IX

Savages and Barbarians

These writers might as well say that all Negroes and all sheep are alike; but this would only prove the carelessness of their scrutiny, that they have not the eye of the shepherd or the slave dealer.

—Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820), “Observations générales sur les Indiens ou sauvages” (1803)1

Volney, who traveled through Egypt and Syria from 1783 to 1787 and narrowly survived the Terror of 1793, moved on to the United States in 1795 and made the New World the subject of wide-ranging studies. At first glance, the quotation from one of his papers on America seems disturbing. Volney appears to bracket Africans and animals in a dehumanizing way. Yet the sentence has a second meaning, quite representative of the time when it was written: the days of the traveling amateur and the impressionistic travel writer are over—a group in which Volney probably also included his younger self as an oriental traveler. The observer now has to be an expert. He has to subject what he sees to the closest possible scrutiny. His main duty is to make scientific distinctions and classify both the natural and the human world. These two worlds meet in the figure of the “savage,” now slowly morphing into the less flamboyant “primitive.” Wherever the European travels he encounters savages, a mass of nonwhite strangeness that presents a surmountable challenge to the scientific mind.

But let us pick up the thread from the preceding chapter. In the eyes of eighteenth-century Europeans, the “elemental-historical” was a barbaric force that erupted into the civilized world from outside and destroyed it. Sometimes it also worked to revitalize a civilization that had been debilitated by luxury and lethargy, infusing it with previously untapped primal energies. The barbarian was both the destroyer of refinement and the enemy of overrefinement. In the best case scenario, where the barbarian invaders proved willing and able to adapt to the vanquished culture, new syntheses could emerge. That helps explain the fascination of China, where it was precisely the “barbarian” Manchus under the Kangxi emperor who ushered in a renaissance of Chinese civilization. Partly for this reason—there were others—Kangxi was in European eyes the most illustrious monarch in all Asia: the barbarian king turned peace-bringing Augustus.2 Similar to the Gothic ruler Theodoric for Edward Gibbon,³ Kangxi was for his admirers the paragon of the ideal prince, the self-transcending barbarian.

Not all “barbarians” acted as elemental forces of historical change, however. Most had long since ceased to march at the vanguard of world-historical progress. Having been neutralized as a political and military threat, it was now easy to treat them as objects of ethnographic inquiry. The Others—savages as well as barbarians—were assigned to ethnography and ethnology once they no longer inspired terror. For Asia, this shift commenced in the eighteenth century.

LOST SAVAGES

By the mid-seventeenth century, nobody could seriously expect to find monstrous human-animal hybrids, such as those described by the ancients, prowling the forests of Asia. While the European discourse on Asia in the Enlightenment era was still shot through with illusions and wishful thinking, it no longer resorted to pure fantasy. To the enlightened mind, the same natural laws obtained everywhere in the world. In Asia, much was possible that strained belief when reported in Europe; the ascetic exercises of Indian holy men (“fakirs”), for example, appeared all but incomprehensible. Yet no European scholar believed in the existence of exotic alternative universes in which the laws of physics and physiology were suspended. The fabled East of djinns and flying carpets, but also of violence and debauchery, found its literary monument at the dawn of the eighteenth century in Antoine Galland’s translation of the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, before being rediscovered and enriched with gothic elements by William Beckford in his novella Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786); it later became a common setting and source of materials for romantic literature. Writers such as Byron, Coleridge, Pushkin, Wilhelm Hauff, Théophil Gautier, Thomas Moore, and Thomas de Quincey pored over travel reports to stimulate their imaginations.4 The worlds of Asia as imagined in fiction and Asia as perceived in reality intersected in a variety of ways, yet few contemporaries—least of all creative writers, who often ornamented their works with footnoted references to travel reports—ever confused the two.

If the East had now been unfabled, were there at least still “savages”: not human-animal hybrids but human beings who had not yet been ennobled or spoiled (depending on the observer’s philosophical taste) by modern civilization? The “noble savage” had been discovered in America and was subsequently rediscovered in the 1760s in the South Seas. The myth of man in the state of nature was staged in the rugged Canadian wilderness and on the sun-drenched islands of the Pacific.⁵ In Europe, wildness had been domesticated away to such an extent that even the discovery of wild horses set mouths agape.⁶ In Asia “primitive” social conditions persisted at the outer edges of the great empires.

Each of the Asiatic high cultures had its own ideas about primitive savagery and barbarism. These often coincided with the views of European observers. When the Jesuits in Peking reported on the imperial campaigns to repress ethnic minorities in the mountains of southern China, they did so entirely from the perspective of the imperial court, which believed itself the center of all civilization.⁷ The non-Han aborigines of Formosa and the mountain tribes in the tributary state of Tonking were likewise represented as savages.⁸ In June 1822 the British consul Dr. John Crawfurd examined a member of the Ka people introduced to him by his Siamese host:

I had brought to me to-day an individual of the wild race called Ka. This people inhabit the mountainous country lying between Lao and Kamboja and still preserve their rude independence. The Siamese make no scruple in kidnapping them whenever they can find an opportunity. In consequence of this practice, a good number of them are to be found in a state of slavery at the capital. My present visitor had been taken about three years before. His features differed strikingly from those of the Siamese.… In intelligence, I found him greatly superior to what might reasonably have been expected.9

In Vietnam the same traveler learned that the neighboring Cambodians were regarded as barbarians, and in Burma the ethnic Karen people were described to him as savages.¹⁰ Chardin had earlier reported that the Persians viewed the Muscovites and Tatars in much the same way.¹¹ Almost everyone whom Europeans categorized as barbarians looked down on their own barbarians in turn.

By common consent, there were still people on Europe’s periphery who remained similarly untouched by civilization: Lapps, Albanians, Irish, Highland Scots, and many more. When the Russian army marched into Paris in 1813 with its Tatar and Caucasian regiments, the sight struck both awe and fear into the hearts of many. The mountain warriors from the Caucasus, in particular, brought home the ambivalence of wildness, since only a minority of them were subjects and auxiliary troops of the tsar. Most peoples of the Caucasus had staunchly defended their freedom against Russian encroachment and now had to put up with being told that they were “ignorant in matters of religion and law, uncouth in manners, more bandits than petty thieves, false, deceptive and disloyal to themselves and others.”¹² In the “art of robbery,” wrote one of the few Westerners to visit them, the Chechens in particular had attained a “great barbarian mastery.”¹³ In the Caucasus, as almost nowhere else, the law of the jungle seemed to prevail in an anarchic countersociety: a state of nature under civilization’s eyes. Attentive observers noticed, however, that customs such as hospitality or blood vengeance were by no means archaic leftovers from a purported “childhood of humanity”; they served as functional equivalents for stable social institutions.14

In the eighteenth century, the most primitive savages of all were deemed to be the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, the New Zealand Maori, and also, towards the end of the century, the Australian Aborigines and South African Bushmen. It was very rare to find conditions in Asia that were equally far removed from what Europeans understood by civilization. The surest sign of this is a paucity of reports on cannibalism, the most drastic indication of barbarism. William Dampier, by no means averse to sensationalist reporting, assured his readers that he had not encountered a single cannibal during his thirteen-year circumnavigation of the world.¹⁵ According to the experts, in the reams of literature devoted to Asia in the seventeenth century there are only two authors who claim to have witnessed cannibalism, in both cases on the Indonesian island of Amboina.¹⁶

The story was much the same in the eighteenth century. There are occasional reports of people driven by hunger to eat human flesh, such as in the Indian city of Patna in the 1760s.¹⁷ Gibbon claims—half in provocation, half in jest—that the Christians who set out on the First Crusade, and not some woebegone Asiatic starvelings, provided the greatest and almost sole example of medieval cannibalism.¹⁸ William Marsden contends in his History of Sumatra that the Batta (Batak) people, otherwise civilized enough to dress in colorful fabrics, play orchestral music, and adroitly handle muskets, engaged in ritual cannibalism. Never having witnessed this with his own eyes, however, he relied mainly on literary tradition and voiced his own doubts at the end of his discussion.¹⁹ After thoroughly looking into the matter, Sir Stamford Raffles concluded that the Battas’ former custom of consuming their unproductive elders had been sacrificed to progress. He nonetheless did not completely place his trust in such an alleged improvement in morals, writing as a precaution to his friend Charlotte, Duchess of Somerset:

Notwithstanding the practices I have related, it is my determination to take Lady Raffles into the interior and to spend a month or two in the midst of these Battas. Should any accident occur to us, or should we never be heard of more, you may conclude we have been eaten.20

Sir Stamford and Lady Sophia came back sound in life and limb, but with grisly tales to tell about the alleged juridical cannibalism of the Battas, who were said to sacrifice fifty to sixty convicted criminals each year in peacetime. In principle, Raffles found such behavior, if it had actually occurred, no worse than the public corporal punishment inflicted on malefactors in the recent European past. In both cases he placed his trust in the gradual progress of civilization.²¹

One of the rare descriptions of an Asiatic people languishing in a state of extreme barbarism is found in Captain Michael Symes, the author of two detailed reports on Burma. In early 1795, while traveling from Calcutta on his first mission to Burma on behalf of the EIC, Symes and his entourage visited the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Here they encountered a coast-dwelling tribe numbering more than two thousand, “a degenerate race of Negroes with woolly hair, flat noses and thick lips.”²² These people went around stark naked, lived in the simplest wooden huts, subsisted almost entirely on a diet of speared fish, and coated themselves in a layer of hardened mud to protect themselves against insects. Symes recoiled in horror from such brutishness, but he also found words of praise for the virtues of the Andamanese: they never developed a taste for the liquor introduced to them by foreigners, they always longed to regain their liberty when placed in captivity, and they practiced a sun and moon cult that struck him as “the purest devotion of an unenlightened mind.”²³ A cautious observer, Symes felt that it would be reckless to declare these people to be cannibals without hard evidence. It was equally impossible to clarify whether or not they believed in an afterlife. He expressed his irritation with reserve, shunning any outright display of abhorrence, but he also showed no sign of wanting to idealize this species of homme naturel. Symes instead approached his subjects with clear-eyed realism, as when he diagnosed them with chronic malnutrition resulting from nutrient-poor flora and fauna as well as a lack of cooking utensils. In short, the learned British officer proved an early exponent of what ethnologists today call “cultural materialism” or “cultural ecology.”

Travel writers returning from Asia had no other candidates apart from the wretched Andamanese to offer the eighteenth century’s yearning for unspoiled wildness. Only the natives of Kamchatka, harder to reach than the South Sea Islanders, had what it took to become something like the Tahitians of the North. In the course of the Great Northern Expedition they were visited and described by two of the most intrepid travelers of the age: the young Russian Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov, who spent the period from September 1737 to June 1741 on a research trip to Kamchatka, the easternmost tip of the tsarist empire, and Georg Wilhelm Steller, who arrived on the peninsula in September 1740 and remained there until March 1745.

The question of which qualities defined a people as “primitive” had been a topic of lively debate since the mid-sixteenth century. The usual answer, in brief, was that savages lacked three things: laws, religion, and morals.24 That more or less remained the state of discussion until, beginning in 1748, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Ferguson developed a more sociological concept of primitiveness that foregrounded technology and the division of labor. Krasheninnikov, still untouched by these new ideas, applied a tangible criterion to ascertain whether or not he was dealing with savages: they were people who had never come into close contact with Europeans, as could be inferred from their ignorance of alcohol and tobacco.²⁵ This held true for most Kamchadals.

The natives of Kamchatka are as wild as their country itself. Some, in the same fashion as the Lapps, have no permanent dwelling place, but move from one location to another, driving their reindeer herds along with them.… The nomadic peoples live in iurts or huts made of reindeer hides, the others in underground dugout iurts. In general, all these natives are idolaters, and are totally ignorant and illiterate.26

This was a report from a first-contact situation. A few decades later, under the tsarina Catherine II, official attitudes towards the indigenous population of Siberia softened for a time, and the discourse on the “natives” became calmer and less dismissive. Written in the early 1750s, Krasheninnikov’s detailed ethnography draws out the contrasts with Europe. The antipode to Western civilization could be found at the opposite end of Eurasia. All that Europeans and Kamchadals (more precisely: Itelmens) had in common was that both believed themselves to be the happiest people on Earth. The Itelmens had a completely different sense of time from Europeans. Private ownership of property was unknown to them, there being more than enough land for everyone. Their trade with each other and with their neighbors was more a ceremonial exchange of gifts, carried out not for personal gain but to secure the basic necessities of life. Their notions of sin and virtue were utterly utilitarian and amoral: “They regard as acceptable anything that can gratify their desires and passions, and they consider sinful only those actions which make them feel real harm.”²⁷ Divorce was a straightforward matter, while no undue fuss was made about sex before marriage. Their dead were thrown to the dogs—hardly surprising for a society in which dogs were the most valued commodity: “whoever is eaten by the dogs will have good dogs in the other world.”²⁸ Their greatest pleasure was to laze about doing nothing. They only hunted, fished, and worked when they had no other option. They lived entirely in the present; past and future held no interest for them. “They have no knowledge either of riches, of honor, nor of glory; consequently they know neither greed, ambition, nor pride.”²⁹

Steller, an even shrewder observer, draws a similar picture of the pleasure-loving Itelmens of Kamchatka. Not only did they go through life blessedly unplagued by material concerns, their musical artistry was such as to enthuse even the contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel:

Besides eating they take great delight in singing. Just as it may truthfully be said that this jovial nation is predisposed to music above all else, so one can only marvel at their songs, which have nothing wild about them, but are performed cantabile and composed in perfect accordance with the rules of music, rhythm and cadence, such that it appears almost inconceivable that this people should be capable of the like. The cantatas of the great Orlandus Lassus … are far less pleasing to the ear than the arias of the Itelmens, which are not only sung in unison but also ably supported by middle voices.30

In addition, the natives were sexually uninhibited and left their civilized visitors little choice, given the underdeveloped state of the monetary economy, but to partake of the local freedoms:

Any man who comes to Kamchatka and does not take a woman or live with one in secret companionship will find himself forced to do so by necessity. Nobody will wash for him, sew for him, or perform him the least service without payment in the form of copulation.³¹

Almost two decades before the circumnavigator Bougainville acquainted Europe with the joys awaiting visitors to the earthly paradise of Tahiti, Steller and Krasheninnikov described the naïve happiness of a prelapsarian community in similar terms. But first impressions could be deceptive. In the South Seas, and previously among the “primitive” inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, Bougainville had been struck by the unhierarchical, quasi-organic democracy that others had already perceived at work in several North American tribes.³² Krasheninnikov draws on the same register:

they [the people of Kamchatka] had always lived in complete independence without rulers or laws. The elders, or those who were distinguished for their valor, were preeminent over the others in each ostrog [village]. The preeminence, however, consisted only in that preference was given their advice over that of others. Aside from that there existed complete equality among them; no one might command another, nor would anyone presume of his own accord to punish another.33

Yet those halcyon days were long gone. By the time the scientific expeditionaries visited the peninsula, the traces of the brutal Cossack conquest launched in 1697 could no longer be overlooked. Large parts of Kamchatka that interested the tsar only as a source of sable furs had become little more than a target for Russian colonial exploitation.³⁴ Steller and his Russian friend were aware that it was already practically impossible to make statements about the Itelmens’ authentic culture. Around 1740 they observed the natives to be conspicuously belligerent; their clans and villages were pushing each other to the brink of extermination. Had it ever been thus, the young European scholars asked themselves? Was their constant infighting an expression of their innate character or a result of the brutalizing effects of the Russian invasion on all aspects of society?³⁵ The visitors had no way of knowing the answer. They were reluctantly forced to concede that no foreigner had ever seen the Itelmens in their pristine, uncontaminated condition. Steller laments in general “how strongly the loss of natural freedom can change our inclinations and manners” before relating this to the situation in Kamchatka:

For this reason one can say that Kamchatka has changed beyond recognition within a short time, and finds itself in a far worse state than before. The more the Itelmens fraternize with the Cossacks, the closer they live to the ostrogs,³⁶ the more they befriend Cossack and Russian customs, the more dishonest, mendacious, deceitful and duplicitious they become: the less they do all these things, the more honesty and virtue they still display in their conduct.³⁷

The dream of homo naturalis was at an end in Asia before it had even begun in the South Pacific. When the sobering reports from Kamchatka first became known in Western Europe—Krasheninnikov was published in English translation in 1764, Steller in German in 1774—they could suggest at least two things to careful readers. On the one hand, “noble” and “ignoble” savages could not be clearly distinguished from each other in ethnographic reality; on the other, the authentic truth about the primitive Other had already been disturbed by contact. Only a minority of European intellectuals followed Rousseau in his critique of civilization, projecting utopian wishes onto an idealized homme naturel. The more common question was how a savage became a barbarian.38

FOUR TYPES OF BARBARISM

Until well into the eighteenth century, European ideas about societies organized differently to their own remained dominated by concepts inherited from ancient ethnography. Many early modern ways of coming to grips with the alien had been pioneered by the Greeks: positing a binary contrast between civilization and its opposite, describing civilizations in comparative terms, deriving biological and cultural differences from climatic and other environmental factors, theorizing the origin and evolution of culture.³⁹ Other civilizations, such as the Chinese and the Arab-Islamic, independently arrived at quite similar ways of classifying, explaining, and dealing with foreignness. In numerous non-European languages there were evaluative words and phrases that roughly matched the semantic field of the “barbarian” in Europe. Of all the terms for designating otherness available to eighteenth-century Europe, “barbarian” and “barbarism” were still the ones bandied about most often. Since the word’s meaning became terribly diffuse over time, tracing its etymology back to Greek usage is as futile as trying to arrive at a half-way accurate definition. The Enlightenment had no universally accepted concept of barbarism.

First of all, “Barbary” (Barbarei, Barbarie) was the common name for the “Berber lands” of North Africa.⁴⁰ Because the buccaneering corsairs who lived there were some of the most notorious troublemakers in the Mediterranean, they soon became identified with the barbarousness of their conduct. Secondly, inhumane cruelties of all kinds were termed “barbaric,” regardless of whether they were committed by Europeans or non-Europeans. Calling Europeans barbaric meant unmasking their claim to superiority as hypocrisy. The implicit assumption—and the ultimate criterion for judgment—was that “real” barbarians could be expected to behave barbarically all the time. Alexander von Humboldt repeats a topos found in early Spanish critics of colonialism (such as Bartolomé de Las Casas) in a diary entry from September 1802, where he contends that Europeans “behave more barbarically when abroad than the Turks—and worse, because they are even more fanatical.”41 In 1762 Justi invites his readers to consider whether there is anything more barbaric than warfare as routinely practiced in Europe today, and he encourages them to find such misconduct more deplorable than the crimes allegedly committed by cannibals half a world away.⁴² Faced with the atrocities that accompanied the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571, Hammer-Purgstall recalls the barbarism “of the whole age,” citing Ivan the Terrible, the Huguenot Wars, the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the horrors unleashed upon the taking of the Estonian-Finnish fortress of Winterstein by the Russians in 1573 as the most shocking examples: “If this could happen in France and Finland, how could anything different be expected in Turkey?”⁴³ Gibbon relativizes and neutralizes the accusation of barbarism by showing how Crusaders and Muslims (with whom he sympathizes more than with the Christian knights) “despised each other as slaves and barbarians.”⁴⁴

“Barbarian” is used in a third way when an entire community’s way of life is characterized as uncivilized. This does not necessarily mean that they are guilty of any barbaric acts (in the second sense); barbarians can also possess vital natural instincts or be harmless dolts. Barbarism is here simply the antonym of civilization; more precisely, it is a negatively charged marker of deficiency. Barbarians are people who do not share the cultural practices that are taken for granted in the imperial center: language, religion, notions of justice, social norms, and so on. But periods of regression within the historical cycle of an empire or high culture can also be barbarian (in the sense of uncivilized): the European Middle Ages, for example, were barbarian from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment, especially the seventh, eleventh, and fourteenth centuries.45 Voltaire and Gibbon, in particular, never missed an opportunity to point out the lapses into barbarism that punctuated the history of civilization.⁴⁶

Characterizing foreign nations as “barbarian” could give rise to endless disputes. A barbarian, it was said in jest, was someone whose mouth starts watering at the sight of a Jesuit missionary.⁴⁷ Arbitrary criteria for exclusion, old stereotypes, and new experiences were all mixed up in these debates. Nobody in Europe ever dreamed of calling the Japanese “barbarians.” Japan was the only country in Asia that was always recognized as a civilization in its own right. Differing opinions could be expressed about China, even if the voices proclaiming it to be barbarian remained at all times in a minority. The opposite held true of the Turks, who were respected by Europeans for their military prowess far more than they were admired for their cultural achievements. Even their most vocal champion, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ultimately saw the conflict between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as one “between civilization and barbarism.”⁴⁸ Such, at any rate, was his verdict on seventeenth-century Turkey; from around 1700 he noted a certain softening of Turkish customs.⁴⁹ The Persians, conversely, had been regarded since the days of Herodotus as a highly civilized nation, an appraisal that their political renaissance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century seemed only to confirm. The chaos that descended on the land in the eighteenth century cast doubt on this judgment. Persia now became the only Asiatic country in which a Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all—appeared to have been realized in the present. Many who affirmed the barbarism of Asiatic peoples recognized that the concept was far too sweeping to capture nuances and changes over time. With regard to the Mongols, Hammer-Purgstall suggested, should not a distinction be made between their savage barbarism before Genghis Khan and their organized barbarism in the aftermath of his institutional reforms and imperial conquests?50

Fourth, over the course of the eighteenth century, the idea of barbarism as a state of deficiency gradually came to be supplanted by the notion that barbarism referred to a stage in social development. There had already been stage theories in antiquity, and they would go on to reach a high point of sophistication and complexity in nineteenth-century “evolutionism.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were bound up with some of the most intellectually contentious questions of the era. In particular:

• What was the relationship between biblical historia sacra and its chronology to the potentially far older—even pre-Adamite—history of heathen nations such as the Chinese, Egyptians, and Chaldeans?
• How do religious ideas develop? In particular, how did monotheism first arise?
• What is the origin of language?
• How did social ties, social inequality, and the authority to rule emerge from a primordial state of humankind?

A phase of “barbarism” played a part in almost all the theories that ventured answers to such questions. This could mean different things to different authors.

In the eighteenth century, the idea that the dawn of human history had witnessed a golden age that was succeeded by a decline into barbarism found ever fewer adherents. It endured only in a tradition of primitivism reformulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in the idea that early societies were particularly powerful incubators of artistic talent, as expressed in anonymous folk poetry and in figures like Homer or the Celtic bard Ossian (who turned out to be an invention of the Scottish poet James Macpherson). This template of an early cultural flowering that all too quickly wilted into degeneration was now no longer seen to pertain to the entire human race, however much such ideas continued to be applied to individual civilizations. It was replaced by theories of man’s rise from primitive beginnings to the pinnacle of civilization.51

Such theories came in two versions.⁵² On the one hand, the transition from barbarism to civilization, from the state of nature to the state of culture, could be envisaged as a foundational act: either by a wise lawgiver (législateur) or through consensus between parties to a social contract. On the other hand, a gradual progression through a series of stages was also conceivable. Whereas sixteenth-century thinkers, confronted with the sacred and profane meaning of the discovery of American Indians, had construed “barbarians” to be human beings left behind by the march of progress,⁵³ in the late eighteenth century they were generally credited with the potential to advance along the path to civilization. In the best case scenario, barbarians could liberate themselves from their constraints; failing that, they could always be educated to freedom. Why a given people found itself at a given developmental stage at any given time was a question that could only be answered through empirical research.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, “barbarism” was widely regarded as a secondary development following on from a stage in which humans eked out an existence close to nature: barbarians were incompletely denatured savages.

Montesquieu, who tended to apply the concept far more liberally to the European early medieval period than to non-European cultures, distinguished savages from barbarians by arguing that, while savages live in small scattered bands or hordes, barbarians come together to form larger political associations. The former were largely gatherers, the latter herders. He cited the Siberian tribes as examples of the former; in the latter category he placed the Mongols, who proved themselves capable of creating a vast (albeit short-lived) empire.⁵⁴ Adam Ferguson saw private property as the key differentiating criterion: while savages have no inkling of it, barbarians recognize it de facto even if there are no legal guarantees put in place to protect it, as there are in more advanced societies. Among barbarians, the relative equality of the first phase gives way to clear power hierarchies, which are ordered and reordered through constant struggles for dominance.55

This understanding of barbarism as a transitional phase between savagery and civilization was intended to be descriptive and value-neutral. It was more substantial than the simple concept of barbarism as the opposite of civilization. Yet Montesquieu and Ferguson made little use of it, and Adam Smith, another great social scientist of the time, completely avoided it, preferring instead to distinguish between dominant “modes of subsistence”: hunting, pasturage, farming, trade, and manufacturing. The sociological concept of barbarism proved too blunt an instrument to be useful, given that it encompassed all premodern high cultures, wherever they happened to be. By the nineteenth century it could be found only in latter-day stage theorists⁵⁶ as well as in some versions of ethnological evolutionism. Its demise in the 1830s as a category pertaining to a universal theory of societal development was sealed by a very narrow definition: “barbarians” are nomadic peoples in the process of forming institutions and establishing permanent settlements, as well as illiterate farmers who lack the higher arts and have nothing but the “rudiments of civil society and a state.” This definition was said to include most black Africans, several Malay ethnic groups, and a number of mountain tribes in Asia.⁵⁷ By that stage the concept had already migrated to where it would be principally domiciled for the rest of the nineteenth century: the myth of the inner demons that were tormenting Europe.

THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

No contemporary inhabitants of Asia fitted the eighteenth century’s image of the “barbarian” better than the Tatars (or Tartars). Unlike the desert Arabs, the competing candidates for the role, the Tatars not only fulfilled the criterion that they were a nomadic people who had moved beyond the stage of primitive savagery; they also embodied the raw forces of history that had been pacified not long before. All the most devastating scourges of history, from the Scythians and Huns via the Turks and Mongols up to the conquering Manchus at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, seemed to originate in that “terrible vast land in deepest Asia.”58 As late as 1788, Sir William Jones was still speaking of “the great hive of the northern swarms, the nursery of irresistible legions.”⁵⁹ In the words of another author, Tartary was “the great officina gentium whence such myriads of barbarians have at different periods poured into the more cultivated regions of the earth.”⁶⁰

By the late Middle Ages, “the Tatar” was already the best known of all barbarians.⁶¹ In contrast to the Arabs, who besides living in desert tents as Bedouins had developed a sophisticated urban culture, the Tatars appeared never to have risen above a subsistence level.⁶² Those living furthest to the west, the Crimean Tatars and the Nogai Horde, were considered “the wildest people in Europe,” as one writer was still declaring with a slight shudder in 1820.⁶³ Calling someone a Tatar was a choice insult. Voltaire hurled it at the English in India, Chateaubriand at the Turks on a number of occasions.⁶⁴

Where was Tartary? Medieval travelers to Asia could still make for an obvious destination: in the first half of the thirteenth century, the court of the Mongol great khan in Karakorum was not just the political heart of Inner Asia but also one of the great power centers of the medieval world. Following the breakup of the Mongol world empire, the revival of Chinese strength under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and the beginning of Russian eastward expansion in the late sixteenth century, Inner Asia came to be seen in the West as a kind of no-man’s-land between the empires: a world of boundless grass steppes ranged by hordes of nomadic herder-warriors unbeholden to anything resembling a unitary state.

In the seventeenth century, it became common to split Tartary into western (= Mongol) and eastern (= Manchu) halves. Tartary itself, however, seemed to extend far beyond the area controlled by these two peoples or ethnic groupings. At a time when borders between territorial states were becoming increasingly fixed, the very indeterminacy of this space allowed exotic fantasy to take flight. Thus the English geographer Richard Blome, who takes Tartary to mean the country between the Volga and China, between the Caspian Sea to the south and the Arctic Ocean in the north, remarks in 1670 of the people who inhabit these far-flung regions: “they are very rude, barbarous and revengeful, not sparing their enemies, who in revenge they eate, first letting out their Blood, which they keep, using it as Wine at their Feasts.”65 This was lurid fantasy even by the standards of the time, fed less by distorted travel reports than by the very lack of post-medieval reporting. New information was not long in coming. Working independently of each other, Nicolaas Witsen and Pierre Avril compiled the seventeenth century’s scattered knowledge of North and Inner Asia.⁶⁶ Reports of recent Russian overland voyages to China were publicized, augmented in the 1730s by the accounts given by Swedish prisoners-of-war of their experiences in Siberia.⁶⁷ In 1735 Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, drawing on the travels and research of Pater Gerbillon, devoted almost the entire fourth volume of his Chinese encyclopedia to Mongolia, now little more than a Sino-Manchu protectorate.⁶⁸ Russian research into Tartary got underway with Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt’s journey of 1720–27 and was continued in the Great Northern Expedition.⁶⁹

Firsthand observation of the Tatars did much to normalize their image. “We found them to be good company,” wrote Johann Georg Gmelin in 1733, “and the once-dreaded name of Tatar held no more terror for us.”⁷⁰ But achieving greater ethnographic clarity was a slow process. That Tartary was inhabited by “an extraordinary number of peoples”⁷¹ had been a literary commonplace since Pliny. Yet who these peoples were and how they could be told apart from non-Tatars remained uncertain. Those who adopted a maximalist definition treated even China under Mongol (Yuan dynasty, 1279–1368) and Manchu rule (Qing dynasty from 1644) as part of Tatar history.⁷² Sometimes Tibet was included, sometimes not. Witsen’s map of Tartary (1690) was the first to chart the region with any degree of accuracy; in 1706 it was supplanted by Delisle’s map, which in turn was superseded by d’Anville’s map in 1735. None of these representations set down sharply defined external borders. The idea that “Greater Tartary” was the area between the 57th and 160th meridians east and the 37th and 55th parallels north could expect to find some support.73

As early as 1730, the Swedish captain and Russian prisoner-of-war Philip Johan Tabbert, subsequently ennobled under the name of Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, had criticized Europeans’ unwillingness to distinguish between the peoples of “High Asia” (as he was one of the first to call it). He saw a symmetry in the way both sides employed sweeping generalizations:

And likewise to this day the people of High Asia, when they give us Europeans a name, make no distinctions among our nations, but call them all Frang or Frank, whether they be from Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, England or Holland.⁷⁴

In 1768 Johann Eberhard Fischer, the expert on Siberia, justly complained “that when Europeans speak of Tatars, I have not the faintest idea who they are talking about.”⁷⁵ Such criticism made little impact. Admittedly, towards the end of the eighteenth century it became less attractive to label everyone living in the central part of the continent by that name, and more common to adopt a narrower meaning that excluded Mongols and Manchus.⁷⁶ The term was nonetheless fuzzy enough, and in 1824 the researcher on Central Asia, Isaac Jacob Schmidt, still felt compelled to polemicize against that “vacuous, antiquated … common name.”⁷⁷

“TARTARY” IN GEOGRAPHY, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, AND ETHNOGRAPHY

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the astonishing situation came about that three almost unrelated discourses on “Tartary” flowed alongside each other.

Firstly there was a series of geographical reflections that gradually dispensed with the notion of Tartary. Philippe Buache, the Cartesian geometrist among eighteenth-century geographers, developed a technique of topographical description that attached cardinal importance to the mapping of mountain ranges and river systems. Such an analysis revealed a high-altitude arid plateau at the center of Asia. All the great Asian mountain chains radiated from this plateau like spokes from a hub, and all the continent’s major rivers arose at its edges.78 Central Asia thus did not consist of endless steppes on which mounted archers rode impetuously from one skirmish to the next, but of deserts, salt lakes and chilly highlands.⁷⁹ Paradoxically, these barren landscapes were the natural origin of the great riverine civilizations. This reorientation in spatial perception led to the continent being recategorized into North, Central, and South Asia, as recommended by Gatterer, among others.⁸⁰ What was crucial was that, on the one hand, previously unified Tartary was now divided into Central and North Asia; Siberia thus became a distinct geographical entity. On the other hand, the image of Tartary’s “endless expanses” underwent revision as the extraordinary height of the central plateau became visible in relief. The geographer August Zeune spoke in 1808 of “High Asia” as an “elevated bowl valley,” while Carl Ritter, the era’s best-informed expert on Asia, referred in 1817 to the continent’s “exalted middle.”⁸¹ As a consequence, both North and South Asia, and perhaps China as well, appeared as lowlands extending from High Asia down towards the sea. The gigantic mountain massifs of the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush, still barely known in Europe, became the rooftop of the world. Peter Simon Pallas, who unlike the armchair theorists had at least traveled the Atlas Mountains and had written the most correct orographic description of Central Asia to that point, spoke of the “roof of Asia” (le toit de l’Asie) being located amidst “awe-inspiring mountain ranges in the North of India, from which Tibet and the Kingdom of Kashmir radiate outwards.”⁸²

This new spatial awareness affected the historico-philosophical discourse on Tartary. Ever since the biblical teaching that an earthly paradise had once existed had begun to be taken less literally, theorists of the genesis and worldwide dispersal of the human race had been searching for the place where civilization might have originated. Since the seventeenth century, Egypt had been zealously promoted as the fount of all knowledge and wisdom.83 Pierre Daniel Huet, a bishop of Avranches, even proposed that China had been an Egyptian colony. Half a century later, Joseph de Guignes exerted all his scholarly authority in a vain attempt to demonstrate this thesis.⁸⁴ Early nineteenth-century romantics were more drawn to India. In the last third of the eighteenth century, Jean-Sylvain Bailly’s hypothesis of a “primal people” met with considerable interest.⁸⁵ Bailly eloquently conjured up a vision of the Central Asian high plateau as the birthplace of natural fertility and cultural achievement. In 1778, for example, he wrote in an open letter to Voltaire:

This great space, where so many rivers have their source, is strewn with towering peaks. They enclose vast valleys where men, sheltered from wind and conquest, were able to settle down undisturbed and found empires.⁸⁶

Directly contradicting the information provided by geographers, Bailly talks up the Edenic bounty of Central Asia, which the nomads had supposedly failed to use to their advantage. Why had they never settled down? Because they wanted to keep themselves in readiness for future conquests abroad. That had not always been the case. In the lush and protected mountain valleys of Tibet, “Brahmans” had meditated on profound truths in ages past. These genial climes had once been well-tended and densely populated. They had only reverted to wilderness when humans had been forced to abandon them following a deterioration in climate.⁸⁷

Bailly’s mythic construction of space was nothing if not ingenious. It was based largely on the sparse reports compiled by the abbé Prévost on the topic of Central Asia. Johann Gottfried Herder’s exposition of similar ideas in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man) rested on only slightly sounder empirical foundations. According to Herder, it was at the heart of Asia, “in the center of the most active organic powers,” that “creation had progressed farthest, and had developed most extensively and with the greatest refinement.” Envisaged as “an extensive amphitheater, a constellation of mountains, the arms of which extend into various climates,” Central Asia was the first abode of all higher life-forms.88 Herder distinguishes the Mongol conquests of historic times from the “ancient migrations from this highest spine of the earth.”⁸⁹ The portrait Herder paints of the Mongols is the darkest produced in the eighteenth century. On the basis of writings by Peter Simon Pallas, he depicts their external appearance as being diametrically opposed to the “finely formed peoples” he imagines dwelling in the earthly paradise of Kashmir and the countries to its west. In Herder’s racial typology, Mongols and Kalmyks are the most Asiatic Asians of them all: they resemble “human beasts of prey” in their ugly, animalistic facial features.⁹⁰ They are also weak and “womanly,” developing their strength and power not as individuals but in hordes and masses. It is therefore unsurprising that Herder fails to emulate the fine ambivalence of a Gibbon in evaluating the historical role of the Mongols. He also completely overlooks Genghis Khan’s legislative legacy, not least a religion that acted as a long-term civilizing force on his people—Lamaism—as well as a written language. The Mongols were “light birds of prey” (leichte Raubgeier), “rapine wolves come down from the Asiatic heights,” “despoilers of the world.”⁹¹ Hegel’s “elemental-historical” has rarely been so chillingly invoked as in these sentences by Herder.

It is remarkable that Herder refrains from equating Tatars and Mongols, thus avoiding the path trodden by so many of his contemporaries—including at times even the great Joseph der Guignes, the doyen of Inner Asian history. Bailly employed just such an all-embracing, blanket concept of “Tartary” and “Tatars,” much as Montesquieu had thrown Mongols and Manchus into the same basket in 1748. The abbé Raynal, who did more than anyone else to shape the broader public’s views on the non-European world, accurately described the current political situation when he pointed out in 1770 that most “Tatars” were now subjects of the Chinese and Russian Empires.⁹² But Raynal all too often mined his sources uncritically and did not always escape self-contradiction. He even went so far as to contend that the Indian Mughal dynasty was Tatar, a claim he could support only through spurious genealogical reasoning. Because he saw the Manchu conquest of China in 1644 as nothing but a repeat performance of the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, he missed the point that it was precisely the Manchus who had tamed the “elemental-historical” force of the Mongols. In confronting the unavoidable question of what constituted their shared “Tatarism,” Raynal referred neither to a myth of origin nor to common ethnographic or racial characteristics. He instead pointed to the unifying bond of Lamaism, the “doctrine of the Grand Lama, who resides in Potala.” So little was known about Tibetan religion at the time that Raynal cannot be blamed for ascribing it the fantastic age of three thousand years.93 His argument was not inept or flawed per se, but it would necessarily have undermined the historico-philosophical stereotype of the “Tatar.” This is because, on the one hand, a significant number of the peoples widely known as Tatars were actually followers of Islam or shamanist cults; on the other, a central place in the imaginary construct “Tartary” was now assigned to the Tibetans, a wholly unexpansive and irenic people without the slightest “elemental-historical” tendencies, at least since the downfall of the Tibetan Empire in the ninth century. Nowhere else do the inner tensions of the notion of Tartary come through so clearly as in Raynal’s chapter entitled Notions générales sur la Tartarie.

Herder, to return to him, was one of the few historico-philosophical commentators to assimilate some of the subtleties of ethnographic discourse, which he knew inside out as a tireless reader and collector of materials.⁹⁴ His Tatars include Uzbeks, Bukharans, and Circassians, among others. He classifies all these ethnic groups among the “finely formed peoples” (schöngebildeten Völkern), even if some of them “have run wild on the steppes.”⁹⁵ Herder draws a curious racial borderline between Tatars, who in his view stand much closer to Russians, and Mongols: “When Russians or Tatars intermix with Mongols, it is reported, handsome children are produced.”⁹⁶

The historico-philosophical discourse on Tartary essentially ends with Hegel. We are confronted here with the problem of an unreliable textual transmission. Hegel held lectures on the philosophy of world history between 1822/23 and 1830/31 at the University of Berlin. These lectures are known only from student notes, and the only ones established as critically secure are those from winter semester 1822/23, which survive in three separate transcripts.97 In these lectures Hegel held forth at length about China, but it was not until 1824/25 that he delivered an appendix on “the Mongolian principle.” We know it only from Georg Lasson’s edition from 1919, likewise based on auditor notes.

Hegel was so intimately familiar with the literature on Asia⁹⁸ that the blunders he makes in his Berlin lectures are hard to explain. It is uncertain which criteria he uses to differentiate between Tatars and Mongols, and he confusingly declares at one point, with the eighteenth century in mind when an Inner Asian dynasty presided over a multiethnic empire: “The Mongols rule over China, which controls the other Mongolia.… By Mongols we also mean the Manchus who rule over China. They are unrelated to the Mongols proper and belong instead to the Tungus.”⁹⁹ Hegel recycles an error already repeatedly corrected by the Jesuits, asserting that the Manchus, a hunting people from the Manchurian forests, were nomadic. Only through such simplifications could the topos of the thundering steppeland warriors be saved. Thanks to the report on Tibet by Samuel Turner (1800), Hegel is better informed about Lamaism, which he analyzes in some detail, than Raynal; unlike Raynal, he recognizes it as a variant of Buddhism. Yet he regards it as a complement to a nomadic way of life,¹⁰⁰ even though the Tibetans’ lifestyle was anything but.

Hegel brings together the motifs of the eighteenth century when he additionally emphasizes Central Asia’s topographic features. Pastoralism and patriarchy—in other words, the disintegration of society into individual family units in the absence of any central state authority—are both typical of highland dwellers. Highlanders are also unconcerned for the future and lack an understanding of “legal relationships,” which is why they oscillate between the polar extremes of hospitality and lawless banditry. For unknown reasons or, as Hegel puts it, impelled “into external motion by some impulse,” they periodically descend upon civilized lands “like a devastating storm.”101 High plains, high mountain valleys, and above all the interior of the Asiatic continent were for Hegel the birthplaces of a militarized patriarchalism that from time to time erupted into paroxysms of elemental violence before subsiding once again into inactivity.

It is a characteristic of the historico-philosophical discourse on Central Asia that it largely immunized itself against the results of recent ethnological research. References to pastoral life hardly went beyond the clichés of the ancient world. The peoples of Central Asia and Siberia had been important objects of ethnographic study in the eighteenth century. A history of the ethnographic “Tatar” discourse could no more neglect Chinese investigations than it could pass over the report by al-Biruni (973–1048). Ethnographic studies could do little with the coverall term “Tatar.” They were locally specific, always having to do with particular ethnic groups, often presented in a comparative framework. They had little interest in macrotheories, such as the hypothesis of a “primal people,” or in statements on the role played by apocalyptic horsemen in world history.

In the Chinese Empire and its dependent periphery, Europeans found it difficult to carry out such ethnographic observations. The most thorough, Ippolito Desideri’s investigations in Tibet between 1712 and 1733, were disseminated in Europe only in summary form.¹⁰² Fathers Verbiest, Gerbillon, and Régis, whose descriptions became known through Du Halde, gave far more precise and detailed information on the landscape and climate of Mongolia than on the customs of its inhabitants, whose various ethnic and tribal affiliations were known to the Jesuit scholars as a matter of course. To some extent, they saw through the glasses of a victorious China when they presented the Mongols as harmless primitives. In 1735, for example, Du Halde writes about them:

They are naturally of a good disposition, always gay and chearful, and perpetually inclin’d to laugh, but never pensive or melancholy, and indeed why they should they? since they have commonly neither neighbours to manage, enemies to fear, nor superiors to flatter; no difficult affair, no painful occupation, but spend their lives in a continual round of diversions, as fishing, hunting, and other exercises of the body, in which they are very expert.103

What this description makes clear is that the Mongols have lost the historical initiative. They have come under the emperor’s protection or fallen under his dominion. Imperial rule has had a stultifying, infantilizing effect. In 1822/23 Hegel elevates the tranquility of Mongol life into an idyll that is unparalleled in his writings on Asia:

Now as for the Mongols and Tibetans, they are described as extremely good-natured, open, trusting, observant, obliging, and far from the deception, cowardice, and baseness of the Hindus. Trusting and friendly, these peoples carry on a peaceful life. The priests are pious on behalf of the entire land. Every one of the laity performs his job in peace and quiet. They are not, on the whole, warlike. Moreover, Tibet has mostly been spared from war.¹⁰⁴

There are reasons why Hegel can depict the descendants of Genghis Khan’s terrifying mounted armies as peace-loving and hence assimilate them to the Tibetans (who in reality were not always quite so pacific). Yet Hegel only hints at what these reasons were and appears to underestimate their historicity. He barely goes beyond the laconic assertion that the peoples of Inner Asia stood “under Russian dominion, with some under Chinese rule.”¹⁰⁵ He never discusses how the Mongols could have been defeated and tamed by the Sino-Manchu Qing dynasty, how their fall from hyperactive world conquerors to rural simpletons could have been possible. Perhaps he sensed at least one important factor: the pacifying effect of the Lamaist religion, which was deliberately propagated by the Qing emperors as an instrument of rule.¹⁰⁶

The Mongols, meanwhile, were by no means transformed in European eyes into the noble savages of Asia. The civilizational deficits they were increasingly seen to embody spoke too much against them. Mongols, Du Halde was already claiming, are dirty, foul-smelling and crude: their social structure, distinguishing only between nobles and commoners, is primitive. Through living in such close proximity to their animals, they appeared to have lost all contact with civilized values and become dumb brutes themselves.107 Jesuitical primitivism rolled European and Chinese primitivism into one. It expressed the general arrogance of empire. That remained the status quo until 1830/31, when Johann Heinrich Plath published his masterpiece on the history of Inner Asia, especially Manchuria. Influenced by Heeren’s perspective on universal history, Plath was the first since Joseph de Guignes to paint a panorama of demographic movements and state formations in Central and North Asia. In doing so, he began a new chapter in the study of the non-Han Chinese peoples who had been pushed to the margins of the Middle Kingdom.¹⁰⁸

KNIGHTS AND STRANGERS IN THE CRIMEA

When Western European readers in the second half of the eighteenth century were provided with ethnographic information about “Tatars,” they were generally not learning about the descendants of Genghis Khan but about tribal societies inside the tsarist empire. In Russia, Voltaire justly observed, “there is a greater number of different species, more singularities, and a greater diversity of manners and customs, than in any country in the known world.”¹⁰⁹ While the Tatars were still described in 1737 as “the masters of the third part of Asia,”¹¹⁰ this assessment soon become obsolete from the vantage point of both Peking and Saint Petersburg. Here is how Johann Gottlieb Georgi summarized his impressions as a participant (from 1771 to 1774) in Peter Simon Pallas’s great academy expedition:

The Tatar hordes are so far from inspiring terror that several of them are forced to seek shelter with each other or with their neighbors: sometimes here and sometimes there, depending on circumstances. The remaining hordes are subjects of Russia, the Ottoman sultan, the Grand Mughal, China and also Persia, especially before the unrests there; or they are dependent on these powers for their protection.111

Taken together, the Tatar hordes formed the largest single “nation” in the tsarist empire after the Russians. The ethnographic findings that gradually became available in Western European languages following the publication of Johann Georg Gmelin’s Siberian travels (1751–52) gave rise to a far more nuanced understanding of the Tatars. This new research steered a middle path between demonizing and racially defaming the peoples of Central Asia (Herder) and idealizing them as loyal good savages (Du Halde). The basic attitude—differently accented in the coolly impersonal Peter Simon Pallas than in the chatty, vivacious Johann Georg Gmelin or the detail-infatuated, demonstratively pro-Tatar Johann Gottlieb Georgi—is one of sympathetic objectivity. Samuel Turner likewise contrasts his own fresh experience in Tibet with the shopworn clichés still being peddled about the Tatars: “The Tibetans are very humane, kind people,… so different from the ferocity commonly annexed to our ideas of a Tatar.”¹¹²

The reports make clear that by no means all the eastern expanses of the tsarist empire were occupied by typically Mongol nomadic horsemen. The spectrum ranged from the permanently settled Kazan Tatars, whom Georgi believed to be better farmers than many Russian peasants,¹¹³ to the largest ethnic group in Central Siberia, the unusually mobile Tungus, who combined livestock farming with hunting over vast areas.¹¹⁴ The travelers were keenly interested in shamanism, describing it with precision even as they condemned it as erroneous pagan belief. Reprising a motif that enjoyed widespread appeal in the Enlightenment critique of religion, much that appeared illogical and preposterous could be explained as priestly fraud, in this case “deception worked by shamans and magicians.”¹¹⁵ J. G. Gmelin and G. F. Müller, the scientific leaders of the Great Northern Expedition, had a liking for ethnological experiments and demanded that the shamans conjure something up for them. They were surprised when the discovery that the magicians’ tricks were often nothing but hocus-pocus failed to discredit them in the eyes of the native population.116 Georgi, at least, discovered even in shamanism “the universal ideas of natural religion” and traced the persistence of such beliefs to a hostile nature and a lack of instruction for the young.¹¹⁷ Rational explanations were pursued as far as possible by most of these authors. A clear correlation between shamanism and primitiveness, such as would become almost obligatory in the nineteenth century, is still nowhere to be found in these early anthropologists of religion.

Ethnographic studies were by no means confined to non-European specimens. Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, whose description of the Tatars of Astrakhan represented perhaps the most cogent ethnographic study in eighteenth-century travel literature from the tsarist empire, applied similar investigative and literary methods to the Don Cossacks as well, a community that had constituted itself from Russian and Ukrainian peasant stock.¹¹⁸ The Cossacks were Russia’s “savages within,” a militia frequently deployed to “civilize” the purportedly even more savage peoples of Asia.¹¹⁹ Borders were further blurred by the fact that “Asiatic” Tatars could be found in Europe as well. A trip to the Crimea sufficed to be made aware of this.

Adam Olearius, secretary to an embassy sent by the small German state of Holstein, observed in 1634 how emissaries of the Crimea Tatars, “cruel and hostile,” defiantly approached the tsar as representatives of an equal power and demanded gifts from him: “His Tsarist Majesty, desirous to buy peace, usually spares no expense on them.”¹²⁰ At the time those words were written, the Crimean Khanate still controlled significant territories north of the Black Sea as well as the Crimean Peninsula itself; a century later, little remained of its former status as “a great power in its own right.”¹²¹ Targeted by increasing Russian aggression, this Ottoman vassal state was nonetheless able to maintain a political and social order unique in all Eurasia until it was finally annexed and the last khan deposed in 1783.

As Nicolaas Witsen emphasized in his brief description from 1692, the Crimean Tatars were notorious slave hunters and traders.122 As kidnappers, Muslims, and ethnic aliens on European soil, they appeared to be ideally cast for the role of archnemesis to the Christian West. Few Western Europeans cared or dared to enter the Tatar state of their own accord. Interest levels increased in the years when it was being taken over by the tsarist empire, however. The Crimea, a landscape blessed by its favorable climate (and famous to this day for its sparkling wine), attracted visitors who wanted to form a picture of the last Asiatic barbarians on European soil.

In 1771 Nikolas Ernst Kleemann, a merchant trading in chandeliers and mirrors (among other things), described the impressions he picked up on several business trips to the Crimea. Kleemann disliked the “braggart” Turks and contrasted them with the kind-hearted and modest Crimean Tatars, who were said to be better than their reputation would suggest. He was particularly taken with the power of the aristocracy, whose “Consilium or Parliament” imposed strong constraints on the dynastic ruler.¹²³ Lady Elizabeth Craven, who visited the Crimea in early 1786 following her divorce for adultery by the Earl of Craven, was more intent on collecting “sentimental” impressions. She found herself thrust unawares into the role of guinea pig when the new absolute ruler of the freshly annexed peninsula, Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, used her to trial the elaborate deceptions (“Potemkin villages”) he had arranged to conceal the devastation wreaked by war from the pleasure-loving Catherine II on her upcoming tour of the Crimea.¹²⁴ Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Lady Elizabeth’s travel report should contain little information of any value.

The learned French consul Claude Charles de Peyssonnel (fils), by contrast, studied the country with great thoroughness. He evoked the vanquished khanate shortly before its demise, coating it with a patina of historical nostalgia. In the Crimea, squeezed between the oriental despotism of the Ottomans and the despotic absolutism of the Romanovs, he discovered almost early medieval, feudal conditions: a weak monarchy, a strong aristocracy imbued with the values of warrior culture and a free peasantry (unlike their enserfed Russian counterparts), with an underclass consisting mainly of ethnically exogenous slaves. The native aristocratic elite cultivated the same code of honor as the European high nobility. In war and in peace, nothing was more important to the gentilhommes tartares than the point d’honneur—with the exception that they never dueled.125 The feudal laws in eighteenth-century Crimea were “by and large the same as those … in France at the beginning of the monarchy.”¹²⁶

Written on the eve of the French Revolution, Peyssonnel’s fantasy of Tatar chivalry Europeanized the Crimean Tatars in extreme fashion. It made them appear to stand far closer to the Western European historical tradition than to their oriental neighbors and Russian conquerors. The French consul showed no interest in their Islamic religion or their “Asiatic” facial features. It is a moot question whether this image of the Crimean Tatars as paragons of feudal nobility was any further removed from reality than the stereotypes of Russian (and later Soviet) propaganda, which depicted them as degraded, criminal savages.¹²⁷ At any rate, the Crimean Tatars lacked many of the characteristics typically ascribed to the uncivilized Tatar: they were no shamanists and “heathen idol-worshippers” but devotees of a monotheistic high religion. Their state, led from the 1440s by khans from the Genghisid House of Giray, was among the most important in Eastern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Until its final years, it possessed—in the words of one modern historian—“all the requisites of early modern statehood”:¹²⁸ a functioning central government, a legal system (combining Ottoman and Central Asian elements), a hierarchically structured social system with a high urban population, flourishing foreign trade, and an education system that was equal to anything the Ottoman and Muscovite-Russian Empires had to offer. The khans were patrons of the arts and keen builders; Tatar chroniclers made important contributions to Islamic historiography. Baron de Tott even claimed to have discussed Molière with Khan Sahin Giray.129 Peyssonnel’s message was therefore not wrong: the Crimean Tatars were far from savages. They were only “barbarians” if the most stringent criteria were used for defining civilization, in which case it is difficult to see how their more powerful neighbors, the Russians and Ottomans, would have come off any better.

Only a few years after Peyssonnel, the Crimea presented an altogether different scenario. The English mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke, who visited the peninsula in 1800–1801, was appalled by the scenes of destruction he witnessed in Kefe (Caffa, now Feodosia), the once-thriving center of the Tatar slave trade. The town had recently been occupied by Russian forces:

Fifty families are at present the whole population of the once magnificent town of Caffa.… During the time we remained, soldiers were allowed to overthrow the beautiful mosques, or to convert them into magazines, to pull down the minarets, tear up the public fountains, and to destroy all the public aqueducts, for the sake of a small quantity of lead they were thereby able to obtain.… Some of those fountains were of great antiquity; and they were beautifully decorated with marble reservoirs, exhibiting bas-reliefs and inscriptions.… The remains of antient sculpture left by the Grecians in Caffa, had not shared a better fate. All that even Mohammedans had spared of bas-reliefs, of inscriptions, or of architectural pillars, were fractured by the Russians, and sold as materials to construct their miserable barracks.… In a short time, nothing will remain in Caffa but the traces of desolation left by its Russian conquerors.¹³⁰

Clarke heard Greek merchants cursing the Russians as “Scythians.”¹³¹ With that, the European discourse on Tartary had come full circle. The inheritors of classical civilization were now characterizing their fair-skinned rulers, not the Tatars they had overthrown, with the original byword for Asiatic savagery.

When the geographer Moritz von Engelhardt and the botanist Friedrich Parrott visited the Crimea in the service of the imperial government in 1811, the conditions they saw there—like those encountered seventy years before in Kamchatka—could only be described as colonial. Both Baltic scholars took issue with how the Tatars had been depicted by one of the leading intellectual lights of the tsarist empire: Peter Simon Pallas, councilor of state to Her Imperial Majesty of all the Russias, who had traveled the Crimea between March and July 1794. From 1795 to 1810 Pallas had then returned to the peninsula to live on an estate bestowed on him as a retirement residence by the grateful tsarina. His report on the Crimean trip appeared in German translation in 1799–1801.132 During the academy expedition, Pallas was the coolest and most distanced observer of the non-Russian nationalities of the tsarist empire. Even in the Crimea, which he toured in the aftermath of the Russian annexation, he lacked all sympathy for the romanticism of the noble savage and the tragedy of his downfall. Pallas saw everything from the viewpoint of how nature could be mastered to maximum economic and material benefit.

Like Pallas before them, Parrott and Engelhardt criticized the poor use the Tatars made of the land, yet they contradicted their illustrious predecessor’s claim that the fault lay with the innate “idleness of the working class, which exerts itself only for the most necessary nourishment and is almost entirely lacking in industry.”¹³³ Pallas recommended that the Tatars, “who demonstrate in their economic behavior that same addiction to destruction and improvidence which has always been typical of their nation,” be driven out or resettled in Russia.¹³⁴ Parrott and Engelhardt denounce this proposal as “unjust and inhumane”;¹³⁵ fortunately for them, they did not live to see it implemented in the twentieth century. The Tatars, they argued, were not lazy but they had modest needs. Pallas failed to grasp this because, as an official, economist, and administrative expert, he cared only for the good of the state. For him, human worth was determined solely by the product of human labor. But did this mean, they asked, that the Tatars were morally inferior to “people from civilized nations” ?¹³⁶

Engelhardt and Parrott proceed to indict Russian land policy in the Crimea. Because a considerable amount of Tatar land had been confiscated and transferred to alien landlords (including Professor Pallas), Tatar peasants had no incentive to make the best use of the soil. The popular complaint about the Tatars’ Asiatic torpor, requiring that they labor under strict supervision, was therefore a colonialist pseudo-anthropology—in essence, nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of their new overlords.137 Furthermore, the authors stoutly defend the Tatar moral character against the stereotypical slurs. Tatar hospitality was by no means a sham, as claimed; it was a seriously observed injunction of the Koran. Both travelers find their hosts to be nothing but honest and welcoming. Tatars could be model citizens if treated with decency. Their intelligence and eagerness to learn make them better qualified than anyone else to further the economic development of the Crimea. They should certainly be tapped for their expertise in horticulture and beekeeping. Many of the new colonial landowners, on the other hand, showed no interest in agricultural improvements and had adopted a parasitic relationship to their newly acquired landholdings.¹³⁸

This heartfelt and courageous plea for a free Tatar economy with only limited colonial interference tailored the image of the Crimean Tatars to the dictates of modernity. Whereas Peyssonnel had defended the Tatars by archaizing them, the two Estonian scholars, motivated by similar considerations, aimed to demonstrate that, given the right policy settings, the Tatars could fully satisfy the requirements of Muscovite-Russian late mercantilism. Exoticizing the Tatars and mentally distancing themselves from them was the strategy of their colonial oppressors. Their sympathizers, by contrast, sought to demonstrate that the Tatars’ non-European exterior did not entail an anthropological otherness that made them unfit to be integrated as equals into a modernizing society. To be sure, following the mass exodus of Crimean Tatars into the Ottoman Empire and an influx of Russian settlers, the Tatars had by 1800 already become a minority in their own country. Parrott and Engelhardt’s humane proposals came too late to prevail over Pallas’s rigorous solutions.¹³⁹

THE ETHNOLOGY AND POLITICS OF ARABIC LIBERTY

The Crimean Khanate fitted into none of the theories of the age. Above all, it refuted the simple equation, “Savages = Tatars = Nomads.” The nomadic way of life exerted a powerful hold on eighteenth-century intellectuals. The nomad, no less than the carefree homme naturel frolicking on a palm-shaded beach in Tahiti, was an emblem of the era.

In accordance with modern anthropologists, the eighteenth century favored a narrow concept of nomadism that, rather than covering every form of mobile existence, was restricted to “pastoral mobility.”140 The nomad was thus generally a herder, recognizable as such from the Old Testament, from ancient ethnographic texts, and from the tradition of bucolic literature. Present-day herder-nomads were found among ethnic groups that had once been major historical actors before being pushed to the margins by the great territorial empires. Besides the Mongols, these were in the first instance the Arabs: once an “effervescent nation” (brausende Nation),¹⁴¹ now overwhelmingly subjected to Ottoman suzerainty. Exact descriptions of the nomadic way of life were rare. People dwelling in houses and cities seem to have found nothing more difficult than to put themselves in the well-worn shoes of those who moved incessantly from place to place. From 1776, the leading and almost only authority on the Mongols was Peter Simon Pallas, who had seen little of them himself and therefore relied on the findings of other travelers (Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, and others).¹⁴² Benjamin Bergmann’s marvelously detailed and extraordinarily sympathetic account of his time with the Oirat Mongols or Kalmyks was little known outside the German-speaking realm.¹⁴³ Bergmann saw the Kalmyk lifestyle as the polar opposite of the European. Thanks to his Rousseauian affinity for pastoral simplicity, he resisted getting carried away in flights of fancy or “constructing” the Other as a “world turned upside-down.” He sought instead to demonstrate with the utmost precision how the Kalmyks tended to their horses and camels, for example.¹⁴⁴

For a long time, almost as little was known about the nomadic inhabitants of North Africa, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula. In 1715 Jean de la Roque—or rather the long-serving consul in Aleppo Laurent D’Arvieux, the true author of the report published under de la Roque’s name—had popularized the image of the serious, contemplative, silent desert-dweller. Two decades later Dr. Thomas Shaw, still smarting from a number of unpleasant experiences with the Arabs, represented them as barbarian cutpurses. In 1771, nearing the end of a voyage around the world, a well-to-do “philosophical” traveler, the Vicomte de Pagès, had accompanied the caravan from Basra to Aleppo. The insightful account he wrote up after the event betrays a measure of sympathy for the Arabs’ way of life. By far the most detailed description of Arab nomadism to that point, however, was that furnished in 1772 by Carsten Niebuhr.145 Volney, who had studied nomads in Syria, visibly strove to attain Niebuhr’s level—apparently with success, judging by the public acclaim that greeted his work.¹⁴⁶ The Swiss Orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt subsequently became the leading authority of the early nineteenth century.¹⁴⁷

It almost goes without saying that theoretical reflections on nomadism by eighteenth-century authors were influenced by ethnographers like Pallas and Niebuhr, just as the latter in turn were affected by the general intellectual climate. Yet the discourse on nomadism did not necessarily flow from direct observation of the sources. Perhaps its most important characteristic was that it largely avoided a discussion of the historical role of peoples such as Mongols and Arabs. It must therefore be kept separate from debates on the “elemental-historical.” These peoples were regarded as unhistorical in the sense that they were at once posthistorical and prehistoric: posthistorical, because they had exited the stage of history following their star appearance; prehistoric, because they appeared to have sunk into an atemporal stasis that made them witnesses and relics of an age-old past. As late as 1820, one traveler found himself reminded of “the happy age of patriarchal life” upon first glimpsing Mongol nomads.¹⁴⁸ Such associations were almost unavoidable when encountering Bedouins, the present-day occupants of the biblical lands. In the case of the Arabs, such archaism was especially conspicuous, given that here—unlike for the entirely nonurban Mongols—a contrast could be drawn between primordial desert Arabs and modern city-dwellers. Europeans’ sympathies lay squarely with the sons of the desert, for the urban Arabs, according to one characteristic asseveration, “have all the vices of civilized society, without having quitted those of a savage state.”149

While Carsten Niebuhr begins his analysis of the Bedouins with the same contrast between town and desert, he is too discerning a writer to equate it simplistically with the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism:

The inhabitants of Arab cities, and especially those lying by the sea and on the border, have intermingled with foreigners to such an extent that they have lost many of their old customs and manners. The true Arabs however, who have always esteemed their liberty a treasure far greater than riches and comfort, live in tribes under tents and still steadfastly observe the age-old government, rites and customs of their ancestors.¹⁵⁰

For Niebuhr, life in the desert was not an expression of civilizational backwardness, nor the decree of “Providence,”¹⁵¹ but the consequence of a free decision for a life lived in simplicity, liberty, and closeness to nature. The Bedouins made the choice that was right and appropriate for them. There were two sides to their love of liberty. On the one hand, they refused to submit to a fixed power structure. They lived in a mosaic-like multiplicity of small communities—clans and tribes—which regularly came together to form higher and larger units. The respective rulers, the sheikhs, exercised patriarchal authority over their families and servants. Following the death or removal of a sheikh, the eldest son did not automatically inherit his place; rather, the ablest male relative was elected to the vacant position. Outside the family, everyone who wielded political authority could be held to account. The “lesser sheikhs” were not the obedient vassals of the greater:

The great sheikh must regard them rather as his confederates than as his subjects. If they are dissatisfied with their government yet incapable of deposing it, they can always drive their herds to another tribe, which is usually happy to be able to strengthen its party. But each lesser sheikh must also strive to govern his family well, lest they likewise depose or abandon him.152

The other side of Bedouin freedom is its contrast with Turkish despotism in the cities. The realistic Niebuhr does not absolutize this contrast in the manner that would later become fashionable. Only a few tribes lived in total isolation; the price they paid for their complete freedom from external influences and ties was a particularly austere way of life.¹⁵³ Far more characteristic were contact and conflict between Turkish power and Arab counterpower. Niebuhr feels compelled to defend the Arabs against the charge of lawless brigandage leveled against them by the Turks. The Arabs may have felt no compunction about plundering caravans and individual travelers, but they rarely murdered them or left them to die in the desert. Resistance to Ottoman aggression could be (mis)classified as robbery only for blatantly propagandistic purposes.

If therefore the Turks appear each year with an army in Arabia, then the Arabs can only assert their rights by countering with an army of their own, particularly in a situation of open war. This army cannot justly be compared with a band of thieves, being commanded by six sheikhs who are indisputably lords of the desert, and hence have every right to oppose all those who would forcibly pass through their domains.¹⁵⁴

Niebuhr’s descriptions, which went on to influence those of Volney and Burckhardt, outline the vision of an unmistakable genre de vie (as Volney likes to call it) while at the same time sketching a theory of Bedouin nomadism. If the harder-edged realistic accents are disregarded, such as references to chronic hunger among Syrian Bedouins or the provision of the Baloch people through the international arms trade,155 such material could be used to construct the partly neo-pastoral, partly heroic idealization of the desert dwellers that would culminate artistically in romantic Orientalist painting before reaching a literary climax in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922).¹⁵⁶ Similarly, the discipline of Islamic studies later implicitly or explicitly adopted many of the ideas of these pioneer Arabists.

THEORIES OF NOMADISM

The eighteenth century saw several attempts to arrive at a general theory of pastoral nomadism. A particularly wide-ranging one, based mainly on ancient sources, was elaborated by the English physician William Falconer.¹⁵⁷ Falconer saw the pastoral way of life as a stage in cultural development interposed between the invention of money and the universal spread of agriculture. Unlike Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Falconer, one of the earliest ecologists, paid attention to the specific environmental conditions that could cause quite distinct versions of pastoral life to develop in lands as different from each other as Egypt, Sicily, Arabia, and Mongolia.¹⁵⁸ In general terms, according to Falconer, it may be said that in the pastoral stage, human beings are roused to purposeful activity; the previously loose bands of society are drawn tighter; the female sex is treated for the first time with respect. On the other hand, it would be a mistake “to consider the pastoral character as a model of virtue and simplicity.”¹⁵⁹ The introduction of property laws leads to greed, miserliness, and new forms of crime. The invention of money draws bribery and indebtedness in its wake, fostering relations of dependency. Warfare is a key element in the life of herders, who sharpen their wits by learning how to fight. Since they have no understanding of urban life, however, they do not know how to lay siege to a city; they lack the patience for it.¹⁶⁰ Because nomads are not tied to any fixed place, temples as well as immobile images of the divine are foreign to them. As a consequence of their way of life, they therefore possess fairly abstract ideas about god, making them receptive to monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, the most aniconic among them.161

Defying the era’s tendency to binary opposites, Falconer’s examples of pastoral life are drawn from both Europe and Asia. Huns and Teutons, Scythes and Celts all share significant affinities in their manner of living and thinking. Edward Gibbon, likewise no friend of East-West antagonism, was interested more specifically in herder societies that had intervened in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to change the course of history. This led him to a comprehensive interpretation of nomadism that, uniquely for the eighteenth century, combined Hegel’s “elemental-historical” with the ethnographic perspective. J.G.A. Pocock, one of the foremost historians of ideas of our time, has dedicated several important studies to it.¹⁶² Because Gibbon identified the various waves of barbarian invasions as an important causative factor for the fall of both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, it was only natural that he should seek to arrive at an understanding of the motives driving these barbarians.

Gibbon concludes chapter 25 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the death of Emperor Valentinian I in 375. He begins the next chapter with a depiction of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the greater part of the Roman world on July 21, 376. This natural disaster coincided with a convulsion that was to prove even more fateful: the beginning of Hunnic aggression. Gibbon now pauses before picking up his grand narrative to address some fundamental questions under the heading, Manners of the Pastoral Nations.¹⁶³

According to Gibbon, the reality of herder societies had nothing to do with the bucolic idylls painted so lovingly in the pastoral literature of the early modern period.¹⁶⁴ All such peoples closely resemble each other on account of their way of life. Since they follow their herds from place to place rather than settling down to till the soil, they are incapable of forging lasting cultural identities. Killing animals is part of the everyday life of “barbarians” and fosters brutality towards humans, too. There is no taboo on eating horse meat; on the contrary, it is one of the secrets to the nomads’ success in mounted warfare. Their perpetual readiness for war issues from their pastoral way of life, not from some immutable Tatar or Scythian “character.” Young men live in mobile camps and test their strength in military contests. No sense of homeland or territorial belonging impedes them in their search for fresh pastures. Living under the harshest conditions provides ideal preparation for the ordeals of far-flung campaigns. Nomads do not live from their herds alone, however. They are also skilled hunters, trained from an early age in marksmanship and quick reactions. The hunt is the training ground for the battlefield. All that was needed to trigger the great “elemental-historical” tidal waves of nomadic horsemen was thus a combination of external stimuli and internal political leadership. Their political structures were flexible enough to allow proven warrior-princes to advance quickly to the fore.

So much for the foundations. Gibbon borrows the notion of a “mode of subsistence” from the Scottish social theorists, who had introduced it shortly before, and refines it into an instrument of historical analysis. In later chapters, individual examples of nomadic military outbreaks are thoroughly investigated in their specific causative contexts: the Huns under Attila, the Arabs in the decades following Muhammad, the Mongols under Genghis Khan. A highpoint is chapter 50, where Gibbon discusses the origins of Islam. He speaks here of the paramount importance of the camel for the life of the desert Arabs, expatiating on its advantages over the less resilient and less versatile horse. He depicts how they gradually departed from their original primitive state, a process that in his account was nothing like a simple leap from one stage of development to the next. In contrast to the Huns and Mongols, the Arabs had already made the transition to urban culture in pre-Islamic times, although this implied no antagonism towards the Bedouin way of life. In the city as in the desert, the social putty was provided less by institutions compelling obedience from above than by voluntary reciprocity on a relatively egalitarian basis. In Gibbon’s eyes, Arab democracy could withstand comparison with both the Greek and Roman versions. It was less dependent than these on prescribed participation rights and institutions—“artificial machinery,” in Gibbon’s critical phrasing165—than on a love of individual liberty that made for a less tractable, more fiercely independent citizenry. This form of government was not so unstable as to lead to outright anarchy, while at the same time it thwarted tendencies to despotic individual rule such as first gradually emerged from the eighth century onwards under Byzantine and Persian influence. Social evolutionary processes were accompanied by a bardic poetry that worked to moralize social relations and inculcate decorum. Gibbon sets out how he saw Islam developing under such conditions and in the interplay of faith and politics in one of the finest examples of universal-historical analysis ever written. Perhaps no other historical figure is so carefully examined in Decline and Fall as Muhammad, the founder of the world religion that offered Gibbon his second great case study (after Christianity) for the history-making power of individual charisma combined with exceptional organizational skills.

Gibbon’s theory of nomadism lays the foundations for his pan-Eurasian interpretation of the Middle Ages. That interpretation is materialistic insofar as it takes a people’s environmental conditions and “mode of subsistence” as its starting point, without thereby lapsing into climatic or geographical determinism. It also never denies the agency of ideas and especially religious convictions, wavering ever precariously between superstition and fanaticism. Gibbon is not content with merely telling a historical narrative. His ambition is to explain the movements that shaped history most profoundly, such as the rise of Islam. In doing so, he steers a middle path between Falconer-style generalizations and close scrutiny of local conditions. Such a historiographical program went far beyond Gibbon’s sources and informants; small wonder, then, that he could only implement it in half-speculative fashion. Apart perhaps from Montesquieu in his short book on the greatness and decline of the Romans (1734), nobody had attempted anything of the kind before. Precisely nomads, who for many seemed to stand outside history, became in Gibbon’s hands the occasion for the most subtle historical analysis of the Enlightenment era.

TRIUMPH OF THE SETTLERS

The last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth witnessed an unparalleled offensive on the part of the settled “civilizations” against mobile “savages” or “barbarians.”166 “The great fear of the primitive world” (Michèle Duchet) had finally been laid to rest.¹⁶⁷ Social theorists reflected this by interpreting pastoral nomadism as a stepping stone on the path of social evolution.¹⁶⁸ Needless to say, the “civilized” were themselves highly mobile. Through military conquest and agricultural colonization, they expanded their living space at the expense of nonagrarian peoples. Mobility was here only a temporary means to an end, not a way of life, despite borderline cases such as Argentinean gauchos, Australian drovers, or (from the 1830s) the South African Trekboer. North American Indians, Kurds, Mongols, and Siberian tribespeople were not the only ones to be driven from their ancestral lands and pushed back into ever smaller reserves. In the same period, the Royal Navy set out to eradicate piracy in the course of their operations against the slave trade—not always with lasting success, at least in the Persian Gulf and the seas around Malaya. Pirates are a nuisance for any great sea power. The British Empire, it was admitted in 1816, might have overthrown or subdued the Indian warrior states but it had so far made little headway against piracy in the Persian Gulf.¹⁶⁹ The fair-skinned buccaneers of the Caribbean, who in the seventeenth century had practically formed their own sovereign terrorist power, had been quashed by the early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the French navy patrolled the Mediterranean with increasing success; in 1830 the “pirate state” in Algeria, which had posed no serious threat to mercantile shipping for some time, was toppled following a French intervention.

Robbery and vagabondage were closely associated in the imperial mind. Early modern territorial states campaigned against organized robbery and street crime, begging and vagrancy. They attempted to immobilize their subjects in order better to control and tax them.¹⁷⁰ Nomadism was not seen as a legitimate form of self-organization, “but merely as a refusal to organize that posed a challenge to the established order.”171 This attitude was exported to the colonial world. Missionaries complained that nomads were almost impossible to civilize and proselytize and pressed that they be forcibly settled on stations. Colonial reformers saw them as poor material for “improvement.”¹⁷² In India, migrant communities—the so-called “criminal tribes”—were violently suppressed, particularly following the “Indian Mutiny,” the great anti-British uprising of 1857.¹⁷³ The exclusion and persecution of “gypsies,” variously interpreted as Indian or Egyptian immigrants or as Turkish spies, increased during the Age of Enlightenment. Even Johann Gottfried Herder’s celebrated tolerance went out the window when he turned to the subject of gypsies:

A rejected Indian caste, separated by birth from everything that calls itself godly, respectable and civil, and remaining faithful for centuries to this debased destiny: for what are they suited in Europe except for military training, which can discipline everything as quickly as possible?¹⁷⁴

Just as the gypsy could only be romanticized—mysterious foundlings, fiery women, freedom in the rolling wagon, and the like—once effective police measures had been taken against the “Gypsy problem,” and just as the North American Indians could only be sentimentalized once they had been destroyed as a viable fighting force, so Europeans only discovered noble barbarians in Asia when they were no longer forced to make their direct acquaintance. The last refuge of liberty, Montesquieu had taught, was to be found among the indomitable mountain tribes.¹⁷⁵ From the late eighteenth century onwards, Afghans, Kurds, Rif Kabyles, Gurkhas, Chechens, along with Tyrolians, Swiss, and Highland Scots, were transfigured into primordial custodians of premodern customs and liberties.¹⁷⁶ With that, mountain peoples underwent an astounding revaluation. They were now no longer perceived as threatening savages, pouring down from their impregnable redoubts with no apparent provocation to bring the sword and the flame to peaceful lowland settlements. Forgotten, too, were the tales of the “Old Man of the Mountain” brought back with them to Europe by the Crusaders and Marco Polo: the head of the Muslim Ismaili sect who held his followers in thrall through his personal charisma and sent young, drug-benumbed “assassins” into the cities of the plain to do his murderous bidding. Such stories still preoccupied Orientalists such as Sylvestre de Sacy and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, but they now barely ruffled the popular imagination.177

The new savages—unsettling precisely because they were unsettled—gradually became more visible in the European metropolises. Friedrich Engels saw the Irish as modern nomads and described them with all the repugnance that eighteenth-century travelers reserved for the most primitive and rootless natives.¹⁷⁸ In 1851 Henry Mayhew began his great social panorama, London Labour and the London Poor, with an observation about “Wandering Tribes in General,” dividing the global population into “two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen.”¹⁷⁹ According to Mayhew, these differed from each other even in their physical appearance, such as their skull shape. Nomads, in Mayhew’s opinion, had in all civilizations been the parasites of domesticated society. The noble barbarian and homme naturel, pushed to the inhospitable fringes of the great empires, had now been succeeded by the restless tribes peopling the new industrial landscapes at their center. The vendors and lumpenproletariat who thronged the streets of London, as seen by the early social researcher Mayhew, had more in common with the Kalahari Bushmen than with their middle-class neighbors. Mayhew describes them using the very same categories that the eighteenth century had applied to ignoble savages:

The nomad then is distinguished from the civilized man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour—by his want of providence in laying up a store for the future—by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension—by his passion for stupefying herbs and roots, and, when possible, for intoxicating fermented liquors—by his extraordinary powers of enduring privation—by his comparative insensibility to pain—by an immoderate love of gaming, frequently risking his own personal liberty upon a single cast—by his love of libidinous dances—by the pleasure he experiences in witnessing the suffering of sentient creatures—by his delight in warfare and perilous sports—by his desire for vengeance—by the looseness of his notions as to property—by the absence of chastity among his women, and his disregard of female honour—and lastly, by his vague sense of religion—his rude idea of a Creator, and utter absence of all appreciation of the mercy of the Divine Spirit.180

By the mid-nineteenth century, pastoral romanticism had become passé. The nomad now served as a negative foil to bring the Victorian bourgeois gentleman into sharper relief. He had become a problem for the police.