Invited Book Review

Stewart Gordon, There and Back: Twelve of the Great Routes of Human History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2018, xiv+266 pp., Rs. 595

Kanad Sinha

Department of Ancient Indian and World History, The Sanskrit College and University, 1, Bankim Chatterjee Street, Kolkata-700073, West Bengal, India

Email: kanad.india@gmail.com

Stewart Gordon’s book There and Back: Twelve of the Great Routes of Human History is an interesting application of the controversial subfield of geography, variously called cognitive geography, behavioural geography, or mental mapping, that points out that people’s perceptions of concepts like near and far, long and short journeys, and significant and insignificant landmarks were strikingly different from what were portrayed on the maps or what an outsider might see on the ground, in historical studies. Gordon writes a history of 12 famous routes in human history, across continents and across time periods. Routes, as the theme of a book on cognitive historical geography, is immensely interesting, because no other structure, as rightly noted by Gordon, can bring people and ideas together the way a route does. Also, it is often the element of mental mapping that turned one or more roads and waterways into routes. Thus, routes are often much more than geographical features, and subjects of legends and stories, songs and paintings. Gordon has chosen twelve such historically famous routes for inspection. The book contains four sections focussing on four major kinds of routes: river routes, pilgrimage routes, tribute routes, and trade routes. Each section consists of four subsections: an introduction and the case study of three selected routes of that category. While Gordon discusses the history of all the twelve routes, each of the case studies is sketched around one particular account or set of accounts of that route.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64456/panch2025v16i2.07