Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as commercial centres or as destinations offering spa treatments as in Bath, horse racing in Newmarket or naval services in Portsmouth. Containing over 100 images of towns in England, Wales and Scotland, this book draws on the extensive Gough collection in the Bodleian Library. Contemporary prints and drawings provide a powerful visual record of the development of the town in this period, and finely drawn prospects and maps - made with greater accuracy than ever before - reveal their early development. This book also includes perceptive observations from the journals and letters of collector Richard Gough (1735-1809), who travelled throughout the country on the cusp of the industrial age.

He was known simply as the Blind Traveler. A solitary, sightless adventurer, James Holman (1786-1857) fought the slave trade in Africa, survived a frozen captivity in Siberia, hunted rogue elephants in Ceylon, helped chart the Australian outback--and, astonishingly, circumnavigated the globe, becoming one of the greatest wonders of the world he so sagaciously explored. A Sense of the World is a spellbinding and moving rediscovery of one of history's most epic lives--a story to awaken our own senses of awe and wonder.

Medieval Christian European and Arabic-Islamic cultures are both notable for the wealth and diversity of their geographical literature, yet to date there has been relatively little attempt to compare medieval Christian and Islamic mapping traditions in a detailed manner. Cartography between Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic World offers a timely assessment of the level of interaction between the two traditions across a range of map genres, including world and regional maps, maps of the seven climes, and celestial cartography. Through a mixture of synthesis and case study, the volume makes the case for significant but limited cultural transfer. Contributors are: Elly Dekker; Jean-Charles Ducene; Alfred Hiatt; Yossef Rapoport; Stefan Schroeder; Emmanuelle Vagnon.