“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

“Terrestrial Lessons brims with the gems of research of one of the most important scholars writing today in the history of geographical knowledge, gathered from across diverse genres, archives, and lives. Notably, Ramaswamy covers the whole of India, from south to north, which is a rare feature even in this transnational age. It is a profound scholarly commitment to historical method—combined of course with the beautiful writing which we now expect from Ramaswamy’s golden pen—that leads the reader to agree that the ubiquity of the globe was never natural or inevitable, but that the range of paths that led to the outcome of globe as icon varied across different religious, cultural, and gendered registers of being and knowledge-making.”

Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge

“This is a fascinating study of the globe as material artifact and analytic concept in the shaping of colonial minds. At once an instrument of nation building and secular thinking, geography emerged as a key subject in what Ramaswamy aptly calls ‘pedagogical modernity’, dislodging inherited cosmological views of the earth. Whether to inculcate a vaunted sense of worldliness in Indian princely rulers or a modernizing sensibility in young learners, the terrestrial globe became a vital icon of British imperial dominance, as this well-researched book admirably demonstrates.”

Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University

In all I found this a valuable book and a welcome addition to my cartographic history library.

Imago Mundi