Edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, the Cambridge History of Travel Writing is an admirable volume that combines rock solid reliability with the imaginative flair needed to engage a genre so elusive, and yet so historically pedigreed, as travel writing. Youngs also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002, hereafter Companion). This continuity pays dividends, and Cambridge University Press is to be commended for understanding that what might only be essayed as a companion in 2002 might be attempted as a history in 2019. The editors, Peter Hulme and Youngs, began by pointing to “the absence within the academy of a tradition of critical attention to travel writing”; their volume could offer “only a tentative map of a vast, little explored area” (Companion, 2). They ended their introduction to that volume by acknowledging that travel writing has “a complex history which has yet to be properly studied” (Companion, 10). The “two major limitations” shaping the work of Hulme and Youngs in 2002 were summarized upfront as “concentrations on the period since 1500 and on travel writing in English and published in Britain” (1). These are indeed serious constraints, or deformations; each is admirably addressed by the 2019 Ausgabe. Das and Youngs open with a chapter on travel in the ancient world by Jonathan S. Burgess and two chapters on medieval travel (Mary Baine Campbell on peregrinatio and Sharon Kinoshita's “Beyond the Pilgrimage”). The chapters on medieval travel, especially, add balance while yet messing with teleology. Hulme and Youngs gave particular weight to scientists and philosophers such as John Locke and Francis Bacon, bent on discovering a “new continent” of truth (Companion, 4); by such a standard, later editors found themselves shocked by “the fibbing that goes on in travel writing” (Companion, 10). The vastly popular Book of John Mandeville, surviving in some three hundred copies, is brought to full prominence in Das and Young's volume. Mandeville long shaped visions of the world while yet being palpably a medieval mash-up, “an elaborate literary hoax,” as Kinoshita says (History, 60). But then so, one might say, are the marvelous travel narratives of W. G. Sebald, enigmatically absent from both the Companion and (aside from one brief mention on page 139), the History.

The second and more serious editorial decision that was made by Hulme and Youngs in 2002 is now impressively unpicked and reversed by Das and Youngs. By concentrating on “travel writing in English and published in Britain,” Hulme and Youngs inevitably retraced vectors leading from an imperial center to worlds abroad. This in turn replicated the greater, globalizing, outward movement of Cambridge University Press itself (publishers of English language Bibles since 1591). To their credit, Hulme and Youngs intuited, toward the end of their introduction, that all is not well with this picture: things have shifted since Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). They make brief mention of texts beginning at a point eccentric to the imperial center, including “Caryl Philipp's travels in white Europe” (10). Whereas in 2002 there is brief recognition of countermovement in travel writing, of multiple points of origin, of plural languages, all this is now impressively developed in 2019's History. Youngs himself recognizes the importance of Caryl Philipp's The European Tribe (1987) as “a revisioning of the Grand Tour” (134), but the most sustained analysis of this author (oddly missed by the indexer) is furnished by Victoria E. Thompson's fine “Travel and the City.” Philipp's, Caribbean-British, offers a “counter-travel narrative” (313) by setting out upon European journeying from Casablanca's Kasbah (which serves as grounding point-of-origin, point of comparison). Further instances of “counter-travel” crisscross the History, as penned by Jewish and then Islamic travelers to Pisa (home to Rustichello, Marco Polo's romancing co-author, 57); by Egyptian travelers to Paris (150) and North Carolina (157); by Indians to London, encountering strange representations of themselves at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 (167).

Das and Youngs's History opens in conventional fashion with eight chapters dedicated to travel writing by period, from antiquity to “after 1900.” Space here is preponderantly but not exclusively dedicated to work of British provenance; Gerald Maclean dedicates half his wordage to Bartolomeus Georgievits, “a learned Hungarian who had spent twelve years in captivity among the Muslim Ottomans” (68). The next run of ten chapters, covering locales ranging from India and China to Australia and Africa, happily opens with “Arabic Travel Writing,” an important and oft-changing body of work over the longue durée. Next come six chapters dedicated to “place” (cities, deserts, rivers, mountains, polar regions, and wilderness), then eight dedicated to “forms” (from advice genres to digitally aided travel). The sketchy designation of the excellent final section (“Approaching Travel Writing”) suggests that we are again pushing up against limits of editorial and disciplinary vision: what next for the genre? Paul Longley Arthur and Tom Van Nuenen unwrap the promise of Airbnb (“live like a local,” 512). Kylie Crane, engaging ecocriticism, brings us to “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (548), and Agnieszka Sobocinska and Richard White to TripAdvisor (579). These co-authors offer devastating critiques of the gender-voicing of guide books (“In Lonely Planet's eyes, ‘real’ travelers were men,” 578), and such issues receive due attention throughout the volume. Elizabeth Leane is especially acute on the absenting of women from polar exploration narratives (371), and Robert Aldrich absorbing in the chapter “Three Frenchwomen in the Himalayas” (522–29), and on writing on “peripatetic postwar homosexuals” (529–32). Victoria E. Thompson meditates on how “women travel writers have been denied access to some spaces while given preferential access to others” (311).

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing proves immensely rewarding whether entered from the back, via the index, or read seriatim. Generous in space and time, its deeply historical and convincingly global coverage presses right up to our present moment, our most urgent planetary challenges. Debbie Lee's chapter, “Travelling in Wilderness,” does this especially well, evoking ecocritical moments that intuit, so it seems, ecocatastrophe. As I write, however, our anxious gaze is turning from the slow burn of climate change to the rapid spread of coronavirus. We may be entering a new age of “anti-travel”; this splendid collective project, a joy and education to read, may welcome the chance for light aggiornamento before its second coming, its paperback avatar.