For many years, the history of cartography slumbered in historiographical obscurity, less source of Clio's muse than cause of Clio's snooze. The history of mapmaking led, so it seemed, to the ultimate reality effect—the inexorably and progressively more accurate reproduction of geographical space in two dimensions. After J. B. Harley, Thongchai Winichaikal, and others called such simplistic views into question, the critique of cartography has extended in many directions in the multivolume History of Cartography and to fruitful reconsideration of mapping and empire in works by Matthew Edney on India, D. Graham Burnett on British Guiana, and Laura Hostetler on China.

Ian Barrow focuses on the British histories embedded in colonial maps of India. His central claim is that histories of territorial possession in British colonial maps provided legitimacy for British rule of India and reinforced British national identity. Barrow ventures beyond the maps to recover thematic histories of possession. James Rennell's map of Bengal associated the British with improving landlords and generalized the East India Company's acquisitions as those of the British nation. Descriptions of route surveys rendered Indian territories as “safe” and mastered by British ingenuity and science. Reverence for the traditions of the Survey of India led to naming Peak XV after the former surveyor general, Sir George Everest. The continued use of antiquated survey techniques by native surveyors sustained romantic narratives of British rule. Curzonian commemoration of the Black Hole of Calcutta resulted from an imperial nostalgia that sought to identify the particular moments from which British rule could date its origins.

The thematic focus on cartographic histories of possession provides coherence across diverse chapters, but its limitations relate to the wider purposes and audiences for these British maps. Discussion of Rennell's map, for example, would be stronger if it went beyond dedications and illustrations to weigh the use, circulation, and influence of these atlases and the histories they portray. Matthew Edney's Mapping an Empire roots the early Indian surveys in a broader context of Enlightenment knowledge-making and colonial governance. By the end of the nineteenth century, Barrow shows that the maps and monuments to the Black Hole of Calcutta appeared in tourist guides, but the overall transition from instrument of rule to educational tool, and the reaction of Indian audiences more generally to these cartographic histories, could be developed further. Barrow's discussion of the romance associated with native surveyors, for example, also could be supplemented by Kapil Raj's work on Indian contributions to the Survey of India as a hybrid and collaborative endeavor.

Barrow gives an excellent account of the nineteenth-century debates over naming the highest peak in the world Mount Everest, but it is an exaggeration to say that the name had, by the 1930s, become “a universal symbol and was no longer a symbol of British scientific supremacy” (120). To this day, the name remains contested in India, Nepal, and China. Especially in the 1930s, assertions of its universality are difficult to disentangle from assertions of British supremacy over the region in general and the mountain in particular. Indeed, the name “Everest” may be an even stronger example of embedding the history of British territorial possession into cartographic orthodoxy than Barrow allows. The refusal to adopt local names in favor of a British name was less a denial of nationalisms than a kind of strategic internationalism in the service of empire.

Did these maps provide legitimacy for British rule and strengthen British national identity? Considered from the point of view of British audiences, they clearly did. Considered from a wider compass, with greater prominence given to Indian perspectives, the legitimacy conferred by these maps is more complicated. Manu Goswami has suggested that the construction of “India” as a colonial economy and national space in such maps called into question British legitimacy and gave shape to Indian notions of self-rule. Barrow notes the “cartographic sleight of hand” (30) of colonial maps asserting that India was possessed by Britain but was not part of it. The discrepancy between these categories formed “Indian” as well as “British” identities, as the same maps could produce divergent histories of possession. These multiple identities and histories all claimed legitimacy based on the map's apparent concreteness and naturalness, the very characteristics that earlier historians had found so straightforward and soporific. By examining the British uses of atlases, surveys, names, and monuments to tell histories of possession, Barrow's Making History, Drawing Territory makes a valuable contribution to understanding the intertwined histories embedded in British-Indian cartography.