The rise of London as a global emporium, as Robert Batchelor argues in this fine new book, was more than just the exchange of sugar, spices, fabric, and bullion from distant lands. It even involved more than the simple exchange of ideas; it also involved the way these ideas were translated. Batchelor traces 140 years of an English intellectual movement aimed at compiling the knowledge being brought back by merchant seamen about Asian polities, philosophies, legal structures, and trading networks and rendering it intelligible to new generations of English traders as they in their turn sought profits in Asia. London's ascent from its economic subordination to Antwerp in 1549 to the leadership of a global trade network in 1689 rested upon the success of English intellectuals as translators of Asian languages, culture, and knowledge.

This concept of translation is the overarching theme that ties together Batchelor's exploration of a vast array of Asian cultural practices and artifacts. He singles out the “Selden map” for his most sustained treatment, thus exemplifying his approach to the study of translation and justifying the map's pride of place in the book's title. Drafted by a Chinese cartographer early in the seventeenth century and captured by an English vessel in the 1620s, the map became part of the collection of the legal scholar John Selden, who on his death in 1654 bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library.

Though Selden's acquisition shows intriguing signs of engagement with European cartographic techniques, its real interest for Batchelor is in the trade networks it sketches out from China to Japan, the Philippines, the Indies, India, and points westward. This interest in lands beyond China and the maritime networks binding them, is rare among extant examples of Chinese cartography, for the Selden map “demonstrated the use of technology by Chinese merchants to define sea routes and achieve dominium outside of the strict sphere of imperium” (151). Europeans arriving to trade in Asia must follow suit, seeking ways of arriving at workable shared meanings with their Asian counterparts that could support commercial agreements within the preexisting matrix of Asian trade. As Selden argued in Mare Clausum, his rebuttal to Hugo Grotius's seminal work of international law Mare Liberum, Europeans could not simply treat Asia as a blank slate to be inscribed with whatever sorts of novel contractual arrangements or claims of sovereignty they wished. Asia could not be ruled; instead, it must be translated.

Of course, the translation process did not begin or end with Selden and his map. Batchelor places its beginnings with Sebastian Cabot, impresario of the “Cathay” ventures of the 1550s that led to the foundation of the Russia Company, and the intelligence-gathering role of later joint-stock firms like the East India Company figure conspicuously throughout the narrative. He connects the compilation and translation process with an ambitiously wide variety of English and European intellectual developments, though the lines of influence lie so close together at some points in the text that it becomes difficult to keep track of what is being translated, by whom, and for what purpose. For example, a single paragraph beginning on page 88 traces professional relationships among no less than ten cartographers and other intellectuals, and similarly dense thickets appear elsewhere in the book. Even so, Batchelor substantiates the bulk of his proposed translations of Asian ideas into European contexts, most importantly including his identification of Chinese-derived theories of sovereignty and absolutism as elements within the competing “modernities” at stake in the Revolution of 1688.

To grasp Batchelor's argument, it is important to understand what he does not mean by “translation,” a term he generally uses in unmodified form to indicate a basically benign process by which English people sought to comprehend Asian knowledge and use it to operate successfully and peacefully in an Asian context. Indeed, he distinguishes “the seventeenth-century universalist approach in which Latin and Greek jostled in libraries with Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Telugu” from the methods of “the nineteenth century discipline of Orientalism, which advocated reading Asian books in terms of a distinct hermeneutics and thus in separate reading rooms” (14–15). In other words, the nineteenth-century scholars did not “translate” Asian books as their seventeenth century predecessors did but instead studied them in a way that deliberately preserved their exoticism and thus presented Asia and Asians as open to imperial domination.

Whether or not one accepts this boundary on the definition of “translation,” it leads Batchelor to depict an overly sharp dichotomy between Asia, supposedly the exclusive site of English translation activities, and the Atlantic world, where even in the seventeenth century the English operated under the assumption that “the institution of slavery could remove the necessity of translation in the Americas and Africa,” thus creating “two rather distinct economies—slavery in the Atlantic world and bullion exchange in Asia” (162). Yet far from being distinct, these economies were actually deeply interrelated. English re-exports of Asian luxuries to Africa featured prominently throughout the era of transatlantic slave trading; moreover, until 1700 they primarily fetched African gold rather than enslaved persons. Either way, English trade to West Africa no less than to East Asia required an ongoing effort to comprehend and comply with local cultural realities, such as the sealing of contracts with fetish-oaths. There seems little reason to limit the potential applicability of “translation” to early English contacts with Asia alone.

In any event, Batchelor builds a solid case for English success in translating the Asian world as an indispensable factor in London's growth as a global entrepôt for goods and knowledge alike. The Selden map in particular emerges as a key repository of information on the deep structures of Asian geography and commerce as they existed in the first centuries of European seaborne contact. We are indebted to Batchelor for translating its profundities to us.