The Norwegian Roald Amundsen's victory over the British Captain Scott in the 1911–12 race to the South Pole is probably the most iconic event in polar history. While this episode is often presented as unique, Peder Roberts's The European Antarctic demonstrates that the fortunes of Britain and Scandinavia in Antarctica continued to be entwined throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In a series of previously little-studied episodes, Roberts examines the three-way relationship among Norway, Britain, and Sweden in relation to Antarctic affairs from the first decade of the twentieth century up to the Cold War geopolitics of the 1950s. Although the subject might seem a little distant, Roberts ensures that the book will be of interest to scholars far beyond the field of Antarctic history by presenting the continent as “a mirror reflecting the values, ambitions, and anxieties of its interlocutors” (5).

Roberts's approach to his subject might not be what many of his readers are expecting from a book on Antarctic history. Rather than providing a blow-by-blow account of Antarctic explorers trudging across snow and ice and suffering from the cold, Roberts instead focuses on the histories of science and strategy that underlay European interest in Antarctica. He is more interested in the why than the how of Antarctic exploration. In taking this approach, Roberts is at the leading edge of a trend in Antarctic history that seeks to integrate the region into broader histories of imperialism, nationalism, science, and the environment. In what is perhaps the most important contribution of the book, all of the case studies demonstrate quite clearly that the history of Antarctic science cannot be separated from the history of Antarctic politics.

A theme that runs throughout the book is the relationship between Britain on the one side and Norway and Sweden on the other, which Roberts suggests was sometimes akin to informal imperialism. Despite their triumph in the race to the pole, Scandinavians played a largely supporting role to British imperial ambitions in Antarctica in the early twentieth century. Chapter 1, for example, reveals how a group of Swedish scientists and businessmen proposed the idea for a systematic scientific study of Antarctic whale populations, only to be maneuvered out of the way as the British government developed its own oceanographic research program that came to be known as the Discovery Investigations. As the twentieth century progressed, however, both Norway and Sweden grew in confidence in Antarctic affairs and began to pursue their own agendas, sometimes against the interests of Great Britain. Chapter 3 explores these developments through an examination of Norway's increasingly nationalist “Union of [Whale] Hunting and Research” in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the major themes of the book come together in chapter 6, which examines the 1949–52 joint Norwegian-British-Swedish expedition to Queen Maud Land. While the rationale for this expedition was publicized as being about the conduct of pure science, Roberts shows that all three countries had clear political reasons for participation and that national rivalries permeated the expedition.

In his introduction, Roberts states: “Instead of engaging in rather tiresome debates about whether particular expeditions or individuals were more ‘scientific’ than others in an absolute sense, [he] views claims to being ‘scientific’ as rich subjects for historian analysis in their own right” (2). On several occasions, however, the author does seem to be drawing his own distinctions between expeditions that were scientific and those that were less so. This is especially the case when contrasting the science of the heroic era with the Antarctic science that came later. While this appears a little contradictory, the fact that it proves so difficult to set aside our own ideas about scientific validity clearly reinforces the author's point about the rhetorical importance of science within Antarctic history.

Although the subject is clarified by the subtitle, the book's title, The European Antarctic, seems slightly misleading since there is not much discussion of the French, German, or Belgian expeditions that sailed to Antarctica during this period. The author's repeated references to whales as “imperial subjects” raise fascinating questions about the nature of imperialism in a place without people, which could perhaps have been explored in a little more detail. But these are very minor reservations. The European Antarctic is an excellent book that is written with wit and verve. It seamlessly weaves historiography into its narrative and makes an important contribution not only to the history of Antarctica but also to the history of Anglo-Scandinavian relations and to studies of science and empire more broadly.