Dislocating the Orient

"Foliard has produced a study that will no doubt become the standard work on cartography and the emergence of the Middle East. Beyond its immediate importance to the field of Middle Eastern and British imperial history, it opens up possibilities of comparison as well. Indeed, Dislocating the Orient should be read alongside comparable work in imperial cartography by Matthew Edney, Felix Driver, D. Graham Burnett, and Ian Barrow."-- "Journal of Modern History"

A Book of the Year. "Daniel Foliard's Dislocating the Orient: British maps and the making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 (Chicago) skillfully examines Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of another "East", revealing how spiritual journeys shape and deform cartographic documents."

--Rachel Polonsky "Times Literary Supplement"
"Dislocating the Orient is a richly illustrated, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking enquiry into the intellectual and cartographic origins of the 'Near East' in a period when the region was of great religious and cultural interest and of enormous strategic importance. Foliard's focus is maps and mapping--but this book offers so much more. It explores the construction of the 'Near East' in nineteenth-century public minds, and in school and university education, in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, and within the region itself. It illuminates the connections between exploration and espionage and the institutional apparatus of empire. From Victorian atlases and scriptural geographies to the implications of the 1919 Versailles agreement, Foliard traces the fashioning and representation of a region key to the making of the modern world with erudition and elan."-- "Charles W. J. Withers, University of Edinburgh"
"Foliard's book is a highly significant contribution to the growing literature on cartography and empire. Not the least of the projects of European imperialism was the mapping of the globe. Far from being an objective exercise, this mapping was bound by ideological and cultural, military, and ethnic considerations. Nowhere was this truer than in the region which came to be known as the Middle East. The importance of Dislocating the Orient lies both in the light it sheds on the construction of the Middle East, underpinning the politics and tensions of today, and on the applicability of its ideas to other imperial zones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."-- "John M. MacKenzie, Lancaster University"