What does it mean to ‘think geographically’ about the Enlightenment? Charles W. J. Withers proposes a complex answer in his ambitious work of historiographical synthesis. On one level, he invites us to think about the discipline of geography in the eighteenth century – how it was studied and taught in locations ranging from universities to private houses. He describes the maps, atlases and descriptive texts through which the subject was conveyed. On another level, he shows how people at the time underwent a variety of new experiences broadly classifiable as ‘geographical’. In Europe and elsewhere, they became more knowledgeable about their own localities and more invested in the social life of their towns and nations. They also found themselves more tightly linked than before with distant regions through exploration, trade, correspondence and the circulation of printed materials. How, then, did formal knowledge of geography relate to these new experiences? And how should the era's expanded geographical awareness shape scholars' interpretations of the Enlightenment today? Withers's suggestion is that the cultural transformation known as the Enlightenment should be characterized primarily through its geography – that it should be defined in terms of the new spatial experiences of the age.

The argument is set out at the beginning of the book, which then proceeds to develop it by means of a well-informed review of recent scholarly work. Withers cites relatively few primary sources; what he offers is an original synthesis that draws on many fields of eighteenth-century studies. Particularly notable is his reliance on recent work in the history of science, which he sees as having profound implications for the general historiography of the Enlightenment. Thus his concern is not just with the variety of locations in which the movement flourished but also with how new geographical experiences underwrote the production of new knowledge. As a first step in this direction, he points to the collection edited by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), though he also notes the limitations of national context as a geographical category, given the importance of local settings and international exchanges. Similarly, Withers disputes the utility of the categories of ‘core’ and ‘margin’ in relation to Europe as a whole, pointing out that such nations as Greece, Spain and Portugal – often relegated to the margins of the Enlightenment – had vigorous and largely autonomous intellectual movements. Ideas, goods, letters, books and specimens did not flow only in one direction, from the metropolitan centre to the periphery, but there was considerable counterflow from such regions as the Americas and the Pacific to Europe itself.

The vision of the period that Withers offers is one in which the whole globe was opened up for human traffic as never before, and in which that traffic generated an explosion of information about the Earth, its plants, animals and people. Maps, travel narratives, surveys, plant specimens, minerals and accounts of native peoples all circulated through learned academies and societies, coffee houses and salons. Like many recent historians of science, Withers emphasizes that the resulting knowledge was often shaped by the circumstances in which it was produced, notwithstanding the global ambitions of its makers. ‘Globalization’ is too simple a label to capture this process, in which patterns of circulation linked often distant places that nonetheless retained their own quite localized cultures and perspectives.

Much of the material Withers summarizes – on voyages of exploration, topographical surveys, geological and botanical fieldwork and Europeans' encounters with Native American and Pacific peoples – will be familiar to specialists in the period, though he often chooses lesser-known examples to illustrate his points. In the final chapters, he returns to the question of the organization of geography as a discipline. He shows how geographers, historians and philosophers reflected the new global knowledge in their writing and teaching. Jedidiah Morse, for example, whose The American Geography was published in 1789, gave the inhabitants of the United States a new consciousness of the territory of their nation and its scope for future expansion. But at the same time, geography remained rooted in its own humanist traditions, and many authors were more concerned with studying classical texts or Scripture than with incorporating the latest discoveries.

In this respect, and in others, what Withers identifies as the new geographical experiences of the age do not exactly correspond to the perceptions of people in the eighteenth century themselves. Withers resists attempts to ‘privilege’ the Enlightenment in one particular place, where it is thought to have originated, and to assume passive reception of its ideas elsewhere. One might nonetheless acknowledge that a sense of ‘cultural gradient’ – the notion that some places were further along the path of progress than others – was often expressed in the period, and might be said to be part of the experience of cultural transformation. Thus recent scholars' perspectives on the geography of the Enlightenment are not precisely consonant with the era's own consciousness of cultural geography. Some of the most intriguing issues raised by Withers's study concern this disjuncture between what is now understood about the spatial dimension of knowledge in the eighteenth century and what thinkers of the time understood. Scholars have to decide just how much of the geographical self-consciousness of the period is worth trying to recapture today.

Readers will be stimulated to develop their own reflections on the relations between geography and history by Withers's book, an accomplished work of historiography in the geographical mode. As a survey of recent literature, its extensive footnotes and bibliography will serve readers for years to come, though its coverage is limited to the natural and human sciences, ignoring other realms of Enlightenment culture such as politics, religion, literature, philosophy and the arts. The book is imaginatively illustrated, with a large selection of maps and other images that show how geography was studied and taught. Most of all, historians of science should be grateful to Withers for having made the work done in our field so central to his attempt to reconfigure scholarly understanding of this critical historical period.