Reading this book's thirty-page bibliography will be a humbling experience for all scholars, no matter how knowledgeable they are about the maritime routes connecting the East African coast, Iraq and Iran, South and Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), and East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyu Islands) (pp. 243–73). Offering comprehensive coverage of the subject between 1900 and 2018, the bibliography includes only a handful of items written in 2019 and 2020—and it seems likely that COVID-related problems delayed the book's publication until now.
The best way to read Geoffrey C. Gunn's Imagined Geographies may be to toggle between the bibliography and the running text. The introduction, chapter 1, and the afterword treat the overall field; chapters 2–6 explore the geographical understandings of Greater India, the Arab world, China, Japan, and Australia; and chapters 7–10 offer more focused studies of global port cities, marine archaeology, Ryukyu trade, and Macau....