Rarely, yet certainly occasionally, a scholar's first book rises above a learned but specialized monograph. Aiyaz Husain's Mapping the End of Empire marks an original point in the literature on British and American territorial aims during and after the Second World War. How would postwar maps of the world be redrawn? Husain's broad purpose is to answer this question by reassessing archival records accessible some four decades ago but that now include many files and documents withheld at the time. Though his book does not significantly alter conclusions by earlier historians, it sheds fresh light, especially on American cartography of the era, effectively fusing the disciplines of history and geography.

The British side of the equation is well known. As if the ghost of Joseph Chamberlain, sporting a monocle to examine the territorial integrity of the British Empire, were gazing on the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, the first British goal, in Husain's words, was a map of the world with “an unbroken bloc of Muslim lands from the Levant to South Asia that would remain friendly to Britain” (265). But the internal borders of individual colonies and dependencies were constantly changing—or needed to be changed. Old lines ceased to make sense, and new ones needed to be drawn, not only to take into account changing demographics but also, for example, to fortify access to oil in the Middle East—as in the disputed area between Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Abu Dhabi, designated on wartime maps as the Buraimi oasis. The bland name of a desert watering hole muted the clash between the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (present-day British Petroleum, BP) and the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco, today's Saudi Aramco). Meanwhile, emphasizing colonial dependencies in Asia, the colonial secretary, Oliver Stanley, summed up the British view with the words “We hold what we have.” It would be up to the India Office or the Raj itself to make adjustments, if need be, in complex areas such as Kashmir to ward off a possible Soviet advance. Apart from India, the most prominent geographic feature of the British Empire at large continued to be the Royal Navy's “five keys that lock up the world”: Gibraltar, Suez, the Cape, Singapore, and the Falklands.

The American side is far and away the more intriguing. Husain establishes the significance, in his estimate, of the thirty-seven million copies of maps published during the war by National Geographic. The magazine held iconic status. It prided itself on “accurate accuracy” and disclaimed political bias. Yet it was unmistakably Anglophile. Its maps sometimes created the impression that American strategic bases would provide a shield for a “contracting” British Empire. National Geographic sparked popular interest in oil reserves in the Middle East; it called attention to islands in the Pacific that might, if only by implication, provide bases for American security; and it gave new perspective on civil and military air routes, some of them over polar regions.

The maps in National Geographic were scientific but not forbidding. Newspapers across the United States, from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, also published maps for a popular readership. Franklin Roosevelt himself contributed to the vogue of studying wartime areas by urging his radio audiences to “get a map.” As if America were the center of the world, global renditions in newspapers and magazines placed the United States in the middle, flanked by Asia on the left and Europe on the right. Regional maps stirred up immense curiosity about the future of the French and Dutch colonies. When depicting wartime theaters of American troops fighting overseas, the drawings conveyed emotional intensity as well as possibilities for new boundaries.

Within the US government, an interagency territorial committee studied with especial care the map of Asia. The committee included members from the three military services. Unlike the public tenor of discussion, the tone of the exchanges within the committee was sometimes abrasively anti-British. Officers of the US Navy were wary of British strategic aims, as if the Royal Navy were still the principal rival. US officers knew that the British needed American naval support to stabilize the western Pacific and regain control over Hong Kong and Malaya (and the French and Dutch, in turn, depended on the British to reoccupy Indochina and the Netherland East Indies). The future of Japan raised the most difficult questions. In the extreme view of Captain H. L. Pence, USN, not only the government but also the people of Japan should be “destroyed”—the Japanese were “international bandits and not safe on the face of the earth.” Beyond the Japanese homeland, what of the Japanese colonial territories, which offered raw materials and bases in the Pacific? Studying the geography of the region led to one preeminent and, at the time, compelling conclusion: most of the Pacific seemed to represent new scope for Manifest Destiny.

Husain's account is excellent on “Project M,” the ultra-secret committee appointed by Roosevelt to determine places best suited for Jewish refugees—not necessarily Palestine, though Palestine figured as the principal preoccupation. The foremost geographer of the era, Isaiah Bowman, believed that the Palestine question would be solved in part by the answer to a geographic conundrum. Should Palestine be regarded as part of the southern arc of Europe (the American view)? Or should it be seen as within the western circumference of the Middle East (the British perspective)? The American position ultimately held that Palestine figured as the logical geographic and political solution to the problem of Jewish refugees—a position upheld after the war by President Harry S. Truman, to the dismay of the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin.

Bevin was the dominant figure in the postwar Labor government. He took the lead in reviving the morale and spirit of those who believed in the ongoing mission of Britain as a world power. India would be granted independence, but the Middle East would take its place. Despite Arab antipathy towards the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the region would become a strategic bulwark and a source of oil and other resources. The British would deal with the Arabs as equals. The Arab states would become part of the British imperial system, thus meeting the challenge of Arab nationalism.

Husain could well have commented on the realpolitik of the transition from empire to Commonwealth rather than simply assuming that the British Empire had reached a point of terminal decline by the end of World War II. But his strength lies in elucidating American assumptions about the postwar world, and he provides a useful account of the power of geographic thinking when reaching political solutions. Mapping the End of Empire is a worthy and valuable reassessment of the archival records of the Second World War—above all by integrating the geographic dimension into the political settlement of 1945.