Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His first book was From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa. It was reviewed as 'without doubt the best historical geography of South Africa to date'. Although his work over the next five years remained centred on southern Africa, it focused on the range of connections between the Cape colonial frontier and other sites of British colonization. With Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain, he helped to pioneer the spatial turn in colonial