In this volume concerning the comparative study of colonial cartography, Australia and southern Africa have been selected by Etherington (history, U. of Western Australia) as focal points because of lacunae in the literature, because their trajectories of conquest and occupation roughly coincide, and because similar technologies of surveying and mapping dominated the production of geographical knowledge in both cases. The eight chapters he presents provide an overview of Indian Ocean hydrography and its connections to European imperial rivalries, the production of fantasy maps in southern Africa and Australia, the underlying ideology present in cartographer Robert Dale's panorama of King George Sound in western Australia, the way ethnicity and indigenous presence were rendered on maps of Australia and South Africa, imperial competition between German and British schools of cartography on the eve of the "Scramble for Africa," the political objectives of George Stow's reconstruction of the peopling of South Africa, national capital planning in Australia and South Africa as means of projecting the state's self-image on an urban landscape, and the cartographic aspects of South Africa's Parliamentary Millennium Project (initiated in 2002). Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)