Cartography: The Ideal and Its History by Matthew H. Edney (original) (raw)

2022, Environment, space, place

historian and a geographer wrote the other two. The four chapters in Section IV ("Dynamics of Distribution") all deal, in one way or another, with the role of various types of power in shaping, even determining, the manner in which scarcity manifests in different situations. All of the authors deal, explicitly or implicitly, with ideas and insights generally associated with Sen's studies about famines. 1 At the end of day, what does one make of Scarcity in the Modern World? It is a dense volume, involving multiple voices, disciplines, approaches, and perspectives. Its case studies range widely from electricity shortages in India in the early twentieth century to sanitation problems in Lagos, Nigeria, at roughly the same time, and from food shortages in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to the famine in the Sahel in 2012. As a result, different readers will likely be drawn to different chapters, but the overall quality of the chapters is high. Even though the relentlessness of the interrogation of "scarcity" and the intensity of the detail can be overwhelming, and the book's good questions definitely outnumber its answers, the time expended in reading The Making of Scarcity is certainly justified.