{"product_id":"the-last-blank-spaces-exploring-africa-and-australia","title":"The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century  the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge  adventure  and fame  but often experienced confusion  fear  and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations  from idea to practice  from intention to outcome  from myth to reality.  Those who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific investigation that had been developed by previous generations of seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans  empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping  measuring  observing  and preserving. They found  however  that their survival and success depended less on this system of universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by native peoples.  While explorers sought to advance the interests of Britain and its emigrant communities  Dane Kennedy discovers a more complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously  explorers whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided  and  above all  local states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own purposes. The collisions  and occasional convergences  between British and indigenous values  interests  and modes of knowing the world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44950190981173,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674048474","price":225.96,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674048478.jpg?v=1770100396","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-last-blank-spaces-exploring-africa-and-australia","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}