Riaz Dean's Mapping the Great Game retells a relatively well-known story that has been attempted many times. That story always seems to leave one wondering whether the Great Game was something of actual significance or more of a media event designed to sell books to the British public along the lines of Stanley and Livingstone. Map historians know that as with the Cook expeditions of the late eighteenth century, new kinds of mapping or cartographic practice emerged as a result of this “game” as well as new kinds of cross-cultural scientific techniques, which is what makes at least the title of Dean's book tantalizing.

Dean is an amateur historian, a well-traveled engineer with an MBA who was born in Fiji and now works as a consultant in Wellington, New Zealand. He is also a collector of nineteenth-century books and maps. He writes in a popular style that dispenses with footnotes. Yet, despite having traveled extensively in Central Asia, backpacking and by jeep, the kind of creative nonfiction employed by the likes of William Dalrymple and others is nowhere in evidence. This is unfortunate, as one suspects that if Dean had put more of his own cards on the table, some interesting insights about the relation of the present to the past and of “globalization” to imperialism might have emerged, not to mention new stories. Surely, he must have photos from his own grand tours, rather than the drab headshots of “players who shaped the Great Game” placed at the beginning of the book. As to the contemporary situation, a brief mention of the Americans and British still being “bogged down” in Afghanistan appears at the end (p. 270), which seems to be the murky and not particularly helpful moral of the genre in which he writes.

As far as history goes, Dean's bibliography suggests reading in academic history and popular history that is not particularly recent—the latest being Dalrymple's Return of a King—and favoring the kind of style and approach used in Peter Hopkirk's Great Game (1990) and John Keay's Explorers of the Western Himalayas (1997).Footnote ¹ Keeping with that, the book often gives us language from another era, or from current neo-nationalism—“the xenophobic Tibetans” (pp. 259–60) or the Sikhs as a “warrior race” (p. 32). The praise harmonizes with this approach: “Rudyard Kipling immortalized this phrase [the Great Game] in his masterpiece and surely one of the best-loved English language books, Kim” (p. 3).

Meanwhile, the compelling title baits and switches. The center of the book is indeed about the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India. However, although several maps get mentioned, very few are shown or analyzed in depth. The only map reproduced from the period is Kishen Singh's (codename A-K) 1884 map of Lhasa (reproduced by Sarat Chandra Das in 1902), interesting but barely discussed, while there are a number of made-to-order modern maps produced by Roger Smith of Geographx in Wellington.Footnote ² A bit is said about cartography, mostly drawn from the excellent work of Matthew Edney on the GTS, but Dean completely ignores more recent efforts by Matthew Mosca and others to place this in a comparative and non-Anglocentric perspective.Footnote ³ There is a figure about how triangulation works (p. 76), but it is pretty basic stuff. One would have hoped that Dean's engineering expertise would have been more on display, explaining instruments and how collaboration worked.

The actual focus of the book is perhaps more on the “pundits” or native Asians such as Abdul Mejid, Abdul Hamid, Sandra Chandra Das, Mirza Shuja, Hyder Shah, and Kintup, as well as Nain, Kalian, and Kishen Sing, who worked with and for the British, drawing here from the work of Derek Waller, Edney, and others. Dean claims that these are forgotten people, which in some ways is true in narratives like Hopkirk's, but not really so in more recent scholarship. The core problem here is that Dean only takes us a bit further along the path of getting to know these figures. An opportunity seems to have been missed.

The book concludes (p. 269) with a paean to Gerald Morgan's Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia (1981),Footnote ⁴ while essentially repeating its basic errors. The first is an inability or unwillingness to read Russian and use Russian sources. Dean claims to know Russian, but he cites neither primary nor secondary sources. The second is an overreliance on British sources. Morgan, however, did know well both the India Office Records now at the British Library and the Foreign Office Papers at the the National Archives, which Dean does not. Neither of these would be fatal errors if either the maps or regional (“native”) sources were consulted in more depth, as work still remains to be done on these fronts. At least on the British side of things, the sources Dean does use and the methods employed are rather too well-trodden ground.