III

Changing Perspectives

Der Amerikaner, der den Kolumbus zuerst entdeckte, machte eine böse Entdeckung.
(The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.)

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), Sudelbücher1

CULTURAL TRANSFER AND COLONIALISM

At first, the process of global integration that made such an impression on late-eighteenth-century authors was largely confined to port cities and their immediate hinterlands; the vast interior spaces of the continents remained all but untouched by outside forces. In this way, as in many others, it differed from the strain of globalization that emerged during the last decades of the nineteenth century. At this stage, there were still no signs of widespread “Westernization” in Asian societies that had escaped colonial control. John Richards, editor of the first Persian-Arabic-English dictionary and a comparative cultural historian of sorts, made the point with all forcefulness in 1778:

With a wonderful predilection for their own ancient manners, they [the peoples of Asia] have a peculiar and invincible antipathy to those of Europe. They are so opposite to their genius, to their hereditary prejudices, and to every idea political and religious, that no instance can be produced, perhaps, of one single custom originally European ever been adopted by the Asiatic nations.²

European mores and manners, to the extent that they were known at all in Asia, did not invite imitation. At this stage, Western cultural influence was spread mainly by missionaries scattered unevenly across the world outside Europe, and it left a permanent mark on large swathes of the population only under quite exceptional circumstances. The Philippines alone were subject to effective Catholic missionary activity and evangelization from the sixteenth century onward. In Japan, the great hope of the Jesuit order in the last decades of the sixteenth century, the start of the seventeenth century saw the Catholic mission disbanded and Christianity as a whole criminalized under the new dynasty of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In China, more than two centuries of intensive missionary work had by 1800 failed to convert significant sections of the general populace or make inroads into the administrative elite, the culturally Confucian class of bureaucrat-scholars. The Muslim world remained as resistant as ever to Christian proselytizing. Even in the colonial outposts run by the British and Dutch, Christianity made little progress. The East India Company (EIC) forbade missionary activity in its territories until 1813 in order to avoid causing unnecessary disturbance to the Indian population. And visitors to Batavia were constantly registering their surprise and dismay that the VOC’s colored subjects in Batavia and its surroundings were spared Christian instruction.3 Protestant missionaries only invested time and effort into areas where they faced direct competition from Catholicism.⁴

During the early modern phase of Europe’s expansion, then, the immediately apparent influence of European culture on Asia remained primarily (and necessarily) confined to the field of religion, and even here the impact was fairly limited. Cultural transfer, still on a small scale, took place along other pathways: through the magnetic attraction exerted by colonial cities on their environs; through the uptake of Western technologies (particularly those with military applications) and artistic techniques; in China, through the practical—astronomical, cartographical, and architectural—influence of the Jesuits; in Japan, through the uniquely purposeful institutionalization of “Dutch learning” (rangaku), which opened the floodgates to Western knowledge of all kinds.5

Europe arrived in Asia predominantly in commodity form. European wares quickly filtered through to the furthest reaches of the continent, although the manufacturing capacity of Asian economies remained far superior to that of Europe, and Asian textiles defended their entrenched position in European markets well beyond the middle of the eighteenth century.⁶ The traveling English merchant, Jonas Hanway, observed in the 1720s that fully a third of the army of the Iranian conqueror, Nadir (Nader) Shah, was clad in European cloth.⁷ Shortly before 1800, coats and vests in the almost completely secluded kingdom of Burma were made of European wool, while the military was armed with mostly French and British rifles.⁸ At the same time a visiting diplomat, Samuel Turner, noted with amazement the widespread presence of English brocade in the remote mountain fastnesses of Tibet, where few Europeans had set foot before him.⁹ In Bhutan he had earlier delighted the raja and his court with Bordeaux wine and strawberry jam, single-handedly creating a potential export market for European delicacies.¹⁰ Of all the influences emanating from Europe, commodities penetrated the furthest. European imports were circulated by indigenous trade networks in regions where no white man had ever been seen. For most people, then, the encounter between Europe and Asia chiefly came in the form of tradable goods.¹¹

Several authors already foresaw the profoundly transformative effect of an expansion that went far beyond the activities of European merchants, soldiers, missionaries, and traveling scholars. In 1769 the French journalist and later academy secretary, Jean-Louis Castilhon, warned in his perceptive Considérations sur les causes physiques et morales de la diversité du génie, des mœurs, et du gouvernement des nations of the “corruption” of morals threatened by overseas trade. In an age of flourishing international travel and trade, few parts of the world had escaped Europe’s corrosive touch; authentic national character types were fast disappearing from view; few modern peoples had retained the stability and constancy of their ancient forebears.¹² A few years later the assiduous collector of ethnological material, Jean-Nicolas Démeunier , saw the human race growing ever more uniform and recommended, partly for this reason, that the ethnography of ancient and modern nations be studied.13

Yet even as European goods were infiltrating the most far-flung corners of Asia, Asian products were conquering European markets. Coffee, silk, fine cotton cloth, and china ware—a name that recalls the Far East’s former monopoly in porcelain production—were all in high demand.¹⁴ At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the economic and cultural impact of Asian trade on Europe was greater than the other way around. The scales began to tip in Europe’s favor only toward the end of the century.¹⁵

The relationship between cultural transfer from Europe to Asia and colonial rule of Asians by Europeans was not a fixed one. Paradoxically, cultural transfer was at its greatest where Europeans were afforded the fewest opportunities for colonial expansion: in Japan. Before the idea of a Western civilizing mission in the Orient took root around 1800, allowing colonial rule to be stylized as a benevolent instrument for propagating superior cultural norms, every step to advance European rule in Asia had been dogged by vocal public criticism. The past colonial practices of the Spanish and Portuguese were roundly condemned, particularly from the Protestant side of the confessional divide. So too, unsurprisingly, was the present-day conduct of rival imperial powers; thus the British, for example, waxed indignant over Dutch administration of the East Indies. Yet the version of colonialism pursued by one’s own nation was not spared criticism, either. While German commentators such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Forster, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, or Alexander von Humboldt could adopt an air of skeptical but cool detachment, given they were not directly affected by national imperial projects, British and French critics attacked the policies of their own governments with unbridled vehemence.

They could be motivated by quite different considerations. The economist Adam Smith soberly analyzed the irrationality of many aspects of colonialism, especially the monopoly on trade.¹⁶ The “conservative” (by today’s standards) parliamentary politician, Edmund Burke, instigated a years-long campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, whom he accused of orchestrating or condoning violent attacks and injustices against the peaceful Indian population, particularly the aristocracy. Burke feared that such barbaric misconduct, if left unchecked, would have repercussions for the political culture of the motherland.17 The abbé Raynal, a radical man of letters in the twilight of the ancien régime, coauthored with Denis Diderot and others one of the top international bestsellers of the age: the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770). In the guise of an unusually detailed denunciation of the misdeeds perpetrated by European conquerors and colonists in both hemispheres, replete with scenes of terror and wide-ranging analysis, they offered a philosophical conception of history that for the first time drew attention to the paramount importance of overseas expansion for modern Europe’s self-understanding.

In the Age of Enlightenment, unlike in the nineteenth century, the European takeover of the world was not assumed to be inevitable. A work of the same condemnatory force as Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire philosophique would never again be written in Europe. Even those among their contemporaries who accepted the fundamental legitimacy of European expansion, and were thus prepared to tolerate a kind of “soft” colonialism, still kept watch for violations of justice in the certainty that the same standards of right and wrong applied to the entire human race. No accusation hit Warren Hastings harder than Burke’s claim that he adhered to a relativist “geographical morality” in his dealings with the Indians, treating them in ways that would be proscribed in Europe as tyrannical and criminally reprehensible.¹⁸ The Enlightened critique of colonialism, as formulated perhaps most trenchantly by Diderot,¹⁹ gives the lie to the claim that European intellectuals were capable of nothing other than autistic self-reflection and had, from the very beginning of the age of expansion, been hopelessly compromised by their complicity with power. Self-relativization in a period of increasingly asymmetrical contact between civilizations may not have been the norm, yet it was a far from negligible element in the repertoire of European strategies for coming to terms with the world beyond its borders.

The great Scottish historian William Robertson, a pioneer of empirical global history in an age fond of philosophical histories of mankind, was still expressing this attitude in 1791, in his lengthy Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India.20 In his History of America from 1777, Robertson had weighed up the costs and benefits of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, as much for the Iberian powers and societies as for the American natives. In doing so, he had depicted European atrocities in the New World rather less colorfully than had Raynal and Diderot in their contemporaneous account. He had also largely absolved both the Spanish state and the Catholic church of direct responsibility for the brutalities of the Conquista. Nonetheless, readers were left in no doubt that the encounter of two societies at such different stages of social evolution had led to catastrophe. This outcome was not the regrettable result of excesses committed by a few rogue individuals operating beyond the reach of the law; rather, it was the necessary consequence of enormous social disparity, coupled with an inability on the part of the Spaniards to perceive the gulf that separated them from their new subjects. The golden opportunity for the discoveries in the New World to lead to progress for all had been squandered. While Robertson was well aware that the India of his day did not bear comparison with sixteenth-century America in every respect, he still felt compelled to warn against the newly aggressive stance adopted by his British compatriots in South Asia. He did so, not by polemicizing against the latest wrongdoings in the colonies, but by presenting a highly respectful account of Hindu India’s long record of cultural excellence.

The septuagenarian Robertson was by no means swept away by enthusiasm for all things Indian. Unlike several of the German Romantics a few years later, including Friedrich Schlegel in his treatise Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808),²¹ Robertson was not one to go fishing for age-old truths in the murky depths of the Ganges. He had no interest in the sacred origins of mythology. In common with his younger contemporary Johann Gottfried Herder, a more influential figure in paving the way for the romantic idealization of Brahmanical wisdom,22 Robertson approached Indian civilization with sympathetic interest and a tolerant acceptance of its differences and peculiarities. Robertson denied neither his Christian beliefs nor his enthusiasm for the achievements of modern Europe, particularly in the field of science. At the same time, however, he refused to elevate religion or progressive values into absolute standards against which other cultures could be judged and found wanting.²³ Robertson and Herder, like Immanuel Kant in his late text Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795), defend a position in the 1790s that soon after becomes increasingly rare before dying out altogether with Alexander von Humboldt, the last bastion of the European Enlightenment: an informed cosmopolitanism, critical both of itself and the colonial enterprise, that takes the non-European world too seriously to patronize and exoticize it.

THEORIES OF ETHNOCENTRISM

In 1717 Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, Baron de la Brède, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, vineyard owner, and newly appointed judge at the provincial court or parlement of Bordeaux, began writing his Lettres persanes. The book appeared anonymously four years later as a series of 161 letters addressed to their friends and wives by Iranians traveling in France. The author was exploiting the fascination with the Orient that had gripped France during the reign of the Sun King. The Orient that the book sets out to illuminate is not purely a figment of the imagination. Montesquieu had read a great deal of the relevant travel literature, above all John Chardin’s substantial report on Iran and Sir Paul Rycaut’s work on the Ottoman Empire; he was familiar with d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Oriental and Galland’s 1001 Nuits.²⁴ Much of this literature was also known to his readers. When Montesquieu has the Persian Rica mock the latest fashion crazes of the French, for example, many readers would have been aware that the Orient is represented in that literature as a static realm unaffected by changing tastes in dress; Rica’s astonishment is inexplicable otherwise. Montesquieu’s Persians act and judge in ways that are anything but unpredictable and randomly motivated. They behave more or less how educated readers of the early eighteenth century expected Orientals to behave. Whereas less talented imitators of the “letters from abroad” genre cloaked opinions that might otherwise have met with censorship or censure in the most threadbare of non-Western guises, Montesquieu succeeds both in creating a plausible counterworld—the sphere of the harem with its bitter power struggles—and in exploiting to the full the opportunities for satire offered by the outsider’s fictitious point of view.

Montesquieu is not writing primarily about the Orient or Iran. Yet that is also his theme, for the famous theory of oriental despotism presented in his 1748 masterpiece, De l’esprit des lois, is already prefigured in the Lettres from 1721. An Orient that had to strike contemporary readers as minimally plausible became the backdrop for a virtuosic role play. No great interpretive ingenuity was required to realize that conditions in Regency France were being satirized here, nor would the great seriousness of many of the book’s statements—such as the critique of colonialism in Letter 121, where the voice of Montesquieu the political philosopher can already be heard—have been lost on the public. The literary technique of contextual alienation proved so appealing that dozens of imitators tried their hands at it in the following years. While Montesquieu did not invent the format of a report on the state of the nation presented from the exotic and estranging perspective of foreign visitors, the Lettres persanes became the model for an entire genre.25 It was skillfully continued in Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to His Friends in the East (1762) and José Cadalso’s Cartas Marruecas (written in 1768–74 but not published until 1793), if not with the same prismatic, polyvocal artistry that shimmers through the Lettres persanes, where the letters are distributed among no fewer than twenty-one correspondents. In no other work of this kind, moreover, is the Orient sketched so deftly or with such sharply defined strokes as in Montesquieu.

Montesquieu adopts a distancing “ethnographic” gaze that allows aspects of his own culture that had long since been taken for granted to be seen with fresh eyes. One such aspect was an ethnocentric view of the world. All things foreign, Rica writes from Paris to his countryman Rhedi in Venice, appear ridiculous to the French.26 In the forty-fourth letter, Usbek—who is here likely speaking for Montesquieu himself—refers to a travel report, presumably Froger’s Relation d’un voyage aux côtes d’Afrique (1698), that depicts the encounter between French sailors and a king in Guinea

who was dispensing justice to his subjects beneath a tree. He was sitting on his throne, that is, on a log of wood, as proudly as if it were the throne of the Grand Mogul.…. This prince, with a vanity which exceeded even his poverty, asked the strangers whether he was much spoken of in France. He thought that his name should be conveyed from pole to pole, and unlike the conqueror of whom it has been said that he had put the whole world to silence, this man believed that the whole universe should be talking about him.²⁷

Drawing on popular clichés about rule by “savages,” Montesquieu is partly allowing himself a cheap joke at the African’s expense. Conditions in Europe are turned on their head: the African king holds court in the sun but is nothing like the Sun King, still less the Grand Mughal, who for the oriental letter-writer—we recognize the care that has gone into Montesquieu’s method—clearly represents the apogee of civilization. Yet according to the rules of satirical subversion, which here potentially undermine the effect of the ethnographic inversion, the two sun kings have indeed swapped roles. For had not Louis XIV, carried away by vanity and vainglory, sent out diplomats and missionaries as far away as Siam and China?

In the black king’s ethnocentrism, Montesquieu mirrors that of his white colleagues, a literary procedure that from the end of the eighteenth century came to be driven out in favor of the thinking in binary categories later given immortal expression by Kipling: “O, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In the 1790s, for example, we see such thinking in the unfeigned outrage of Western diplomats at the grandiloquent rhetoric, symbolically assumed superiority, and claims to world dominance asserted by the Qianlong emperor in Peking, notwithstanding the fact that the power he wielded at the time entitled him to be every bit as arrogant as the Sun King.28 Ethnocentrism, it appears, had now become the exclusive possession of bigots elsewhere. At the same time, the crass Gallocentrism and increasingly smug, self-satisfied insular nationalism that were emerging in France and Great Britain, respectively, refused to countenance any form of relativizing self-criticism. Someone who, around the turn of the century, responded to public indignation over the alleged ethnocentrism of the Turks by asking how the Turks would be treated in Europe could expect the question to fall on deaf ears.²⁹

In the eighteenth century, by contrast, the possibility of a general critique of ethnocentrism—not just in Montesquieu—still lay on the horizon of European thought. For Johann Christian Adelung, who pioneered the writing of cultural history in Germany, the ethnocentrism of the Chinese, Japanese, or Egyptians paled in comparison with that of the ancient Greeks, who felt themselves to be the gold standard against which the rest of the world should be judged.³⁰ That was in 1768; a decade later, Antoine Court de Gébelin, royal censor and author of a multivolume work on the universal history of religion, decried the habitual insularity of almost all nations as “one of the greatest causes of the misery of mankind.”³¹ Adam Ferguson, long-standing professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and, with Adam Smith, the most important social theorist of the Scottish Enlightenment, reached the dispassionate conclusion that societies at all stages of development could only establish their identity by cutting themselves off from neighboring “barbarians” and dividing the world into opposing camps. In order to form exclusive attachments strong enough for people to set aside their naturally unsociable, quarrelsome inclinations, societies needed to create a “foreign” adversary by attacking another “troop” or nation, for example.32 This basic law of sociology did not prevent Ferguson from speaking out in his “moral essay”³³ of 1767 against ethnocentrism, particularly in its modern European form. In contrast to the “naïve” ethnocentrism found almost everywhere else, Europe, like China, had theorized a ladder of civilizational progress that in practice proved extremely difficult for other nations to ascend. It therefore functioned as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: “We are ourselves the supposed standards of politeness and civilization; and where our own features do not appear, we apprehend, that there is nothing which deserves to be known.”³⁴

James Dunbar, Ferguson’s Scottish contemporary and professor of moral philosophy in Aberdeen, was even more emphatic in denouncing the claims to superiority that effectively denied other cultures their very right to exist. Europe today, he wrote in the 1770s, “affects to move in another orbit from the rest of the species.”³⁵ The remark was occasioned by doubts that had recently surfaced over whether human beings shared a common origin, as suggested by the biblical account of creation. Those who maintained, on the contrary, that they belonged to distinct races not only broke with the “unity of the system” of all living things; they also called into question the natural rights of whichever races they happened to deem inferior. In pointing out the practical consequences of European pretensions to superiority, Dunbar’s prophetic warning surpasses the concerns of all his contemporaries in its clear-eyed prescience:

According to this theory, the oppression or extermination of a meaner race will no longer be shocking to humanity. Their distress will not call upon us so loudly for relief. And public morality, and the laws of nations, will be confined to a few regions peopled with this more exalted species of mankind.³⁶

In his essay Of Heroic Virtue (1692), the statesman, diplomat, and philosophical essayist, Sir William Temple, had already taken issue with the Europeans’ tendency to regard “the laws of nature and nations” as valid for themselves alone.37 James Dunbar goes a step further and speculates on the foreseeable consequences of such a divided universalism.

COMPETITION AND COMPARISON

Criticism of European ethnocentrism could lead in different directions. Normative standards could be reversed and foreign civilizations held up as superior or even exemplary. This occurred time and again in the eighteenth century. Jesuit missionaries had kept the European public well-informed about the Chinese Empire, which seemed to offer particularly valuable lessons for Europe. Whether the claims made about China could withstand critical scrutiny, then or now, is a less important question. The foreign ideal played a key rhetorical role in the domestic controversies of the era.

Drawing on the favorable reports of the Jesuits, a number of authors projected their own political ideal onto far-off China, then reimported it as a yardstick for gauging the shortcomings of present-day Europe. One such author was the multifaceted political philosopher and economist, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi. Sadly neglected today, Justi was a writer of considerable originality who attempted to bring discussions about society and the state down from the lofty realm of natural law to the firmer ground of empirical historical analysis; in this he resembled his near-contemporary, Adam Ferguson. Justi judged state institutions from the pragmatic viewpoint of justice, freedom, and usefulness.³⁸ He was by no means the only author of the time to confront his own society with foreign models. What sets apart his tome, Vergleichungen der europäischen mit den asiatischen and andern vermeintlich barbarischen Regierungen (Comparisons of the European with the Asiatic and Other Supposedly Barbaric Governments, 1762), is its fundamental critique of Eurocentrism. Justi understood that an oriental utopia would carry little conviction unless Europeans were prepared to take seriously social and political arrangements that differed from their own. Any comparison between Europe and Asia therefore had to be preceded by a rationale for their comparability. Justi could no longer rely on the older motif of Asian superiority over “young” Europe. As far back as 1750, the prolific English author and historian, John Campbell, had already concluded from recent “happy” developments that Europe was so far superior to the rest of the world as to render all comparison meaningless:

That Europe is, beyond all Comparison, the most happy and valuable Quarter of the Globe, is a Thing so much taken for granted, that perhaps few would think a Man much in the wrong who should conceive himself under no Obligation to prove it.39

Justi briskly dispatches with such complacency:

So highly do we esteem our reason, our knowledge, our understanding, that we look down on all other nations that do people the Earth as on so many miserable creeping worms; and in truth, we treat them no better. We consider ourselves lords of the Earth; we seize without compunction the lands belonging to all those that inhabit the three other parts of the world; we dictate them the laws of their lands, appear before them as their masters; and, if they dare put up the least resistance, we exterminate them utterly.⁴⁰

In the chapters of his book, Justi goes on to provide a systematic demonstration of how alternatives to the political order and especially the practice of politics in Europe might be conceived. As a seasoned pragmatist, he was far from blind to the different cultural conditions that would doom any attempt to replicate, say, the Chinese civil service examination system on European soil. When pointing out what is praiseworthy about other nations’ institutions, his overriding concern is to train readers in the habit of changing their perspective. A good example of this—and one highly characteristic of his procedure in general—is provided by his discussion of justice.⁴¹

Justi proceeds from general principles that are the product of rational insight. Above all, the freedom of the individual must be held inviolable; the laws should be “certain and indubitable”; and justice must be administered “with the strictest impartiality, without regard for person and interest.”42 He next points out that the law can be differently administered under different political systems, “and yet be equally good.”⁴³ The third step involves reviewing how problems have been dealt with empirically. Here Justi finds more grounds for suspicion than for emulation in the brevity of trials in China. In this instance, at least, he warms more to Hottentot justice, the system presided over by Montesquieu’s African king. In the early modern period, a great deal was known about the Hottentots (or Khoikhoi, to give them their correct name); it was not uncommon for travelers stopping off at the Cape of Good Hope to make an excursion to see them.⁴⁴ Justi could thus draw on a series of travelers’ reports and had no need to resort to fantasy.⁴⁵

Following a description of Hottentot justice, he examines the extent to which it accords with the universal principles set out at the beginning of the chapter, concluding that it is of a quality that “places it far above anything to be found in Europe.”⁴⁶ Anyone who considers it beneath his dignity to be compared with the “savages” of Africa, Justi continues, might still allow the comparison with the culturally more advanced Siamese, “who practice commerce and the arts and are therefore more similar to us, however much we may declare them to be barbarians.”⁴⁷ Upon testing this case, partly by referring to the very precise report on Siam compiled by Simon de La Loubère, Justi pronounces himself satisfied that the Siamese justice system may be no better than the European, “yet [it is] at least as good.”⁴⁸

After these detailed case studies, what remains of European exceptionalism? Only whatever can be rationally demonstrated as relative superiority. “For it does not suffice,” Justi says, “for a nation to pass itself off as reasonable and civilized; it must furnish the requisite testimony and proof.”⁴⁹ In many instances, Europeans simply cannot provide such evidence.

If the European administration of justice is, if not worse, then at least no better than that of the Hottentots and Siamese, my God!, what cause do we have for our vain pride in supposing ourselves to be the most reasonable and civilized nations on Earth? I raise this question here once and for all, although it would be necessary to ask it for almost every comparison. If these people are barbarians, then surely we are no less so.50

Justi’s literary method is in many respects comparable to that of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. Despite passages where he has his Iranian correspondents ventriloquize the ideas of a French philosopher, Montesquieu never adopts a standpoint of omniscient infallibility. When Rica and Usbek cast judgment on Europe, the voice of reason is speaking through foreign observers who may never fully grasp what it is they are seeing. Europe appears from an ethnographically distanced perspective, but there are no grounds for supposing that such an outsider’s point of view must always and under all circumstances be privileged over an insider’s. Montesquieu thus plays a game with the multiplicity of possible perspectives for viewing and judging the world, while at the same time taking care to avoid falling into the trap of uninhibited relativism.

Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi is pursuing the same strategy. The principles that ought to guide public policy can be deduced from natural law and knowledge of human nature. Yet they are never purely manifested in reality, only in culturally specific institutions of human making. No culture on Earth, including that of modern Europe, enjoys more privileged access to rationality than any other. Rational social and political institutions are possible in any culture, regardless of its level of material refinement. This brings with it the great advantage that cultures are able to learn from each other.

Justi wrote his book with no other goal in mind than to make such learning both conceivable and profitable for Europe. For him, shifts in perspective rotate around the fixed axis of the rational. Yet reason is an ethnological as well as anthropological universal. It is something that is not just innate to every human being but distributed among peoples and societies all around the world. Together with Adam Ferguson and Montesquieu, Justi is not yet willing to advance the claim that modern Europe enjoys an exclusive monopoly on reason. He is therefore equally disinclined to attribute the opposite, a lack of reason, to other cultures. A “savage ethnography” (Pierre Clastres) has no relevance for these paragons of enlightened thought, since ethnography as they understand it has an inherently civilizing effect. The Enlightenment contributes to the study of Edmund Burke’s “Great Map of Mankind,” not by establishing a mental distance between the European ethnographer and an exoticized Orient, but by overcoming that distance in the rational convergence of their experiences.

DISCURSIVE JUSTICE

Justi was not the only European writer to advert to the relativity of intercultural perceptions. The geographer Bernhard Varenius noted in 1649 that the Japanese found the Europeans less ridiculous than the other way around.51 The philosopher David Hume took issue with an aesthetic ethnocentrism that dismisses everything unfamiliar as barbaric; according to Hume, salutary self-doubts should arise when, “amidst such a contest of sentiment,” all sides adhere with equal justification to their own preferences.⁵² Jean-François Marmontel, later secretary of the Académie Française, pointed out in the Encyclopédie that the sense of humor varies from culture to culture.⁵³ And Jean-Nicolas Démeunier invited his readers to imagine encountering European rituals and customs among the natives of Africa. That thought experiment is likely to show us that many of the cultural usages we take for granted at home would strike us as absurd if we were to see them practiced abroad.⁵⁴

Démeunier , the industrious collator of ethnographic material, did not confine his researches to the world beyond Europe’s borders. The purpose of his ethnography—like Adam Ferguson’s—was not to gather information about alien cultures but to understand human society everywhere in all its formal variety. In 1798, Charles-Athanase Walckenaer—an ambitious young man at the time, later one of the mandarins of learned France—followed in Démeunier ’s footsteps by seeking to correlate levels of social evolution with habits of perception. Sedentary agrarian societies invariably regard pastoral people as barbarians while looking down on more advanced mercantile and trader societies for having been softened and corrupted by luxury.55 The idea is imperfectly executed but not without interest. It points to the possibility of a sociology of knowledge applied to the apperception of foreignness.

Yet it was one thing to call for a change in perspective; it was quite another to write descriptive texts that implemented it in practice. Authors of fiction had it easier in this regard. Indeed, they frequently made things too easy for themselves by merely dressing up their traveling Turks or Chinese in carnivalesque costume without granting them, like Montesquieu, the authenticity of their own cultural background. That is why so much of the literature written in the wake of the Lettres persanes reveals next to nothing about how the author viewed the Orient: many a fictitious “Turk” behaves no differently than the average European libertine.

Those who purported to depict reality in works of history or travel reports had to resort to other representational devices. Historians, for example, could incorporate foreign-origin sources and historiographical texts into their accounts. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was not the first European historian to do just that, but he succeeded more often than others in artfully combining different perspectives on the same events. Thus, rather than blending the disparate viewpoints of Byzantine and Ottoman historians into a smoothly homogeneous narrative, he juxtaposed them to bring out their incongruities and inconsistencies.⁵⁶ Somewhat later, in his great Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches (History of the Ottoman Empire, 1827–35), he shows how differently Europeans and Ottomans viewed the Egypt of the Pharaohs.⁵⁷ Hammer also clearly marked the—to some extent unavoidable—limits to any European or imperial account of people who inhabit an alien cultural sphere:

Xenophon and Caesar, Thucydides and Tacitus recorded the history of their own time … for posterity, yet to arrive at a correct estimation of their veracity we want the tales of Persian imperial historiographers, the sagas of British bards and Gallic druids.58

Historians and authors of travel literature could also attempt to reach a balanced judgment by weighing the supposedly negative characteristics of the Other against comparable qualities on the European side. Alexander Hamilton was a Scottish sea captain who between 1688 and 1723 plied the oceans between East Africa and China in a series of trading missions, leaving behind vividly descriptive accounts of the lands he visited. What was so mystical about the Orient, he ventured to ask, when in Rome, the right arm of a saint was displayed for public veneration: surely that surpassed all the superstition of the East?⁵⁹ Around the same time, it was recalled that the much-feared Muslim corsairs who roved the Mediterranean were no crueler than the (nominally) Christian pirates, including the notoriously brutal Knights of Malta.⁶⁰ In 1762, Justi reminds those of his readers who regard the Arabs as barbarians that only recently twenty-five unfortunate wretches had fallen victim to a “frenzy of religious enthusiasm” and been burned alive in an auto-da-fé in Portugal.⁶¹ Balancing judgments is a stylistic device much favored by Edward Gibbon, who delights in recounting how crusaders and their Muslim opponents denounced each other as barbarians. Gibbon likes to refer to “Western barbarians” and depicts early Islam in an unusually positive light, partly in order to oppose it polemically to early medieval Christianity.⁶² Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s unflagging commitment to justice for Asia does not lead him to conceal the “flood of horrors” unleashed by Genghis Khan’s Mongols at the conquest of Bukhara, yet instead of launching into a diatribe against oriental bloodthirstiness, he judiciously adds: “All the atrocities reported by Byzantine historians when Constantinople was conquered by the Franks [in 1204] were renewed when Bukhara was taken.”⁶³

CHINESE INTERVIEWS, INDIAN LETTERS

Changes in perspective can also become apparent on the rare occasions when European authors allow real Asians to speak for themselves. Montesquieu had good reason to heap scorn on an attitude that placed greater trust in the reports of travelers to the Orient than in the testimony of people who actually lived there. While mixing in Parisian high society, Rica meets “a man who was extremely satisfied with himself” and has an opinion at his disposal about everyone and everything, including Iran. Rica, a native of Isfahan, immediately finds himself “refuted” by the writings of the French travelers, Chardin and Tavernier, who apparently know Iran better than the Iranians themselves.64 Not that Asiatics were simply ignored—every traveler and scholar, including Chardin and Tavernier, relied on informants on the ground. Yet they are rarely given a hearing in European texts, and almost never allowed the final say.

Authentic voices are most likely to be heard where Europeans approached an Asian civilization with an attitude of almost deferential respectfulness. Such is the case for some of the reports on China prepared by the Jesuits. The results are fairly meager, however. While the reports quote copiously from Chinese texts in translation, the sense of living discourse is largely absent. One remarkable exception is the interview granted in 1773 by the Qianlong emperor, then at the height of his power and fame, to the Jesuit priest, Michel Benoist, while at the same time having his portrait taken by the French painter and fellow Jesuit, Guiseppe Panzi. Pater Benoist was an experienced missionary and, far more importantly, a distinguished courtier. Resident in China since 1744, he had served the emperor as court mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and constructor of fountains in the newly built Summer Palace; his universally praised engineering skills were entirely self-taught. Benoist acted as a kind of all-round factotum for the Qianlong emperor, who entrusted him with a wide range of tasks.⁶⁵ While we have no means of gauging the authenticity of the transcript, the interview is too plausible for it to be dismissed as the mere fabrication of Jesuit propaganda. Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, had held similar audiences with missionaries, although they are nowhere near so well documented. What is unique about the situation in 1773 is the reversal in roles: the questions are posed by the emperor, the answers provided by the missionary.

Qianlong, one of the wiliest and most successful power politicians of his age, a figure comparable in stature to such contemporaries as Frederick II and Catherine II, presses the missionary for detailed information about the political situation in Europe. Among the copperplate prints you have brought with you from Europe, the emperor asks, there are some that celebrate your sovereigns’ victories: which enemies did they vanquish?66 Were none of these princes powerful enough to enforce a lasting peace? What are the chances that one European state could rise to supremacy over the rest? Why do interdynastic marriages among the crowned heads of Europe not prevent them making war on each other? What is the current state of relations between France and Russia? Are there any French savants residing at the court in Saint Petersburg? And so on. Asia’s mightiest monarch later becomes more familiar, quizzing the French padre on whether the Jesuits could order wine from Europe to Peking, whether they brewed their own alcohol in China, whether brandy distilled from grapes was healthier than rice wine, and so forth.⁶⁷

Pater Benoist’s text, no doubt subjected to energetic redaction when it arrived at Jesuit headquarters in Paris, sketches the portrait of a highly rational, good-humored statesman who may not know much about Europe (even if he is at least as well-informed as European rulers about China), yet asks exactly the right questions to find out what he needs to know. The text makes no attempt to present the Chinese court setting in an alien or exotic light. Qianlong says nothing to hint at the cultural limits to his understanding of the world. The emperor instead radiates a cultivated, tolerant urbanity. There is nothing “typically Chinese” about what he says. No anthropological barrier separates the Chinese emperor, chatting cordially with one of his court Jesuits, from European readers of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, the publication where the text first appeared (something like the in-house foreign affairs journal of the Jesuits). The effect is nonetheless similar to that achieved with different means by Montesquieu and Justi: exposed to the half-bemused, half-critical gaze of an outsider, European ways suddenly no longer appear quite so self-evident. For—the reader might and perhaps should react—is it not entirely reasonable to ask why Europeans find themselves in a permanent state of war while internal peace prevails in China? Had not the great Leibniz asked the same question?

The only other eighteenth-century text on Asia that rivals the Qianlong interview in its directness of address is the Malabarische Korrespondenz (Malabar Correspondence), brought to European attention by the Protestant missionary, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg.68 Ziegenbalg was based from 1706 to 1719 in the small Danish colony of Tranquebar on the southwest coast of India. The Danish colony had been established in 1620 through a treaty between Denmark and a local prince, the Nayak of Tanjore. Its maximum extent was about fifty square kilometers. In spite of its limited size, the colony was an important point of commercial contact between India and Europe. At the time when the Malabarische Korrespondenz was compiled, Tranquebar and its environs had about eighteen thousand inhabitants, around two hundred of them Europeans of various nationalities, including up to five missionaries.⁶⁹ The vast majority of the Indian population were Hindus who belonged to more than ninety castes. Very few of them had converted to Protestant Christianity.

Ziegenbalg’s work consists of ninety-nine letters written by local correspondents in southern India. They were composed between 1712 and 1714 in response to the missionary’s written questions; the original manuscripts have never been found. The letters were then translated from the Tamil and provided with commentary by Ziegenbalg’s colleague, Johann Ernst Gründler. Finally, after being sent to the headquarters of the Pietist mission in Halle and undergoing a process of revision (now impossible to reconstruct), they were published in two installments in the Hallesche Berichte (Halle Reports): the first in 1714, the second in 1717. As early as 1717, some of the letters were translated in paraphrase and began to circulate in the English-speaking world. Most of the letters appear to have been written by Aleppa, chief interpreter of the Danish EIC and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s Tamil tutor. Aleppa probably put the missionary’s questions to his circle of acquaintance and then edited a kind of collective response.70 All efforts to convert Aleppa to Christianity were in vain. The authentic voice of Hindu “heathenism” thus filters through to us from his letters.

The letters were primarily taken up with religious questions and only secondarily with life in Tamil society. The missionaries sought to gain a clearer picture of Tamil gods, their creation myths and ideas about history, their rituals, everyday life, and views on Christianity. On this last question—to cite only one example from the wealth of material—the correspondent overcomes his initial reserve to express himself with all desirable frankness. In the fifteenth letter of the second installment, after praising aspects of Christian teaching, he responds critically to the question: “What do the Heathens think of the Christians’ law, teachings and way of life?”:

You [Christians] ought to renounce the evil practices that you have introduced, such as failing to clean your teeth, not using water to wash after relieving yourselves, not purifying yourselves in holy ponds, your women’s failure to observe a period of purification, and ignoring the impurity of your saliva. After contact with the people of despised castes, you do not purify yourselves. You swear and curse about everything. When you give the sacrament, you say that the bread is the holy body and that you drink the holy blood of Christ. Such things are beyond my comprehension. Additionally, in many other respects you lack purity as well, including your eating of beef. It would be much better if you stopped doing such things, for if you Christians abandoned these evil practices all the Tamils would embrace your religion.⁷¹

In another letter the correspondent goes to the heart of the mission project. His sense of outrage is palpable as he relates what the Danish missionaries find “ridiculous and despicable” about Tamil customs. Then he launches a counterattack:

It is indeed true that our people do commit several things that are wrong and that should be condemned. Among us, all kinds of sin and unrighteousness thrive that should not. At the same time, one should not reject everything. Had we been heathens and our way of worshipping God was totally false, one would not find virtue or good works among us. But in fact there are many virtues among us, good works are performed on all side by many people: there are even those among us who live such a holy life that one cannot convict them of any sin. Can a Vētam [“sacred knowledge” or “law”] that renounces all sin and urges people to do good be viewed as false and unfit to confer salvation? Each and every nation has its own dress, customs and rites that look odd to others, and so it is with religion too. God is manifold in his creatures and diverse in his works; that is why he wants us to worship him in a variety of ways.…

At the same time, we have many reasons to fault the Christians who have come here to our country from Europe. Were we to judge the Christian religion by the deeds of these Europeans, we would hardly find any good in it at all. We notice that justice and chastity are hardly found among them. They do very few good works; they give almost nothing away as alms. They do not practice penitential exercises. They accept bribes. They get drunk on heavy liquor. They torture and kill living animals and consume their flesh. They give almost no thought to physical purity. They despise all other people except themselves and are greedy, proud, and angry.72

Ziegenbalg and Gründler, along with their mission heads in Halle and their political patrons in Copenhagen, did not study such texts with the dispassionate interest of professional ethnographers. The letters were at once a useful source of information, intended to make work easier for missionaries on the Malabar Coast, and advertising material for the still fairly young mission (it had been founded in 1706), designed to familiarize the public back home with its prospects and difficulties in the hope of attracting financial support. To that end, the master propagandists Ziegenbalg and Gründler gave more space to countervailing native voices than any of their Catholic colleagues in China, India, or Canada. No traveler’s report showed the same generosity.

NIEBUHR’S MONKEY

In eighteenth-century European texts on Asia, changes in perspective most commonly appear in the form of reports on European impressions of how Asians see Europe. The European public was always grateful for stories about dim-witted Orientals who entertained absurd ideas about Europe, the exact opposite of the intellectually assured Qianlong emperor or the earnest Tamil letter-writers. Regardless of whether these events actually occurred or were anecdotes invented or embellished by the writer: when a Cochinchinese (South Vietnamese) minister asked a French diplomat on September 30, 1749, if there were any women in Europe (and was satisfied when his question was mischievously answered in the negative);73 when Chinese mandarins traveled from afar to Peking in fall 1793 to inspect a fabled British hen, reputed to gobble up fifty pounds of coal a day, that had been brought along by the Macartney embassy;⁷⁴ or when in December 1762 the emir of Loheia on the Red Sea was unable to contain his delight at being shown a louse under the microscope, and had to admit “that he had never seen so big an Arab louse and that the beast under the glass had to be a European louse”⁷⁵—on each occasion, the reader’s laughter came at the expense of the credulous Orientals, who appeared to be incapable of forming an accurate image of Europe, the Europeans, and their technical tricks. Ridiculous, hostile, or both: their ignorance of Europe or their distorted picture of it was—it seemed to many Europeans—entirely characteristic of Asiatic civilizations.

Not all travelers peddled this trite cliché, however. The same voyager who told the story of the louse, Carsten Niebuhr, constantly strove to understand the hidden meaning behind alien modes of perception and behavior. Niebuhr was a member of the Danish expedition to Arabia that left Copenhagen on January 7, 1761, passing through Egypt, Sinai, and the Red Sea before reaching its planned destination, Yemen, in mid-December 1762. After all five of his travel companions had died en route, Niebuhr continued to India on his own. In November 1767 he arrived back in Copenhagen, having returned by way of Iran, Mesopotamia, and Syria.76

Niebuhr’s extensive report is refreshingly free of self-regard. There are repeated episodes where he not only studies his alien cultural environs and judges them by his lights, but is aware—or is made aware—of the fact that he himself is a foreigner and is rightly regarded as such by locals. His sensitivity to situations in which such perceptual interplay can arise is characteristic of Niebuhr. In Cairo, where the six travelers are treated with far greater animosity than later on in Arabia, Niebuhr sees the monkeys of Egyptian street performers:

The long Eastern garments are not very suitable for monkeys, as they go around on all fours most of the time. Monkeys trained to dance are therefore often clothed in the European manner. This leads the common Mohammedan to compare us with animals, especially when he sees a well-dressed, bare-headed European with a horizontally hanging sword sticking out from behind him like a monkey’s tail.⁷⁷

In Niebuhr’s eyes, the monkeys’ European costume does not confirm a previously suspected hostility to Europe on the part of recalcitrant Orientals. Instead, he finds a functional explanation for the costume that would strike any impartial observer as sensible: the impracticality of Turkish trousers for dancing monkeys. Niebuhr also refuses to take offense at the less-than-flattering simian simile made by “common” Egyptians; they are not to blame for having had little exposure to foreigners and even less education.

Many other travelers likewise avoided tarring all Asians with the brush of bigotry and xenophobia, as would happen all too often in the nineteenth century. They searched instead for reasons why some people might nurse feelings of animosity towards Westerners. When Europeans complain about Chinese deceitfulness, asks a Jesuit report from 1777, do they not often fail to mention who deceived whom in the first place?78 Henry Burney, a much-traveled diplomat in the service of the EIC, speculated in 1826 that the Siamese may have gleaned their notions about Europe from their experiences with their own subjects of Portuguese origin, who occupied a lowly position in Siamese society. All other Europeans were then assimilated to this stereotype; time and again, the rowdy behavior of English sailors on shore leave only confirmed the worst Siamese prejudices.⁷⁹ Even the far-from-Turcophilic Prussian lieutenant and later field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, who served from 1835 as military adviser to the Ottoman Empire, was forced to admit that the Turks were right to hold Europeans in low esteem, given that most Europeans they encountered were scoundrels and swindlers.⁸⁰ Everywhere in Asian and North African port cities, European consuls and other representatives were busy keeping unruly sailors of their own nationality under control. Drunken mariners were a special nuisance in Muslim countries, where liquor was taboo.⁸¹

The Swedish physician and naturalist, Carl Peter Thunberg, arrived in 1775 in Nagasaki, the only harbor in the country that was open to foreigners. He noted how the Japanese were horrified at “the frequent unfriendliness and impoliteness shown by Europeans even in their intercourse with each other, and the barbarism with which their sailors are cursed, flogged and treated in sundry other cruel ways.”⁸² The disdain in which the Japanese held the Europeans was therefore neither incomprehensible nor undeserved, particularly since the Dutch representatives in Nagasaki, including the chief factor himself, threw themselves passionately into the smuggling trade. Shortly before Thunberg’s arrival, news had emerged that these “Opperhoofds” and captains had for decades been carrying contraband goods concealed in specially prepared tunics. Now the Japanese were surprised to see the stout Dutch gentlemen slimmed down to the size of ordinary men.⁸³ On one occasion, a parrot smuggled inside a pair of Dutch trousers revealed its existence by talking aloud.84 Thunberg, a renowned scholar and author of one of the eighteenth century’s two most authoritative reports on Japan—the other being Engelbert Kaempfer’s classic History of Japan—never thought to accuse his hosts of xenophobia. He found their attitude entirely understandable.

Carsten Niebuhr, to return to him, repeatedly attempts to dissolve rigid East-West dichotomies and treat other people’s viewpoints with respect. In an historic note, Niebuhr points out that during the bombardment of the Yemeni port city of Mocha (Mokka) by French warships in 1738, the native population was by no means gripped by anti-European hysteria. English and Dutch residents were allowed to continue living in the city undisturbed; there was no sign of the general hostility towards “farangi” or “Franks” that was commonly attributed to all Muslims.⁸⁵ Further evidence of Niebuhr’s de-Orientalizing common sense: Dr. John Crawfurd, who led a British diplomatic mission to Burma in 1826, encountered there the opinion that England must owe its wealth to alchemy—a belief that immediately struck him as ridiculous and absurd.⁸⁶ Crawfurd’s judgment was in keeping with the time; Great Britain, after all, had just won its first war against Burma. By contrast, in March 1763 Niebuhr was told by Yemenites that the local population credited the Danish-German traveling scholars with the ability to make gold. Quite understandably, says Niebuhr; for having previously only met European merchants, the Arabs must have found it puzzling “that we had come such a long way without having any goods to trade.”⁸⁷ The foreigners appeared to spend a lot of money while earning none. That needed explaining, and the conclusion that they were making gold to finance their expenditure was far from ridiculous. Indeed, in the Yemenite cultural context this must have been a natural and even rational hypothesis.

In his unceasing efforts to use their own way of thinking to understand how the non-Europeans he encountered made sense of the world, Carsten Niebuhr was atypical for his time. But he was not alone. The German circumnavigators, Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster; the British roving diplomats, Michael Symes (posted to Burma in 1795), Samuel Turner (1783–84 to South Tibet), and Mountstuart Elphinstone (1808 to Afghanistan); the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg (1775–76 to Japan); and Alexander von Humboldt in his voyage to the Americas (1799–1804): these and others like them advocated a dialogic relation to the Other that did not take it as axiomatic that Europeans were always in the right.

They also showed respect for what other nations knew about Europe. While some travelers—perhaps most—mocked Asians for their ignorance of Europe, a part of the world they had never visited, in this countertradition someone like Samuel Turner could still be amazed at the Tibetans’ good knowledge of geography: monks in the Tashilhunpo monastery had a rough idea of the relative size of the larger countries in Europe.88 Their understanding, although basic by European scientific standards, was respectable enough in view of their extremely limited access to information and the absence of any practical need for them to concern themselves with European geography.

Yet recognition of the native point of view did not necessarily go hand in hand with a deeper cultural sympathy. John Barrow, who visited the Chinese Empire in 1793 as comptroller to the Macartney embassy, and would later rise to great influence in London as second secretary to the Admiralty, showed considerable understanding when the Chinese made fun of their guests’ tight-fitting clothing and powdered heads:

If they could not refrain from bursting into fits of laughter on examining the grease and powder with which our hair was disfigured; and if they sometimes lamented that so much oil and flour had unnecessarily been wasted, we might perhaps, in the vanity of self-importance, affect to pity their taste; but setting custom and prejudice apart, we had certainly no great reason to despise and ridicule the Chinese, or indeed any other nation, merely because they differ from us in the little points of dress and manners, seeing how very nearly we can match them with similar follies and absurdities of our own.⁸⁹

Yet Barrow was not the generous cultural relativist this passage makes him out to be. His words need to be read with the correct emphasis: it did not bother him in the slightest that his hosts deviated from the Europeans “in the little points” because he regarded their civilization as inferior in the big ones.

In the end, there was a glaring asymmetry of perception that no European author could fail to notice. While many Europeans traveled to Asia, very few Asians moved in the opposite direction to report back on their experiences in Europe. When Europeans ventured abroad, did they demonstrate a more comprehensive understanding of the cultures they encountered? Were they better able to reconstruct the logic underlying the behaviors they witnessed? Did they immerse themselves more fully in their new surroundings? And if so, did their hermeneutic advantage over the East, their surplus in the intellectual balance of trade between the continents, entitle them to colonial mastery? These were all still open questions at the end of the long eighteenth century, even if more and more writers now treated them as closed.