This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the testimonia and fragments of the geographical writings of the philosopher Dikaiarchos of Messana (late 4th BC), arranged into 15 extracts. The chapter introduction identifies his innovative focus upon physical geography. A new map illustrates Dikaiarchos’ concept of a central parallel of latitude bisecting the inhabited portion of the world; in devising this, he may have been building upon Eudoxos of Knidos (Chapter 6 of this volume). He may have pioneered the measurement of the heights of mountains using triangulation, and the use of noonday shadows to estimate the circumference of the Earth, a technique which Eratosthenes famously took further (Chapter 12) and which in effect adopts the concept of a meridian of longitude.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the three fragments of a satirical sketch of southern Greek communities, now attributed to one Herakleides Kritikos and probably written between 279 and 239 BC, together with an additional testimonium. An appendix presents a fragmentary papyrus (P. Hawara 80–1) containing a contemporary description of the Piraeus. The chapter introduction recognizes the literary and performative character of the text, its selective use of geographical information (as far as we can judge from the surviving passages, extending from Attica to Thessaly where we have the original ending of the work), its use of irony, and its geopolitical claims about the extent of ‘Hellas’. A new map clarifies the route followed by the first part of the text.

This chapter considers the early modern ‘prehistory’ of the Romantic sublime. It considers the sublime as a type of experience of the natural world that far preceded its formal articulation, taking as examples the volcanic encounters of the Scottish traveller William Lithgow (c. 1582–c. 1645) and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). The natural philosopher Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) has often been identified as an originator of the Romantic sublime; this chapter casts him instead as a lynchpin. He was not the first to ‘see’ the great in nature; instead, his theory challenged the theological foundations of many early modern sublime experiences, paving the way for a theory of the sublime that could move beyond the divine. Above all the chapter argues for the value of the vocabulary of sublime experience to describe encounters with the natural world before the Romantic sublime.

The central feature of Bert Bissell’s life was his deep-seated Methodist faith. Bissell went to the hills (always the hills for him) to renew contact with this faith rather than to discover it for the first time. Climbing mountains in search of God has a long history and Bissell’s dedication to it suggests we should not be too quick to construe ruralism or nature worship as a displacement of religion. Nevertheless, even in Bissell’s case, other elements than religion contributed to his ruralism, including strong physical and social impulses. Perhaps most important of all was the need to shore up his own sense of self in the face of a world moving rapidly away from his most cherished beliefs and values.

The chapter looks at the effect of natural barriers on linguistic configuration and diffusion through illustrations of cases from Arabic and other languages. It provides examples of how different types of topographical features either facilitate or hinder communication, thus affecting the diffusion of linguistic features. It also provides a thorough introduction to the Arabic linguistic atlases available, from 1915 into the twenty-first century. The chapter highlights cases of language isolation and language contact involving Arabic.

This chapter begins with surveyors Alexander and James Gerard, and their attempts to prove that they had climbed higher than Alexander von Humboldt. In examining the measuring practices of East India Company surveyors, the chapter especially deals with moments when scientific instruments were found to be inadequate. These are revealing of the importance instruments played in establishing scientific authority in a world in which the senses were unreliable. This chapter firstly considers responses to damaged instruments, and attempts at repair. This is followed by a discussion of surveyors’ fieldbooks and inscriptive practices. It concludes with an examination of ongoing problems – both conceptual and material – with instruments designed in Europe by those with no experience of the Himalaya. The chapter argues that the staggered recognition of the true scale of the Himalaya reveals multiple levels of displacement in scientific practice: between those in the mountains, those in Calcutta and those in London. In so doing, it emphasises the laboriousness of the instrumental measurements necessary to impose, if incompletely, a form of universality that made global comparisons possible.

This chapter examines East India Company botanical gardens at Saharanpur and Mussoorie. The history of colonial gardens has borne much fruit in recent years, but in the case of India, this has overwhelmingly focused on Calcutta. Instead, this chapter follows the largely untold story of the ‘northern’ gardens, and their roles in the remaking of the Himalaya in European scientific and imperial imaginations. In focusing on the ambiguous position of these gardens – straddling the uplands and lowlands – this chapter demonstrates the inherent complexity in attempts to categorise the vertical globe. The chapter begins with the modification of the existing Mughal garden at Saharanpur for the purposes of scientific botany. Next, it considers debates around the need for a higher garden and the way altitude factored in the acclimatisation of plants. This is followed by a discussion of the centrality of two South Asian gardeners – Hari Singh and Murdan Ali – to the functioning of Saharanpur, and the role of indigenous collectors in the mountains. The final section considers the problems of distance and limited resources as the gardens became spaces for an increasingly globally oriented science.

The introduction outlines the two major arguments of the book. Firstly, the sheer laboriousness of doing science in remote locations, and the inherent dependency of naturalists and surveyors on Himalayan peoples’ expertise and labour. Secondly, the way that the imagining and remaking of the Himalaya was complicated by comparisons with the Alps and the Andes, and the recognition of the commensurability of mountain environments globally. Together, these approaches work to offer wide-ranging insights into the trajectories and consequences of emerging imperial visions of the globe in the nineteenth century. The introduction also lays out the geography, scope and scale of the Himalaya as treated in this book, and how the remaking of these overwrote existing understandings of the mountains in South Asian cosmology. This is followed by a discussion of the story of measuring mountains in relation to wider debates in historical geography, the history of science and the history of the British Empire in South Asia, as well as interdisciplinary questions about mountains, exploration and indigenous labour.

Altitude sickness was little understood in the early nineteenth century, and the inconsistency of symptoms led some to doubt a constant cause. This led to tensions when European travellers were forced to compare their bodily performance against their South Asian companions. This chapter begins by contextualising altitude sickness in relation to lowland colonial anxieties around health, acclimatisation and air. Next is a discussion of indigenous understandings of altitude and a consideration of the ways the performances of bodies were recorded in travel narratives. Finally, the chapter considers experimental approaches around quantification. The chapter argues that there was a politics of comparison that developed around altitude sickness at multiple scales: in the way bodies, European and South Asian, experienced altitude sickness; in the way comparisons affected interactions within expedition parties; in the way these were represented in written accounts to avoid upsetting supposed superiority; and in the way these ultimately constituted high mountains as aberrant environments in relation to lowland norms.

In insular Southeast Asia Presbytis and Trachypithecus langurs show a complex distribution pattern whereby in certain areas only one species is present, in other areas two or three species of the same genus live sympatrically, and in yet other areas two, three or even four species of the two genera co-exist. Given their morphological similarity it is intriguing to unravel the ecological differences that allow these species to live side by side. Presbytis langurs are more confined to wet forests than Trachypithecus langurs; their range includes drier regions, high mountains and small islands. In terms of diet (young, old leaves, fruits, seeds) or activity budgets there is a large variation within species and no clear difference between co-occuring species emerges. Home range sizes for Presbytis langurs (~35 ha) is larger than those for Trachypithecus langurs (~20 ha), but day ranges appear to be more similar (~500 to 1,500 m). The variation in group sizes and composition (especially the number of adult males) differs in that Presbytis langurs typically live in smaller groups (~5 to 12 individuals), mostly with one adult male, than Trachypithecus langurs groups (frequently over 20 individuals) that frequently have two or more adult males present.

The first chapter draws on Ladakhi and trans-Himalayan sources to examine precolonial understandings of space, boundaries, and frontiers in Ladakh and the broader northwestern Himalayan region. Sources surveyed range from the earliest available records of the tenth and eleventh centuries to the beginning of British rule in 1846. This chapter provides both a historical background to the region and an exploration of four major facets of indigenous Himalayan space: cosmology, politics, language, and matter. In illustrating multiple historical modes of seeing by indigenous historical actors, I suggest that the single, bounded entity called Ladakh was primarily a product of imperial possession in the nineteenth century. I am not arguing that there was not an earlier political entity known as Ladakh but rather that indigenous conceptions of its space were more pluralistic than the subsequent territory envisioned by its imperial rulers. The commingling of cosmological, political, linguistic, and material ways of seeing, I argue, produced identities that failed to map neatly. This chapter draws not only on the limited extant precolonial Ladakhi sources but also on an array of anthropological, linguistic, and archeological sources.

Frontiers became increasingly central to colonial spatial sciences as the nineteenth century progressed. Examining surveyors’ activities in the field along with the material processes by which maps were produced and circulated, this chapter analyses three broad junctures of frontier surveying based on distinct techniques of seeing and representing space. Route surveys of the 1820s to 1840s mostly gave way to triangulation from the 1850s on, and trigonometrical survey parties increasingly ventured into frontier regions from the later 1860s. By this later period, surveyors and ‘men of science’ in metropole and colony alike deemed comprehending frontier locales a key goal of imperial science. Agents of empire considered these regions as providing unparalleled opportunities, but also substantial challenges to established modes of spatial knowledge and representation. The chapter shows how this ambiguity reached a peculiar resolution, as many surveyors and geographers came to celebrate and to uphold the elusive quality of India’s frontiers.