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of the moments of disruption that Hornsby narrates in Surveyors ofEmpire is the outbreak of American War of Independence,a conflict that terminated the general survey before its vision ofcreating a comprehensive archive of American spaces could berealized.

One of the final chapters examines the making of The AtlanticNeptune, detailing the costs of its production, the ranges of scalesrepresented by its charts, and their immediate use by British forcesduring the American war. Although comprehensive in its recount-ing of the politics, publication history, and stray inaccuracies of DesBarres’s celebrated atlas, Hornsby offers little in the way of expla-nation for how these complex images e many of which combinedtext, bird’s-eye views, and landscape profiles in arresting combi-nations e operated culturally within the British Atlantic world torepresent American spaces to discerning audiences. Hornsby citesBruno Latour on the ways in which Europeans states turned theircapitals into ‘centers of calculation’ (p. 71) that gathered informa-tion as a means of controlling places around the world. He refers toJ.B. Harley to note the ‘silent spaces’ (p. 144) of maps that concealedan indigenous presence through omission. Aside from these anda few other brief forays into broader interpretation, Hornsby largelyfocuses on narrating the process by which the surveys wereconceived and executed, and their knowledge rendered in the formof maps and charts. It is an impressive as well as rewardingreconstruction of one of colonial British America’s least remem-bered and most important regions.

S. Max EdelsonUniversity of Virginia, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2012.01.007

Magali M. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: MappingPractices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Durham, Duke UniversityPress, 2011, xxi þ 325 pages, US$24.95 paperback.

Traveling from New Spain to Mexico is a thoughtful and richlydetailed book that seeks to illuminate ‘the complex and diversespatial practices through which Mexico came to locate and defineits national space’ (p. xiv). The book certainly achieves this goal.Magali Carrera covers an impressive range of visual culture as shecontextualizes the life andwork of the nineteenth-centuryMexicancartographer and geographer Antonio García Cubas (1832e1912).García Cubas produced the first national maps and atlases ofrepublican Mexico that helped Mexicans visualize their emergingstate. This book will be important for historical geographersbecause it amplifies our understanding of how a distinctive visualculture emerges within the dynamic social contexts of a newly-independent nation. Although the book focuses on the Mexicancase, Carrera’s methodology can be applied to other newly-independent countries, thereby expanding its potential reader-ship wider than the title suggests.

To understand better how García Cubas’s mapping projectsresulted from and contributed to particular constructions ofMexican identity, Carrera draws upon the scholarly literature fromthe history of art, the history of cartography, and visual culturestudies of nineteenth-century Mexico. She seamlessly combinesthese separate fields of knowledge using the theoretical perspec-tives developed by the historians of cartography J.B. Harley andDavid Woodward. Harley’s and Woodward’s critical methodologydemands a comprehensive contextual approach to interrogatingmaps. Theoretically grounded in this way, Carrera begins to framethe contexts that situate García Cubas’s œuvre within its time and

place of construction. Her key to framing these contexts andsynthesizing disciplinary literatures is the concept of ‘scopicregime.’ Rather than focusing narrowly on a specific style ormedium of visual expression, a scopic regime casts visual culturemore broadly by emphasizing the various modes of visualproduction and consumption.

In chapters one through four, which together constitute over halfthe book’s remaining pages, Carrera reconstructs the scopic regimewithinwhichGarcía Cubasworked. Atfirst blush these chaptersmayseem like excessive throat clearing, but recall the book’s title, Trav-eling fromNew Spain toMexico, with the emphasis here on traveling.Carreramust guide readers on a journey through the three centuriesof social changes that preceded García Cubas’s mapping projects.She concedes that her original research plan was ‘a ratherstraightforward iconographic and textual analysis of García Cubas’smajor geographic and cartographic projects’, but she soon realizedthat ‘his atlas and map projects have complex and convolutedorigins, and, at the same time, are highly interconnected to othernineteenth-century texts and images’ (xiv). This holistic approachdemands the reader’s patience as Carrera summarizes Europeancartographic history, Mexicanist travel narratives, shifting (post)colonial spatial realties, and the emerging technologies of thenineteenth century such as daguerreotype, lithography, andphotography. These summaries allow her methodically to recon-struct the nineteenth-century Mexican discourses that connectvisuality to power, gender, politics, and, crucially, theways inwhichMexicans produced and consumed their own national identity. Toflip past any of these chapters would be to deny oneself the oppor-tunity to witness an accomplished scholar synthesize the disparatehistorical threads that elucidate the cultural context of her object ofstudy. This synthesis is in largemeasure the book’s purpose becauseit is integral to the titular concept of ‘traveling’ in that it relocatesGarcía Cubas’s works from rigidly defined fields of knowledge intoMexico’s reconstructed nineteenth-century scopic regime.

The stage now set, in chapter five the spotlight at last shinessquarely upon García Cubas and his works. With his memoirs at herside, Carrera relates how García Cubas viewed his mappingprojects. He conceived of Mexico’s geographic knowledge of itselfas ‘a girl, deformed and wasted away’ (p. 147). His duty, as heunderstood it, was to invigorate Mexican cartography as a means tonurse this metaphorical girl back to health. His first effort dates to1856, the Carta general de la República Mexicana (General Map ofthe Mexican Republic). This map prompted Mexicans to locatethemselves culturally, historically, and ideologically as citizens ofa newly-independent country. For example, the Carta general joltedSanta Anna to fully realize the extent of Mexico’s territorial loss tothe United States that resulted from the 1848 treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo. Carrera devotes considerably more attention to Mexico’sfirst atlas, which García Cubas published in 1858: the Atlas geo-gráfico, estadístico é historic de la República Mexicana (Geographical,statistical and historical atlas of the Mexican Republic). Here, Car-rera’s keen analysis links the order in which maps appear in theAtlas, the placement of map elements, the design of cartouches, andmore to the wider visual culture of the time that emphasizedreproduction, panoramic display, and a coherent national identity.The first four chapters that reconstructed nineteenth-centuryMexico’s scopic regime prepare the reader to easily follow Car-rera as she makes these rapid-fire linkages.

By showing howa single historical figure’s mapping projects canbe situated and understood within a particular scopic regimeTraveling from New Spain toMexico offers amodel for similar studiesin different periods and places. This book also exemplifies how toblend the dialogues of art history, the history of cartography, andhistorical geography into a single, fruitful research agenda. Theo-retically grounded in critical cartography, rich in historical detail,

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012) 196e208 201

and laced throughout with over 90 illustrations, this is not lightreading. Expect to spend some time with this sophisticated anddelightful book.

Richard HunterState University of New York at Cortland, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2012.01.008

Rachel A. Moore, Forty Miles from the Sea: Xalapa, the Public Sphere,and the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson,University of Arizona Press, 2011, xvi þ 231 pages, US$49.95hardcover.

This volume is a revision of the dissertation ‘Route to the capital,route to the sea: domestic travel, regional identity, and localisolation in the VeracruzeMexico City corridor, 1812e1876’(University of California, Berkeley, 2006). That title more accuratelyreflects the book’s content, although it was doubtlessly deemed tooacademic even for a university press. This volume covers far morethan Xalapa (also spelled Jalapa) and its relationship with MexicoCity and the port of Veracruz. Orizaba in particular, but alsoCórdoba, Perote, and several nearby communities receive consid-erable attention.

Moore, a historian, sets herself the ambitious goal of investi-gating how and where ‘Atlantic coastal culture’ diffused inland inlate colonial and early republican Mexico. Rather than deal with allaspects of Atlantic coastal culture, Moore focuses on how cultureaffected communication in the region extending inland from theport of Veracruz between 1790, when Xalapa merchants cameunder the jurisdiction of a consulado (merchants’ guild) in Veracruz,and 1867, when Xalapa finally agreed to operate under the rule ofthe central government in Mexico City. She seeks to ‘Atlanticize’regional history by identifying the ways in which interior residentswere connected with the coast.

The first several chapters discuss the Atlantic coastal culture inXalapa. Chapter one relates how from 1790 to 1810 Xalapa, aninland city located on the eastern foothills of the Sierra MadreOriental, came to be tied to the port of Veracruz throughcommerce, defence against foreign invasions, and epidemiology.The mountain city wanted to be connected closely to the port ofVeracruz, from where the most essential information wasdeemed to originate. Xalapa assumed its independent mantle,which it still proudly wears, as it was in the city’s self-interest tobe independent from Mexico City. Each foreign invasion or evenrumor thereof favored Xalapa as an inland first line of defense.The threat of yellow fever in the port of Veracruz, moreover, ledto wholesale seasonal relocation of population to Xalapa. Chaptertwo covers the years 1810e1825, the time of struggle for Mexicanindependence and establishment of stable self-governance. Herethe author examines anti-imperial and anti-Mexico City senti-ments among the more literate denizens of the XalapaePerotecorridor. In this chapter Moore deftly connects Xalapa to theCaribbean, as a source of news and of return immigrants afterthe Mexican War of Independence. Chapter three addressesthe transport rivalries between Xalapa and Orizaba from 1812to 1842. Whereas Xalapa was well connected to the port ofVeracruz via the northern route, Orizaba, the inland city along thesouthern route, was topographically forced to face Mexico City.Although Orizaba succeeded in getting the VeracruzeMexico Cityrailway to run through it, the author makes clear that thecity remained more provincial than Xalapa as travelers avoidedthe railroad.

Chapters four and five are case studies of how Xalapa andOrizaba realized the utility of the ‘public sphere’ in Mexico. Mooreapplies Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere as an arenaof public exchange engaged in by the educated that, in turn,supports a collective political discourse. Chapter four deals withXalapa’s on-and-off relationship with the mercurial Antonio Lópezde Santa Anna, a native xalapeño (resident of Xalapa). This caudillo(leader) is portrayed not only as interfering with Xalapa’scommunication and sources of information, but also as drawing theattention of xalapeños to Mexico City and vice versa. To support herargument Moore compares the newly opened reading rooms,financed by the government to expose citizens to officially sanc-tioned printed matter, and the cafés, where subversive conversa-tions and rumors flourished. Yet neither the reading rooms nor theAmerican invasion in 1847 dampened the city’s appetite for newsand ideas from the Atlantic world. The chapter ends with the poetand lothario Manuel Flores and how he secretly met and corre-sponded with various Xalapa belles. This picaresque discussionreveals how xalapeños expanded the public sphere by cleverly cir-cumventing censorship of printed matter and the mails.

The second case study deals with Orizaba’s relationship withMexico City after the start of the War of Reform (1857e1861).Because of the federalist 1857 constitution Orizaba demanded animproved postal system. The rationale was that if the church was toplay a diminished role in society then the government would haveto protect and inform citizens themore. This part of the book is slowto develop, with the post office not discussed in detail until 13 pagesinto the chapter. Why is Xalapa’s post office, larger than Orizaba’s,not chosen for such a case study? Although Orizaba’s postal officialsleft correspondence pleading for more funds and personnel, it isvery likely that Xalapa’s post office made the same appeals.

The concluding chapter is a short summary and ends with theobservation that both Xalapa and Orizaba eventually situatedthemselves in the national public sphere. Their paths to that end,however, were different.

This book is generally well written although a bit discursive. Thetext, however, is supported with only five illustrations, all froma recent publication on the talented German artist Juan MoritzRugendas, who lived in Mexico in the early 1830s. The gray-tonereproductions do not show his paintings well. The one map, onthe nineteenth-century road network between Veracruz and Pue-bla, unfortunately does not depict all the routes or towns discussed.These shortcomings contrast with Moore’s careful use of materialsfrom 10 archives and libraries in Mexico as well as in the LatinAmerican holdings in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

This volume is recommended for researchers and advancedstudents interested inapplying the conceptofpublic sphere to coastalareas in Latin America and to anyone concerned with nineteenth-century communications in Mexico. The author admirably succeedsin making the reader rethink Atlantic coastal culture and see coast-lines as amorphous boundaries that move with time.

Steven L. DrieverUniversity of MissourieKansas City, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2012.01.009

Roman Adrian Cybriwsky, Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a TokyoNightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City. Athens,University of Georgia Press, 2011, US$24.95 paper, xx þ 303 pages.

In this book Roman Cybriwsky takes us by the hand thoroughRoppongi, a neighbourhood of Tokyo that accommodates a fabulous