The Kingfisher Atlas Of Exploration & Empires: A Pictorial Guide to The Great Age Of Discovery–From AD 1450 to 1800, by Simon Adams, Illustrated by Mark Bergin

It is important in reading a book like this to appreciate who the book is for–younger readers likely interesting in learning about early modern history or geography–and how this book can be enjoyed. The artwork itself is generally well done and the maps are certainly amusing, even if this book really falls short as a history. At best, it can be said that this particular book has some useful timelines that help keep the history of the period in some kind of context, which is good because the maps are sometimes baffling in terms of what they include and their relationship to any chronological account of history. Given the very limited size of this book, it is a little bit strange that the author sees it fit to spend time on the Renaissance and Reformation and Enlightenment, even though these subjects do not have a great deal to do with the atlas’ purported subject of exploration and empires. Perhaps the book means to include more information about the period from 1450 to 1800, and so includes some cultural and religious changes going on in Europe–though admittedly not around most of the rest of the world, even if that is not thematically connected to the book’s subject matter as a whole.

This book is a bit short of 50 pages and it is divided in a largely but not entirely chronological fashion. The book begins with a discussion of the theme of exploration and empires and provides some maps of the period from 1450 to 1800. There are some discussions of various (very incomplete) voyages of discovery, as well as a discussion of the Aztecs and Incas as well as Spain and its empire. The author and illustrator include references to the Renaissance and Reformation which again are somewhat incomplete and somewhat out of place here, before returning to their themes of empire with maps and discussions of the Ottoman Empire, the Mogul Empire, as well as the Tudors and Stuarts in the British Islands. This is followed by a discussion of a divided Europe during the time of the Thirty Years’ War, where the author hilariously opines that the English Civil War kept the British Isles busy and out of the wars roiling the rest of Europe. There are some maps that follow relating to the expansion of Russia, China and Japan, Africa, the slave trade (but not all of it), as well as the colonization of North America. There are then discussions of the age of absolutism (where the Stuarts are claimed to be weak kings), the enlightenment, the exploration of the Pacific Ocean, and then finally the American and French Revolutions. The book then ends with an index and acknowledgements.

It may be expecting too much from a book like this to have some complete or balanced history, but among the key matters that this book gets deeply wrong is including three references to the Atlantic Slave Trade in this short atlas and even one reference to the enslavement of whites by Barbary corsairs (because apparently it is not a bad thing for regimes to enslave whites), but no references to the enslavement of more than ten million blacks by Arab Muslim slave traders in Central and Eastern Africa, although there was certainly room to mention it. As the book cannot decide if it wants to focus on exploration and empire–admittedly two very important themes in the period between 1450 and 1800, and be reasonably complete on those terms, or try to give a Eurocentric view of history in that same region, it is hard to know what this book is really going for. If the book wanted to be more accurate when it came to exploration and empires, it would do well to include more information about the Viking explorations and others that helped set the context for European efforts. Similarly, if the book wanted to focus on empires, it could do a better job dealing with non-Western Empires like the Ming or Manchu, or even the Safavids and their successors. This book is at least funny and with cute pictures, so it is not without worth, but most of its statements require nuance or context or correction, and so it does not make for the best historical atlas one could ask for from an educational perspective.