The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West. By Ricardo Padrón. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 346 pp. ISBN: 9780226455679 (cloth).

As directions, east and west remain relative. As concepts, East and West resemble statuary: immobile constructs subject to erosion over time and more immediate efforts at either conservation or toppling, depending on who wields the chisel. Ricardo Padrón's engrossing account returns us to the workshop before either East or West had been carved into their current form. The Indies of the Setting Sun captures the strained efforts of Spanish cartographers to wrestle the Pacific expanse into geographic and imperial cohesion. The book accomplishes this by peeling away centuries of learned intuitions about the orientation of the world and the resulting toponyms reinforcing them.
Was the New World “new” or an extension of Asia? How wide was Balboa's South Sea? How far west could and should the Spanish Indies extend? Padrón argues that the architects of Spain's sixteenth-century cartographic imagination labored to establish “Amerasian” continuity of one form or another, lashing...