The long eighteenth century, lasting from around 1680 to the 1820s, was a period of intensive European engagement with Asia. This engagement was partly colonial—in South Asia, on Java and the Philippines, in the Russian Empire from the Black Sea to the vast expanses of Siberia. Other regions of the continent were barely touched by European imperial ambitions: the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Afghanistan, China, Japan, and the greater part of Southeast Asia. Whether colonized or not, a steady stream of European adventurers, scholars, explorers, diplomats, soldiers, traders, and priests crisscrossed the continent, reporting back on what they saw to an interested public.
Their writings, often translated into several languages and disseminated across the continent and also to the Americas, laid the foundation for some of the era’s most important works of philosophy, social theory, and history. The “big names” and armchair travelers who never left Europe referred to Asia extensively, making it a touchstone for their wide-ranging theories. Asia may have been Europe’s “Other,” but it figured as a permanent intellectual challenge rather than as an entirely alien and incomprehensible world. Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Turgot in France; Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, or Thomas Robert Malthus in Great Britain; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Gottfried Herder, or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany; last but not least the great historian Edward Gibbon in his self-imposed exile at Lausanne—they all grappled with the broad variety of Asia’s societies and civilizations, with its past, present, and future. Together with philosophically-minded travelers on the ground—Engelbert Kaempfer in Japan, John Chardin in Persia, the Jesuits in China, Carsten Niebuhr in Arabia, Sir Stamford Raffles in Java, and many others—they formed a single and seamless class of physically and mentally mobile intellectuals, a classe curieuse.
I draw on this large body of travel literature and theoretical comment to challenge the conventional postcolonial wisdom that sees all attempts to understand “the East,” including those of an era “before empire,” as invariably imperialistic and contaminated by European fantasies of power. On the other hand, the book is no partisan and one-dimensional apology of an Enlightenment whose ambiguities and “dialectic”—see Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s famous book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)—have been revealed by numerous earlier critics. The main argument of my book is that the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism. I also discuss how Enlightenment cosmopolitanism came to be replaced by the aggressive colonialism and sense of superiority so prevalent in the nineteenth century. The end result was a mental “great divergence” in Eurasia that has narrowed again only in our own time. Asia was left an object of scientific inquiry while it disappeared from public debates in the many fields where it had played such an enormous role before: political theory, economics, the philosophy of history, or emergent comparative social science. This development can be conceptualized as a passage from “inclusive” to “exclusive” Eurocentrism.
This book has an unusual history, and readers may want to know a little about it before they decide to spend time on the chapters that follow. It was first published in German in 1998 as Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert; a second edition of 2010 added a postscript commenting on more recent literature. How the English title Unfabling the East came about will be explained at the end of chapter 1. Most of the library research for the book was done in the mid-1980s in dim rare book collections and in front of uncomfortable microfiche readers, in other words, at a time when the prospect of having a profusion of sources available at the click of a mouse was beyond one’s wildest imagination. After a long interval caused by other professional commitments, I wrote the bulk of the manuscript in 1996–97 while I had the privilege of spending ten months as a fellow at that pinnacle of the German academic system, the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Studies) in Berlin. It is a pleasure to renew my thanks to that splendid institution, in particular to its rector at the time, Wolf Lepenies, and to the current rector, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. The Wissenschaftskolleg in 2001 also graced the book with its own Anna-Krüger-Preis given to publications that bridge the gap between the world of experts and an educated lay public.
For those readers who are familiar with German academia I should add that the book is not one of the two academic theses that are still required in Germany of budding scholars in the humanities; it is no Habilitationsschrift. This proved to be a great advantage. While the book aims at meeting high academic standards it was never constrained by the formal conventions of a research monograph. At the same time, no publisher’s commission stood at the beginning of the project. I did not write with a specific “market” in mind and could safely ignore deadlines and even word counts. Thus, I enjoyed the freedom to realize my intentions to the fullest extent. This would have been impossible without the understanding and generosity of my German publishers, C. H. Beck at Munich, a distinguished family firm that has succeeded in carrying over a great tradition of publishing into modern times and provides its authors with an intellectual home.
These intentions also imply limitations that I imposed on myself. Though it should become obvious upon casual acquaintance with the book that it does not aim at encyclopedic completeness, readers may miss chapters on two classical topics: religion and language. These omissions are deliberate. The question of Western views of Asian languages demands a specialized knowledge that I would never have been able to acquire within reasonable time, while religion is such a vast and well-researched topic that there would have been little more to do than summarize the existing literature. Splendid new works such as Urs App’s The Birth of Orientalism (2010) will satisfy the curious. I also felt that I had nothing original to add to the extended debate about the emergence of racism in the eighteenth century.
The present American edition is a thoroughly revised version of the German original. I went through the text and redrafted numerous passages. Any reference to books and articles published in 1997 or later points to material newly consulted. In the meantime, the works by some of my protagonists came out in excellent new editions: Leibniz (his correspondence with the Jesuits in China), Montesquieu, Voltaire, Engelbert Kaempfer, Edmund Burke, George Bogle, Alexander von Humboldt, and others. Long-awaited biographies of and monographs on a few central characters appeared in print: Lawrence Baack on Carsten Niebuhr, Michael Franklin on Sir William Jones, Isobel Grundy on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or Richard Bourke on Edmund Burke. J.G.A. Pocock’s six volumes on Edward Gibbon and his contemporaries, one of the great achievements of the humanities in our time, were not yet available when I wrote the book more than twenty years ago. They have proved a constant source of inspiration. The same is true for Karl S. Guthke’s wide-ranging studies of German cosmopolitanism in Goethe’s Weimar as well as for Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s series of profound writings on the European-Asian encounter, though they focus on an earlier period and put a stronger emphasis on real-life connections than I do in this book.
Given that this book aims to resurrect a corpus of Enlightenment travel literature and geographical commentary that is rarely consulted today, it will come as no surprise that extensive use has been made of quotations from primary sources. In the case of works in foreign languages, the original wording has sometimes been included in the notes where the expression is especially felicitous, or where the author employs specific terms that informed readers may wish to access for themselves. Where possible, such sources are quoted in the main text from the earliest existing translations into English, which often preserve something of the original’s period flavor. Slight modifications have occasionally been made and duly noted. The abbreviation ff. has been used to indicate that the reference continues over more than two pages.
There is no need to repeat my acknowledgements from the first German edition of 1998. Anyway, in German academic culture the habits of sharing and consulting are much less developed than in the United States, and lists of supporting friends and colleagues tend to be significantly shorter. Brigitta van Rheinberg at Princeton University Press made this project possible in the first place. This is the fourth book I am doing with her, and it is a privilege and pleasure to collaborate with her and the superb Princeton team. No less indispensable has been the work of Robert Savage, a master translator. Himself a scholar both of Adorno and Heidegger, he is familiar with some of the most difficult texts in the German language and rose with panache to the challenge of finding a language that we envisaged to be as far removed as possible from the notorious ponderousness—perhaps, though, an undeserved cliché—of German academic writing. The funding for the translation was kindly provided by Geisteswissenschaften International, a most worthy program that is run by the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association) together with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Foreign Office, and the VG Wort.
At various stages in preparing the American edition Lawrence J. Baack, Sven Beckert, Alexander Bevilacqua, Franz Leander Fillafer, Garth Fowden, Michael Kempe, Harry S. Liebersohn, and Suzanne L. Marchand provided indispensable encouragement and assistance. At the University of Konstanz, Alexandre Bischofberger became highly accomplished in solving bibliographical riddles and tracing online materials. The Leibniz-Preis, awarded in 2010 by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), made it possible to acquire the necessary literature for the university library at Konstanz.
The original edition of 1998 was dedicated to my wife Sabine Dabringhaus, herself a historian of eighteenth-century (and later) China. I am happy to present her not just with a recent Chinese translation of the book but also with this Princeton University Press version that brings the study back to life and should now count as its standard edition.