The Last Blank Spaces

Dane Kennedy

“Kennedy sorts through a far more complicated and messy history of 19th-century British exploration than the record has assumed, taking into account much failure as well as a deep reliance on indigenous help. The author asserts that the first British explorers of Australia and Africa looked to the vast continents much as the seafaring explorers had regarded the sea before them, as great unknown oceans, blank spaces to be ‘measured, mapped, quantified, classified, catalogued, and compared.’ …Kennedy teases out a fascinating comparative study of Australian versus African exploration thattakes into account the early British settlers’ colonies in the former and the richly entrenched indigenous societies and forbidding disease environment in the latter… A wealth of research for the armchair traveler and historian.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Triumphalist narratives of European trailblazers leave out complexity and conflict, along with the contributions of indigenous peoples, according to this probing social history of 19th-century imperialist British exploration… Kennedy shrewdly dissects the ideology of exploration as the adventurous standard-bearer of progress and sets it against the record of British explorers confronting sophisticated, canny, contentious locals with their own agendas and formidable resources. These locals helped, thwarted, and sometimes even took command of European expeditions. Kennedy’s erudite yet highly readable study restores much of the nuance and drama that has been airbrushed out of standard accounts of Western exploration.”—Publishers Weekly

“Nineteenth-century explorers did not merely discover the truths about landscapes and peoples they encountered: instead, as Dane Kennedy shows, they created new ways of knowing them, shaped as much by colonial realities as by metropolitan science. A masterful study of exploration.”—Felix Driver, author of Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire

“In this beautifully written and strikingly original account of British exploration of Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century, Dane Kennedy demonstrates the limits as well as the violence of imperial power and the vulnerability as well as the vainglory of the explorers. The vast ‘blank spaces’ of the European imagination in fact sustained complex and ancient civilizations, whose peoples challenged even as they helped produce the explorers’ knowledge of the world.”—Marilyn Lake, co-author of Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality

“Groundbreaking and deeply satisfying, The Last Blank Spaces provocatively argues that the blank spaces on nineteenth-century maps of Africa and Australia actually represented the limits of western knowledge. This marvelous book delivers on the promise of the ‘new imperial history’ by providing a refreshingly original perspective on imperial power in the age of exploration.”—Timothy Parsons, Professor of African History, Washington University in St. Louis

Related Links

• At the Boston Globe, read Dane Kennedy’s argument that existing African empires such as Zanzibar, Egypt, and Tripoli used European missions of “discovery” for their own ends

• Seminary Co-op »
• Powell’s »
• IndieBound »
• Barnes & Noble »
• Amazon »
• More Bookstores…