IV

Traveling

On the other side of the range were tribes and places, of which we had never heard the names; while those we had learned from our maps, were equally new to our informants. All we could learn was, that beyond the hills was something wild, strange, and new, which we might hope one day to explore.

—Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859), An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815)1

Mountstuart Elphinstone is no Marco Polo, Columbus, or James Bruce, no discoverer of unknown worlds.² Writing during the Napoleonic Wars, he stands at the end of an era of European overseas travel. He is ten years younger than Alexander von Humboldt, the last and the greatest of the Enlightenment travelers, and he dies in the same year as the Prussian polymath. In 1808, the governor-general of India sends the Persian-speaking officer and diplomat with a small staff on a mission to Afghanistan. Elphinstone, plainly, is an agent of empire. But his mission fails. The emir of Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, stops the embassy at the border town of Peshawar and refuses to make concessions. British India is unable to impose terms on Afghanistan. Elphinstone moves within the world of Asiatic power politics. He does not penetrate into the unknown. Still, knowledge comes in many shades of completeness and reliability, and even a learned agent of the mightiest empire on earth is hampered by some degree of ignorance. His maps fail him, his indigenous informants give vague or contradictory advice. He gazes at the horizon and has no idea what to expect. In his account, composed after his return from the journey, Elphinstone provides a confident description and analysis of Afghanistan as he saw it and as he was able to envisage it from oral and written testimony by others. His work, published in 1815, is a masterpiece of ethnography and political geography. Still, when he tells the story of his advance towards Kabul, he strikes the pose of the clueless traveler heading for “something wild, strange, and new,” a traveler who hopes to win higher laurels—those of the explorer.

SIR JOHN MALCOLM’S DINNER PARTY

On June 18, 1825, a dinner was held at the residence of the British ambassador in Paris, the Duke of Northumberland.3 The host was Sir John Malcolm, who had traveled to France as a curious spectator to the coronation of King Charles X in Reims and was now taking a few weeks’ holiday in the metropolis. Sir John, fifty-six years old, had lived in India and Iran from 1783 to 1822 as a servant of the EIC, interrupted by short periods of home leave. One of the EIC’s most experienced military commanders, he was also a distinguished scholar in his own right. At the time of his stay in Paris, he held the rank of major-general in retirement; in 1827, he would be recalled to India to serve as the governor of Bombay for a further two years.⁴ As a general, diplomat, administrator, imperial strategist, and scholar, Sir John Malcolm was one of the most successful empire-builders of his day; a highly proficient amateur historiographer, he collected many of his sources himself, understood the necessary languages, and, no less gifted a conversationalist than Humboldt, had gathered much of his information by speaking with natives whenever the opportunity arose.⁵

The evening’s guest of honor was Alexander von Humboldt, the world’s most famous naturalist and traveler. Baron Julius von Klaproth and Sir George Thomas Staunton were seated at the same table. Klaproth, an intensely driven linguistic genius of extraordinary thematic range and fearsome polemical combativeness,⁶ had taught himself classical Chinese and Manchu at the Royal Library in Berlin and advised Goethe in his Chinese studies since 1802.7 While not endowed with private means, he managed to eke out a living as an independent geographer, cartographer, and oriental scholar. Alexander von Humboldt held him in high regard, procured modest grants for him, and often mentioned him in his letters.⁸ Following trips to Mongolia, Georgia, and the Caucasus, Klaproth published numerous works on Asian geography, history, and linguistics. Despite making his career in Paris and Russia, in 1823 Klaproth had relabeled the new “Indo-European” language group as “Indo-Germanic” in a semantic coup de main that was to have fateful consequences.⁹ Some thought him a Prussian spy, so there was considerable surprise when he tried to name the archipelago he had “discovered” on a Chinese map after his late mentor, the legendary Polish adventurer and novelist, Count Jan Potocki.¹⁰

Sir George Thomas Staunton, finally, was the first Briton (his family was of Irish descent) ever to converse with a Chinese emperor in Chinese. His father, Sir George Leonard Staunton, was appointed secretary to Lord Macartney’s mission to the Peking court in 1793–94. Thomas, twelve years old at the time, had been taught the rudiments of the language by two Chinese priests traveling in the entourage—enough, at any rate, to impress the elderly Qianlong emperor during their audience on September 14, 1793. Staunton Junior went on to represent the EIC in Canton for many years. Upon returning to England in 1817, he was elected to Parliament and was frequently consulted on Chinese affairs by the government of the day. In 1823 he joined Henry Thomas Colebrooke, the great Indologist, in founding the Royal Asiatic Society.¹¹

On the evening in question, as on almost all social occasions he attended, Humboldt appears to have dominated the conversation. The talk was of Mexico and Peru and especially Humboldt’s chief preoccupation at the time, the distribution of temperature over the earth’s surface. What is particularly intriguing is the biographical constellation of the illustrious quartet. All four had undertaken extended overland journeys. Not one of them was an “explorer” of previously uncharted terrain, in the manner of Captain Cook, yet their expeditions—whether undertaken at their own initiative or organized by others—had brought important new information to light about the lands they visited. All four were respected authorities in their field. Alexander von Humboldt probably knew Latin America better than any living Latin American, and had recently published the centerpiece of his vast American travel work: the three-volume Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814–25), a monument of world literature. Sir John Malcolm was intimately familiar with India, having traversed it from end to end and penned a number of works about its modern history. In 1815 he had brought out his History of Persia, earning him an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. As a comprehensive overview of Iranian history, it remained unsurpassed for almost a century. Julius von Klaproth was regularly cited and consulted as an expert on Central Asia. And Sir George Thomas Staunton was the leading China specialist in the British Empire, his scholarly reputation built on his translation of the most important legal texts of the Qing dynasty.12

One thing all four luminaries had in common was that their knowledge of the world beyond Europe stood in imperial contexts. Admittedly, this was less obviously the case for Humboldt than for the others. Between 1799 and 1804, he had privately traveled the length and breadth of the Spanish colonial empire at his own expense, and he had not held back in his criticism of Spanish rule. Yet even he relied in his travels on the goodwill of the colonial authorities. In 1829 he found no other way to explore Russia and Siberia than to accept an official invitation from the tsar.¹³ Klaproth was a Russian imperial privy councilor (a purely honorific title), in which capacity he inspected the expanding borders of the tsarist empire to the east and southeast. Staunton had traveled in British state service since childhood. And Sir John Malcolm, as already mentioned, was one of the preeminent empire-builders of his day.

Sir John’s dinner party is informative in many respects. In the early nineteenth century, as already in the second half of the eighteenth, travelers could rise to fame on the strength of their writing. These men were intrepid scholars and at the same time gentlemen, members of a social elite. They traveled not for love of adventure but in pursuit of scientific goals and under state patronage. The knowledge they acquired was useful for empires; even Humboldt’s proposals for reform would have benefited the Spanish authorities had they been willing to lend them an ear. Travel at this level was not something that could be left to chance or undertaken at a whim. It demanded the most painstaking organization. “High travel” of this kind had become unexceptional by around 1800. Writing anonymously in the Edinburgh Review in 1815, one author distinguished it from “low travel” and welcomed the quality of reporting produced by a new breed of expeditionary scholar. At the same time, he regretted that no region visited by such consummate professionals “was to their imagination surrounded by the dignity of mystery and darkness,” whereas the scribbling “physicians and jewelers” of the seventeenth century—he has the likes of Chardin and Tavernier in mind—had boldly plunged into the unknown and come into more frequent contact with “the body of the people.”14

But what did “traveling” beyond Europe mean in the long eighteenth century? It was not necessarily a geographical extension of traveling to or around England, Germany, France, or Italy.¹⁵ Such voyages were never undertaken simply for pleasure; even with the most careful preparation, they were “hard and dangerous work,” as one veteran traveler put it.¹⁶ This was already true of journeys east of Prague. Travelers who ventured outside Europe were expected—far more so than those who journeyed within its borders—to write up their travels upon their return. Patrons and the public were less keen to read about on-the-road adventures and the traveler’s shifting mood than to receive detailed reports about the countries visited en route. After all, was it not the empirical knowledge won through scientific experiment and travel that gave modern Europe a leading edge over both the ancient world and other civilizations?¹⁷

Above all else, traveling outside Europe was a time-consuming affair. A more or less thorough tour of the Near East might take two years, even longer for more remote regions. Many Europeans departed for a posting in Asia knowing they were likely never to return, or at best only at a much later stage in their lives. This should be taken into account when considering what travel meant at the time. The Jesuit missionaries sent to China, for example, could expect never to see Europe again. Pater Antoine Gaubil, a scholar with a European reputation and perhaps the most accomplished Sinologist among eighteenth-century Jesuits, arrived in Peking in April 1723 and died there in July 1759, having left the capital on only a handful of occasions in all that time.18 Pater Niccolò Longobardi, a learned pillar of the China mission a century before, had spent even longer in the Celestial Empire, a full fifty-eight years. Gaubil was notorious for his deteriorating French and Latin prose style, a consequence of his total immersion in his Chinese environment.¹⁹ Gaubil was no more a traveler in the intra-European sense than was the Moldavian prince, Demetrius Cantemir, author of an influential history of the Ottoman Empire (1734), who arrived in Istanbul as a fifteen-year-old in 1687 and stayed on, with only brief intermissions, until 1710.²⁰ The merchant and manufacturer Jean-Claude Flachat lived in Constantinople between 1740 and 1755, enjoying such excellent relations with the court that he became the first European to be granted access to the inner quarters of the sultan’s harem.²¹ In what sense might he be called a traveler?

Of course, Sir John Malcolm traveled up and down India on imperial business, and other Jesuit Fathers were less sedentary than Pater Gaubil. Several were dispatched to remote parts of the empire by Chinese emperors: Jean-François Gerbillon for example, one of the Kangxi emperor’s top diplomats, undertook the dangerous journey to Mongolia on no fewer than eight occasions between 1688 and 1698.²² Such people set out on their travels not from Europe, however, but from regional centers such as Calcutta or Peking. As Europeans more or less permanently stationed abroad, they were “travelers” only in a very broad sense. At any rate, a large part of the era’s standard literature on Asia was composed under such conditions of quasi-permanent contact. This was not travel writing, strictly speaking, but it was still first-hand reporting on Asia.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, very few Asians had the opportunity to practice this kind of participant observation in the lands of the West. One of them was Mirza Abu Taleb, an Indian Muslim, who proved a careful and perceptive analyst of English society during his stay in the United Kingdom from 1799 to 1803.23 His account, in the words of two modern historians, “provided a view that was not always flattering to the English, but congenial enough, in that it contrasted Albion’s vigour to Indian decadence.”²⁴ At the end of the period covered in this book, the young imam Rifā’a al-Tahtāwi was dispatched by the modernizing pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, on a study mission to France that lasted from 1826 to 1831. His report, circulated in manuscript from 1834 onwards but published only in 1849 (in Arabic), easily matches the sophistication of the best Western descriptions of Asian or North African countries.²⁵ In general, the asymmetries of imperialism and the small number of literate and educated Asians and Maghrebis who sojourned in Europe meant that Europeans came across non-Western views mostly when they arrived as diplomats or conquerors in the countries of South and East Asia. Thus, we have precious documents on Chinese perspectives of the Macartney embassy of 1793–94, on the British military campaigns in India under Lord Wellesley through South Asian eyes, or on the ways in which Egyptian and Algerian dignitaries and savants responded to the French invasion of their countries.²⁶ These texts were rarely known to European contemporaries. The myriad physical encounters between Asians and Europeans during the long eighteenth century were only in exceptional cases raised to the level of an intercultural dialogue of genuine reciprocity that can be reconstructed from literary sources.

A WEEPING MANDARIN

Our image of overseas travel in the eighteenth century is justifiably influenced by the great Pacific crossings of Captains Wallis, Cook, Bougainville, and Lapérouse, the most spectacular expeditionary voyages of their time.²⁷ They began during the Seven Years’ War and marked an enormous and sudden extension of Europe’s geographical vision and imperial reach.²⁸ Tahiti, more than any other place on earth, was the emblematic discovery of the eighteenth century. Asia, by contrast, was yesterday’s news: frequently visited and described, it seemed to have long since yielded its most important secrets. James Cook avoided Asia. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope on his second voyage of 1772–75, the longest he ever made, he sailed due east in Antarctic latitudes, steering well south of the Indian Ocean. Earlier still, in the 1720s, Captain Shelvocke showed scant interest in the continent, “as the Asiatick seas and countries are well known to us.”29 “Countries hitherto unknown,” remarked one visitor to China, “have now been so often visited and comprehensively described by curious Europeans that they are almost as familiar to us as our own fatherland.”³⁰ The Germans know all about the East Indies, we read in 1730,³¹ while a glut of descriptions meant that Istanbul and the coast of Asia Minor had become “pretty trite subjects.”³² Around 1800 it can be said—not without cause—“that few countries have been visited more frequently than Persia,”³³ that widow burning in India has been so often described that it would be tiresome to do so again,³⁴ and that the sea voyage from Europe to India and China, although not without risk, is now “a beaten track,” no longer a challenge for the ambitious mariner.³⁵ In 1816 the English captain, Henry Ellis, sailed to China in the firm conviction that there was nothing new to be seen there—and accordingly saw very little.³⁶

That was one side of the coin. On the other, there were certainly new societies and ways of life waiting to be discovered and explored. In particular, there were Siberia, the Caucasus, and the lands bordering the Caspian Sea—a vast ethnological field that remained terra incognita until the eighteenth century. In India many ethnic groups, religious communities, and political entities, such as the Sikhs and Marathas, first came to European attention with the decline of the Mughal Empire.³⁷ Countries like Yemen, previously known only in broad outline, were now intensively traveled and described in detail by men like Carsten Niebuhr. Travelers who ventured beyond the coastal zones frequently found that the people they encountered had never before set eyes on Europeans: for them, truly a Columbian discovery in reverse. The less there remained to be discovered by sea, following the epochal exploits of a Columbus, Magellan, or Cook, the higher rose the prestige of travel by land. There is no great art, remarked the adventure-loving Alexander Hamilton, in traveling to Bombay or Batavia and from there, as a self-styled “East Indies hand,” claiming expertise on more distant countries and customs.38 The difference between conditions on the coast and in the interior, a Jesuit observes in a letter, is sometimes as great as that between Europe and the rest of the world.³⁹

Something like a genuine first encounter was nonetheless still possible, even at the doorstep of the Chinese Empire. Korea was the most closed-off country in Asia in the eighteenth century, even more so than Tibet. Everything known to Europeans about this Sinicized empire at the periphery of China came from two sources. On the one hand, Chinese knowledge of Korea, the most important tributary state within the Sinocentric world order, filtered through to Europe via Jesuit encyclopedias.⁴⁰ In the opposite direction, first reports about Christianity were brought back to the Joseon kingdom before 1623 by Korean ambassadors who had come into contact with Jesuit missionaries in Peking. By 1790, the number of Koreans who called themselves Catholics had risen to around a thousand. They had been converted by studying Christian texts written in Chinese, not through direct proselytization by missionaries, and they suffered severe persecution in the following years.⁴¹ Secular knowledge of the West reached Korea shortly after 1600, when an ambassador from Peking presented the court with a map of Europe. In 1631 another diplomat came back from Peking with a musket, a telescope, a clock, a world map, and books on astronomy. At the same time, a Chinese edition of Frater Giulìo Aleni’s World Geography was closely studied in Korea and subjected to critical commentary.⁴² Although missionaries and European traders were forbidden entry into the kingdom, early nineteenth-century Koreans were not entirely in the dark about the West. The second source Europeans could consult for information about Korea was the journal of Hendrik Hamel, who had spent thirteen years in Korea following a shipwreck in 1653. Doubts were cast on his testimony, however, and its authenticity was not confirmed until the early nineteenth century.43

When therefore in September 1816 the two British ships, Alceste and Lyra, part of the squadron that escorted Lord Amherst on his abortive mission to China (Milord found no opportunity to open serious negotiations), spent ten days scouting the west coast of Korea, something akin to a South Pacific first encounter finally took place. Up to this point, there had been no direct contact between Koreans and Europeans; no European ethnographic documentation had ever depicted Koreans, their customs, and their dress. This precious moment was recorded for posterity from the European side by Basil Hall, captain of the Lyra, and Dr. John M’Leod, ship’s surgeon aboard the Alceste.⁴⁴ The travelers were not exactly gripped by Bougainvillean euphoria: Korea was no second Tahiti. While Captain Hall did not arrive as a conquistador, he was no well-prepared ethnologist, either. Needless to say, none of the sailors spoke a word of Korean, while a Chinese servant they had brought along with them turned out to be illiterate and thus proved unable to decipher the Chinese characters written down for him by the Koreans. Hall and M’Leod struggled awkwardly to establish minimal communication with the Korean villagers, who at first were unwilling to come out and meet the foreigners. Gifts, including dollar bills, were to no avail. To the unwelcome visitors’ surprise, the Koreans neither panicked nor showed the kind of joyfully childish enthusiasm expected of “savages”: “These people have a proud sort of carriage, with an air of composure and indifference about them, and an absence of curiosity which struck us as being very remarkable.”⁴⁵ Nevertheless, they made no secret of their expectations:

One man expressed the general wish for our departure by holding up a piece of paper like a sail, and then blowing upon it in the direction of the wind, at the same time pointing to the ships, thereby denoting that the wind was fair, and that we only had to set sail and leave the island.⁴⁶

When Captain Hall and his men wanted to set their boats ashore at another point, the signals from the Korean side were similarly blunt, albeit this time more puzzling:

They drew their fans across their own throats, and sometimes across ours, as if to signify that our going on would lead to heads being cut off; but whether they or we were to be the sufferers was not apparent.47

Tensions abated somewhat when a grizzled old dignitary, possibly even a learned mandarin, appeared on the scene and could be enlisted for negotiations on board the Lyra. The worthy gentleman—Captain Hall dubbed him the “Chief”—first needed to verify that the foreigners spoke no Korean, then that they were incapable even of reading Chinese characters: unbelievable proof of their utter barbarism.⁴⁸ Writing with wit and empathy, and without any hint of mockery toward the Koreans, Basil Hall sketches the subsequent diplomatic pantomime between the honorable mandarin and the British naval officers, culminating in their shared enjoyment of cherry brandy. The Chief is one of the most moving Asiatic figures in all early nineteenth-century literature, the scene in which he appears one of the finest set pieces on mute communication between representatives of different cultures.

It dawned on the British that they were not dealing with primitive savages, at the very latest, when they discovered that the mandarin’s escorts had rapidly measured the entire ship and taken notes on its rigging and weaponry.⁴⁹ After appearing to befriend each other over several exchange visits, the Koreans’ initial feelings of mistrust gave way to a determination to try out Western cultural techniques. While breakfasting on the Lyra, the old Chief demonstrated his enterprising spirit:

He ate heartily of our hashes, and of everything else that was put before him, using a knife, fork, and spoon, which he now saw, probably, for the first time in his life, not only without awkwardness, but to such good purpose that he declined exchanging them for Chinese chop-sticks, which were provided for him. In fact, he was so determined to adopt our customs in every respect, that when tea was offered to him in the Chinese way, he looked to the right and left, and seeing ours differently prepared, held up his cup to the servant, for milk and sugar, which being given to him, the old gentleman remained perfectly satisfied.

The politeness and ease with which he accommodated himself to the habits of people so different from himself, were truly admirable; and when it is considered that hitherto in all probability, he was ignorant even of our existence, his propriety of manners should seem to point, not only to high rank in society, but to imply also a degree of civilization in that society, not confirmed by other circumstances.

Be this as it may, the incident is curious, as shewing, that however different the state of society may be in different countries, the forms of politeness are much alike in all. This polished character was very well sustained by the old Chief; as he was pleased with our attempts to oblige him, and whatever he seemed to care about, he immediately took an interest in. He was very inquisitive, and was always highly gratified when he discovered the use of any thing which had puzzled him at first. But there was no idle surprise, no extravagant bursts of admiration, and he certainly would be considered a man of good breeding, and keen observation, in any part of the world.50

Basil Hall makes no attempt to conceal the visitors’ astonishment at the Chief’s mastery of proceedings. Far from gawking in stupefied admiration at the West’s totemic civilizational achievements—from breakfast tea to the ship’s artillery—he displays an interest in them that is at once coolly objective and pragmatic. He is sufficiently in command of the situation to experiment with role changes without ever betraying his own culture. At the end of the encounter, he politely yet energetically requests that the British leave his land forthwith. When they show no signs of doing so, he bursts into tears and loud lamentations, protesting that he is in danger of losing his head:

The Chief now began crying violently, and turning towards the village walked away, leaning his head on the shoulder of one of his people. As he went along, he not only sobbed and wept, but every now and then bellowed aloud.51

Both ships eventually set sail and continued on their course.

This sudden turn of events presents Captain Hall with a serious problem of interpretation. Having initially seen in the Chief the model for an alternative mode of civility, and having paid him the ultimate compliment that could be bestowed on anyone—even a European—who had the misfortune not to have been born British: that of being a “gentleman,” the Chief now poses a riddle through his loss of emotional control, his tearful breakdown in the face of British noncompliance.⁵² Civility itself, the familiarity of a supraculturally recognized, smoothly polished code of elite conduct, gives way to a shocking, completely alien outburst of emotion. Incomprehensible feelings lurk behind the conventional “forms of politeness.” Basil Hall leaves the Korean coast with decidedly mixed impressions, impressions that do not fit neatly into the usual schematic contrast between civilization and barbarism. It says much for the honesty of his report that he makes no attempt to conceal his discomfort by striking a pose of superiority or by taking refuge in clichés of Asiatic weakness of character:

We quitted this bay without much regret. The old Chief, indeed, with his flowing beard and pompous array and engaging manners, had made a strong impression upon us all; but his pitiable and childish distress, whatever might have been the cause, took away from the respect with which we were otherwise disposed to regard him. Yet, this circumstance, though it makes the picture less finished, serves to give it additional interest, whilst every thing ridiculous in the old man’s character is lost in the painful uncertainty which hangs over his fate.53

Following his retirement from the Royal Navy, Hall launched a second career as a professional travel writer and went on to cofound the Royal Geographical Society. Here, in just a few pages, he has captured scenes that provide the closest equivalent to a prototypical first encounter in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Asia. Alceste and Lyra sailed on to the Ryûkyû (Liuqiu) Islands, where they came across an intelligent, friendly, and peace-loving people who likewise seemed untouched by the West: at long last, Tahiti in the East China Sea!⁵⁴ Once again, the situation on the ground resembled that of a pure first contact. Yet in this case, once again, what the voyagers discovered was not entirely unknown back in Europe: Spanish reports had briefly mentioned the islands, and Pater Antoine Gaubil, the emissary of European science at the court in Peking, had published a description based on Chinese sources along with a detailed map in his Lettres édifiantes et curieuses.⁵⁵

One of the main reasons why Korea—the “hermit kingdom,” as it soon came to be known—could remain undisturbed by the West until 1816 was that it offered few prospects for trade. The famous Korean ginseng root, whose miraculous healing powers had been praised by the seventeenth-century polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and expatiated on more fully by Pater Jartoux in 1711,⁵⁶ could be procured in sufficient quantities by way of China. For the time being, at least, the visit paid by the British fleet changed nothing. It was not until 1876 that Korea’s closed doors cracked open under sustained battering from the Japanese. Only then did more comprehensive reports about Korea reach the West. Ethnographically speaking, the brief accounts provided by Hall and M’Leod were of limited value and were no substitute for Hendrik Hamel’s older text.

SEA AND LAND

Over the course of the century, the sea passage to India and the lands located east of the subcontinent became safer and more comfortable. The most important technological breakthrough was the invention of a chronometer that made it possible for longitude to be determined accurately at sea. A solution to this problem had long been sought, and in 1714 a high-profile Board of Longitude, initially chaired by Sir Isaac Newton, had been established in Great Britain to that end, offering cash rewards for scientific results. After decades of attempts, in 1770 the brilliant self-educated clock-maker, John Harrison, finally constructed an instrument that met the practical needs of mariners: an invention that immensely reduced the loss of human life at sea, helped ships maintain their course, and played a key role in the worldwide expansion of British naval power.57 Similarly crucial were the improvements in naval hygiene and diet recommended in 1753 by the Scottish physician, James Lind, in a bid to prevent scurvy, a dreadful vitamin deficiency disease. During his circumnavigation of the globe from 1740 to 1744, Admiral Anson had lost a total of 1,410 men in his fleet (73 percent of the entire crew), 997 to scurvy alone.⁵⁸ From Cook onwards, the disease was almost entirely eradicated from the high seas. Not a single sailor succumbed to it during Otto von Kotzebue’s second voyage around the world, which lasted three and a half years (1815–18).⁵⁹ In addition, navigational charts—for Britain as for France an imperial project of the first order—could only be perfected and used as a matter of course once steering by the senses had been replaced by scientific methods of navigation.⁶⁰

Notwithstanding this “nautical revolution,” the average passage on a merchant vessel operated by one of the European EICs could not be compared with the perfectly equipped, nationally prestigious marine expeditions of a Cook, Lapérouse, or Krusenstern (an Estonian captain in Russian service). The East Indiamen of the EIC, most of which carried between 500 and 1,200 tons, were relatively comfortable ships. Yet even decades after it was formulated, the advice given future sea passengers in 1716 by Johann Wilhelm Vogel, a German mining expert who worked for the VOC until 1688 and was subsequently a civil servant in the small residential city of Coburg, still held good: pray fervently to God and avoid bad company. Take your own supplies on board, including lots of garlic and also brandy, although this should be reserved for storms. Drinking too much is dangerous as you risk falling overboard. Seek out a place to sleep in the middle of the ship.61 Even the process of boarding ship was generally chaotic, and travelers could count themselves lucky if they set sail with all their possessions still intact. Many were reminded of the old saying: “The man who strikes dead his mother and father is still too good to sail for the East Indies.”⁶² Life on board ship depended largely on the passenger’s station and duties. Naturally enough, sailors had it worst. Subject to strict discipline, they performed hard physical labor, slept in hammocks in steerage, and received the most meager rations. Soldiers and craftsmen were better off. Germans who had signed up with the VOC as experts tended to distance themselves in their travel reports from the “blasphemous” and permanently inebriated “race” of seamen.⁶³ They clung to their own middle-class values.

Gentry and grandees were accommodated in the quarterdeck cabins as paying passengers or senior company officials. They were no less threatened by maritime disaster than their shipmates but otherwise traveled in this floating class society with far greater ease. Their complaints—as set out in an impassioned diatribe against sea travel written in the late 1740s by the much-traveled botanist, economist, and colonial agent, Pierre Poivre, still a young man at the time—concerned the stench of shipboard animals, the noise and vulgarity of the sailors with whom they lived in such unwelcome proximity, the arrogance and stupidity of the officers, and the stultifying boredom of life at sea.⁶⁴ August Ludwig Schlözer, more an armchair traveler than a veteran mariner, placed greater emphasis on the experience of forced companionship in his Göttingen lectures on the art of travel: “People nowhere become better acquainted with each other than at sea. They are practically married.”⁶⁵ Higher-class passengers were not spared the infectious diseases that spread rapidly in such a confined space, nor could they avoid smelling the putrid waste that accumulated at the ship’s side after only a few days of calm weather. If the stench became too much, the ship had to be towed by rowboat to a different location.66 Pirates and corsairs were a constant danger on the high seas. Each encounter with another ship was an anxiously anticipated adventure. The threat of shipwreck and catastrophe hung suspended over every long-haul passage like the sword of Damocles.⁶⁷

While overseas travel overall became faster, safer, and less onerous, no technological innovation produced a similar effect for transport overland until the gradual introduction of the railroad into Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1825 the voyage out from London around the cape to Calcutta, traveling on the best ships and with optimal winds, had been cut from eight months to five.⁶⁸ In 1800, by contrast, travel by land occurred in much the same manner and at much the same pace as in the age of Alexander the Great or Marco Polo. In Iran, Sir Harford Jones’ British embassy of 1808/9 (in which James Justinian Morier, author of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, took part) crept along at a rate of just nineteen miles a day. Native camel caravans managed thirty-five miles, on average; an army traveling without baggage could cover up to seventy.⁶⁹ It took the regular caravan from Aleppo sixty days to get to Baghdad. Europeans had to make do with whatever means of transport were available on the ground. There was thus no land-based equivalent to the technological advantages their modern sailing ships gave them over native vessels operating in Asian waters.

Unlike travel by sea, which was undertaken in company, journeys by land could be individual enterprises fraught with hardship and privation. In the early seventeenth century, Henry Blount had logged some six thousand miles in his peregrinations between England and Egypt, so earning him the byname, “the great traveler.”⁷⁰ The Portuguese Jesuit, Bento Goës, was the first European to tackle the extremely taxing overland route from India through Afghanistan, over the Pamir Mountains to Turkestan and on to Suzhou in East China, where he died in 1605.⁷¹ In April 1661 his fellow Jesuit from Linz, Johann Grueber, set out for India from Peking, where he had served as mathematician at the imperial observatory. On October 8 of the same year he became the first European ever to set eyes on the holy city of Lhasa—without later committing to paper an account of what he saw. Continuing by way of the Transhimalaya (which he was also the first European to cross), the Mughal capital of Agra, Iran, and Asia Minor, he eventually returned to Rome, arriving there in February 1664.72 Individual feats of this magnitude became increasingly rare in the eighteenth century; Ippolito Desideri S. J. was the only one to follow in Grueber’s footsteps, between 1712 and 1728.⁷³ The most remarkable quasi-solo enterprise from the second half of the century was the African journey undertaken by the Scot, James Bruce, between 1763 and 1773. It took him and the Italian draughtsman Luigi Balugani via North Africa, Syria, Egypt, and the Red Sea to the court of the Ethiopian emperor in Gondar; in October 1770 he reached the source of the Blue Nile.⁷⁴ He had, Bruce wrote in the dedication of his travel report to King George III, traversed a region “which … contained all that is terrible to the feelings, prejudicial to the health, or fatal to the life of man,” and visited places “so unhappily cut off from the rest of mankind, that even Your Majesty’s name and virtues had never yet been known or heard of there.”⁷⁵

The great overland journeys in eighteenth-century Asia were no longer the initiative of individuals, even if one still finds the odd footslogger like Joseph Tieffenthaler, a Jesuit from Bolzano, who spent three decades trudging through vast tracts of the Indian subcontinent.⁷⁶ In the 1690s the Society of Jesus, supported among others by Leibniz, sought to extricate its Chinese mission from the logistics of the EICs by opening up a land route from Rome to Peking. Yet in winter 1690/91, letters of protection issued by the king of Poland and the Chinese emperor proved of little avail to Pater Claudio Filippo Grimaldi when he was denied transit by the tsar. Attempts to create an overland route for missionaries had to be abandoned in 1712.⁷⁷ There were two important long-distance routes across Eurasia. The first led from Saint Petersburg through Siberia and the Mongol grasslands to Peking and was mainly used by diplomatic missions and trade caravans. Long sections of it involved waterborne transport on rivers and lakes. Depending on the availability of a means of transport and the smoothness of the journey, it took between twelve and twenty months to cover the huge distance between the two capital cities.78 The second route connected the Mediterranean to India and was chiefly used by EIC staff. Its most frequented stretch—the 760-mile-long Great Desert Route—ran from Aleppo in Syria across Mesopotamia to Basra on the Persian Gulf. It was recommended by a 1791 travel guide as a less tedious alternative to the sea route, provided travelers were willing to overcome their distrust of Turks and Arabs and make do without English food.⁷⁹ It attained the height of its popularity between 1751 and 1798⁸⁰ and acquired a certain political sensation value in the years when speculation was rife about a possible Napoleonic invasion of India.⁸¹

EAST ASIA: WALLED EMPIRES

The extent and quality of information about the various parts of Asia largely depended on their accessibility to Europeans. In the eighteenth century, unlike in the second half of the nineteenth, many Asiatic governments were still in a position to regulate the entry and movements of foreigners.

This was especially the case in East Asia. Korea was exceptional in its total isolation, but Japan came a close second. Throughout the eighteenth century, the country had been ruthlessly effective in keeping itself closed off from the outside world. Only the Dutch were allowed to maintain their tiny trading post on the artificial island of Dejima.⁸² In 1708, sixty years after the suppression of Christianity, the Italian priest, Giovanni Battista Sidotti, became the last Christian missionary before Japan’s opening in 1853/54 to make the suicidal attempt to set foot on Japanese soil. He was arrested on the spot and died—possibly of hunger—in the underground cell to which he was eventually confined.⁸³ The British showed little interest in Japan, fully aware that any foray into the country would founder on the combined resistance of the Japanese and Dutch. When Great Britain occupied the Dutch colony of Java during the Napoleonic Wars, two ships were sent in 1813 to Nagasaki to break the VOC’s trading monopoly. They were forced to return, their mission unaccomplished, bringing back with them the most valuable of the gifts intended for the shogun: a live elephant. It had been thoroughly inspected by the Japanese officials who came on board to parley with the foreigners, and it left a deep impression in Japan as only the fourth example of the species ever to have been seen there.84

In the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire emerged as the most active naval power in the North Pacific. The Japanese refused to be intimidated by this development, however. While mapping the southern Kuril Islands in July 1811, Captain Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin was taken prisoner along with six of his crew and held captive for twenty-six months by the vigilant Japanese authorities, who had been alarmed by brutal attacks against Kurile civilians perpetrated by Russian individuals. The Russians were treated well and subjected to weeks of in-depth interrogation. Although Captain Golovnin and his commander Rikord published informative accounts of their ordeal, the episode probably contributed more to Japanese understanding of Europe than to European understanding of Asia.⁸⁵ The first Russian expedition to circumnavigate the globe under Captain Adam Johann Krusenstern had already met with a less-than-warm reception in 1804/5. Krusenstern was free to explore and hydrographically chart the seas around Japan but, like almost all other Europeans, he was permitted to dock only at Nagasaki. He was not alone in complaining about “the insulting jealousy which is observed towards strangers in Japan.”⁸⁶ The sole opportunity to catch a glimpse of the interior was as an official VOC representative on one of the three-month long court journeys to the shogun in Edo, which the Dutch were regularly obliged to perform in their status as quasi-vassals. The route they followed never varied. It became well known in Europe thanks mainly to Engelbert Kaempfer’s masterly report from 1691–92 (first published in 1727), as well as to Carl Peter Thunberg’s less impressive account of the 1776 court journey.⁸⁷

In China, the situation was at once similar and quite different. There, too, limits were imposed on Westerners’ freedom of movement, but there were far more options available for traveling and hence for gathering information. These fell into three broad categories. First, overseas maritime trade in the Qing Empire was not as strictly regimented as it was in Japan. Chinese authorities were fundamentally indifferent to which foreigners visited Portuguese-administered Macau and the European factories in Canton. A sketchy description of Canton was the least readers could expect from any documented trip to China.88 Travelers wishing to hide their embarrassment at not having ventured beyond Canton could always resort to the curious hypothesis that, wherever you went in China, it all looked the same, anyway.⁸⁹

Secondly, the Jesuits continued reporting back from China in the eighteenth century. The position of the Fathers at court, their standing among the bureaucrat-scholars, and their scientific caliber may all have declined since the previous century. And several excellent descriptions of the country, drawing on extensive travel through a number of provinces, had been produced earlier, notably the books by Alvarez Semedo (1642) and Gabriel de Magalhães (1688).⁹⁰ Yet it was not until the arrival of the first French Jesuits in Peking in February 1688 that literature on China began to flood the European market.⁹¹ Around the mid-eighteenth century, the public in France or Germany was better informed about China than about many countries on Europe’s periphery. In 1696 Louis Le Comte, scientifically a lesser light than many of his fellow priests but a talented writer nonetheless, published an introduction to the land and its people that was soon much cited as an authority in the field.⁹² From 1702, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses appeared periodically in Paris as collections of epistolary reports filed by missionary correspondents based in Peking and Southeast Asia. In a lively and skillfully edited selection, the European public was treated to everything from technical and botanical descriptions to moving stories about miracles and conversions. By way of translations the volumes were disseminated far beyond the circles of French-reading friends of the Jesuit order, although English editors took care to excise what they took to be “Popish superstition.”93 Following the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773, the letters were superseded by the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages des Chinois, appearing in sixteen volumes from 1776 to 1814. In 1735 the available material on China was already so abundant that Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, a Jesuit living in Paris, was able to collate it into an encyclopedia in four hefty quarto volumes. Translated soon after into English, German, and Russian, it became the standard reference work on the Middle Kingdom.⁹⁴ This massive work, lavishly illustrated with maps and engravings, served the additional purpose of enhancing the reputation of the learned Fathers in Peking in the eyes of the European intellectual elite. However, it took the literary experience of a Paris-based author and editor to produce a systematic and readable account of the Celestial Empire. His co-pères in China supplied the raw materials.⁹⁵

By 1742 the savant and writer, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, could declare “that China is known to us today in as much detail and precision as France and other states in Europe.”⁹⁶ Fifty years later the abbé Grosier brought this information up to date with the latest research. Later still, between 1818 and 1820, he published a final summation of Jesuitical knowledge concerning China.⁹⁷ Yet from around 1710 the position of the Jesuits in Peking, where they were wholly dependent on court patronage, had begun to deteriorate; by the 1730s they were little more than technical personnel in the Forbidden City. Upon the death in 1722 of their most liberal-minded protector, the Kangxi emperor, Christianity itself came under threat in China. The mission in the inland provinces became more and more difficult to sustain. It soon became apparent from their reports that opportunities to roam the country were growing scarce. Restricted to the capital city, the Jesuits came to rely less on their own experiences than on their interpretation of Chinese texts.⁹⁸

The third form of travel in China was the diplomatic embassy. For nonmissionaries there was simply no other way to get to know the country’s interior. Between 1692 and 1795, three Russian, two Portuguese, one British, and one Dutch embassy made their way to China.99 Each is well-documented, best of all the Macartney Mission of 1792–94.¹⁰⁰ In 1805/06 a further Russian embassy under Count Yuri A. Golovkin—the retinue included Sir John Malcolm’s future dinner companion, Julius von Klaproth—turned back at the Chinese border when agreement could not be reached on questions of protocol.¹⁰¹ The second British mission under Lord Amherst broke down for similar reasons in 1816, although at least the embassy made it as far as Peking and tangentially resulted in Captain Basil Hall’s excursion to Korea and the Ryûkyû islands. Unlike the standardized Japanese court journey, the delegations traveled along different routes; the regions mentioned in their accounts thus vary accordingly. For all that, transport and accommodation were still arranged by the Chinese authorities, meaning that the Western diplomats essentially saw only what their hosts wanted them to see. Even though the path to the country was relatively well-trodden and frequently described by 1830, the claim made in that year that many parts of China were “almost unvisited by modern travelers” was not inaccurate.¹⁰² Travelers’ reports from all of the country’s provinces were only available by around 1900.

SOUTH ASIA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA: POROUS BORDERS

No other Asian states practiced so inflexible a foreign policy as Japan, Korea, and China. Interest among Europeans in the lands of Southeast Asia and their access to these lands depended on domestic political developments and economic factors.¹⁰³ Seen as a whole, the eighteenth century was on both sides more a time of retrenchment than of expansion. At the end of the eighteenth century, European knowledge of Siam still rested to a large extent on the numerous and sometimes very detailed reports produced during the brief diplomatic flirtation (1673–88) between Louis XIV and King Narai; there had been few travel contacts since then. In Vietnam, which since the 1610s had been divided into Tonkin, the northern kingdom ruled by the Trinh lords, and Cochinchina, the southern secessionist state over which the Nguyen lords held sway, the Catholic mission had been unusually strong and successful, although it also had to endure periodic bouts of hostility. Alexandre de Rhodes, a Jesuit priest from Avignon, had built it up since 1624, and in 1650 he published the first ethnohistorical treatise on Tonkin, soon to be followed by many other missionary texts.104 Chinese reports, particularly from the culturally Sinicized tributary state of Tonkin, provided a second source of information; they became known in Europe through the Jesuits.¹⁰⁵ Vietnam only began to be visited more frequently by Western merchants toward the end of the century. The Macartney Mission stopped off in the bay of Turon (Da Nang) on its way to China and produced several accounts, albeit from a narrowly coastal perspective. Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, squeezed uncomfortably between Siam and Vietnam, were visited even more rarely than the other states in Indochina. For a long time, probably the most cited source on the land of the Khmer was the 1727 report by that most intrepid of adventurers, Alexander Hamilton.

For obvious reasons, the entire Himalayan region was among the least traveled parts of all Asia.¹⁰⁶ Individual itinerant missionaries—above all the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri, the first European to describe the holy mountain of Kailash—were the most important informants until mounting tensions between the Nepalese Gurkha state and the Chinese Empire attracted the interest of the British. Reports by two political agents of the EIC—William Kirkpatrick and especially Francis Hamilton-Buchanan—then did much to shape the nineteenth century’s view of Nepal.¹⁰⁷ Next to nothing was known in the seventeenth century about “the great Switzerland Tibet,”¹⁰⁸ a kind of Qing Chinese protectorate; a century later, Desideri’s report remained unpublished and the picture was still essentially unchanged. Once again, Chinese sources were the most reliable.¹⁰⁹ Buddhist subjects of the tsar returning from a pilgrimage brought back rumors to Russia.¹¹⁰ Warren Hastings, the governor-general of British India, sent George Bogle (in 1774) and Samuel Turner (in 1783) on diplomatic missions to Tibet. Both set down lively, detailed accounts; Turner’s appeared in 1800, while Bogle’s was edited from the manuscript and published posthumously in 1876.111 Since there are so few texts, the handful that were written stand out all the more. But Bogle’s and Turner’s deserve their good reputation. The same holds true for the Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) by Mountstuart Elphinstone, a friend and colleague of Sir John Malcolm, written following his return from the embassy of 1808. The Afghans had already drawn European attention to themselves in 1722 by invading Iran, but Elphinstone was the first to report directly from Afghanistan, a country that tenaciously preserved its independence in the imperial age and was never easy for Europeans to access.

By contrast, no Asian land was more easily accessible than India and none so widely and frequently traveled, even in the seventeenth century. The Mughal dynasty had allowed Europeans complete freedom of movement, that is to say: the foreigners were ignored.¹¹² In a multiethnic empire they were far less conspicuous than in an ethnically homogeneous country like Japan, and they were of little account anyway. Europeans had taken part in succession disputes fought between various pretenders to the throne, entered court service, and pursued opportunities for trade. In the eighteenth century, many had hired themselves out to Indian princes and potentates as officers or artillery experts. Compared with China and Vietnam, the missionary element played a lesser role; the literature on India was not dominated by mission reports. There were still heroic individuals traipsing around eighteenth-century India as well. None better embodies this type than Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, an eccentric dreamer and linguistic genius who pioneered the study of ancient Persian language and literature, but also a precise geographer and clear-headed analyst of the contemporary political scene.¹¹³ Anquetil was behind the times in his inveterate hatred of England: even in old age he was imploring Napoleon to liberate India from British colonial rule, offering to take personal charge of the expedition.¹¹⁴ British supremacy in India was already unassailable by that stage, the literature on India long since established as a British domain.

Wherever the British conquered territories and brought them under their imperial control, the character of travel changed fundamentally. It was transformed from an adventure into an administrative routine. Under conditions of Pax Britannica, hostile natives no longer posed a vital threat. Instead, danger now came only from the heat, the tropical diseases, and the tigers that occasionally disturbed art-loving travelers during their inspection of Hindu temples and picturesque landscapes.115 Travel within India in the period between around 1770 and 1830 was overwhelmingly the prerogative of EIC officials. It came in two forms. Behind the newly established military borderlines marched a legion of administrators and tax-collectors, land surveyors and cartographers, but also historians, who now set about writing the history of subject peoples and victorious British arms sine ira et studio. Great works ensued: James Rennell’s historical and contemporary geography of the Mughal Empire; James Grant Duff’s history of the Marathas, the most formidable Indian opponents to British power; or the socioecological microdescription of southern Indian village life by Dr. Francis Buchanan,¹¹⁶ respectfully dubbed “the sharp sighted Pausanias of India.”¹¹⁷ The second form of travel involved venturing beyond the empire’s secure borders into regions that could turn out to be either potential candidates for later annexation or nothing more than unruly neighbor states. Sikhs in the Punjab, the Baloch people, and many others were visited and described accordingly. A frontier literature thus arose alongside the empire.

THE NEAR EAST: A PILGRIMAGE TO ANTIQUITY

Iran offers a further case study for the power of political relations. Of all Asiatic empires, it was said with some justification in 1783, Iran was the best researched.¹¹⁸ The shahs of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722) practiced an open-border policy that European travelers exploited to the full. It is hard to determine why Iran attracted so many learned travelers. In the late Renaissance, a time of burgeoning travel, Iran, the eastern enemy of the Ottoman Empire, was a country that welcomed Europeans more openly than Turkey, the perennial adversary. A century before Peter the Great and two and a half centuries before the Japanese Meiji emperor, Shah Abbas I (bynamed the Great, reigned 1588–1626) was the first eastern monarch who seemed to open his land to the West, implementing a process of political modernization comparable to that taking place in Tudor England or France under Henry IV. Through his reforms, he became the architect of the modern Iranian state. When Safavid glory began to fade in the seventeenth century and several of Abbas I’s successors incarnated the type of the bloodthirsty “oriental despot,” other attractions remained: Iran’s geographical position as the gateway to the Indian Ocean (by sea) and to the Indian subcontinent (by land), its reputation as an ancient center of civilization, and its genial climate, not to mention the ruins of Persepolis—in the words of one travel guide from 1754, “the most magnificent on the face of the earth.”119

If the number of literary voyagers to Iran declined in the eighteenth century and not a single new account of the country and its sights matched the high scientific and literary standards of the seventeenth century,¹²⁰ then this was not due to a policy of strict isolationism (as in Japan) but rather to a catastrophic breakdown in all forms of political order during and after the Afghan invasion of 1722. Apart from the odd visitor to Persepolis, Iran—unlike Asia Minor, Egypt, and increasingly India—was now completely bypassed by scholarly travelers and tourists. This state of affairs lasted until the turn of the century. In no Asiatic country was travel so hazardous a prospect as in lawless Iran, and few countries had less to offer in terms of trade or strategic advantage. It was not until the era of the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing “Great Game” between Britain and Russia that Iran gained renewed importance as an ally or buffer state in the imperial conflict. On three occasions—in 1800/01, 1808 (a signal failure), and 1809/10—the governor-general of India dispatched Sir John Malcolm at the head of diplomatic missions to Iran.¹²¹ These experiences flowed into the later chapters of Malcolm’s magisterial History of Persia. Early nineteenth-century trips to Iran thus became increasingly politicized.

It is impossible to make generalized statements about travel in the Ottoman Empire, so diverse were its constituent provinces. In the eighteenth century, many thousands of Europeans still gained unwanted first-hand experience of Barbary, the corsair state of Algeria, as victims of abduction or extortion. This gave rise to an entire literary genre detailing the trials and tribulations of captivity, along the Mozartean lines of “In Moorish lands imprisoned …” (an aria from The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782), although it was supplemented by the works of diplomats, priests, and traveling naturalists.122 Egypt, ever-present in the European imagination as the land of the pharaohs thanks to Herodotus, hosted barely more visitors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century than Iran, notwithstanding its proximity to Europe. There was no question of there being any political impediments to travel. The harbor city of Alexandria was occasionally inspected, perhaps also Cairo with its nearby pyramids, Suez by those traveling to India via the Red Sea, and a few hardy pilgrims might pay their obeisances at Saint Catherine’s monastery at Mount Sinai.

There had been a first modern wave of scholarly trips to Egypt from around 1585. Its most significant yield was the Pyramidographia (1646) by John Greaves, professor of astronomy and mathematics at Oxford. The book maintained its standing as the most scientifically accurate description of the pyramids until the nineteenth century.¹²³ At almost exactly the same time, Henry Blount was warning his readers against neglecting modern Egypt in their enthusiasm for all things pharaonic: Egypt was still a great and vibrant land.¹²⁴ A second wave followed in the 1730s, when two inveterate travelers—the English clergyman, Richard Pococke, as learned a man as he was courageous, famed equally for his Greek scholarship and his investigations into glaciers, and the Danish captain, Frederik Norden—made their way independently of each other to Upper Egypt and described their travels in voluminous, lavishly illustrated works.¹²⁵ Neither they nor those who followed in their footsteps took Blount’s advice to heart, however. With a few notable exceptions, such as the notes made by Johann Michael Wansleb, who twice visited Egypt in the seventeenth century, the Islamic (and also partially Coptic Christian) Egypt of the present remained all but invisible.¹²⁶ Modern-day Egyptians had to wait for Savary’s Lettres sur l’Égypte (1785–86) and Volney’s epochal account of his travels through the country (1787) to be brought to European public awareness.

Until then there had been good reasons for the prevalence of an antiquarian perspective in European views of Egypt.127 Egypt lacked the contemporary relevance provided elsewhere by Christian missionary work (China and Vietnam), trade (Japan), diplomacy (Siam, Iran), or colonialism (India, Java). Those with an interest in Islam felt they could study its Sunni version more comfortably in Istanbul. Once again, it was the global conflict between Britain and France that shifted the parameters. With his invasion of Egypt in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte not only pulled off a stunning military coup; he simultaneously ushered in a new era in oriental studies as a state-sponsored collective imperial enterprise, undertaken on a scale that overshadowed even British research activity in India. When Champollion went on to solve the riddle of the hieroglyphs in 1822, a new science was born: Egyptology.

Asia Minor—Turkey in the narrower sense—was by far the most frequented region in Asia. Even in the hottest phases of the ongoing conflict between the Christian powers, it was still theoretically possible to travel through Asia Minor.¹²⁸ Istanbul was the best-known city in Asia or, as it could also be viewed, “the greatest city in Europe,” incomparable in its grandeur and beauty: “We have nothing in France to rival it.”¹²⁹ As in Rome, Paris, or Vienna, observers traveled and wrote “in each other’s footsteps,”¹³⁰ and wholly original achievements became ever more difficult; most descriptions came from French visitors.

Despite the considerable amount of literature devoted to the Ottoman Empire, several genres of travel writing and reporting were poorly represented. Like everywhere else in the Islamic world, there were almost no Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Reports from traveling embassies—so important for China, Siam, Tibet, Iran, and Mughal India—barely played a role, since the European powers had permanent ambassadors stationed in Istanbul (and nowhere else in Asia). It was therefore unnecessary to set foot outside the capital. Several of these representatives or ambassadors were themselves noted scholars, or at least supported the scientific projects of others.131 Only a few had the competence and interest to write books themselves: Sir James Porter, for example, ambassador to the Sublime Porte from 1747 to 1762, an outspoken Turkophile, friend of Benjamin Franklin and Sir William Jones, and probably the leading British authority on Turkey in the eighteenth century,¹³² or the French ambassador, Count Antoine-François Andréossy, author of a work on the physical geography of the Bosphorus and Istanbul’s water supply system. Extraordinarily important scholarship was carried out by lower-ranking diplomats, however. The superbly well-educated Sir Paul Rycaut transformed his experiences as English consul in Smyrna from 1667 to 1678 into a historical chronicle of the Ottoman Empire.¹³³ The versatile, immensely industrious Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was sent on various Austrian diplomatic postings in the Levant between 1799 and 1807. In the generation between Porter and Hammer-Purgstall, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, an Armenian by birth, was reputed to know the Ottoman Empire better than any other European, particularly its legal system and culture. After serving for many years as a dragoman (interpreter), he was appointed Swedish chargé d’affaires (1782–84), then ambassador (1795–99) to the Sublime Porte. His magisterial Tableau générale de l’Empire Othoman (1787–1820), based on critical analysis of the available source material, was still considered “indispensable” by early twentieth-century students of the Ottoman Empire.¹³⁴

Large tracts of the empire were seldom or never visited by Europeans: inner Anatolia, several of the Black Sea provinces, the area bordering Iran, Libya, Mesopotamia (apart from the caravan route), or Yemen, which Carsten Niebuhr was the first to explore in any depth. Greece and the coast of Asia Minor were far more popular destinations. Istanbul, where hotels could now be found in abundance, became the eastern terminus of the aristocratic grand tour: from Vienna, one proceeded via Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople (Edirne) to the Bosphorus and from there by ship to Italy or Marseille.¹³⁵ Attica, the Peloponnese, and the ruins of classical antiquity on the Asia Minor coast could all be reached by detouring from this route. Classical Hellas was rediscovered or reconstructed twice: from 1755 in the imagination and in artistic theory by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and already in 1751 by two young English architects, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, sent out by the Society of Dilettanti to put their expert draftsmanship to use in measuring and sketching the Greek antiquities. Hordes of tourists followed in their wake. Not all were pursuing the lofty goals of education and edification. Many went out to loot and plunder. Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, who notoriously took possession of parts of the Parthenon frieze in 1801–3 (and sold them to the British nation in 1816), embodied an entire species. Whereas members of diplomatic missions to China surreptitiously pocketed stones from the Great Wall and filled their bottles with water from the Yellow River,136 the Ottoman government was too weak, or too unconcerned, to block large-scale private digs on the field of classical antiquity. The ransacking of ancient sites by well-heeled English tourists was more than offset, however, by the achievements of numerous learned visitors to Greece and the coast of Asia Minor. Together, they pioneered the descriptive scientific study of these regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Working around the same time that Dr. Francis Buchanan was researching southern India and employing similar methods, the British artillery officer, William Martin Leake, compiled a comprehensive geographical description of the regions of the Ottoman Empire that had stood under Hellenic influence.¹³⁷

Such scientific rigor, which in Leake as in Buchanan also served the political and strategic interests of empire, was not to everyone’s taste. A new type of literary traveler, initially confined to the Mediterranean, responded by flaunting the subjectivity of their impressions. The most influential was the poet Chateaubriand, who in 1806 set out on a round trip from Paris via Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Tunis. He too was not above systematically looting the sites he visited—“I have always purloined something from monuments where I happened to pass by”¹³⁸—yet his chief purpose was to drink directly from the fount of classical culture and (in the Holy Land) Christian religion. This was experience on a higher emotional plane than the more studious interest taken by a traveler like Pococke, who journeyed to Egypt and Palestine in the hope of arriving at a better understanding of the Bible stories.139 Chateaubriand ridicules the mania for antiquity exhibited by his fellow travelers,¹⁴⁰ yet in Palestine he shows no sign of the strain that his near-permanent state of religious ecstasy must have placed him under.¹⁴¹

All these travelers, it would be fair to say, showed less interest in the present state of the lands through which they passed than in ancient ruins and biblical reminiscences. Turks and Arabs were nuisances or had to be put up with as hired help; even fanatical philhellenes rarely had the imagination to see a Greek shepherd as the descendant of their Periclean idols. Such pilgrims to antiquity were to be found only in the Ottoman Empire: they may have been traveling in the Orient but they never truly arrived there.

ADVENTURERS AND RENEGADES

The regions targeted by travelers, their aims in traveling, and the various types of travel they undertook can be linked together in certain contexts. Unlike in the politically and culturally relatively homogeneous space of Europe (west of the Russian border, at least), not all forms of travel were possible everywhere in eighteenth-century Asia. There were no mission trips to Japan, no educational tourists in Siam or China, no embassies roaming the Ottoman Empire.

This broad framework of excluded and realized possibilities would need to be filled in by a nuanced sociocultural history of travel. Among the travelers to Asia who documented their journey in their own reports, itinerant adventurers and free agents were less prominent in the eighteenth century than in earlier times. Growth in trade with Asia and the expansion of colonialism in Java and India attracted soldiers of fortune. Yet very few came home as wealthy nabobs, and hardly any published a memoir of note.¹⁴² The accounts of their experiences written by Germans who traveled to the East Indies in the service of the VOC, mostly simple sailors, soldiers, and minor functionaries, play a role within the German literature on Asia only up to around 1730; they are not as informative as the contemporary Dutch literature.143 Many a journey inadvertently turned into an adventure: following a storm at sea, the eighteen-year-old Robert Knox was shipwrecked on the coast of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) along with his father, the ship’s captain, and sixteen crew members and there taken captive by the king of Kandy, Rajasinha II. It took him twenty years to escape to a Dutch fort on the coast. In September 1680 he arrived back in England with an unfinished manuscript in his possession. With help from the Royal Society, this then became the basis for his remarkable Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681).¹⁴⁴

The type of the enterprising private globetrotter who funds his travels from his own pocket and subsequently writes up his adventures in book form had its heyday beyond the Mediterranean Near East in the second half of the seventeenth century. It first reemerges in the early nineteenth century with India’s gradual opening to tourism.¹⁴⁵ Around the turn of the eighteenth century, the type is impressively represented by the Calabrian judge, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, who was driven by frustrations with his judicial office, family strife, and wanderlust to undertake a journey around the world from 1693 to 1698. Gemelli Careri must have been a man of extraordinary charisma. He had the ability to reach places that remained off limits to other travelers and the gift of finding generous benefactors at every turn. His travels took him to Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Iran, India (where he visited the camp of the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb), and Malacca. During his eight-month stay in China, he not only toured the south of the country but was also one of very few nonmissionaries and nondiplomats to gain admission to Peking. Although some Jesuits intrigued against him, taking him for a secret agent of the Pope, in 1695 he pulled off the unprecedented coup of an audience with the Kangxi emperor. He thereafter crossed the Pacific in one of the famous Manila galleons and spent eleven months in Mexico. His Giro del mondo (1699–1700) was highly regarded in Italy, not least because it was so well written, and became something of a bestseller. Long held in suspicion as a braggart and defended by few,146 the accuracy of many of his descriptions was recognized only later.¹⁴⁷ Gemelli Careri’s odyssey remained unparalleled. So far as we know, he was the first person to travel around the world by using the scheduled transportation services available at the time, particularly the great trans-Asiatic caravans (which ran at fairly regular intervals) and the annual round trip across the Pacific on the Manila galleons.¹⁴⁸ At best Alexander Hamilton, already mentioned several times in these pages, cuts a comparable figure: a Scot who first turns up in the records in 1688 as a captain and trader in the Far East and spends the next thirty-five years plying the seas between Mocha and Amoy (Xiamen). But his sober report, written for the practical benefit of fellow seafarers and traders, conceals the adventurousness of his existence.¹⁴⁹

That is emphatically not the case for Maurice, Count de Benyovsky, a swashbuckling Hungarian nobleman who died in 1786 during a failed attempt to conquer Madagascar for Austria. His travel journal relates his exploits and experiences between 1770 and 1772, primarily in Siberia, Kamchatka, and Japan; it appeared posthumously in English translation in 1790 and went through numerous editions in several languages. Critical readers pointed out glaring inconsistencies in his account, and Benyovsky’s good name as a truthful chronicler suffered lasting damage, but this did little to dent his popularity with the wider public: in Germany alone, his book ran through nine editions in eight years.¹⁵⁰ The German translator of the book, no less a personage than the great circumnavigator, Johann Reinhold Forster, who had taken on the project for financial reasons, likewise soon came to harbor doubts about its veracity and simply omitted anything from his German version that struck him as unbelievable, exaggerated, or sensationalized.¹⁵¹

The age of the great Asian adventures, whether real or invented, was already over by then. With James Bruce, who published his account in 1790, those looking for tales of action and adventure set in exotic locales shifted their attention to Africa. Far from the public eye, an assortment of oddities and eccentrics continued to be drawn to the East: Giovanni Ghirardini, a cheerful Italian painter (and irrepressible rhymester) who was recruited for service at the Chinese court by Pater Bouvet, providing a ray of sunshine amidst the gloom of Jesuit piety;152 Charles-François Tombe, a French officer who was demobilized following the Peace of Amiens of 1802 and who, driven by necessity and despair, set sail for the East Indies, later writing an informative description of Batavia;¹⁵³ or John Dundas Cochrane, who trudged through half of Siberia as a private traveler.¹⁵⁴ The travel report of a certain Alexander Drummond is especially curious. He spent much of the 1740s on the road as a grumpy tourist rather than an intrepid adventurer (and he was certainly no objective scientist). In Frankfurt am Main and Aleppo he finds nothing whatsoever to arouse his interest; he grumbles about the lack of hotels in the Orient, seeing only filth and decay wherever he goes. All his expectations are bitterly disappointed; not even oriental bandits find him worth robbing.¹⁵⁵ The poor man arrives home without a single decent traveler’s tale to show for his troubles.

At the opposite end of the spectrum were cultural renegades, people who appeared from a European point of view to have crossed the existential border to another civilization. The most radical step of this kind was conversion to Islam. This could be motivated by expediency and practical considerations. In Algiers there were more than a few Christian renegades: some of them converted prisoners who had acquired their freedom in this way, others criminal refugees from Christian countries. If they were snapped up by European ships, a particularly cruel fate lay in store for them.¹⁵⁶ For European sailors to convert to Islam was not uncommon and attracted relatively little comment.¹⁵⁷ It caused a bigger stir when members of the elite took this step. Following the assassination of General Kléber in June 1800, command of the French expeditionary forces remaining in Egypt fell to General Jacques Abdullah Menou. His much-derided conversion to Islam was motivated partly by political considerations, partly by the wish to marry an Egyptian: a descendant of the Prophet, no less.¹⁵⁸ In the early nineteenth century several European converts entered the service of Egypt’s modernizing ruler, Muhammad Ali.¹⁵⁹ Only one scientifically distinguished traveler appears to have become a Muslim, however: Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Carsten Niebuhr was told the story of a French doctor and naturalist named Simon who traveled to Aleppo to conduct his investigations. Unpleasant experiences with Europeans pushed him to the “desperate decision” (as the far-from-Islamophobic Niebuhr calls it) to become a Mohammedan. The Turks advised him against the move and showed him no favors in return. While patients continued to call on him, Monsieur Simon was “despised as a man who had betrayed his religion and his fatherland.”160 Here the convert appears not as a mediator between civilizations but as a wanderer lost between them.

There were many stages leading up to a change in religion. Scholars could express their sympathy for the foreign culture they had studied in outward signs. In 1680 Sir John Chardin, a French Huguenot emigrant returned from his travels in Iran, appeared in London dressed in oriental robes, and when the young Joseph Hammer saw the revered Mouradgea d’Ohsson for the first time in Vienna in 1792, the learned Swede was wearing Turkish robes with a Mozart-style powdered wig.¹⁶¹ Bedwin Sands, the “elegant dandy and Eastern traveler” in William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1848, set around 1815), could have been a figure from real life—not implausible for an author who was born in Calcutta as the son of a colonial administrator:

An Eastern traveller was somebody in those days, and the adventurous Bedwin, who had published his quarto, and passed some months under the tents in the desert, was a personage of no small importance. In his volume there were several pictures of Sands in various oriental costumes; and he travelled about with a black attendant of most unprepossessing appearance.¹⁶²

The Jesuits at the court in Peking, several of whom were high-ranking officials (especially in the seventeenth century), went about clad in the robes of Chinese mandarins. Their opponents within the church, who felt that their theological and philosophical accommodation with Confucianism had gone too far anyway, took this as further proof of their deplorable heterodoxy.

In many respects, the Jesuits who were active in China embodied a distinctively modern type of European living abroad. These were not private travelers; rather, they led a kind of official double life: on the one hand, as members of a large supranational organization, on the other, as experts in the service of a non-European power. In addition, several could regard themselves as diplomatic representatives of the French crown. A number of Asian states employed European experts, mostly in the military, without expecting them to break with their cultural and religious heritage. Indian princes had taken Europeans into their service ever since two Milanese gunsmiths had deserted from the Portuguese army to the Zamorin (King) of Calicut, casting three hundred cannons and field guns for him in three years.163 In the mid-seventeenth century, François Bernier observed that the great mughal’s artillery was operated by highly paid Europeans. Their market value had already slipped, however, since Mughal troops had become more skilled in working with gunnery.¹⁶⁴ French advisers armed the enemies of Britain, above all the Marathas and the sultans of Mysore. Between 1750 and 1803 there were 179 European mercenaries in Indian service, almost half of them French.¹⁶⁵ The Ottoman Empire also engaged European military experts from the early eighteenth century onwards. Such jobs came with no cultural strings attached. Whereas Baron de Tott, for example, a French officer of Hungarian origin who from 1773 set about modernizing the Ottoman artillery, improving military training, and building fortifications on the Danube border and in the Dardanelles, was a rabid Turcophobe, his Scottish colleague Campbell had switched cultural allegiance and taken on a new identity as a renegade (“Ingiliz Mustafa”).¹⁶⁶

SCHOLARS AND ADMINISTRATORS

Considerable misunderstandings arise when conventional ideas about intra-European travel in its various forms are applied to eighteenth-century Asia, especially beyond the Mediterranean basin. The documentary evidence suggests that travel in Asia, unlike in Europe, was not typically an individual project. It became ever less so. The number of institutionally unattached, self-financing travelers can be tallied without difficulty. Of these, the only first-rate travel writers were Gemelli Careri, Volney, Bruce, and Alexander von Humboldt—and the last two traveled mainly in Africa and America, respectively. The wealthy amateur Joseph Banks took part in Captain Cook’s first circumnavigation of the globe at his own expense; his diaries long remained unpublished and he never wrote up a full account of his trip. All other travelers were functionaries of large organizations: governmental bodies, quasi-state chartered companies, religious orders, and other church organizations. Several were also sponsored by privately funded learned societies—Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was the agent of the African Association, founded in 1788 by Joseph Banks and others—or one of the academies in London, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. This transformation of travel into an instrument of public or private officialdom is one of the most important developments in the history of transit in the eighteenth century. One anecdote illustrates this nicely: following the dissolution in 1773 of the Jesuit order in France, the missionaries left in Peking—now downgraded from Père to Monsieur—continued to be paid from the coffers of the French state.167

Over the course of the eighteenth century, voyages of discovery and research became increasingly bound up with national prestige and imperial rivalry. At sea, the Pacific was the most important setting of an Anglo-French competition for discovery and nautical success, with Russia later joining in to make it a three-way contest. On land, the era’s greatest Asiatic travel projects were carried out within the tsarist empire at state initiative. In the 1760s the interests of politics and science intersected in a series of internationally coordinated mega-projects.

The most important occasion was the expectation of an extraordinary astronomical event: the transit of Venus across the solar disk. This would make it possible to measure the exact distance from the Earth to the Sun. In 1716 the English astronomer, Edmund Halley, had predicted the event for 1761 and again for 1769: it would not be repeated until 1872. The Seven Years’ War meant that European astronomers were unable to agree to a joint action plan in time for the 1761 transit, and only a French initiative met with any success. By 1769, however, European governments, academies, and learned societies—the Royal Society in England was particularly active—were in a position to coordinate their efforts to an unprecedented degree.168 Numerous scientific expeditions were sent out to observe the phenomenon from different points of the Earth’s surface: Cook and Bougainville in the South Sea, the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche (who had witnessed the 1761 transit of Venus in Tobolsk, the capital of West Siberia) in California. Le Gentil had already missed the previous planetary passage in the Indian Ocean and had been waiting there ever since for a second opportunity—which, as bad luck would have it, he reportedly missed again. The scientifically trained private traveler, James Bruce, made astronomical observations from Upper Egypt in June 1769. Peter Simon Pallas took up position in Siberia.

Pallas was one of several German scientists commissioned by the Russian government to investigate the Asiatic parts of the empire. Like other research trips taking place at the time, these endeavors were Janus-faced, at once scholarly and imperial in outlook. Scientists worked in the field to gather data in the various natural sciences (geography, geology, astronomy, botany, zoology), but they also collected ethnographical and economic information that could make it easier to govern, develop, and exploit the vast non-European territories of the tsarist empire. Pallas was the most famous but by no means the first or only such traveler.

At Peter the Great’s behest, the scientific exploration of Siberia¹⁶⁹ had entered a new phase between 1721 and 1727 with the modestly conceived research expedition mounted by Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, a doctor from Danzig who had received his medical training at the prestigious university of Halle. For fourteen months, Messerschmidt was accompanied by the recently released Swedish prisoner-of-war, Philipp Johann Tabbert, who went by the name of Philipp von Strahlenberg and later published a valuable geographical overview of North Asia.¹⁷⁰ Only isolated fragments of Messerschmidt’s journal were published in the eighteenth century. The author died in poverty and disillusionment in Saint Petersburg in 1735. The easternmost part of the Russian Empire, the Kamchatka peninsula, stood at the center of imperial interest even then. The First Kamchatka expedition of 1725–30, personally initiated and planned by Peter the Great near the end of his reign, was a far bigger undertaking than Messerschmidt’s pioneering mission. Part of its brief was to fix Asia’s eastern border and search for a land bridge between Asia and America. It was led by the Danish sea captain, Vitus Bering. Upon his return, Bering began planning the Second Kamchatka expedition. This enterprise, better known as the Great Northern Expedition (1733–43), involved a total of 570 men split among three regional groups. It was by far the most ambitious Asian travel project of the century. The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences (founded in 1725), one of the greatest scholarly institutions in Europe at the time, assumed responsibility for the scientific aspects. For the Siberian expeditionary group, it set up an academic division that included two young professors: the chemist Johann Georg Gmelin, scion of a long line of scholars from Tübingen, and the historian and ethnographer, Gerhard Friedrich Müller. They were assisted, among others, by the historian Johann Eberhard Fischer, the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, and the student Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov.171 Only the last two made it all the way to Kamchatka. Gmelin and Müller nonetheless logged over thirty-three thousand kilometers in what was probably the longest overland journey made by Europeans during the first half of the eighteenth century.¹⁷²

Pallas’s activities fall in the next phase of tsarist exploration policy, dominated by the so-called academy expeditions from 1768 to 1774. The external motivating factor was Empress Catherine II’s determination to show the rest of the world what Russian science could achieve when the next transit of Venus occurred in 1769. At the same time, and above all, the expeditions were again intended to serve the economic interests of the empire. They were organized on a smaller scale than the Great Northern Expedition; almost all involved travel by land alone. Russian scientists shared tasks with German specialists recruited by the academy. The German participants were Johann Anton Güldenstädt, who crossed the (then-) imperial border to traverse the Caucasus and Georgia; Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, a nephew of Johann Georg Gmelin, who explored the shores of the Caspian Sea; and Peter Simon Pallas himself, the head of the expeditions, who was also in charge of analyzing their findings. Pallas visited the middle Volga and the Urals and traveled as far east as Irkutsk and the Lake Baikal area. The writings of the German scientists, like those of their Russian colleagues Ivan Ivanovich Lepyokhin and Nikolai Petrovich Rychkov (in German translation), were quickly made available to the Western European public.

These journeys were imperial research trips. Their occasionally fatal “adventurousness”—both Bering and Steller died en route—was an unwanted side-effect rather than a guiding principle. Those who took part in them were not thirsting for thrilling escapades and epic quests, nor were they impelled by naïve curiosity, nor did they long to put behind them the stale comforts of modern Europe. Indeed, an important impulse behind the scientific travels of the Enlightenment era was a determination not to leave the earth’s discovery and investigation in the careless hands of adventurers. For the young German scholars, the tsarist expeditions opened up extraordinary career prospects denied them in the small states of their homeland: J. G. Gmelin was offered a full professorship in Saint Petersburg with attractive conditions at just twenty-two years of age, Pallas at twenty-five. After unhappy experiences in Russian state service, the former went on to become rector of Tübingen University, while the latter retired as one of Europe’s most celebrated naturalists to an estate in the Crimea bestowed on him by the tsarina.

A methodical approach to travel had already started to be developed in humanist circles in sixteenth-century Italy, France, and the Upper Rhine.173 What the traveler would observe was now mapped out in advance in carefully planned itineraries rather than left to his passing fancy. In Asia, scholarly travelers had observed and described their surroundings in precise detail before Gmelin and G. F. Müller: Engelbert Kaempfer in Iran and Japan, for instance, and Pater Gerbillon around the same time in Mongolia. But the eighteenth-century Russian expeditions combined six key elements for the first time:

(1) a detailed work program;

(2) logistical planning on a military scale;

(3) meticulous scientific preparation;

(4) routinized and schematized daily documentation of results;

(5) systematic analysis under the auspices of academic institutions; and

(6) a scientific (and secondarily political) rationale.

Almost concurrently with the Great Northern Expedition, something similar was attempted—albeit in colonies controlled by foreign powers—in La Condamine’s journeys to Peru and the Amazon.174 In theory at least, since the execution often left much to be desired, all the essential elements of a research trip were now in place. Such trips did not have to take the form of an expedition, a kind of mobile colony already partially realized in the circumnavigations and Pacific voyages of yesteryear. The Danish mission to Arabia set out in 1761 as a small expedition but was single-handedly continued by Carsten Niebuhr following the death of his travel companions. Thanks to his diligent preparation he was able to attain many of their research objectives on his own, returning to Copenhagen as a duty-bound servant of the Danish crown rather than as a footloose vagabond.¹⁷⁵ James Bruce and Alexander von Humboldt on his American odyssey relied almost entirely on their own resources. But their cost and public significance almost inevitably turned research trips outside of Europe into affairs of state, with travelers enlisted as functionaries or recipients of patronage—much to the annoyance of a free and fiery spirit like Johann Reinhold Forster.¹⁷⁶

The Russo-German North Asian voyages of 1733–43 and 1768–74 were unequalled in Asia in their time. Europe’s leading geographers and cartographers were based in France, but France lacked colonial possibilities in Asia. Bonaparte’s occupation of Egypt in 1798, which was also an invasion of the Orient by the French scholarly world, opened the floodgates to long pent-up energies.¹⁷⁷ It established a tradition of having military interventions accompanied by large state-sponsored scientific research operations.178 Great Britain’s official travel ambitions in the eighteenth century flowed predominantly into the three near-perfectly organized circumnavigations of the globe captained by James Cook. German and Swedish scientists also took part in these voyages, even if they were assigned positions of lesser responsibility than those entrusted to Bering and Pallas in Russia. From 1775, the year of George Bogle’s mission to Tibet, to 1815, when Napoleon’s downfall brought the empire temporary relief from Great-Power competition in the East, Britain sent out diplomatic embassies from India to almost all the surrounding countries in Asia. All these embassies carried out scientific work in some form or other, but none came even close to matching the level of professionalism shown by the travelers to Siberia.

We turn finally to the areas under direct British control. During the years when the British occupied Dutch-colonized Java (1811–16), their most senior representative, lieutenant-governor Sir Stamford Raffles, collected materials that flowed into his great description of the country, his History of Java (1817). Once again we see a typically British discursive model at work, loosely adapted from Julius Caesar: the conqueror as historian and ethnographer. We have encountered it before in Sir John Malcolm. British India itself was subjected to thorough scientific examination not long after its various provinces had been subdued by force of arms.¹⁷⁹ It began in 1765, when Robert Clive, conqueror of Bengal, commissioned the young marine officer and surveyor, James Rennell, to investigate and map the newly won territories as surveyor-general.¹⁸⁰ Like Catherine the Great or—as we will see in the next chapter from Volney’s example—France under the Directory, from the late eighteenth century the British colonial state pursued the vision of a comprehensive, systematic, and accurate archive of scientific information about the newly acquired imperial possessions. The most precise instruments that late Enlightenment Europe had to offer for such a task were statistics and survey-based cartography.¹⁸¹ In a frenzy of measurement and quantification, “philosophically” minded Europeans persuaded themselves that rational processes of description would lead to accurate and incontrovertible representations of territories and the material culture borne by them. A century of more or less regional and uncoordinated data collection in India culminated in the creation in 1878 of a central information bureau, the Survey of India. By that time, all the British territories on the subcontinent were enmeshed in a finely spun web of descriptive detail. The country had been exactly surveyed and mapped from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. From the late eighteenth century, teams of administrator-scholars streamed out from the colonial centers to gather data on the conquered territories’ geology, botany, zoology, ethnography, economy (including its capacity for taxation), sociology, and history. A vast stockpile of texts and maps, quantitative data, local gazetteers, and encyclopedias was thus amassed. Enormous collections of manuscripts, coins, works of art, and artifacts of material culture were assembled thanks to the tireless efforts of manic collectors like Colin Mackenzie, who was also a pioneer geodesist and mapmaker and in 1815 was appointed the inaugural surveyor-general of India.182

Many of the objects harvested on official research trips were eventually incorporated into the great imperial archives and museums. This type of travel would not have been possible without the prior pacification and organization of peripheral regions. In turn, it not only contributed to the disinterested accumulation of scientific knowledge; it also made Asia’s subject lands and peoples easier to govern and exploit.