Spaces of Global Knowledge is the latest instalment in the Studies in Historical Geography Routledge series, edited by Robert Mayhew. This volume is an ambitious collection of essays, which neatly weaves together a number of seemingly disparate case studies to create something that both illustrates and challenges what it means to think geographically about how global knowledge was made during the long nineteenth century. As Finnegan and Wright make clear in the introduction, there is no fixed definition of what global knowledge was or is. Rather than creating an intellectual befuddlement, the malleable nature of the concept allows for profitable exploration of the many forms, practices, spaces, senses and sites in which and by which knowledge was made, circulated and displayed in an increasingly interconnected, globalizing world.

The volume is split thematically between, first, encounters and identity; second, collection and display; and third, circulation and translation. The three sections are designed to reflect the dynamic, communicative processes involved in the making of global knowledge. It is noted throughout and especially in the thoughtful afterword by Charles Withers that the making of global knowledge in an ‘age of empire’ was frequently an unequal exchange often made more unequal by the limitations of Western archives. As such, there is a concerted effort throughout the volume to emphasize the agency of non-Western actors and to highlight their ‘life-geographies, practices and varied contributions to knowledge’ (p. 4) as go-betweens and as active parts in the assemblages, contact zones and networks that made and circulated knowledge. Some of the authors, such as Sarah Hunter (Chapter 10) on the Dublin University Mission and the structuring of a ‘global’ medical practice in Hazaribagh, India, achieve this balance more than others, but an attempt to do so is present in all chapters.

In ‘Encounters and identity’ the reader is presented with four accounts of the different ways in which scientific knowledge was variously collected, constructed, inscribed and distributed within a global context. Nuala Johnson consciously eschews the categories of local, national or imperial in presenting her account of a year in the life of Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe, colonial wife and botanist, in Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead Johnson focuses on the ‘zones of contact, routes of mobility and the mechanisms of inclusion or erasure’ (p. 21) that allowed the scientific knowledge that Cuffe encountered, imaged and collected to circulate widely. It is a pity that the intricate watercolours Cuffe produced to picture the botanical specimens she came across are lost in the poor quality of the reproductions used in this volume. This is something which also plagues images in several other chapters, most notably Caroline Cornish's contribution on curating global knowledge at Kew Gardens (Chapter 6). The three other chapters in this first section, by Polina Nikolaou, Diarmid Finnegan and Angela Byrne, take the reader from Cyprus to Brazil to Rupert's Land, and are all in their own way excellent and convincing examples of the way in which the lexicon of global history can be usefully employed in a range of different contexts.

The second section of the collection presents four interpretations on the theme of the collection and display of global knowledge. Collecting practices and a re-evaluation of the traditional division of ‘man of science’ and ‘naval man’ aboard mid-nineteenth-century voyages of exploration on the Pacific inform Sarah Millar's chapter here, while in others there is a more concerted focus on the object itself and the many and varied ways in which objects were displayed and interpreted by different audiences. For instance, Cornish's study in the ‘spatial and temporal contingency of meaning-making’ (p. 121) through the biography of a model of an Indian indigo factory brings to light stories of Krishnanagar artisan modellers and the context of the model's existence and reception at the Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens. This section of the collection is completed by engaging chapters from Wright on the opening and early history of the Belfast Museum, and Robert J. Mayhew on the differences between the first (1798) and second (1803) editions of Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and how these differences illustrate the change from global imaginary to global empirical imaginary in Malthus's writing.

In the final section of the collection, three case studies are offered which deal in more explicit terms with the circulation of global scientific knowledge and, most interestingly, the issues involved in the translation of knowledge in the nineteenth century. Louise C. Henderson uses David Livingstone's Missionary Travels (1857) to explore the mutability of the book's meaning as it extended out to networks abroad and posits the inviting question whether we can see a ‘global Livingstone’ (p. 243) in the nineteenth century, as we might a global Darwin. In Karen N. Salt's chapter on the mobility of knowledge of and about Haiti in the mid-nineteenth century there is a much more concerted and, for the volume overall, much-needed, focus on non-Western historical actors. Although this chapter might ask more questions than it perhaps answers, it will be exciting to follow how Salt's project develops.

Spaces of Global Knowledge owes much to the Isis focus section on ‘Global histories of science’ (2010), texts such as Simon Schaffer et al.’s The Brokered World (2009) and the work of Christopher Bayly, all of which are frequently cited. This collection is an extension of such works and can be viewed as a series of illustrative case studies that will engage with and inform students, early-career researchers, geographers and historians alike about the possibilities of thinking geographically about the multitudinous ways of making, circulating and displaying global knowledge in the nineteenth century. In its focus on books, pictures, pamphlets and models as objects involved in the circulation of scientific knowledge, this volume also offers a counterpoint to the burgeoning literature on the mobility of scientific instruments.