There are few books like this—bold, beautiful, and deeply important. Kivelson deserves accolades for the clear, scholarly, and subtle analysis with which she handles a vast body of sometimes messy primary sources largely unknown until now. Cornell University Press also deserves praise for book's sumptuous production and its lavish illustration with high-quality color reproductions. But above all the book is a must-read for anyone interested in socio-historical explanations. It carefully recasts ways in which we can move beyond the limitations of old orthodoxies of cartographic reason, in terms of knowledge and space. Kivelson shows convincingly that the complexities of her case—seventeenth-century Russia under the Tsars—are accounted for neither by the view that maps mirror geographic reality, or that they are a form of ineluctable and dominant spatiality whereby a centralized state imposes its power upon citizens and territories.

Kivelson's meticulous handling of the arcane details of Muscovite legal wrangling over disputed land claims, and of the very specific character of seventeenth-century Russian cartography, makes this an important book not just for Russianists and historians of cartography, but also for sociologists and historians generally. On her account, two very different and major spatial transformations were underway in Russia at this time: in Muscovy, or European Russia, the peasants under the Tsar were being enserfed, while east of the Urals Moscow was colonizing everything to the farthest reaches of Siberia. Kivelson shows how maps played a central role in both transformations, with results that are both illuminating and surprising.

In both cases, forms of spatial identity were established in terms of place, and this place-based spatiality was mediated by mapping and established the central hegemony of Moscow. However, the outcome was not the simple form of homogenization and control one might expect. West of the Urals, the legal system became entangled in endless litigation over who owned what, against a background of peasants immobilized and locked into place.

Kivelson finds, “maps not only provided the state with a way to track its population and resources and to keep all under surveillance. They also armed local litigants with new and creative ways to lie, falsify and misrepresent the lay of the land and to turn the state's own regulation to their own purposes. The state had no unmediated access to local ‘truth’ and, hampered by its own regulations, could resolve nothing without that truth … Locked into a legal system created and complicated by its own laws and procedures, the Muscovite state found itself confronted over and over again with insoluble legal snarls… . The state's own commitment to legal procedure tangled it up in a web of indecision” (pp. 49–50). Her surprising and insightful conclusion is that the mapping enterprise allowed expression of locally specific forms of place and meaning. But, despite its bizarre and inconclusive complexities, it also provided for a successful modern state because the legal system bound people together in a common enterprise based on acceptance of place.

Equally surprising is Kivelson's finding that the contrasting imperial conquest of Siberia, requiring as it did new and enhanced forms of mobility, was also aided and effected by mapping. However, it did not eliminate the ethnic and cultural diversity of the colonized peoples. Instead, precisely because of the emphasis on place-based identity, it provided a much greater opportunity for local specificity for “inclusion without assimilation” (212).

In her conclusion, Kivelson points out that Russian forms of spatiality, knowledge, and identity, while expressed through and assisted by cartography, contrast starkly with English forms of the same period. The English were enacting differing mobilities and immobilities, enclosing peasant landholdings and colonizing North America, cartographically articulating a conception of ownership based in natural rights rather than location on the land. This contrast opens up the possibility of future, similarly fine-grained analyses to compare differing spatialities and forms of cartographic reason, breaking with the sclerotic, unitary understandings often taken for granted, with a few exceptions such as Winichakul's Siam Mapped. This is a truly fine and important book, and we can only hope it will inspire others.