" Coral Empire 's postcolonial jeremiad also registers the joyful endurance of surrealist visions of the submarine as a deliriously consciousness-altering realm." -- James Delbourgo TLS "[This] book shows that interdisciplinarity is possible. Elias combines the history of underwater cinematography and diving with attention to the surrealist art movement, natural history collecting, colonialism, and the history of tourism, and through this rich patchwork traces shifting popular interpretations of coral imagery in the early twentieth century." -- Antony Adler Environmental History "Ann Elias' fascinating book couldn't come at a better time. Elias focuses on long neglected images from cinema, dioramas from museums, and illustrations from the press. She cleverly articulates them through a set of unexpected global connections that powerfully mobilise all the transforming ideas of empire, race, technology and nature at the time." -- Martyn Jolly Australian Historical Studies "This book is well written and the short chapters make it extremely readable. In addition, the book is beautifully printed, with black-and-white images embedded in chapters and their color counterparts inserted in the middle of the book.

It is refreshing to see a book that relies on the reading of images paying such close attention to their reproduction in the text." -- Samantha Muka H-Net Reviews.