This fascinating study documents a shift in the Qing lexicon of Indian geography from pluralistic divergence to growing standardization by the eve of the Anglo-Chinese wars, which engendered another subsequent change in which a comprehensive, synchronized view of the relationships between frontiers supplanted an earlier official approach that was more narrowly focused on individual regions. Mosca makes a solid contribution to the understudied subject of Qing geographical knowledge of the trans-Himalayan region, a topic that underpins the study of the Qing state's relations to its southwestern and western peripheries. The author connects his core findings to issues of imperial rivalry, knowledge production, and frontier policy, which widens the interest of this book considerably.

The formation and management of empire are continual themes in Mosca's narrative of the changing influences on Qing geostrategic perceptions of India. Part one surveys the inherited scholarship on foreign geography since the Han empire, in which divergent, ambiguous, even contradictory accounts and names for the same place were preserved side by side in geographical publications, which were marked by an outlook that Mosca calls “geographical agnosticism” (pp. 41–43).

In part two, Mosca describes a further increase in lexical diversity from the 1750s to the 1790s, the result of campaigns in Xinjiang and Nepal (Gurkha) that added more geographical terms to the mix (Hendusitan/Yindusitan, Pileng, and Hongmao guo, among others). However, differences in language, transliteration, and regional context of the sources made it difficult for Qing actors to understand the actual geographical referents of these terms, and how they were related. This notably included the terms for “India” (a problematic term in its own right), the Indian subregions, and their neighbors. The author's analysis of these dynamics strikes a good balance between attention to larger structural forces of imperial competition and to individual decisions by different agents in specific roles. In an interesting episode, the Qing court, prompted by an exchange with George Macartney during his 1793–94 mission, interrogated a Gurkha informant captured earlier by Tibetan forces and learned that the people referred to by the name “Pileng” were the British, only to have this discovery lost to later generations after the deaths of the Qianlong Emperor and his court geographers (pp. 150–54, 157). The complex institutional, generational, and cultural-political processes of empire-building could drive the production of knowledge, but could also make it unpredictable.

Part three identifies a disjuncture between Qing geographical knowledge and frontier policy between 1800 and 1838, which Mosca attributes to a failure by officials to modify policy in light of new geographical knowledge. The court came to realize that the same British Empire was behind the disparate activities of the “Yingjili” (English) along the Guangdong coast and those of the “Pileng” on the Tibetan frontier. However, this new geographic knowledge—and the geostrategic perspectives it afforded—did not lead to a comprehensive, coordinated approach to the British in Qing foreign policy. Even by 1860, as described in part four, government action related to one frontier was not necessarily correlated with action on another frontier, despite the fact that the statecraft writings of Wei Yuan and others had already urged taking action on the Tibetan frontier as a strategy for reducing the British threat to Guangdong. As a result, Mosca argues, the government first failed to recognize British India as a credible threat before conflict escalated into war, and then also failed to plan coordinated countermeasures for the coastal and hinterland frontiers.

Mosca avoids ill-fitting generalizations—xenophobia, ignorance, premodernity—in his characterization of Qing geographical scholarship and policy, and he likewise grounds his interpretations in specific contexts. For example, the conceptual vagueness of “Hindustan” reflected the Qianlong court's lack of interest in lands beyond the Tibetan frontier, which in 1757 it believed to be secure from threats. The Qianlong Emperor employed Jesuit cartographers to make survey maps of his empire, but he ignored their information on India because he wanted to be seen as following the cartographic authority of the earlier Kangxi and Yongzheng maps (pp. 115, 121–24). Mosca is thought-provoking in his analysis of Lin Zexu's assessment of the structural vulnerabilities of the British Empire relative to the military leverage of his own country. Although Lin's conclusions were not borne out by subsequent wars, the fact that he presented an analysis based on the best possible data available to him at the time should make us pause before criticizing him for having failed to anticipate factors that he could not possibly have foreseen.

Some aspects of Mosca's argument invite further consideration. One question is how to characterize the nature and magnitude of Qing lexical multiplicity compared to that of other periods. Lexical variability was a dominant trend both before and during the Qing period, but the opposite phenomenon—reduction of source and lexical variance—was also a periodic occurrence in the history of Chinese geographical scholarship, since the emergence of an imperially sanctioned compilation was often accompanied by the subsequent destruction of variant versions and sources. Another question regards Mosca's characterization of Qing policy on all frontiers after the conquest of the Xinjiang region in the 1750s as a minimalist maintenance of the status quo, whereby local officials complied with court policy to avoid frontier entanglements and policy activism. This may be somewhat overdrawn. Although frontier officials frequently acknowledged court concerns about border tranquility and couched their reports on local incidents in the language of restoring frontier peace, they also sometimes pursued capacity expansion through border engagement when doing so provided them with advantages in their competition for power and resources against rival institutions within the imperial bureaucracy.