DOI: 10.1177/1470412911413187a

[Pre-publication version] ‘May not duration be imitated and represented as effectively to the senses as distinctly as space, and may not intervals of time be as easily counted in degrees? ’ The seductive analogy of mapping historical time is evident in the title of this history of the timeline by Daniel Rosenberg of University of Oregon and Anthony Grafton of Princeton. The question was posed in the mid-eighteenth century by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, a Parisian doctor, botanist, philologist and aspiring arms-supplier to the American Revolution (defeated in that capacity by Beaumarchais). This was a time of significant innovation in visual culture, yet, as Rosenberg has said, historians do not study timelines; an object central to many people’s learning of history has gone largely unnoticed. Cartographies of Time is therefore not just a welcome book, it is a necessary one which deals with a neglected aspect of past historiography and an important cultural form. The most significant prior work in this area is that of the authors themselves, including Rosenberg on Joseph Priestley’s graphic invention of modern time (2007) and Grafton’s intensive two-volume study of Joseph Scaliger (1983, 1993), so it is fortunate that these two have now pooled their expertise. How should time be mapped visually? The answers emerging from this richly illustrated history demonstrate vividly the correspondence between certain distinctive visual forms and particular cultural models of time. Though, a