as from the record offices of provincial towns and local scientific societies in the various meeting venues, and occasionally from memoirs of delegates who attended the meetings, the volume provides a fascinating window onto the world of the British Association from the point of view both of those who provided and of those who received its scientific message. The inclusion of illustrative material, ranging from contemporary cartoons and publicity literature to maps and tables produced by the author to chart the movements and interests of the Association, adds an important visual dimension to support his contention that place shaped the production and perception of science at BAAS events.

Overall, though, it is probably the second of Withers's objectives, the examination of the science of geography, which is the dominant theme of the book. The establishment of the British Association was almost concurrent with the foundation of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 and the author follows the fortunes of the subject from the ‘slow moves to subject identity’ (p. 68) in the Victorian period, through to the establishment of the Institute of British Geographers in 1933, which he sees as a watershed in the subject's development as a discipline with professional status. The BAAS's Section E had sometimes attracted criticism for its failure to foster ‘serious’ science, a point reinforced by its accessibility to those who lacked detailed subject knowledge, by its popular appeal and by the draw of papers by the occasional celebrity explorer. By analysing the reaction to this from some sections of the subject community and the attempts made, in response, to define the discipline and its objectives in more clearly scientific terms, Withers is dealing with questions of academic development and professionalization of relevance to many other disciplines.

This book is in no sense a ‘complete’ history of the BAAS, focusing as it does on only one sectional strand of the association's large and diverse meetings, but it has much to offer historians of science in general, as well as historians of geography and of the BAAS in particular. The ambition of the author in investigating the geography of British Association meetings not only in Britain, but also overseas, is admirable, and the bibliography is itself an interesting geographical guide to the scale of the research effort underpinning this book. Such an ambitious undertaking deserves a wide readership and it seems likely that the appeal of this study of the relationship between science and place and the disciplinary debates within the subject community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will extend well beyond a core ‘geographies-of-science’ readership to those with an interest in urban, educational and colonial histories.