Nice review of Reading Kant’s Geography at H-Net. The review is freely available, but here are a couple of excerpts:

Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta’s edition Reading Kant’s Geography is a masterful attempt “to remedy this glaring neglect” and to haul Kant’s geographical thought out of oblivion–at least for English-language readers (Elden, p. 4). The volume is an excellent analysis of Kant’s geographical thought and a great encouragement for further engagement beyond the relatively little existing research. An introductory essay by Elden and seventeen essays grouped into five thematic parts offer a detailed scrutiny of the themes, issues, and obstacles involved when reading and interpreting Kant’s geography lectures. Elden and Mendieta have compiled a volume that not only provides an excellent and comprehensive engagement with Kant’s geographical lectures but also sets the ground for a critical and reflected reading of the lectures’ forthcoming English translation (Kant: Natural Science, edited by Eric Watkins [May 2012]). Whilst calling for an increased attention to Kant’s geographical engagement, Reading Kant’s Geography raises awareness of the corrupted nature of the preserved German lecture notes and of various textual issues regarding the English translation…

Reading Kant’s Geography appears before the English translation of Kant’s geography lectures and yet almost two hundred years after Kant’s death. But will the edition truly become “obsolete” once the English translation has been published? This is to be doubted. The volume is a significant provision against the neglect of Kant’s forty years of geographical (and anthropological) teaching, which will hopefully draw (more) readers to the German and English texts, and perhaps even encourage translations into other languages. With its range of themes and its cautionary remarks regarding the textual and linguistic difficulties of Kant’s geography, it should long serve as reference work–even beyond the appearance of the English translation. One’s surprise about the “‘scandalously’ late” engagement with Kant’s geographical work seems to arise from the fact that this neglect is not only absolute but also relative–relative to the work on Kant’s philosophy and to his anthropology lectures. The reasons for this relative “lateness” are probably many. The noted textual issues, especially the lack of a publication by Kant himself, and the previous absence of a translation are partial explanations: the historical development of geography as a discipline and its late institutionalization might be others, as Church argues. And yet this “lateness” also touches on wider issues: it illustrates time gaps regarding (academic) interest and research agendas between different (language) spaces. Insights on whether the case of Kant’s geography lectures is an exception or an indication for more neglected cases can only–and hopefully will–be revealed by more research. When Withers argues that a better evaluation of Kant’s role in Enlightenment geographical discourse may require “knowing when exactly Kant drew upon others’ findings in amending his teaching” and knowing about his communication with “fellow philosopher-geographers,” he indicates a gap in our understanding regarding the making of geographical knowledge in the eighteenth-century German-speaking world more generally (p. 61). It is certainly unlikely (impossible, Church argues) to fully reconstruct Kant’s sources and his network of correspondents. More extensive engagement with Kant’s and other (German) scholars’ geographical thought, however, might bring further valuable insight into the limits of our understanding of German and Enlightenment geography: it will be of great value to everyone interested in the history of geography and science, and in intellectual history more broadly.

Many thanks to Luise Fischer for the generous review, and Robert Mayhew for commissioning it. Robert is also due to write a review himself for Journal of Historical Geography.