John Short provides us with a colorful and nicely printed general history of the representation of the Korean peninsula in maps. He traces the Korean cartographic tradition as an interaction with Chinese, Japanese, and Western representations of Korea over time to make the point that modern maps in contemporary Korea are not the result of a singular process of imposing the West's “scientific” mapping upon the colonial world after the eighteenth century. He posits in his introduction (chapter 1) that Korea's appearance within the globalization of space was a complex process of “interactions and encounters between the colonial and the colonized, the imperial center and the periphery, the modern and the indigenous” (p. x). I think he has succeeded in demonstrating how this occurred.

The book is divided into three parts that are subdivided into a total of eight chapters. Part 1 examines the separate traditions of maps in early Chosŏn (chapter 2) and how Korea is represented (or not) in European maps (chapter 3). Part 2 delves into “Cartographic Encounters,” comparing and contrasting representations of Korea produced in China, Japan, and Europe (chapter 4) and then returns to “Cartographies of the Late Joseon” (chapter 5). Part 3, “Representing Korea in the Modern Era,” closes the book with chapters 6 through 8 examining “The Colonial Grid,” “Representing the New Country,” and “Cartroversies.” This last chapter I found particularly appealing. It is an exposition on the cartographic blindness to the DMZ and the political boundary it represents in North and South Korean cartography, a discussion of the East/Japan Sea controversy, and a mapping of the Tokdo/Takeshima dispute between the ROK and Japan.

With regard to maps and cartographic history I am a total blank, hence I might be the perfect general reader for this history and I learned a lot about maps. I found the narrative of interactions between indigenous cartographic conventions and traditions with neighboring traditions—then very alien styles and traditions—very interesting. In particular, by isolating how Korea is represented or not represented on others' maps, Short drives home the main lessons of the book, namely that the gradual globalization of space as he calls it was created by interactions of various different ideas of place and space.

The book, however, has a number of failings. Short only barely has a grasp on some of the essential historical themes of the Korean historical narrative. He insists throughout that Korea is a part of the Chinese empire, ignoring the more complicated geopolitical context of historical East Asia, and he overplays the “Hermit Kingdom” thesis as well. Generally speaking, Short would have been better served to not try to give a capsule summary of Korean history from the time of its earliest maps. The more he says about history the more mistakes, omissions, overstatements, etc. he makes.

There is a notable shift in the narrative in part 3. Here Short begins to illustrate history in maps, and sometimes this comes across as, frankly, rather silly. Showing a Russian map of Pyongyang with its Cyrillic script is not in my mind a very revealing “indication of the geopolitical space that Korea occupied for much of the post war world.” Nor does the early Japanese colonial map with its details of land types help me understand the famous Land Survey of 1911–18. Moreover, the existence of penciled-in labels, such as “embassy” and “Presbyterian Church,” on a more traditionally pictorial Korean map is rather trivial evidence for missionaries' “effect on local culture.” By and large this last section is the weakest part of the book. He seems to deemphasize the theme of cartographic evolution for a much less interesting narrative of how maps illustrate the historical context of various moments in the twentieth century. Fortunately, he saves the book in its last chapter with a much more interesting discussion of the importance of maps to three “cartroversies.” I found his discussion a new way to think about these various problems in contemporary times.

I think the book was rather hastily written and edited—at least it gives that impression with numerous quirks and gaffes. Curiously there is no list of plates. And the reproductions of numerous maps themselves are of uneven quality. Larger maps of the peninsula reduced for reproduction here become unreadable. This is particularly the case with the Japanese maps in chapter 6. On the whole, while an unevenly rendered book, it will be a useful addition to our understanding of Korea. Short has placed at the end an extensive bibliography of English-language works on Korean cartography. This will be useful to draw non-Korean interested geographers, amateur and professional, deeper into the Korean cartographic tradition.