A Biography of Power: Research and Excavations at the Iron Age ‘Oppidum’ of Bagendon, Gloucestershire (1979–2017)

which tends to mean taking note of recent archaeological research and providing therefore recent, not historic, historical maps. Moreover, if historical atlases are to be employed, there are excellent ones, for example the threevolume Historical Atlas of Canada. Many of the maps offered by Parker on recent trade are interesting, with good sections on oil in the North Sea, Electronics and the Internet, and Banking and Finance. However, major modern trades that are ignored include drugs, money laundering, and modern slavery. There are maps of these, notably the first, in other sources. Although perfunctorily mentioned in the section on tourism, trade by air is also ignored, with the sole map being ‘The Air Age Map of the World’, a 1945 work essentially of distances. This omission is remarkable because, although relatively low bulk, air travel is high value, and has also opened up areas to production as well as transformed marketing. Thus, Madrid, despite being in the centre of the country, prides itself on the quality of the fish served which is airfreighted in each morning from Spain’s oceanic ports. Longer-range air freight takes, for example, Kenyan flowers to Britain and Zambian meat to Saudi Arabia. The routes, volume and value of air freight provides a relatively easy as well as important topic for mapping. Other current trade routes underplayed by Parker include those opened up by the recent expansion to the Panama Canal, which enabled larger vessels, but also then ensured that only upgraded ports could handle them. The opening up of routes to the north of Asia and North America should also have been covered, as well as the Chinese attempt to develop a global maritime system with key ports, which is far more consequential than the map offered of the European Union. Turning to the past and to both texts and maps, Parker offers a very Eurocentric account. There are some worthwhile sections on Ottoman maps, and spreads on the voyages of Zheng He and on Aztec trade, but the rest of the world, thereafter, is essentially organized in terms of the West. Moreover, the mechanism of trade is transoceanic, with an addition of railways in the nineteenth century. This is unfortunate in many respects. Parker downplays or ignores the range of other maritime and land milieux and mechanisms, such as deltaic, lacustrine, riverine, estuarine and inshore trade, which made up the bulk of world trade by water. As far as maritime traders are concerned, the Maya, the Omanis, and the Polynesians are the most obvious of the many who do not feature. There are of course problems with finding any contemporary mapping for them, but there is material for Polynesia and, since Parker includes historical maps, modern scholarly works could have been used. At the very least, there is a place for contextualizing the West in the text. So, more generally, with the need for a discussion of the issues involved in mapping trade, as for example in the map of the spread of Covid that ends the book, one that is innocent of any suggestion of problems with the data. An attractive work that Parker, a fluent writer, can hopefully greatly improve in a second edition.