Description: Today, acceptance of human-influenced climate change is widely seen as a marker of an educated person, denial as an indication of scientific, geographic, and perhaps political ignorance. In an earlier era, the same could be said for the understanding of Earth as anything other than a sphere. Since at least 1492, the globe that embodies the concept of a spherical Earth has been, in the words of historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, "a master object of pedagogic modernity, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to, indeed constitutive of, one's status as literate and schooled, even enlightened." In this book, she reconstructs the globe's history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era (1794-1956). Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she traces the movement of the globe conceptually from a wondrous and precious artifact whose possession was the prerogative of elite European men to a mass-produced commodity primarily associated with schoolchildren, women, and native peoples.
Brief description:
Sumathi Ramaswamy is professor of history at Duke University in North Carolina.
Review Quotes: "Global history takes on a whole new meaning in Ramaswamy's assiduously researched and elegantly delivered account of terrestrial globes, planetary consciousness, and pedagogic modernity. Ranging widely across India and its colonial history, and in a narrative that encompasses religion, gender, fiction, photography, and film, she demonstrates the centrality of terrestrial geography to an expanding empire of education. In her astute and nuanced analysis the 'Modern Earth' gains a new density of meaning and in 'cartographic evangelism' she develops a concept of rare distinction and wide applicability. Terrestrial Lessons is an intellectual tour de force from which we can all learn."-- "David Arnold, University of Warwick"