Riaz Dean's Mapping the Great Game retells a relatively well-known story that has been attempted many times. That story always seems to leave one wondering whether the Great Game was something of actual significance or more of a media event designed to sell books to the British public along the lines of Stanley and Livingstone. Map historians know that as with the Cook expeditions of the late eighteenth century, new kinds of mapping or cartographic practice emerged as a result of this “game” as well as new kinds of cross-cultural scientific techniques, which is what makes at least the title of Dean's book tantalizing.
Dean is an amateur historian, a well-traveled engineer with an MBA who was born in Fiji and now works as a consultant in Wellington, New Zealand. He is also a collector of nineteenth-century books and maps. He writes in a popular style that dispenses with footnotes....
