VII

Reporting, Editing, Reading

FROM LIVED EXPERIENCE TO PRINTED TEXT

It may, I think, be justly observed that few books disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travelers.

—Samuel Johnson (1709–84), The Idler, no. 97, February 23, 17601

Except under laboratory conditions, it is impossible for us to observe or reconstruct the processes of seeing and hearing. It was equally impossible for eighteenth-century Europeans with an interest in Asia to bypass the media of the day. Before the invention of photography and technologies for recording sound and movement, travel reports—particularly if illustrated—enjoyed a monopoly on communications. There were simply no rival media for them to contend with. European “images” of Asiatic civilizations were textual evocations supported by engravings or etchings and—more rarely—by watercolors or oil paintings. Compared with the twentieth century, when the world beyond Europe’s borders was presented to Europeans as one of images, eighteenth-century Asia was a literary project, a world constructed of language. Today, even people who have never read a book about Asia and routinely ignore foreign news reports still feel they know the continent from television, films, photographs, and the Internet. In the early modern period, those who read nothing, knew nothing.

Visual impressions generally played a subordinate role. But they were still important in many cases. The woodcuts in Sebastian Münster’s Kosmographia (1554) and the copperplate engravings in Theodor de Bry’s travel collections (1590–1634), especially the constantly reproduced scenes of cannibalism, influenced the early modern image of America almost to the same extent as texts. Similarly sensational depictions were lacking for Asia. But a few frequently recycled images from a vast stockpile of visual material, reproduced mainly in anthologies, must have made a lasting impression on European observers: the camp of the all-conquering Turks and the minarette-adorned silhouettes of Muslim cities, the splendor of the grand mughal’s court with its sumptuously bejewelled parading elephants, the many-armed, animal-headed Indian deities, self-torturing fakirs, the likeness of the venerable Confucius, the Chinese emperor shown ritually plowing the first furrow of the spring sowing season, the Great Wall of China and the Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing, the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace, the tropical, palm-shaded European city of Batavia, Japanese Buddhist temples, and Siberian shamans.

Eighteenth-century Asian iconography still owed much to older illustrated works such as the China Illustrata (1667) by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, the report on his Chinese travels by Johan Nieuhof (1665), the Persian voyage of Adam Olearius (1647/56), Abraham Rogerius’s description of India (1651), and the great compilations of Olfert Dapper and Arnoldus Montanus, which appeared between 1669 and 1681. Later, the artist Cornelis de Bruijn (or de Bruyn, de Bruin) returned from his two extended journeys (1674–84, 1701–8) with an ample trove of his own paintings and drawings: most spectacularly, the first European representations of the ruins of Persepolis; he was also a pioneer of color printing.2 Rich collections of visual sources, such as the abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages (1746–61) or Thomas Salmon’s The Universal Traveller (1752–53), drew freely from this stockpile, occasionally adding a piece or two of their own. Asia only began to appear in full color once talented painters and watercolorists were able to join in the great state-sponsored voyages of the late eighteenth century. Realistically observed landscapes and scenes from common life now took center stage. William Alexander, who accompanied Lord Macartney to China, and William Hodges, who, in addition to taking part in Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe (alongside Forster père and fils), lived in India from 1780 to 1783, pioneered a new way of seeing Asia in their art.3 A few years after Hodges, between 1786 and 1793, the landscape painters Thomas and William Daniell, uncle and nephew, traveled through vast tracts of India, creating a substantial oeuvre along the way.⁴ Apart from India, however, no region in Asia before 1800 was depicted as often or as powerfully as the South Pacific.⁵

While images may have gripped the popular imagination, it was texts that promised to give the eighteenth-century public what they expected more than anything else: information.

THE TRAVEL ACCOUNT AS A TOOL OF INQUIRY

The eighteenth century’s famous and influential travelers and travel writers, from Engelbert Kaempfer and John Chardin to Carsten Niebuhr, Constantin de Volney, and Alexander von Humboldt, were no victims of “Orientalist” delusion and peddlars of fantasies and lies about the Other, whose authenticity and truth remained a closed book to them. From Western European humanism, they inherited a role model of the “philosophical traveler”—an ambulatory scholar who, not yet bound by the constraints of strictly defined academic disciplines such as geography or ethnology, contributed to universal knowledge in accordance with the most advanced methodological standards of the day.⁶ Together with hundreds if not thousands of curious and often learned armchair travelers at home, they formed a philosophical class with unprecedented cosmopolitan ambitions and pretensions.⁷ In this intellectual world, travel accounts enjoyed enormous prestige. Customers and collectors were prepared to spend a lot of money on them. Critics took great pains to gauge their veracity and assess their literary merits. But how did such travel books come to be written?

We should not imagine that all travelers began working up their notes into a coherent, book-length format before they had even returned home, or as soon as they reached their native shores. They were far more likely to take up their quills only once whoever had commissioned the report put pressure on them to deliver, or when they wanted to mobilize the book-buying public as quickly as possible—sometimes in competition with companions from the same voyage or expedition. Participants in state-sponsored expeditions were often expected to hand over their private notes to the expedition leader or his literary amanuensis, who would then collate them in the official account.8 Reminiscences of a more personal or subjective nature would appear later on, if at all. Official reports were therefore often joint ventures, syntheses from a wide range of documents masquerading as the work of a single author. Only a few writers—Mountstuart Elphinstone, for example—were candid and generous enough to acknowledge the contributions made by their fellow travelers to the final report, signalling it as a collective product.⁹ Following particularly spectacular journeys, such as Captain Cook’s three circumnavigations of the world or the Macartney embassy to China, struggles for precedence on the book market and for priority and originality would sometimes break out among the journey’s chroniclers.¹⁰ It is worth noting, incidentally, that the most intellectually stimulating product of the China mission from 1793–94, Lord Macartney’s own notes, remained unpublished until fairly recently. Many reports were never intended for publication: sometimes for reasons of diplomatic confidentiality, sometimes because nothing more was envisaged than “the exotic equivalent of a family chronicle.”¹¹

Information about Asia arrived in Europe along numerous channels. One of the most important was correspondence. Considered as a well-organized group of knowledge brokers, the Jesuits were unmatched in their epistolary industry. An unceasing flow of letters poured forth from their tireless quills. In the hands of the padres in China, Vietnam, or India, the letter was at once a propaganda tool for enhancing the order’s image in Europe, an instrument for strengthening international contacts among members of the order, and a means for transmitting scientific knowledge. The best scholars among the Jesuit missionaries did not just conduct their routine correspondence with the order’s headquarters in Paris and Rome, they were also much-sought-after correspondents for the scholarly world outside the church. Conversely, it only helped burnish the reputation of a man like Pater Joachim Bouvet when he was seen in quasi-public correspondence with the great Leibniz, who himself cultivated contacts wherever any kind of mail service was able to deliver his letters. Other epistolary networks radiated out from Leibniz’s contemporary, Nicolaas Witsen in Amsterdam: from Voltaire wherever he happened to be at the time; from the academy secretary Nicolas Fréret and the minister Henri-Léonard Bertin in Paris; from Robert Hooke, John Ray, Joseph Banks, and other members of the Royal Society in London; from Peter Simon Pallas and the astronomer Jean-Nicolas Delisle in Saint Petersburg; from Johann David Michaelis and August Ludwig Schlözer in Göttingen; and in the early nineteenth century from Carl Ritter in Berlin. Manuscripts were exchanged as well as letters. Voltaire sent a rough draft of his history of Russia under Peter the Great to Saint Petersburg, asking scholars there for commentary and additional material, particularly on the tribes of Siberia.12 Much that was of importance went unread: the treatise on Chinese chronology by the great scholar, Antoine Gaubil S. J., arrived in Berlin in 1749 from Peking—and remained unpublished until 1814, when the debate on this topic had long since ebbed away.

Such crypto-public avenues of communication notwithstanding, the travel report remained easily the most important medium for representing Asia. Some reports were written for narrow and specific purposes, such as to instruct fellow mariners and travelers.¹³ By and large, however, authors addressed a broad, educated public. What the general reader expected from them, above all, was an objective depiction of a distant reality. Travel reports were assigned to the old category of Historia, the genre of descriptive literature as such.¹⁴ This did not just encompass history in today’s sense of the word, but all ways of presenting empirical subject matter in a nonspeculative manner. When Engelbert Kaempfer wrote a Historia Palmae Dactyliferae, for example, what lay behind this title was a botanical and economic monograph on the date palm.¹⁵ Until the end of the century, ambitious travel reports were expected to give equal coverage to both historia civilis—the description of the human world—and historia naturalis. Travelers lacking the requisite knowledge of the natural sciences would often apologize for their shortcomings in the foreword. Thomas Shaw, the highly regarded voyager to the Near East, abridged the botanical section in the second edition of his Travels due to scientific advances made in the interim.16

STYLE AND TRUTH

The authors of travel accounts—or at the very least their publishers—knew the generic conventions they had to abide by. The report should contribute to the growth of European knowledge by presenting as much new information as systematically as possible, without overly subjective impressions getting in the way. First-person narration, if used at all, was to be handled with the kind of unassuming tact and discretion demonstrated in exemplary fashion by Carsten Niebuhr or Samuel Turner. Above all, the report should offer readers an undistorted view of its subject matter. Linnaeus could offer no higher praise of a travel book than to say that it gave him the impression he had been there himself.¹⁷ To be sure, a modicum of information about the course and circumstances of the journey was needed to lend the report authenticity.¹⁸ Yet not all authors cultivated the coolly scholarly style recommended by theorists like Linneaus and Schlözer, and refined to a fault by authors like Pallas and Volney. Niebuhr’s fine sense of humor frequently leavens his otherwise dry and objective tone.

British and French authors strayed far less from the ideals of elegance and complaisance than their German colleagues. Some, however, tried to pass off their own lackluster prose as an index of their truthfulness. “All too often,” Pierre Sonnerat, the traveling naturalist and superb draftsman, pointed out, “the pleasing only serves to camouflage the untrue.”¹⁹ By contrast, Thomas Shaw, a travel writer frequently praised for his precision, feared that his years spent immersed in oriental languages might have spoiled his English. He accordingly sought to remedy his book’s stylistic defects when revising it for a second edition.20 John Chardin had his report on the coronation of Suleyman Shah proofread for linguistic infelicities by a member of the Académie Française before publishing it in 1671.²¹ But felicitous expression and vivid description should also not be allowed to degenerate into what Johann Salomo Semler, a connoisseur of overseas travel literature, denounced as “a pointless prolixity that irritates the reader through a profusion of minutiae, fables and unhelpful anecdotes.”²² Minutiae were to be welcomed, on the other hand, when they concerned previously unknown, nontrivial facts: place names, meteorological data, linguistic observations.²³

Around 1800 there was widespread consensus about which alternative was preferred in a hypothetical choice between truth and stylishness. “Mere faults of style,” states Mountstuart Elphinstone, “would be of little consequence if the substance of my account were free from error.”²⁴ But Elphinstone’s goal was to prevent the dilemma from arising in the first place. Scientific rigor and literary excellence were combined at the end of the epoch in a number of authors whose mastery was acknowledged throughout Europe: above all, James Bruce, Georg Forster, and his friend and pupil in the art of travel writing, Alexander von Humboldt, who stood at least as much in the French narrative tradition as in the German one with his Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814–25).

Within the generic framework of the historia tradition there were numerous possibilities for literary organization. One option was a strict itinerary in logbook format, where even the tedium of long days passed uneventfully at sea or in the steppe and desert would be punctiliously noted;²⁵ another was a “daily register” for setting down all observations in chronological order, as required of participants in the Russian state and academy expeditions and as kept with particular strictness by one such participant, Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin. “I abide by the chosen scheme of naming all natural bodies in the sequence in which I viewed them,” he explained during one of his journeys, “for that is the obligation imposed by a daily register.”26 Happily, Gmelin was gifted enough not to be tyrannized by such pedantry, coming close in many of his “thick” descriptions of nature and human customs to the Goethean ideal of the naturalist who is “capable of presenting and describing the strangest and most exotic things in their local environment, in their own element with all that surrounds them.”²⁷ Several authors arranged their material systematically or grouped it into larger geographical units, regardless of the actual route they had taken on their travels. Chardin adopted this method in the seventeenth century with his famous Persian journey; Volney mastered it in the late eighteenth century. Thomas Shaw, who crammed the account of his journey into a brief foreword, had kept a systematic diary while traveling rather than a daily register, later transposing it into his report in the same order.²⁸

At the opposite, more subjective end of the spectrum stood collections of travelers’ letters. The most famous were those posted from Turkey between 1716 and 1718 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.²⁹ The letters from India of Mrs. Kindersley lagged far behind them in terms of their literary quality but are of comparable historical value.³⁰ Letters from the Far East could also serve as a medium of scholarly communication, and not just in the form of the countless published letters by Jesuits. In his journal Fundgruben des Orients (Oriental Repositories, 1809–18), Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall printed numerous letters dispatched from Asian lands by European residents or visitors. Pitton de Tournefort’s authoritative description of Turkey from 1717 was presented in epistolary form, while the letters of the Swedish librarian Jacob Jonas Björnstahl and Savary’s Egyptian letters, for example, were also a valuable source of information.

Needless to say, the learned travel report stood under the imperative of firsthand observation or autopsy. Writers nonetheless copied from each other with such frequency that there were constant complaints about the practice. Apropos of reports about China, the French Sinologist Abel-Rémusat expressed his wry bemusement at seeing the same old accounts constantly being rejuvenated.³¹ Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, a willingness to tolerate plagiarism all but disappeared. William Tennant, an Anglican priest who nursed a vitriolic hatred of Indians, could only expect a hearing in the future from his ideological bedfellows, not from “philosophers,” after the anonymous reviewer of the reputable Edinburgh Review ascertained that in his Indian Recreations (1803) there was “not one single fact of any consequence which is not taken from some other person.”32 It was an altogether different matter if the intermingling of fact and fiction was openly avowed and aesthetically justified, as was the case in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes or the Baron de Lahontan’s report on North America from 1703.³³ Direct reference to earlier travelers was also permissible. While it is true that, as Harry Liebersohn has suggested, we comprehend the writers of travel accounts “most fullly when we view them not as isolated authors with full control over their written words but as actors in a global system of intellectual production,”³⁴ it is equally important to understand that, in an age that held “critique” in the highest regard, the knowledge thus gained and processed was subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

To the extent that the accumulation of European knowledge about Asiatic lands and peoples was conceived as a supranational, collective undertaking, all but the most individualistic travelers (such as Thomas Manning) submitted to the general process of increasing and critically assessing the common store of knowledge. When visiting more frequented regions such as Asia Minor, the Levant, or parts of India, some researchers adopted a specialized role. Assuming that their readers were already familiar with previous travel descriptions, they sought to add to their predecessors’ findings and, where necessary, to correct them. The learned traveler was expected to have the older literature stretching all the way back to classical antiquity at his fingertips, yet to approach it in a spirit of critical inquiry rather than one of unquestioning deference. At the beginning of the century Desideri, the voyager to Tibet, still felt obliged to justify himself at length for calling into question the authority of such notables as Athanasius Kircher and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.³⁵ By the century’s end, no such apologia was required. “Facing the tribunal of the public,”36 Volney made a virtuosically staged literary dispute with Savary, whose book on Egypt had appeared shortly beforehand, one of the key elements in his report on the Near East. Chateaubriand was continually referring—sometimes with an almost exaggerated display of erudition—to the older literature on Greece and the Orient, although he clung to it more closely than a Volneyan empiricism would allow; given the speed at which he traveled, he had no other option. The first edition (1811) of his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem still bristled with footnotes. In a bid to enhance the book’s aesthetic appeal, he reduced their number the following year and banished them to an appendix for the third edition.³⁷

A traveler attained classic status if his findings could be confirmed or empirically verified by later colleagues. Thomas Shaw’s or Carsten Niebuhr’s reputation was built largely on the strength of their verifiably accurate topographical descriptions.³⁸ Later travelers had nothing to correct and little to add. François Bernier owed his enduring fame in France not just to the literary quality of his gripping depiction of power struggles in seventeenth-century India but also to the accuracy of numerous historical details.³⁹ At least one author was canonized despite or perhaps even because of his copious errors: James Mill’s History of British India from 1817, subsequently set as a textbook for aspiring colonial officials, was reissued in 1858 in an unorthodox new edition by the India expert, Horace Hayman Wilson, who took issue with the author in a series of lengthy footnotes. Wilson had almost nothing positive to say about his distinguished predecessor. While his countertext left Mill’s original utilitarian polemic intact, it also discredited much of its empirical content and in so doing consigned Mill’s version to the historiographical archives.⁴⁰

Unlike observations of nature, descriptions of buildings or copies of inscriptions, claims made about historia civilis were difficult to confirm or correct empirically. Here old prejudices proved stubbornly resistant to criticism, as the abbé Grosier found to his frustration in 1818. With considerable effort and patience, he had corrected what he saw as the false claims about China made by M. de Guignes (Junior), only to have de Guignes neither respond to his objections nor refrain from repeating his errors in future.41 More serious was the systematic misunderstanding brought about by the continuing hold of certain “big ideas.” The most powerful of these was undoubtedly that of “oriental despotism.” Even reporters with a strongly empirical bent took its existence for granted and then looked about for post hoc confirmatory evidence. There will be more to say about this in chapter 10.

ANTHOLOGIES, COLLAGES, MEGA-NARRATIVES

Between the reporting observer and his readers stood all the activity of the literary world: editors, publishers, redactors, translators. By the time they reached the reader, the eyewitness’s original perceptions had already passed through a succession of filters. European images of Asia were not simply direct transcriptions of sensory impressions into a textual medium, nor were they even representations once removed. The representation itself was transformed by being processed in different media.

We must start with the most extreme cases. Some of the most significant works on Asia remained unwritten. Alexander von Humboldt was never given the opportunity to undertake the great Asian voyage that he had been planning—and the public expecting—for years. When the sexagenarian toured Siberia and Russian Central Asia in 1829, rather than writing the report himself he entrusted it to his collaborator Gustav Rose, whose execution of the task left much to be desired. Pater Claude Sicard S. J., who traveled in Egypt from 1712 until his death from the plague in 1726, discovered Thebes and had an unrivaled knowledge of the country and its monuments yet left few scholarly traces. “The true measure of Sicard’s accomplishments,” concludes a modern historian of Egyptology, “will never be known because most of his manuscripts, sketches, and maps were lost after his death.”⁴² Other works went missing. Thomas Manning’s extensive report on his trip to Lhasa has never been found.⁴³ John Briggs’s monumental history of Muslim India, said to have totaled eleven manuscript volumes in folio, was destroyed when the British Residency in Pune was looted in 1817.44 Some travelers lacked an opportunity to work up their notes into a proper report. Upon returning from Tibet and the Himalayas in 1664, Pater Johannes Grueber was interviewed by many scholars about what he had seen but committed virtually nothing to paper himself.⁴⁵

Editors intruded, partly by necessity, between the traveler and his texts. William Moorcroft’s notes were posthumously edited by Horace Hayman Wilson, the critical commentator of James Mill, in careless and piecemeal fashion. The life of this fascinating traveler to Central Asia and passionate horse breeder was first reconstructed by the English historian Garry Alder.⁴⁶ Several authors who had never visited the lands they were writing about drew on the papers of anonymous travelers, compiling accounts that were long regarded as definitive.⁴⁷ Learned wordsmiths refined the manuscripts of inept writers, just as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde in Paris adapted the reports sent from the Far East by his fellow friars to the stylistic tastes and religious and political sensibilities of his French contemporaries. The English reading public came to know the Jesuit letters only in ideologically expurgated form. As their editor explained, they had been purified of all Jesuitical influence, “such appearing quite insipid or ridiculous to most English Readers, and indeed to all Persons of Understanding and Taste.”⁴⁸ Besides, the English public preferred the vehemently anti-Jesuit report on China written by the Dominican Domingo Navarette in 1676, which could be read in English translation from 1704.

Not every travel report was presented from the outset in a form that was faithful to the original text. Sir John Chardin’s description of Iran was not even close to properly edited until 1735, twelve years after the author’s death; a completely reliable edition first appeared in 1811. The Italian merchant Nicolò Manuzzi (sometimes: Manucci), who lived in India from 1656 until his death in 1720 and, despite lacking any formal medical education, served for a time as a physician at the Mughal court, wrote a digressively anecdotal history of the Mughal Empire in Italian, French, and Portuguese that ended with the author’s memoirs. Even today, it is still cited by some experts as a half-credible source.49 In 1700 Manuzzi sent off parts of the manuscript to Paris. There the Jesuit François Catrou carelessly and irresponsibly used it as the basis for his anything-but-rigorous Mughal history, first published in 1705. Even in Great Britain, where literature on India was hardly in short supply, it maintained a presence on the book market until the early nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Manuzzi’s complete manuscript was later acquired by the Venetian Signoria but then left to moulder away in the archives, mainly for reasons of cost. A fairly faithful English translation was produced by an official in the Indian Civil Service, appearing between 1906 and 1908.⁵¹ The original has never been published. There were other cases where the urtext remained inaccessible. Demetrius Cantemir’s history of the Ottoman Empire, written in 1716, was brought to England as a Latin manuscript by his son Antiochus, the then-Russian ambassador in London, where it was translated and published (in 1735) by the editor and historian Nicholas Tindal. This version provided the textual foundation for the subsequent French (1743) and German (1745) editions.⁵²

Travel descriptions, particularly voluminous and expensive ones, were not infrequently offered in cheap abridgments. Often these were most readily available in so-called travel miscellanies, wholly or largely devoted to reports from the non-European world. Such anthologies—often in multivolume format—started appearing during the early stages of European expansion into countries engaged in overseas trade.⁵³ Around 1600, editors like Richard Eden and Richard Hakluyt were already setting high editorial standards. The travel miscellanies brought together widely dispersed materials, made foreign-language texts accessible in English translation, and, ideally, presented unpublished manuscripts as well. They covered a wide spectrum, ranging all the way from slapdash compilations lacking any kind of internal consistency, via ragbag anthologies, where the line between text and editorial commentary was often blurred, to meticulously produced mega-projects that met the highest philological standards of the day.

This last category included the nearly thousand-page compendium, Noord en Oost Tartarye (1692), the fruit of a quarter-century’s labor by Nicolaas Witsen, thirteen-time mayor of Amsterdam and an even longer-standing member of the VOC’s board of directors. Witsen never ventured further east than Moscow on his travels. Yet through his formative experiences as a student of the famous Leiden Orientalist, Jacob Grolius, as well as his zeal for collecting and his excellent contacts among travelers and scholars all around the world, he became one of the foremost experts on North and East Asia. These qualifications equipped him to present a vast array of previously unknown information in his magnum opus. Thanks to his contacts in Moscow, Russian informants who visited him in Holland, and the VOC’s internal correspondence, he was privy to information to which nobody else had access.54 Compilation had been a reputable literary procedure since Pierre Bayle’s recently published dictionary, at the very latest; in Witsen, it became a method for showcasing the newly discovered geographical and ethnological diversity of Siberia and East Asia. Like his contemporary Barthélemi d’Herbelot, who arranged his Bibliothèque Orientale in alphabetic order, the mayor of Amsterdam eschewed any systematic organization of his material. He preferred to orchestrate a rich and surprising polyphony rather than forcing the voices he had so painstakingly assembled to sing in unison.

A somewhat different approach was taken by his compatriot François Valentyn, a highly educated priest who had lived in the Moluccas and on Java from 1686–94 and 1705–14 while working for the VOC.⁵⁵ In the five folio volumes of his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien (1724–26), at almost five thousand pages the most comprehensive European work on Asia prior to Carl Ritter’s Erdkunde, he struggled to arrange his material systematically as the sheer abundance of his sources threatened at times to overwhelm him. On other occasions he faced the opposite problem, compelled to uncharacteristic brevity by a shortage of information about countries on the fringes of the Dutch Empire. The conditions under which the work was composed and printed also meant that the finished product—despite the author’s best intentions—turned out to be a compilation rather than an architectonically balanced description.56 Its open-ended character was further underscored by the fact that Valentyn interpolated dozens of official papers, letters, diplomatic instructions, memoranda, and other original documents, many of them previously unpublished. It has rightly been called “a kind of archive,” even though the author’s guiding hand can be sensed throughout.⁵⁷

Witsen’s and Valentyn’s methods for producing a collage of miscellaneous materials were applied less frequently by editors of later monumental anthologies. The most original work of the early eighteenth century, a Collection of Voyages and Travels in four folio volumes by the brothers Awnsham and John Churchill, still stayed relatively close to the sources. Published in 1704 and expanded in three subsequent editions, it mostly featured material that was new to English readers, edited from manuscipts, or translated from other European languages. The texts were lightly abridged and generally accurately reproduced, albeit haphazardly arranged.⁵⁸ In the following year, a competitor product appeared on a hotly contested market: a collection edited by Dr. John Harris. It contained little that was new, however, and it made deep cuts to the texts. The second edition of the Harris collection (1744–48) was curated by the multifaceted writer Dr. John Campbell, whose name did not appear on the title page. He introduced the method of presenting long sections of the texts in editorial paraphrase rather than printing them verbatim. Combined with long essays on history and trade, there resulted a continuous geographical description of the world that anticipated in parts another mega-project in which John Campbell would play a leading role, the English Universal History.⁵⁹

In 1745–47 John Green, editor of an immense collection that became known by the name of its publisher, Thomas Astley, went a step further.⁶⁰ Green did not reproduce a single original text in his New General Collection; he did not even bother “castrat[ing]” his sources, as he put it in his preface.⁶¹ Instead, he recast all the narrative passages in third person and separated the material into travel journals and general remarks about the country. The latter were culled from various reports and worked into so-called “digests,” chapters offering summarized information. In this way readers were spared repetition and had no need to leaf backwards and forwards to compare passages: “instead of a great many imperfect Accounts, which the Authors separately afford, he will be furnished with one complete Description, compiled from them all.”62 The raw material was thus more intensively processed than in earlier anthologies as the collection of voyages evolved into a kind of textbook for descriptive geography.⁶³ At the same time, the all-powerful editor now intervened between the voice of the describing witness and the reader. The immediacy of the original texts was lost. Only occasional page references pointed back to the sources. Indeed, when Green himself relied on another compiler—frequently Du Halde in the case of China⁶⁴—layer upon layer built up between the eyewitness and the final consumer of his information.

The “Astley Collection” was widely emulated on the continent, inspiring the century’s two most substantial travel collections. The Histoire générale des voyages (1746–59), produced by the abbé Prévost in fifteen lavishly illustrated quarto volumes of more than six hundred pages each,⁶⁵ began as a translation of Astley but was continued by Prévost on his own from the eighth volume after the English publisher had to cancel the project due to a lack of subscribers. The abbé translated the English version fairly faithfully but failed to consult the mainly Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch texts that formed the basis of the Astley/Green collection. Once he no longer had the English template to guide him, he retained its methodology while cutting and splicing the original documents in even more drastic fashion. For obvious reasons, he also gave more space to French travelers. In the entire work—most consistently in volumes twelve through fifteen—the rewritten travelers’ texts flowed together into a powerful narrative stream that Prévost, one of the best novelists of his time, knew how to navigate with elegance and unflagging momentum. “Pointless verbosity and tedious repetition” were to be avoided at all costs.⁶⁶

Prévost handled his sources more critically than Astley/Green, weeding out anything that struck him as particularly far-fetched or miraculous. Nonetheless, he saw his task even less than his English precursors in mere documentation but rather in the synthesizing achievement of the narrative historian.67 For him, histoire des voyages meant two things: the history of travel and that of the lands traveled. Prévost’s most ambitious goal was “a complete system of modern history and geography that represents the present state of all nations.”⁶⁸ That extended to the “philosophical” evaluation of conditions outside Europe and, still more, the activities of Europeans abroad. Prévost’s interest was far from antiquarian. In the later volumes produced under his personal control, he sought out the best and most recent sources he could find to convey as up-to-date an image as possible of their respective countries. In this he differed from those less reflective and ambitious compilers who blithely trotted out the same old warhorses from the early days of the Age of Discovery, without giving less educated readers a sense of the age and historicity of their sources.⁶⁹

The greatest German project of this kind was the Allgemeine Historie aller merckwürdigen Reisen (General History of All Curious Journeys), a monumental work in twenty-one folio volumes edited between 1747 and 1774 by a circle of scholars in Leipzig gathered around Johann Joachim Schwabe. It likewise began as a translation of the Astley/Green collection, although its editors added a good deal of their own material along the way. At first Schwabe’s team had sought to emulate Prévost’s “graceful style,”⁷⁰ only to discover that the abbé had made a number of mistakes and arbitrary changes. They then went back to the English original and a French-language edition that had appeared in Holland. Later, of course, they had no choice but to return to the Paris edition. Unlike the Churchill brothers, Schwabe and his colleagues did not generally take the trouble to translate texts written in languages other than English, French, and German directly from the source. They made more of a concerted effort than Prévost, though, to gauge and critically discuss the authenticity of the material. They also prided themselves on having done a better job at selecting the right “terminos technicos or artificial terms.” An extensive apparatus of footnotes was provided partly for this reason. Inconsistencies between statements made by different travelers were to be settled and fabrications eliminated. Like Astley/Green and Prévost before them, the editors paraphrased, streamlined, summarized, and systematized. Reflective remarks in the original were mostly cut. For all its colossal dimensions, the work was meant to be read from start to finish rather than dipped into at leisure. Schwabe was not merely advertising future volumes when he explained in his foreword:

The work itself is so constituted that the further into it one reads, the more delightful and pleasing it will become: and while much may seem perfectly obscure at the beginning, on account of the unknown lands and places mentioned therein, in the reports that follow they will be elucidated in such a way as to remove all traces of doubt from the reader’s mind. Thus ever more light will be shed, and at every moment the desire to gain further insight into this history will increase.71

By the century’s end, standards had shifted. On the one hand, Prévost was now criticized for being too ponderous and pedantic, too bland—lacking in “painterly force” (une peinture énergique)—and too timid in his “philosophical” pronouncements.⁷² His work was shortened and revised to suit current public tastes. The price fetched by his great work on the book market had plunged, we are told in 1808, and its only value now lay in the illustrations.⁷³ On the other hand, compilers with a scientific interest returned to the same ideal of unembellished, faithful documentation that Richard Hakluyt had already realized (by the standards of Renaissance erudition) in his collection from 1589. In 1807 one of the top connoisseurs of the literature expressed the prevailing norm in the following way: “The most useful collections would be those in which every original text is reproduced in full, with critical exactness and, where necessary, with elucidations for obscure passages.” But he was forced to concede: “Only it is unlikely there would be enough purchasers even to cover the cost of publication.”⁷⁴

Not by chance, Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations was now reissued for the first time since 1600, albeit in an expensive deluxe edition of only 325 copies.75 The last of the great British travel collections was planned more along the lines of Astley/Green than of Prévost. The collection edited between 1808 and 1814 by the Scottish geographer John Pinkerton was universal in scope and ambition. Unusually, a significant proportion of the whole was allocated to Europe: some six of seventeen volumes.⁷⁶ Pinkerton had nothing new to offer,⁷⁷ but he showed keen discernment in selecting texts that he regarded as having already attained classic status. In the four volumes on Asia, these ranged from Marco Polo and William of Rubruck, in the thirteenth century, to the most recent Survey of South India by Dr. Francis Buchanan. In Prévost, he took issue with the choice of excerpts, the destruction of the text in its original form through the paraphrasing intervention of an omniscient narrator, and “the easy parade of learned notes”⁷⁸—a charge that might have been leveled against Schwabe as well, and with even better reason. Annotations were not there to correct older authors from the supposedly more enlightened standpoint of the present day. Their sole function was “to illustrate obscure passages,… and in such a collection as the present there are happily few obscurities to illustrate.” Pinkerton took his own advice and limited himself to printing longer extracts, accompanying them with a minimum of commentary. His own geographical description of the world appeared separately.⁷⁹

With Pinkerton, the compiler’s self-assigned role as the most ambitious of all Historia authors had been played out, at first in Great Britain and then elsewhere. The different goals that encyclopedically minded authors such as Green and Prévost had sought to bring together in a single work now drifted apart. The geographer no longer aspired to be a universal historian. Travel literature now gradually lost its role as a privileged locus of geographical and ethnographical knowledge. Increasingly, it represented only itself. Charles-Athanase Walckenaer’s immensely rich collection of reports on Africa (1826–31) had virtually no other purpose than to illustrate a history of travel and to impart geographical information; it never made the Prévostian claim to be a history of Africa.⁸⁰ Older travelogues slowly receded into the auratic distance of museum exhibits, allowing them to be savored more than ever for their purely literary qualities. William Marsden’s edition of Marco Polo from 1818 was of epochal significance in this regard. The great Orientalist translated the text afresh and then did precisely what Pinkerton had rejected shortly before. He supplied very detailed notes, “calculated to bring the matter of the text into comparison with the information contained in subsequent accounts of travels and other well-authenticated writings.”81 Marsden—like Goethe at the same time in a different way—aimed to remove the stain of fraudulence from Marco Polo’s reputation and demonstrate just how astonishingly accurate his findings were. Unlike the footnotes liberally sprinkled throughout eighteenth-century collections, this successful rehabilitation was not designed to bring an old body of knowledge up-to-date by correcting flaws in the data, but rather to contextualize and historicize an author now elevated to the status of a classic. Only through Marsden’s influence did Marco Polo become what he has remained for readers ever since: a medieval writer. It was henceforth impossible to read him naïvely, and it now seemed ridiculous to hold him to the same standards of accountability applied to present-day authors.

Where compilers from the Renaissance up to Prévost and Schwabe had been grateful for every new text from abroad, the genre of the travel collection eventually collapsed under the ever-increasing weight of new information. In the final third of the eighteenth century, the international geographical literature had grown so vast that several journals were kept busy reviewing the latest publications in the field.⁸² Pinkerton got around the problem by selecting a canon. That was of little use to science, however, nor was it enticing enough for the general public. Other solutions had to be found.

Conrad Malte-Brun’s Annales de Voyage (1807–14), a mixture of travel collection and yearbook that initially appeared in periodic instalments, represented a remarkable attempt to make available the most recent material from all over the world. The Annales were the antipodes to Pinkerton’s collection of geographical classics. Whereas Pinkerton printed Engelbert Kaempfer’s century-old report as the definitive, still current text on Japan, thereby ignoring Thunberg’s more recent voyage,83 Malte-Brun began by instructing his readers about the collection of Japanese books, manuscripts, drawings, and coins left behind by the recently deceased Isaac Titsingh.⁸⁴

The increased demand for information concerning foreign and especially Asiatic countries, coinciding with an increased supply of such information, was met by several specialist journals. They had their archetype in the Asiatick Researches, edited since 1788 by Sir William Jones’s Asiatick Society of Bengal. Many of the contributions that appeared there were quickly translated into other European languages. Notable journals in Germany included the Asiatische Magazin (1806–11), overseen by Johann Adam Bergk and others, and the Magazin für die Kunde und neueste Geschichte der außer-europäischen Länder und Völker (Magazine for the Study and Recent History of Non-European Lands and Nations, 1817–18), jointly edited by the Indologist Friedrich Herrmann and an expert on the Americas. The German public had the Forster family to thank for the finest publications in the field: father Johann Reinhold Forster, son Georg, and son-in-law Matthias Christian Sprengel, a student of Schlözer’s and, from 1779, professor of history and librarian of the university in Halle, at that time an important center of learning. In 1790 Johann Reinhold Forster established the Magazin von merkwürdigen neuen Reisebeschreibungen (Magazine of Curious New Travel Descriptions); it continued well beyond his death in 1798, ending only with the publication of the thirty-seventh volume in 1828. The first sixteen volumes, edited by Forster himself, mostly offered new material about Africa and the Pacific, with contributions from the Asiatic region concerning India, in the main. The uniformly lengthy texts, in each case accompanied by copious explanatory and supplementary notes, often appeared at the same time or shortly thereafter in book form as well. Sprengel, who offered his father-in-law editorial assistance on the magazine, also published alongside it his own Auswahl der besten ausländischen geographischen und statistischen Nachrichten zur Aufklärung der Völker- und Länderkunde (Selection of the Best Foreign Geographical and Statistical Information for Illuminating the Study of Nations and Lands, 1794–1800). Völkerkunde, the study of (other) nations, here did not yet carry the restricted meaning of ethnology as the science of so-called “uncivilized” or “natural” peoples. Sprengel had originally conceived the journal with his brother-in-law Georg Forster, who died shortly afterwards following his ill-fated involvement in the Mainz Republic. Like Malte-Brun a little later, the superlatively well-informed Sprengel (who never traveled outside the German lands) printed only the most recent work in the field. Unlike his counterpart in Paris, however, he did not hold back from adding his own schoolmasterly, all-knowing commentary. In 1798 he published extensive extracts from Sir George L. Staunton’s report on Lord Macartney’s trip to China, which had appeared in London only the previous year.85 The limits of the report were critically discussed, and Sprengel could not refrain from observing that Sir George had evidently taken Georg Forster’s Reise um die Welt (Journey around the World) as his stylistic model without, however, even remotely matching it.⁸⁶

Travel collections were compendia of information about the world. They gave readers access to knowledge they would otherwise have been denied. At the same time, editors created images of the world in the way they selected, coordinated, and commented on texts. The individual text never stood on its own. It was always part of a purposefully arranged whole that bore little relation to the original context of observation. While decomposing the travel collection into less compact, less monumental media meant that information was now processed in a more scientific, up-to-the-minute manner, it also entailed the disintegration of Edmund Burke’s “Great Map of Mankind” into discrete cartographical projects. Once the encyclopedic order and the voice of the all-guiding historical narrator à la Prévost had disappeared, there was nothing left to replace them as frameworks of knowledge.

THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR

It was not just for the great travel collections that reports were translated in such volume. Almost no other literary genre could claim more widespread appeal beyond the authors’ homelands than travel descriptions from exotic parts of the world. The translator’s principal task, obviously enough, was to transmit texts to readers who did not understand the originals or were unable to access them. Whereas languages like Swedish or Russian were read by few in the core countries of Europe, knowledge of curricular languages—Latin, French, Italian, English, and German—was extensive among the scholarly and educated public. All the same, languages went through phases of popularity. Around 1800, Latin was a less important tool for scholarly communication than a century before, while English, at least in Germany, had risen during the same period from a position of relative insignificance to become utterly indispensable.87 The reason why all the authoritative travel reports were generally translated into the major European languages was not just so that a less linguistically proficient middle-class public could be supplied with commercially promising literary fodder. The translation of nonfictional texts fulfilled a secondary function it has since lost: improving critique. Originals were not sacrosanct; authors enjoyed no legal right to have their texts translated faithfully. The translator saw his relationship to the translated text as one of mastery, not servitude.

Such freedom could be used in different ways. Very few eighteenth-century translators felt duty-bound to cling slavishly to the text.⁸⁸ It was far from exceptional for translators to tamper with their material in the belief—mistaken or otherwise—that they knew better. In 1791 a certain E. W. Cuhn condensed James Bruce’s Travels into a two-volume “extract”—not, as he explained, because he was not up to the task, but because the Scottish author had squandered words in needless profusion, and “lacked much of the prerequisite knowledge and especially the spirit of philosophical observation needed for such a journey.”⁸⁹ Not everyone in Germany shared his opinion, given that a five-volume complete translation of the monumental work had appeared shortly before.90 Both German editions were fitted out with annotations and appendices by noted scholars. Such an approach had become commonplace by the end of the century, particularly in Germany. Fiction, too, inspired translators and editors to enhance its appreciation by attentive readers. The first Chinese novel to appear in English, in 1761, came with extensive footnotes by Thomas Percy describing the world of Chinese elite culture and citing a broad range of references.⁹¹ In the early nineteeth century, Robert Southey and other romantic writers were then to launch a new lyrical genre: the annotated oriental poem.⁹²

It was sometimes the case that even a translator who was quite willing to tinker with the original text could find nothing to tinker with. Friedrich Rühs for example, who on another occasion had taken the liberty “to excise the excrescences of the original and curtail its intolerable verbosity,”⁹³ dared not touch Mountstuart Elphinstone’s report on Afghanistan and made do with a few respectful explanations. In other cases the translator’s restraint owed more to the dictates of the market. Johann Christian Hüttner, who in 1804, the same year that the original appeared, published his German translation of Sir John Barrow’s report on the Macartney expedition to China, complained: “In order to make readable annotations to a journey, a translator must have more leisure than is granted him by German book fairs and the alacrity of competing translators.”⁹⁴ Hüttner limited himself to providing his German readers with concise explanations of British references. He thus annotates the Smithfield Market in London,⁹⁵ which Barrow mentions in passing, but has nothing to say about Barrow’s highly controversial statements on China. No one would have been better qualified to comment on this than Hüttner himself, who had been the sole German participant in the Macartney embassy and had already published his own report on the mission in 1798.⁹⁶ Based in London as a mediator between the great metropolis and the German cultural scene, he later became an important cultural broker who supplied Goethe and many other German contemporaries with news and texts from all parts of the overseas world.⁹⁷

In the ideal view of the Enlightenment, the comments and corrections made by the translator were supposed to transform the original into a superior work tool. Whether such ambitious claims were recognized was a theme of scholarly criticism. Thus, geographical experts rated Johann Tobias Köhler’s achievements as a translator of travel literature more highly than his superficial commentaries, whereas Johann Reinhold Forster was renowned above all for the learned improvements he made to the literature he introduced to a German-speaking public. Both Forsters, father and son, traveled to England in 1766 and initially made a name for themselves as fastidious translators of travel works into English. Georg Forster assisted his father with commercial translations from the age of twelve, at first from Russian into English. His Reise um die Welt, a landmark of eighteenth-century German literature, was written in English to allow him to compete on the book market as soon as possible with other accounts of Captain Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe. He did not get around to preparing a German edition until 1778–80. Financial need forced the Forsters to take on almost every translation project that came their way. Johann Reinhold even excused himself at times for having his name associated with second-rate products.98 More illustrious—and more characteristic for his oeuvre⁹⁹—were projects that gave him the opportunity to bring his immense knowledge to bear on scientifically worthwhile texts. In extreme cases a new work could arise as a result. Thomas Pennant’s Indian Zoology (1769), a study of Ceylonese and Javanese ornithology, was so expanded and improved in Forster’s hands that Pennant himself, one of the foremost zoologists of his time, acknowledged the superiority of Forster’s Indische Zoologie, a bilingual German-Latin edition that appeared in Halle in 1781. Indeed, he admired it so much that he had Forster’s text translated for the second English edition (1790).¹⁰⁰ The editorial work carried out by a scholar of Forster’s standing was often carried over into subsequent translations. In his 1798 translation of one of the most important non-British descriptions of India, Fra Paolino da San Bartolomeo’s Viaggio alle Indie Orientali (Rome 1796), Forster added 190 extensive annotations that were subsequently retained in the Danish (1799) and English (1800) editions. In the Age of Enlightenment, such a transnational cumulative effect was more the rule than the exception.

A further example is provided by Carl Peter Thunberg’s travel report on South Africa, Java, and Japan, which first appeared in Swedish in four volumes between 1788 and 1793.101 By 1792, two German translations of the first three volumes were competing against each other on the market: one, translated by the young Kurt Sprengel under the editorial oversight of Johann Reinhold Forster, cut the original by around a half; the second, undertaken by the Stralsund headmaster Christian Heinrich Groskurd and authorized by Thunberg himself, performed some light cosmetic surgery on the occasionally bulging material. The biggest international impact was made by the lavishly presented French edition of 1796, translated by the well-known Orientalist and keeper of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Louis Mathieu Langlès. Drawing on Groskurd’s text as his principal source, he also appears to have consulted the original and borrowed several of the cuts and many of the annotations from the Forster-Sprengel edition. Langlès added his own notes, approaching the famous Lamarck for advice on the sections dealing with the natural world. Thunberg’s report became known in Japan in the early twentieth century through a partial translation of the French edition. Thunberg’s text was therefore widely circulated in Europe in a translation twice removed from the original—thrice removed, once it arrived in Japan.

The literary middlemen who came between the author and his readers thus only rarely conceived of their role as guardians of textual authenticity. What the public was given to read at the end was often a polygraphic aggregate resulting from deletion and insertion, rearrangement and paraphrase, commentary, translation, and incorporation of supplementary matter. Editors of travel collections obviously used all these techniques, but an individual work could equally be the final stage in a long production chain. A further stage was added when a compilation such as Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages was cherry-picked by a second-order compiler like the abbé Raynal, editor-in-chief of the Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (1770).102 At each stage of revision, information was filtered out, perspectives were shifted, and judgments modified. Merely through the mechanisms of the literary market, whatever immediate reality an eyewitness report may once have contained became diluted and fictionalized. But that is only one side of the coin. On the other side, in the hands of critical scholars such as the two Forsters, Matthias Christian Sprengel, Langlès, Pallas, Walckenaer, or Horace Hayman Wilson, editorial intervention and critical commentary could scientifically undergird a primary text, subject it to comparative scrutiny, and qualitatively transform it, thereby increasing its use value. Assuming they were not motivated by blind opportunism, editors could be the most careful readers of these texts. They could chase up much that had escaped the author’s notice: inaccuracies in geographical terminology or nomenclature, for example. In the best case scenario, such reécriture resulted from a creative reading that filled in gaps and connected the text with relevant contextual information. So long as travel texts could still be useful, this was a justifiable procedure. It no longer made sense once they were read only for pleasure.

TOPICALITY AND CANONICITY

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a need for more current information made itself felt in sciences with an interest in Asia, a growing awareness that news about other civilizations was rapidly becoming obsolete. The great travel collections were no longer found satisfactory, and editors took considerable liberties with their source texts in an effort to keep pace with the latest scholarly developments. Yet in many areas, an antiquated knowledge base persisted.

In several cases this was due to a lack of up-to-date information. Robert Knox’s description of Ceylon from 1681 maintained its standing for around three generations, surpassed in its descriptive detail only by François Valentyn’s lesser-known Dutch work (1724–26).¹⁰³ A later German visitor reported mainly on his personal experiences.104 Much the same held true of Japan. The Tokugawa dynasty held fast to its policy of strict isolation throughout the entire eighteenth century. Unlike its British counterpart, the EIC, in the period after Warren Hastings, the VOC did not see itself as a patron of scholarship. Jealously guarding its monopoly on contacts with Japan, it did little to encourage study of the country. Engelbert Kaempfer’s report, based on observations made between 1690 to 1692, therefore remained the most important European source on Japan for more than a century after its belated publication (in English) in 1727, although later universal histories and travel collections sometimes presented new material from VOC documents and other minor sources.¹⁰⁵ Thunberg had added to the Westphalian physician’s description following his visit in the 1770s without superseding and replacing it as a whole. As late as 1844, James Cowles Prichard, an assiduous scholar, could find no other authority to cite on the physical appearance of the Japanese than Kaempfer.¹⁰⁶ Matthew C. Perry, the commander of the American squadron that “opened” Japan in 1853/54, consulted an 1853 abridgment of Kaempfer’s old report before his second voyage.¹⁰⁷ Such anachronism was sometimes understandable. Even older works than Kaempfer’s, such as reports by Jesuit missionaries from Portugal, retained their value in the case of Japan, given that vast stretches of the country’s interior had not been visited by foreigners since the silk curtain had come swishing down in the 1630s.

Yet even when there was no shortage of recent reports, images of the country conveyed by earlier accounts could still prove remarkably persistent. In 1670 François Bernier had described Kashmir as a terrestrial paradise. Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century and Friedrich Schlegel in the early nineteenth were still recycling this vision of the French physician and philosopher, while as late as 1810 Joseph Goerres was making the bizarre claim that Kashmir had been the political center and “earth navel” of antiquity.¹⁰⁸ In several cases, the impression of a timeless Orient was deliberately fostered. Thus, in 1744 there appeared in London an edition of the letters sent from Turkey two centuries earlier by the imperial ambassador Busbecq (Busbequius), with no information given about the context in which they were written.109 All the year numbers were omitted from the appended author biography, taken from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire. It was thus made to appear that Busbeck, whose uncommonly lively correspondence was considered of outstanding documentary value by no less an authority than Hammer-Purgstall,¹¹⁰ was describing the current Ottoman Empire.

Students of Asia who did not want to make things too difficult for themselves continued to reach for the same familiar, superannuated standard works. Until around 1730, the Geographia generalis (1650) of Bernhard Varenius was considered the definitive textbook on Asian geography.¹¹¹ A popular work on China published in 1679 was written as if the Ming dynasty, toppled in 1644, were still in power. More surprisingly still, even the learned abbé Grosier spoke in 1818 of the fifteen provinces of the Chinese Empire, notwithstanding the fact that the Qing dynasty had long ago reorganized the empire into eighteen provinces.¹¹² Around 1800, other authors were still citing Paul Rycaut, the leading English authority of the seventeenth century, or even Richard Knolles, the late-Elizabethan author of the perennially popular Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), as the most reliable sources on the Ottoman Empire.¹¹³ Hammer-Purgstall knew what he was talking about when he lamented in 1815 that most geographical statistics in Western literature on Turkey were a couple of centuries out of date, “more noteworthy to the historian than to the statistician and politician.”¹¹⁴ Against this background, the fact that Lord Byron read Knolles’s stirringly eloquent historical narrative for pleasure attested to a new way of approaching old texts.¹¹⁵

The sheer prestige of a traveler was often what secured him the public’s loyalty. Marco Polo, for example, enjoyed great respect in the eighteenth century. Having long been dismissed as a fantasist, the early Jesuit reports from China were able to confirm many statements of his that had previously been disbelieved.¹¹⁶ Even the Berlin geographer Carl Ritter, perhaps the greatest expert on old European travel literature there has ever been, and anything but an uncritical reader, praised Marco Polo for his “in many parts deficient yet otherwise classic and unique work.”117 Repeated attempts were made to put together a canon of exemplary travel texts. There were four categories: excellent, good, suspect, and make-believe, declared the geographer Bruzen de la Martinière in 1768. In his opinion, the “excellent” descriptions of Asia included books by Pietro della Valle, Adam Olearius, John Chardin, Simon de La Loubère, Martin Martini, Cornelis de Bruin, Nicolas Gervaise, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Louis Le Comte, and Nicolaas de Graaf—a list that has stood the test of time surprisingly well.¹¹⁸ By around 1800 this hit parade had by general consensus expanded to take in Pococke, Shaw, Kaempfer, and Steller as well as the more recent reports by Niebuhr, Pallas, Marsden, and Volney, in addition to James Cook’s and Georg Forster’s books on the South Seas. Chardin’s voyage to Iran, reissued in a meticulous new edition by Langlès in 1811, occupied for many a position at the “apex of all travel descriptions,”¹¹⁹ eventually ceding this place to Alexander von Humboldt’s journey to the Americas. Far from being the exclusive preserve of experts, these were classics that formed part of Europe’s common cultural capital. They were, as one reviewer somewhat ponderously opined in 1812, “books which men pretending to general knowledge will not well be excused from reading, at some period of their lives, in an unabridged form.”¹²⁰

Humboldt was not the first to discover that the fame accrued through his travels translated into social recognition. Johann Reinhold Forster was received by no less a personage than King George III, although the monarch spoke only of England during the audience and neglected to mention Forster’s recently completed journey around the world.¹²¹ The young Barthold Georg Niebuhr, not yet the great historian he would later become, found that all doors stood open to him in learned England and Scotland. “You can scarcely imagine,” he wrote from Edinburgh in March 1799, “the universal interest and esteem with which people ask after Father and speak of him.”¹²² The name of the traveler to Arabia later became almost proverbial, as when Leopold von Ranke invoked the intrepid spirit of a Carsten Niebuhr in making a trip—to the archives.¹²³ For Volney, his voyage to Egypt and Syria in 1783–85 was a stepping stone to fame, royalties, and a political career.124 The success of his travel book exceeded even his expectations. It was widely read not just in Europe but also in North America.¹²⁵ Yet when touring the United States between 1796 and 1798, he passed up the chance to become a forerunner of Tocqueville. Instead, he contented himself with a task he held to be “more serious, more scientific” than his comprehensive account of the Orient: a monograph on the USA’s climate and soil conditions.¹²⁶ By that time his name had already been made.

TRACES OF READING

It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the “great” reports on Asia and their countless lesser satellites were actually read and utilized. Descriptions of overseas travel undoubtedly made up an important section in the major state and princely libraries, in many lending libraries and reading societies, and in numerous private collections. John Locke owned 195 titles in the genre—a considerable figure for the late seventeenth century.¹²⁷ Johann Wolfgang Goethe first encountered travel literature as a child, while rummaging through the collections of his father Johann Caspar and his maternal grandfather Johann Wolfgang Textor.¹²⁸ Johann Reinhold Forster’s professional interest in the field was reflected in the roughly 1,500 travel descriptions in his possession, while Carl Ritter held around 1,200 works on Asiatic countries alone in his enormous private library in Berlin, not counting all the major travel collections.¹²⁹ More representative was the scholar’s library assembled in the same city by Johann Bernoulli, which featured 159 bibliographical entries in the division “Exotic History and Travel Description; Universal Travel Collections.” Bernoulli estimated that in the 1780s, over fifty private individuals owned similar collections in the Prussian capital alone.¹³⁰

It is easier to say which of the well-known eighteenth-century scholars and writers drew to any significant extent on material from travel descriptions, historical works on Asia, and translations of Asiatic texts in their own work. Montesquieu’s and Herder’s intimate familiarity with this literature has been established beyond doubt. An entire volume of the standard edition of Montesquieu’s works is devoted to his excerpts from and reading notes on the literature about Asia; he had a special confidence in the mundane writings of itinerant merchants who could not afford to indulge in fantasies and wishful thinking about other peoples and countries.131 Edward Gibbon documents his own omnivorous reading habits—not just restricted to works on antiquity—in countless footnotes.¹³² Voltaire, Turgot, Buffon, Rousseau, and Raynal in France; William Temple, John Locke, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Thomas R. Malthus in the British Isles; Schlözer, Gatterer, Meiners, Blumenbach, Goethe, Heeren, Kant, Hegel, and the Humboldt brothers in the German-speaking world were all outstandingly well-versed in this literature.

The interest in Asia displayed by these authors was in each case bound up with specific motives and purposes. None of them was interested in Asia for its own sake, nor did they seek to make specialized contributions to regional geography or oriental studies. What they had in common was that they all sought to give their ideas universal scope rather than confining them to Europe. This was rather to be expected from natural scientists such as Buffon, Linnaeus, or Alexander von Humboldt than from interpreters of social and cultural life. All the same, Voltaire, Gibbon, Schlözer, Herder, or Heeren sought out new ways of writing history as world history, or at least as Eurasian history. A peculiarity of Gibbon in this regard was his use of recent travelogues to add descriptive detail to scenes from late antique and medieval history. In showing how Asiatic peoples had influenced European history throughout the ages, he sought out all the translations from Asiatic languages he could find. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who learned a few such languages, found linguistic raw material for a global comparative theory of language in travel works such as those of Marsden or Pallas. Both these authors also provided Kant with grist for his anthropological observations. Samuel Johnson, for decades a central figure—if not the central figure—on the London literary scene, had “a truly imperial range of geographical interests,” devouring and commenting on almost all the new travel literature that came his way.133

Economic theory, a discipline which today has been almost totally emptied of cultural content, also drew on data from overseas. It was established by Adam Smith as the historically informed, theoretical study of the creation and distribution of wealth. As such, it did not confine itself to European developments but sought to explain Asia’s relative backwardness as well.¹³⁴ With each new edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus worked in ever more ethnographical material concerning “checks on population” in known civilizations.¹³⁵ Numerous political and historical authors also thought in universal terms. Writing about India in successive editions of his Ideas (1793, 1804, 1815), Heeren gradually weaned himself off the ancient authorities and turned increasingly to more recent travel literature. Edmund Burke was among the first to recognize the immense importance of the conquest of India for English domestic politics. Through voracious reading, he soon acquired a wealth of knowledge that made him one of the best-informed British experts on India of the mid-1780s.¹³⁶ Montesquieu developed in his De l’esprit des lois (1748) a globally conceived system of the interrelations between social forms, political orders, and environmental conditions. Lesser-known authors followed in his footsteps: the English physician William Falconer, for example, who in 1781 published an intelligent book on universal environmental history, or Christian Cayus Lorenz Hirschfeld, significant as a theorist of gardening, who shortly before had sketched a world history of hospitality.¹³⁷

ARTS OF READING

Just as no author of informative travel literature could escape the dilemma of having somehow to demonstrate his trustworthiness, so too his readers found themselves faced with the difficulty of having to verify his claims. Only the universally admired celebrity travelers were exempted from this obligation. In all other cases, readers were left to form their own judgment about a text’s credibility. The more that European thought aspired to cosmopolitan openness, and the more important information sourced from overseas became as the basis for a universal science of mankind, the greater was the need for what we would now call critical literacy.138

To be sure, not all readers brought a critical awareness to the printed page. Some—Buffon, Meiners, and even Montesquieu, to name a few—were known for indiscriminately ransacking texts of all levels of quality for whatever happened to suit their requirements at the time.¹³⁹ The same reproach was leveled against Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren towards the end of our era. Although Heeren was a far more conscientious reader, he failed to meet the entirely novel criteria of scientific source criticism developed by the so-called Historical School in Germany, as Barthold Georg Niebuhr demonstrated to devastating effect.¹⁴⁰ In the second half of the nineteenth century, most readers tended to take a position midway between these two extremes of blind faith in the author’s word and methodically disciplined skepticism.

The examples of geography and cartography provide clear evidence for the extraordinary achievements source criticism could attain even in the early eighteenth century. Despite rarely leaving Paris, Jean-Baptiste d’Anville was able to compare and collate the information that came his way to draw detailed maps of China, the tsarist empire, the Ottoman Empire, and other parts of the world. The maps were so accurate that even decades later, despite all the new data that had been gathered in the meantime, they were still being used with profit and regarded with amazement.¹⁴¹ Such impressive results were harder to attain when evaluating historical sources on Asia. Critical examination of sources was difficult enough even when limited to Europe, although a serviceable methodology had been in place since the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, there was a perceived need to arrive somehow at an evaluation of Asiatic sources as well. But how was that even possible when two or more historians flagrantly contradicted each other in their accounts of the exact same incident? Who could be trusted? Who was in the right? The first priority was to find out as much as possible about the background to the texts: the dates when they were written, their authors, and their varying points of view. These were difficult tasks in the infancy of oriental studies.142

The same problem was identified by Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten, Johann Salomo Semler, and the team of scholars they gathered around them to work on their seventy-five volume Allgemeine Welthistorie (General World History, 1744–1804), based on the English Universal History (fifty-one volumes, 1736–66).¹⁴³ This project, which eclipsed even Schwabe’s Allgemeine Historie in the sheer industry required to produce it, attempted to apply at least a minimum of critical source evaluation in the numerous volumes devoted to non-European history. In his foreword from 1744, Baumgarten barely went beyond such generic requirements as multiple documentation, cross-checking of sources, and “attentiveness to other people’s experiences.”¹⁴⁴ The task had to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. When weighing up several Persian chronicles on the history of Genghis Khan, for example, the editorial team favored those that showed the greatest degree of convergence with Chinese sources (as translated by Pater Gaubil).¹⁴⁵ The Jesuits had always praised Chinese historiography.¹⁴⁶ For a time it was considered the most reliable in all Asia, particularly once Chinese accounts of the advanced age of their own culture gradually came to be accepted. Edward Gibbon went considerably further in his source criticism. When considering how Sultan Bayezid I was treated following his capture in 1402 by the conqueror Timur (or Tamerlane), he extensively discussed his half-dozen sources from the vantage point of the chroniclers’ possible bias and their distance or proximity to the events in question.¹⁴⁷ Marshalling all the evidence at his disposal, he did not hesitate to reach a conclusion on the matter. What was new in Gibbon, compared to Baumgarten, was the idea that no single source could be trusted completely, since they were all to some extent subject to perspectival distortion. The indispensability of source criticism had, however, become widely accepted by the mid-eighteenth century. Not only scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity came to be judged by this humanist standard; it was applied to oriental studies as well. Increasingly, later historians took to criticizing their predecessors for their cavalier treatment of the sources.148

Travel reports and historical sources were closely related. The acceleration of temporal perception in the late eighteenth century went hand in hand with an increasing awareness of the historicity of travel descriptions. Travelogues could rapidly fade into obsolescence, as we have already seen in the case of travel collections. In 1799, impressed by Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the suspicion dawned on the German theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus

that we will soon have need of previous descriptions as our sole possible source for distinguishing the authentically oriental elements [of Egyptian life], which for so long were handed down unchanged, from those affected by modernization and Europeanization.¹⁴⁹

Over time, there emerged something like a critical methodology for evaluating travel reports. It oscillated between literary discussion centered on aesthetic questions and scientific source analysis—with a pronounced tendency to the latter, given that travel reports were primarily valued for their empirical descriptive content. The underlying impulse was mistrust. It could extend very far indeed: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, excluded only a handful of classic texts—for Asia, Chardin, Kaempfer, and some of the Jesuit reports—from his generalized suspicion. Writing in 1754, he failed to see a “Great Map of Mankind” but was impressed by the enormity of European ignorance about the greater part of the world. He deplored the fact that the greatest minds preferred to stay at home, leaving the public to be deceived by a plethora of “unsophisticated travelers.” “The entire earth,” exclaimed the exasperated philosopher, “is covered with nations of which we know only the names, and we dabble in judging the human race!”¹⁵⁰ De Pauw, admittedly a dubious authority given his bizarre prejudices against Americans, thought that only ten out of a hundred travelers spoke the truth: sixty lied from stupidity and thirty from self-interest or sheer willfulness.¹⁵¹ More cautious readers such as Voltaire, Gibbon, or Schlözer did not go quite so far. They were prepared to judge each case on its own merits. Several critical strategies helped them to do so.

Firstly, a detailed knowledge of the older literature was the indispensable foundation for critique. In its absence, cases of plagiarism would go undetected and time would be wasted on texts “which purport to describe the author’s travels yet only ever copy the work of previous authors.”152 Those with a good working knowledge of the genre could trace the filiations of particular statements and images along a chain of texts. A second criterion was the trustworthiness implied by the reporter’s social status. This was admittedly a fairly blunt instrument, for by the eighteenth century, at the latest, almost all travelers involved in public discussion were scholars and gentleman,¹⁵³ and as such felt committed—at least in theory—to the ideal of accurately descriptive, unbiased eyewitness. “In any travel writer,” the world traveler Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff observed on behalf of many, “strict love of the truth is not a virtue; it is a solemn duty.”¹⁵⁴

Trustworthiness was thus a moral, legal, or epistemological problem, not a social one. Sir John Barrow makes this clear when criticizing the report of Æneas Anderson, a fellow traveler to the Far East in the Macartney Mission. Anderson is not to be blamed, Barrow is gracious enough to concede, for having only been Lord Macartney’s valet; his fault lies solely in allowing his memoirs to be defiled by a vulgar “hack writer.”¹⁵⁵ In a lengthy review of Pater Du Halde’s China compendium, Samuel Johnson had already posed the question in such a way as to preclude consideration of the author’s person:

When, therefore, Accounts are produced of equal Authority with Regard of the Reputation of the Writers, yet manifestly contradictory, and which therefore cannot both be true, are we to conclude that either of the Relaters drew up his Narrative with a fixed intention of deceiving Mankind?¹⁵⁶

Dr. Johnson found that discrepancies between different accounts of the same thing were not the result of malice or ideologically skewed vision. Instead, they could be traced back to simple human error—understandably enough, given the traveler’s often-limited range of observational possibilities. They should be regarded “rather as Errors than Falsehoods.”157

If this was the case—and it seems likely that Johnson’s view was widely shared—there remained a third critical strategy: the search for noncontradiction. It was simplest when several mutually independent, demonstrably nonplagiarizing authors concurred in their description of events. Then there could be no room for reasonable doubt. If two of them differed markedly, then domestic readers, unable to inspect the situation on the ground for themselves, had to look out for signs that one text might be more trustworthy than the other. The fact that Mr. Francklin liked the landscape around Shiraz in Persia, whereas Mr. Scott Waring did not, could be dismissed as a mere matter of taste. But when one claimed that the summer temperature in Shiraz never rose above seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit, while the other maintained that it never fell below ninety, who was right? The eagle-eyed reviewer, noticing a number of minor inconsistencies in Scott Waring (a ninety-degree night was said to be “disagreeably cold”), came down on the side of Francklin.¹⁵⁸ He was therefore in general the more trustworthy of the two authors. A distinction thus needed to be made between intratextual and intertextual consistency.

To be sure, freedom from internal contradiction was in itself no guarantee for the empirical value of a report. In the summer of 1703, a young, presumably French-born adventurer—tall, blond, speaking fluent Latin—presented himself to the British public as an inhabitant of Formosa called “George Psalmanazar.” At the beginning of his picaresque career he had passed himself off as a Japanese. He claimed to have been proselytized by the Church of England, although this did not prevent him from eating raw meat in front of gaping London crowds, allegedly a custom of his savage homeland. That Formosa, under the name of Taiwan, had recently been incorporated into the Qing empire was known only to a handful of English savants and proved immaterial to the unfolding hoax. “Formosa” sounded suitably exotic and remote. The visitor from outer space proved to be ingenious in fending off skeptical inquiries. The light complexion of his skin was accounted for by the gruesome assertion that the members of the Formosan upper class spent their entire lives underground.159

Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, published in 1704, was pure fiction, but it was a fiction so plausible, so artfully contrived and so entertaining to read that for a while it reaped its author unwarranted fame as an eminent ethnographic authority. French, Dutch, and German translations were not long in waiting. Psalmanazar’s book is a masterly parody of a contemporary travel description. The story reveals, incidentally, just how seriously the eighteenth century took the criterion of truthfulness in such texts, for the prank, once discovered, was roundly condemned as a scam.¹⁶⁰

The fourth critical strategy—comparison between texts—was also the most frequently employed. The Scottish social scientist John Millar, for example, saw the analysis of agreement and disagreement between texts as a reliable method for determining a work’s trustworthiness without the need to question “the veracity of the relater.” Millar described the procedure with characteristic lucidity, starting with the observation that the sheer number of travel accounts facilitates critical reading:

From the number, however, and the variety of those relations, they acquire, in many cases, a degree of authority, upon which we may depend with security.… When illiterate men, ignorant of the writings of each other, and who, unless upon religious subjects, have no speculative systems to warp their opinions, have, in distant ages and countries, described the manner of peoples in similar circumstances, the reader has an opportunity of comparing their several descriptions, and from their agreement or disagreement is enabled to ascertain the credit that is due to them.… We cannot refuse our assent to such evidence, without falling into a degree of scepticism by which the credibility of all historical testimony would be in a great measure destroyed.¹⁶¹

Alternatives were not always so easy to resolve as the contradiction between the two English travelers regarding the climate in Shiraz. Were children exposed at birth in China, and if so, how widespread was the practice? Cornelius de Pauw, the stay-at-home anti-Chinese polemicist, was generally shy of citing his sources. In 1773, writing in the spirit of Enlightenment humanitarianism, he had forged a pointed argument for Chinese barbarism from the supposed prevalence of infanticide.162 Almost every new book on China now dealt with the topic. Staunton estimated that in Peking, two thousand infants were exposed by their poverty-stricken parents every year. Barrow somehow inflated this figure to nine thousand, deploying his uniquely powerful rhetorical arsenal to renew de Pauw’s attack on the Chinese.¹⁶³ Yet neither Staunton nor Barrow claimed to have seen any of these cruelly abandoned children during their trip to China with Lord Macartney in 1793/94. Two other habitually careful observers on the mission, neither prone to pro-Chinese sentiments, testified some years later that they had not seen a single victim during their several months in the country.¹⁶⁴ Pierre Sonnerat, ordinarily quite prepared to think the worst of the Chinese, accepted the fact of infant exposure but turned the tables on China’s critics, accusing them of hypocrisy and challenging them to contemplate the miserable conditions in French foundling homes.¹⁶⁵ And Voltaire, who held the treatment of children in China to be the darkest blot on the country’s reputation, did not forget to add that even London had not had a home for foundlings until a few years previously (1741, to be exact).¹⁶⁶

In the end, the matter proved impossible to clarify since even the Jesuits, usually the most reliable informants in cases of doubt, became tangled up in contradictions. All the reports of infant exposure ultimately led back to them. On the one hand, they had been condemning the practice for decades as perhaps the greatest stain on Chinese society; on the other hand, in the absence of other converts, they had welcomed the chance to baptize dying children.¹⁶⁷ After de Pauw discovered the polemical potential of this theme, the startled fathers went into damage control mode: earlier generations of Jesuit priests had misunderstood Chinese customs; they had been misled by their own catechists; most of the victims had been suffering from incurable illnesses anyway; the European editors of the Jesuit letters had doctored their reports to make conversion figures look more impressive. In short, the rate of infanticide in China was no higher than in other parts of the world.168

This astonishing and all-but-unprecedented burst of Jesuit self-criticism, which cast doubt on the testimony of even such highly regarded scholars as Parennin and Gaubil, left nothing but confusion in its wake. Everyone spoke of “Chinese infanticide” and nobody admitted to having seen it. When Thomas R. Malthus, the first economist to propose a systematic theory of population, attempted to gain an overview of Chinese demography, the methods for critically comparing texts recommended by Millar and others were thus of little use to him. His solution was a sensible one under the circumstances. He first determined the Chinese descriptions he had found translated in the Jesuits’ Lettres édifiantes et curieuses to be the most authentic documents relating to this question. Setting the fraught matter of empirical evidence to one side, he then discussed the functionality (and hence the functional plausibility) of infanticide within the broader context of sociology and Chinese reproductive behavior.¹⁶⁹ The solution resided here in the theory.

Comparison presupposed that a certain quantum of observational data was available to be compared. Psalmanazaar was believed for so long because he had chosen in Formosa a country that was completely closed off to Europeans, even to Jesuit missionaries. And how could the comparative method be applied to Kaempfer in the absence of contending reports on Japan from the same era? European ideas about Chinese landscape gardens rested entirely on the testimony of a single alleged witness, Sir William Chambers.¹⁷⁰ It is impossible to say what he actually saw in China for want of comparable descriptions in other European sources. An astute contemporary, Christian Cayus Lorenz Hirschfeld, was quick to voice his doubts. Why had no earlier travelers left behind descriptions of these famous gardens? Had not Du Halde expressly claimed that the Chinese understood little about gardening? And did they even have sufficient mathematical knowledge to plan a landscape? Hirschfeld did not accuse Chambers of lying. Besides, whether Chambers had correctly described the reality of what he saw was a secondary matter. Chambers, as convincingly interpreted by Hirschfeld, was an original thinker and sincere lover of horticulture who had nursed the vision of a new, more natural type of garden “in his intellect and in his imagination”:

He was clever enough to admix to these ideas elements that were native to the Chinese view of nature. In sum, he planted British ideas on Chinese soil to give them a more striking appearance and greater penetrative power.171

If it was therefore frequently impossible to go beyond plausible hunches and speculation on the likelihood of a piece of information, this necessity could still be transformed into a virtue by men of genius. Edward Gibbon was no conjectural historian but a solid empiricist, always careful to indicate the status of an assertion. He could never have written his magnum opus without trusting in the “probability” of the extant sources. James Bruce has a nice anecdote about where this could lead. Dr. Thomas Shaw, the celebrated traveler to the Orient, observed members of a North African Arab tribe feasting on lions. This was something that transcended the bounds of probability: Europeans he told about it “took it as a subversion of the natural order of things that a man should eat a lion, when it had long passed as almost the peculiar province of the lion to eat man.”¹⁷² The circumspect doctor therefore omitted to mention this particular episode in his report. Nobody would have believed him. Decades were to pass before James Bruce saw something similar—and tasted lion meat himself.

FRACTURED REPRESENTATION

In the eighteenth century, we can say in summary, description of overseas travel was understood, not as a genre of fictional literature, but as an instrument for empirically apprehending the world in the service of the natural sciences and a transcultural “science of mankind.” Nonetheless, it was and remained a literary artifact rather than an impersonal, quasi-photographic protocol of events. Numerous intermediary steps lay between the direct sensory impressions of the traveling observer and the bound volume the European reader eventually fetched from his bookshelf: always the act of writing, with generic literary conventions, assumed public expectations and market requirements all playing on the author’s mind; then the book’s design, production, and distribution by publishers, illustrators, printers, and booksellers. Often the text passed through further hands: those of editors, redactors, and translators, who felt no compunction about interfering with it, or those of compilers and anthologists, some of whom opted for the open form of collage, others of whom—the abbé Prévost springs to mind—freely reworked their source material.

The representation of foreignness was consequently not a process by which reality came to be depicted in any direct, unmediated way. On the other hand, it would be an exaggeration to deny eighteenth-century texts on Asia all relation to empirical reality and regard them purely as figments of the imagination. Contemporary readers were cleverer here than many later theorists. Hungry for knowledge of other cultures, they chomped through forests of literature on Asia in order to give European historical, anthropological, economic, and sociological discourses as universal an evidential basis as possible. They knew that there was no alternative to the literature produced by traveling eye- and earwitnesses and to translations from oriental languages. That is why they developed a critical methodology for reading these texts. Applying its strategies, they assigned a text its place in the literary tradition, kept an eye out for plagiarism, checked the text for internal logical consistency, compared it with other reports, and finally considered it from the viewpoint of plausibility and probability. An assessment of the traveler’s personal credibility was also important: a reputable scholar, gentleman, or honnête homme was considered more trustworthy than an unknown outsider. Yet this aspect of biographical appraisal should not be rated so highly as tends to occur today by those who advocate a “social history of truth.”173 Critical investigation of texts and assessment of their truth claims was, in the first instance, a matter of reasoned argument and debate within an egalitarian republic of scholars. In this cosmopolitan public sphere, social distinctions took second place.