Book Review: On the Backs of Others: Rethinking the History of British Geographical Exploration by Edward Armston-Sheret Armston-SheretEdward, On the Backs of Others: Rethinking the History of British Geographical Exploration. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2024. xii, 320, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-4962-3097-3, 65 (hbk).

According to Chuma, a 'headman' on a nineteenth-century British expedition to east Africa, his role 'was the "education of the white traveller"' in the skills of exploration (91).Insights such as this inform today's British geographical educational curricula which are newly emphasising the quality of 'resilience,' and the word 'exploration'in its related physical and intellectual sensesis rightly being stripped of its solely negative historical associations, so as to be reclaimed and permitted a wider and more diversely democratic application.On the Backs of Others, drawn from the author's PhD study, and their first monograph, is therefore a timely addition to historical geographical libraries.It draws on largely documentary accounts, some fiction writing and a range of cartographic and graphic images.In setting out to 'rethink' the nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century histories of 'British' and at times 'European' geographical exploration, the author questions who was exploring who in, for the most part, case study histories of land rather than maritime exploration.The book's seven engaging chapters, introduction and conclusion are formulated around the work's theoretical frame made from a collage of well-known valuable contributions of Mary Louise Pratt, especially, as well as works by postcolonial scholars Lowri Jones, Felix Driver, bell hooks, Beau Riffenburgh, Joseph Campbell, Tariq Jazeel, Edward Said and others. 1 Performances of explorers' personas abroad, at home, in the flesh, mind and on private and public pages, and spoken word, are examined.Overall, this work builds on the unacknowledged concept of 'double vision' previously developed in histories of anthropology and taken up by historians of science and geography.In time-old fashion, the book opens with an account of cannibalism, and 'the body' is the privileged object and category in each chapter.Although it primarily draws on important, but familiar, theoretical grounds and largely previously published works, On the Backs of Others surveys, sifts, weaves together and judges these otherwise disparate texts so as to produce a monograph offering a wider depiction of gendered, English-, Scottish-and British-'subaltern' and human-animal beings and identities and behaviours.1.As a starting point, see