Abstract
This chapter explores the interplay between imperial aspirations and the geographic construction of Australasia from the middle of the eighteenth century through to the beginning of the twentieth century. It suggests that a cartographic imagination was central to British understandings of both space and culture within an age where Asia and the Pacific became key domains for British imperial trade, exploration, evangelization, war-making and colonial settlement. This cartographic imagination was manifest in the variety of ways in which ethnology and geography were woven together as well as through an imperial culture that was saturated by geographic artefacts – maps, atlases, globes, textbooks, travel narratives, postcards, board games and biscuit tins – that used cartography to demonstrate and celebrate the global reach of British imperial power.