"The East Asian maps presented in this study are all found in the MacLean Collection"--Introduction.

Alexander Akin examines how the expansion of publishing in the late Ming dynasty prompted changes in the nature and circulation of cartographic materials in East Asia. Focusing on mass-produced printed maps, this book investigates a series of path-breaking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works in genres including geographical education, military affairs, and history, analysing how maps achieved unprecedented penetration among published materials, even in the absence of major theoretical or technological changes like those that transformed contemporary European cartography. By examining contemporaneous developments in neighboring Choson Korea and Japan, the study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the broader East Asian sphere in this period as a network of communication and publication, rather than as discrete units with separate cartographic histories. It also reexamines the place of the Jesuits in this context, arguing that in printing maps on Ming soil they should be seen as participants in the local cartographic publishing boom and its trans-regional repercussions.

This proceedings book presents the first-ever cross-disciplinary analysis of 16th–20th century South, East, and Southeast Asian cartography. The central theme of the conference was the mutual influence of Western and Asian cartographic traditions, and the focus was on points of contact between Western and Asian cartographic history. Geographically, the topics were limited to South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia, with special attention to India, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. Topics addressed included Asia’s place in the world, the Dutch East India Company, toponymy, Philipp Franz von Siebold, maritime cartography, missionary mapping and cadastral mapping.

With a multi-perspective approach and transdisciplinary methods (humanities and sciences), this book offers an in-depth and systematic study of hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps from East Asia. Map colouring provides an insight into past societies, landscapes and territories. Colour is an important key to a more precise understanding of the map’s content, purposes and uses; moreover, colours are also an important aspect of a map’s materiality. The material scientific analysis of colourants makes it possible to find out more about maps’ material nature and their production as well as the social, geographical and political context in which they were made. ‘Reading’ colours in this way gives a glimpse into the social lives of mapmakers as well as map users and reveals the complexity of the historical and social context in which maps were produced and how the maps were actually made.

How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe? This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.

When the University of Chicago Press launched the landmark History of Cartography series nearly thirty years ago, founding editors J.B. Harley and David Woodward hoped to create a new basis for map history. They did not, however, anticipate the larger renaissance in map studies that the series would inspire. But as the renown of the series and the comprehensiveness and acuity of the present volume demonstrate, the history of cartography has proven to be unexpectedly fertile ground.--Amazon.com.