Today, acceptance of human-influenced climate change is widely seen as a marker of an educated person, denial as an indication of scientific, geographic, and perhaps political ignorance. In an earlier era, the same could be said for the understanding of Earth as anything other than a sphere. Since at least 1492, the globe that embodies the concept of a spherical Earth has been, in the words of historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, "a master object of pedagogic modernity, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to, indeed constitutive of, one's status as literate and schooled, even enlightened." In this book, she reconstructs the globe's history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era (1794-1956). Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she traces the movement of the globe conceptually from a wondrous and precious artifact whose possession was the prerogative of elite European men to a mass-produced commodity primarily associated with schoolchildren, women, and native peoples.