II

Asia and Europe

BORDERS, HIERARCHIES, EQUILIBRIA

The first time I set foot on Asian soil, I threw myself to the ground upon alighting from the kayak and kissed the earth as my spiritual homeland.

—Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben1

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, one of the three or four most distinguished Orientalists of his time, is looking back from old age on one of the great moments of his youth. Hammer’s “Asia” is several things at once. First of all, it is a geographical location. Hammer is crossing the Bosphorus. He has already spent some time traveling through the sultan’s territories as an interpreter in the Austrian diplomatic service. But in September 1799, the twenty-five-year-old does not just disembark at a place called Hunkiar-Iskelesi; he lands in “Asia.” Hammer appears to have been deeply moved by this experience of passing from one continent, one world, to another. Later, such pathos would become something of a cliché. It is easy to see why, for no two continents meet so picturesquely as at the Golden Horn. Hammer’s “Asia” is also a “spiritual homeland,” an ideal sphere. What Hammer finds here is the fulfillment of the literary studies he had pursued so ardently at home. He is invoking an ancient tradition: Asia as the motherland of civilization.

ASIA AND EUROPE IN THE TSARIST EMPIRE

Where does Europe end? Where does Asia begin? It has often been seen as an expression of Europe’s flexibility and vitality that these questions permit no definitive answer.2 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the rise of a Russian great power nationalism supported by ideologies of the country’s special “Eurasian” position athwart two continents, the problem of Europe’s eastern limit has been posed anew: one of the most daunting political and perhaps also cultural challenges to beset the Eurasian continent since the turn of the millennium.³

It has long been common knowledge that “Europe” is a cultural construct. The history of the idea of Europe and European self-awareness reveals a long series of highly diverse attempts to define Europe’s “identity,” ranging from repudiation and exclusion of the “non-European” to the search for common distinguishing features. “Asia” itself is a European concept. Before the mid-nineteenth century, when European ideas first became widely diffused, there was simply no precedent in any civilization between the Bosphorus and the Sea of Japan for the idea of an overarching unity embracing all the great world religions—for Christianity, too, has “Asiatic” roots—as well as ethnic groups of the utmost anthropological variety. “The Orient,” “the East” (“Far,” “Near,” and “Middle”), “the East Indies”: these are all arbitrary ascriptions that can be traced back to specifically European needs to classify, categorize, and delimit what was perceived as alien. Even the division of the Eurasian land mass into two separate continents, which we tend to take for granted today, is a geographical convention that bears no compelling relation to the Earth’s physical features. There is, after all, no logical reason why an utterly distinct geographical entity should be taken to begin just east of the Urals and on the other side of the Bosphorus.⁴

Surprising answers to the question of Europe’s borders have always been possible: cultural space does not necessarily fit neatly inside the lines drawn by cartographers. Take Cape Town, for instance, founded by Dutch colonists, permanently ceded to the British in 1806, a resting place for the fleets passing to and from Asia: was it even situated in Africa? One skeptic among many records his travel impressions in 1816: “Cape Town itself is so completely European that it excites little interest, at least to those coming from the West.”5 The same was frequently said of Batavia, established by the VOC in 1619 as their Asian headquarters and progressively built up over the following years: despite having a majority of non-white (especially Chinese and Malay) inhabitants, this was a Dutch city in the tropics, so magnificent and elegant “that Batavia bears comparison with the most important, wealthy and beautiful places in Europe, even surpassing them in some respects.”⁶ Wherever it builds, colonialism sets boundary markers in stone, exporting Europe’s borders into its outposts and enclaves. Asia begins where the bridgehead ends.

For those traveling by boat, the transition between the continents is rarely a problem of perception. Between departure and arrival lies the fluid interval of the sea. In stepping off board, they set foot in Asia. For those traveling by land, the matter is more complicated. Where political borders are invisible, other signals are required. For many, “Asia” begins where steeples give way to minarets and the muezzin’s call to prayer replaces the tolling of church bells. For others, their arrival in Asia is signaled by the first winding caravan to cross their path.⁷ Conversely, the English diplomat James Justinian Morier immediately notices that he has arrived in Europe, not just in Russia, when he crosses the frontier river Araxes on October 5, 1812: instead of camels and mules, he now sees carts and carriages.⁸ Europe is the world of wheels.⁹

The land route to Asia passes via the Balkans or through Russia. Ever since the conquest and economic development of Siberia, beginning in the early seventeenth century, the multiethnic kingdom of the tsars had spanned both continents. In the eighteenth century, Russia alone encompassed Edmund Burke’s “Great Map of Mankind” with its countless sociocultural nuances, extending all the way from the Western-leaning urban societies of Saint Petersburg, Tallinn, Riga, and (later) Minsk to the hunter-gatherer tribes of Siberia, with innumerable variations and gradations in social conditions in between.¹⁰ For the traveler, which of the many internal cultural borders he crossed marked the great continental fault line between Europe and Asia remained a question of minor practical importance. Asia visibly began at the political border of the empire. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was a shifting military frontier, defended—and increasingly pushed outward—in three directions: against the Islamic powers of Iran and the Ottoman Empire, against the nomadic horsemen of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Steppes, and against the mountain tribes of the Caucasus.

In August 1829, Alexander von Humboldt, traveling as the personal guest of the tsar, inspected the fortified “line” in the steppe lands bordering the Middle Horde of the Kyrgyz.11 He had earlier set eyes on an altogether different type of border: that with the Chinese Empire or, as he himself notes, the “first post of Chinese Mongolia.”¹² In the treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kyakhta (1727), which codified a real balance of power, Saint Petersburg and Peking had agreed on a common border and rules to regulate traffic across that border. Guarded with equal vigilance on both sides, this line remained until the 1850s perhaps the most peaceful and stable border between two major powers anywhere in the world.¹³ Western European travelers breathed a sigh of relief upon passing into Qing territory: “for on this side of the markers [i.e., the flags indicating the border] stretched a vast desolate wasteland, while on the other, the Chinese lived in villages and hamlets and had cultivated the countryside.”¹⁴ Arrival in the most important transit point, the twin towns of Kyakhta-Maimaicheng, promised a return to civilization on the Chinese side; streets and internal courtyards there were “kept in a state of such tidiness as is otherwise found only in the towns of Holland.”¹⁵ To be sure, Kyakhta lay on the Mongolian fringes of the Qing Empire and was not the outer limit of a continuously settled territory. Only upon reaching the Great Wall, built centuries before as a bulwark against the “barbarians” of Inner Asia, could exhausted travelers look forward to reentering a civilized space—an especially welcome prospect, given that the Gobi Desert still had to be traversed in the final stage of the journey. On November 2, 1720, thirteen months after setting out from Saint Petersburg, the Russian embassy under Count Leon Vassilevich Ismailov caught sight of the Great Wall from a distance of around forty English miles: “One of our people cried out LAND, as if we had been all this while at sea.”16

The Scottish doctor John Bell, a member of the count’s delegation, leaves those reading his detailed account of the remaining journey in no doubt that the country beyond the Great Wall had nothing to fear from comparison with Western Europe. Even the reception given by the Sino-Manchurian border officials was extraordinary: “I must confess, I was never better pleased with any entertainment.”¹⁷ Bell was not a witness typically given to such outbursts of enthusiasm. For him, as for most trans-Siberian travelers of the eighteenth century, arriving in China did not mean entering a foreign, exotic world. Rather, it meant regaining civilized ground after enduring all the strain and discomfort of the world’s longest overland journey. The contrast with the Iranian border was especially striking. Following the first Russo-Persian War of 1804–13, Iran’s earliest collision with the Christian powers of Europe, which led to the incorporation of the khanate of northern Azerbaijan into the Russian empire, the borderlands were described as devastated and deserted.¹⁸

The attempts made by geographers to split the Eurasian continent into two parts differed greatly from the liminal experiences of travelers. Behind such cartographical and terminological endeavors stood more than just advances in geographical knowledge. As instruments for measuring and representing space grew ever more precise over the course of the eighteenth century, they proved conducive to the projection of political visions. All the imperial powers of the modern age—from Spain to the Sino-Manchurian Qing dynasty—placed cartography in the service of the state: as much to provide exact descriptions of the territories to be ruled and exploited as to project imperial dreams of the future.¹⁹ Russia was no exception. The Janus-faced nature of its empire, turned at once towards Europe and Asia, offered tremendous scope for imaginative construction.

Peter the Great had set up a cartography department in 1719. In 1721, following victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War, he proclaimed the Muscovite tsarist state an empire on the model of the Western European powers. From now on, Siberia no longer figured as a land ripe for settlement by intrepid pioneers but as an integral, indeed symmetrical, part of the empire. As such, it needed to be assigned a role in the imperial context. Ascertaining the line of demarcation between the Asian and European parts of the empire now emerged, for the first time, as a geographical and political problem. According to an ancient tradition that remained influential until the early modern period, the Don River—the “Tanais” of ancient geographers—and the Sea of Azov formed the boundary between Europe and Asia.20 The map of Europe produced by the illustrious French geographer, Guillaume Delisle, still adhered to the Don border as a far-western dividing line between “Moscovie Europe” and “Moscovie Asiatique.”²¹ It was not until the 1730s that Philipp von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who spent thirteen years in Russia as a prisoner-of-war, and Vassily Nikitich Tatishchev, geographical adviser to Tsar Peter and leading advocate of his Westernization strategy, pushed the boundary far eastward, relocating it in the Ural Mountains.²² Some time was to pass, however, before their proposal met with widespread acceptance among their Western European colleagues. Having studied the relevant literature, Voltaire came to the conclusion “that the borders of Europe and Asia continue to be blurred.”²³ He was writing in 1759; but by 1771, when Peter Simon Pallas, one of the foremost geographers and natural historians of the late eighteenth century, defined and described the Urals as a physical and ecological boundary zone,²⁴ the Ural solution had begun to prevail in the literature of the West as well. There still remained the question of where the border continued south of the Urals. The matter was eventually decided by geographical convention: the continental limit was declared to follow the Ural River down to the Caspian Sea.²⁵

This internal borderline loomed large in the Russian imperial mind, coming to acquire enormous ideological significance.²⁶ Beginning with Peter the Great, Siberia was “Asianized” and stylized as a colonial supplement to a “European” Russia that now looked to the West for its identity, refashioning its administrative structures, ruling ideology, and elite culture along occidental guidelines. In keeping with this “Asianization” of Siberia, the notion of a “Great Tartary” was borrowed from the Western geographical lexicon. Descriptions of the empire’s northern territories sought to conjure up the image of a Russian Mexico or Peru. At the same time, official tsarist ideology emphasized Europe’s superiority over Asia, thereby imitating the imperial mindset of the Western colonial powers. Great commercial hopes were pinned on the untapped potential of this vast colonial hinterland, and at times it even seemed that these hopes were being realized.

But when the fur trade that had temporarily fueled North Asian prosperity collapsed in the early nineteenth century, Siberia’s prestige sank along with it. What had once, under the reign of Catherine the Great, gleamed as the brightest jewel in the tsarist imperial crown rapidly lost its luster; in the eyes of the Russian public, Siberia now seemed little more than a worthless, barbaric appendage. The union of Europe and Asia under the aegis of the Romanovs had turned out to be a mésalliance between a dynamically progressive West and a primitive, stagnating East, fit only as a dumping ground for convicts. Then, from the mid-1820s onward, the tide turned once again. New voices were heard singing the praises of Siberia’s uncorrupted simplicity, which—depending on taste and political inclination—promised either radical reform or the conservative renewal of Russian society and civilization. At the same time, following the suppression of the 1830 November Uprising in Poland, liberal opinion-makers in England, France, and Germany instilled fear in the public with the image of an expansionary “oriental depotism” embodied in the person of the tsar. Even in the late eighteenth century, an isolated few had preached caution against the “natural enemy of the Occident,”27 or at least urged skepticism about the renovation of the empire’s despotic façade undertaken by Peter the Great and his successors. In 1748, Montesquieu lamented the absence of a civil society in the tsarist empire and predicted that, in a country where peasants were “slaves chained to the soil” (ésclaves attachés aux terres) and trade was held in disrepute, the yoke of despotism would prove impossible to shake off.²⁸ In his view, the Petrine reforms barely scratched the surface. Even the European part of the tsarist empire remained a quasi-oriental country. This great theme of Russia defining herself—or being defined from abroad—as an “Asiatic” or “semi-Asiatic” culture was reprised with considerable vehemence in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.29

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: EUROPEAN GREAT POWER OR BARBARIAN AT THE GATES?

The Ottoman Empire’s relationship with Europe had previously been debated in similar terms. Cartographically speaking, the situation here is rather more straightforward: just as Europe ends in the southwest at the Straits of Gibraltar, so it terminates in the southeast at the Bosphorus and Hellespont. As in the case of Russia, different continents were brought together in a single imperial embrace. As well as straddling Europe and Asia, the Ottoman Empire held sway over Northern Africa all the way to Algeria, albeit with fluctuating degrees of intensity. This made it a tricontinental empire with a multiethnic ruling elite, recruited in large measure from the Christian Balkans and the Black Sea. Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the Mediterranean in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, was not alone in recognizing that the Ottoman Empire could therefore by no means be classified as a “Turkish” state.³⁰ Nonetheless, the distinction between “Turquie europe” and “Turquie asiatique” became established as a cartographic convention. Geographical handbooks frequently dealt with Asian and European Turkey in separate volumes.

Did the presence of a “European Turkey” on maps mean that the Ottoman Empire was one of the Great Powers of Europe? Ever since the idea—and, little by little, the reality—of a European system of sovereign states had emerged from the carnage and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War, a growing number of commentators had been prepared to perceive elements of this system in the Ottoman Empire. The shift in power relations between the Christian states and the Ottomans following the devastating defeats inflicted on the latter on the outskirts of Vienna in 1683 and on the battlefield of Mohács in 1687, not far from where Suleiman the Magnificent had wrested control over much of Hungary in 1526, helped defuse the “Turkish peril,” normalized the image of the “fiendish Turk,” and bequeathed to European art the long-lasting motif of triumph over the former archenemy. In 1671–72, the young Leibniz had already recognized the geopolitical weakness of the Ottoman Empire. Seeking to drum up support for the idea of a French annexation of Egypt, he had traveled to Paris on a special mission to win the minister, Colbert, for his cause.31 A few years later, the protracted, arduous, and fitful process of driving the Ottomans from the Balkans got underway. This time, however, there was no need to dress up the fight in the colors of crusading ideology, as the Vatican attempted to do one last time in 1684 by enlisting the great powers in a “Holy League.” From the 1670s, “Europe” rather than “Christendom” figures in political discourse as the counterweight to the Ottoman Empire. The “Turks” were seen less as religious enemies than as practitioners and proponents of civilizational values that were at odds with those of their European neighbors.³²

Because the European great power system in the eighteenth century was understood purely as a mechanism for recalibrating balances of power,³³ very little political significance was now accorded the fact that the Ottomans were infidels. Religion and ideology never played so minor a role in international politics as in the eighteenth century. So long as the Sublime Porte conducted its foreign policy according to the same principles of rational—that is to say: self-interested and amoral—power politics applied by the Christian states,³⁴ there was no need to regard the Turks as the Other of European politics. Edmund Burke gave voice to a widely shared viewpoint in 1765 when he called the Ottoman Empire “a great power of Europe.”³⁵ In numerous statistical and historiographical works from the second half of the century, the Ottoman Empire appeared as a part of Europe. Johann Christoph Gatterer, for example, treated it as a world power in his Allgemeine Weltstatistik (Universal World Statistics, 1773), a systematic description of the state of every nation known to people the Earth at the time.³⁶ Ludwig Timotheus Spittler, a colleague of Gatterer’s at the then-avant-garde university of Göttingen, likewise included the Ottomans in his history of Europe.³⁷

Around the same time, new tendencies were emerging that defined membership in the European community of nations by allegiance to a shared set of values. In 1774, Ottoman statesmen were criticized for lacking any understanding of international law.38 In 1791, overturning his previous verdict, Edmund Burke declared the Ottoman Empire to be a part of Asia after all by virtue of its distinctive religious and civilizational ethos. It did not belong in the European system, he maintained, since this was not just a mechanism for maintaining a balance of power but a community of values with roots stretching all the way back to the Migration Period.³⁹ Writing at the same time in his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1785–91), Johann Gottfried Herder, the clergyman, poet, and philosopher in Goethe’s Weimar, dealt with the Turks under the heading, “Foreign Nations in Europe.” The Turks, he argued, could not be counted among the “ancient aborigines of Europe, who have resided in it from time immemorial.”⁴⁰ His explanation is worth quoting at some length:

The Turks, a people from Turkistan, notwithstanding they have resided in Europe for more than three centuries, are still strangers in it. They put an end to the eastern empire, which had been a burden to itself and to the world for above a thousand years; and thus unintentionally and unconsciously drove the arts westward into Europe. By their attacks on the European powers they have kept their valour alert for some centuries, and thus preserved them from falling under any foreign dominion: a slight compensation for the incomparably greater evil of having reduced the finest lands of Europe to a desert, and the once most ingenious Greeks to faithless slaves, to dissolute barbarians. How many works of art have these ignorant people destroyed! Their empire is one vast prison for all the Europeans that dwell in it; but it will fall, when its time arrives: for what have foreigners to do in Europe, who, after the lapse of a thousand years, are still resolute to remain Asiatic barbarians?⁴¹

Here it is not their religion that is held against the Turks—tellingly, Herder uses their ethnic name, not the political and dynastic title of the Ottomans. Nor do considerations of ethnic hygiene lie behind the demand that they be driven out of Europe. Herder is no nativist. On the contrary, he considers the “intermingling of nations” to be a positive feature of European development: “In no one quarter of the globe have nations been so intermingled as in Europe; in no one have they so often and so completely changed their abodes, and with them their way of life and manners.”42 What makes the Turks an unwanted alien presence on European soil, in Herder’s eyes, is instead their unwillingness and evident inability to assimilate to a “higher” culture. They stand aloof from the “general spirit of Europe.”⁴³ Conversely, the people of Greece and the Balkans, who have been languishing for centuries under the tyranny of Turkish rule, qualify as “European.” In both Asia Minor and Greece, so says the associated aspersion, the Ottomans had destroyed or wantonly neglected the sites of classical antiquity and laid waste to the fertile landscapes they had seized from their betters. By so flagrantry maladministering what Europe, as represented by the Roman Empire, had left behind in Asia Minor, the Turks appeared only to confirm their foreignness.⁴⁴

Now that the Ottomans could no longer be accused of pursuing a belligerent foreign policy—indeed, an unusually sympathetic observer like Thomas Thornton, resident for fourteen years as merchant at the British factory in Constantinople, could claim with some justice that the Ottoman Empire had been transformed from a ruthless imperialist power into the object of machinations by other ruthless imperialist powers (notably Russia)⁴⁵—criticism turned instead to focus on the un-European nature of Ottoman governance and, ultimately, Turkish civilization. The conservative French political theorist Louis de Bonald summed up this position when he asserted that the Turks had never been at home in the Balkans. They were only camping in Europe.⁴⁶

In such an intellectual climate, the idea that a coalition of European states might intervene in the Balkans to bring about regime change became ever more conceivable. In 1795, the Göttingen scholar Christoph Meiners, displaying the penchant for strongly worded statements that had made him a prominent public figure in Germany, posed the following rhetorical question:

Why have the greater powers in our part of the world … never even considered lifting the barbarous yoke of the Mahommedans at least from the Greek isles, before they are wholly deserted and desolate? A nation … that has conquered and ruled in the manner of the Turks has no right to lands on which it has conferred not the least happiness, but rather has plunged into direst misery from the first, and continues to make ever more miserable.47

Such an argument would surely have been looked on with suspicion by colonial powers of all stripes, given that here, the right of foreigners to intervene in the internal affairs of a great power was derived from the degree to which it showered blessings on its subject peoples. An English author, writing with one eye on the latest British military successes in India or perhaps the situation in Ireland, hastened to make clear that not every foreign dominion won by the sword is for that reason illegitimate, only a regime that bends its subjects’ necks under “the benumbing yoke of ignorance and slavery” and refuses them an enlightening, mutually advantageous “intercourse of knowledge and benevolence.”⁴⁸

Needless to say, a grand pan-European campaign to liberate the Balkans from Ottoman rule never came into being. Yet the Ottoman Empire also played no part in the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), as by rights it should have as the sixth Great Power of Europe, nor was it involved in the broad normative consensus for establishing and maintaining peace within Europe’s borders that superseded the purely mechanical eighteenth-century principle of equilibrium.⁴⁹ This meant that, in the case of an emergency, greater leeway would be granted at Europe’s periphery than within the European system itself. On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire had become a reliable and predictable force for order over the course of the eighteenth century, and no European power apart from Russia had a political interest in seeing it destabilized, let alone destroyed. When anti-Ottoman national uprisings broke out from 1804 onward, first in the Pashalik of Belgrade, then in the Danube principalities, and finally in the Peloponnes, European governments were confronted with a dilemma that the Greek rebellion finally brought to a head. Should they lend their support to a popular insurrection against one of Europe’s oldest dynasties, the House of Osman, and thereby contravene the counterrevolutionary principles that lay at the foundation of the post-Napoleonic order? Or should they yield to the pressure of public opinion, which sided with the freedom-loving Hellenes in their heroic struggle against Turkish tyranny, painting Turkish atrocities in the most garish of colors while simultaneously downplaying or ignoring those perpetrated by the Greeks?

In the end, the Greek War of Independence that erupted in 1821 could be ideologically neutralized by being interpreted, not as a revolutionary nationalist movement with the potential to spill over into Europe, but as a fundamentally conservative push to restore ancient rights that had been suppressed through long centuries of Turkish usurpation. The Turkish massacre of around thirty thousand Christians on the island of Chios in April 1822, compounded by subsequent Ottoman depredations in the Peloponnes, confirmed the worst anti-Turkish prejudices and unleashed such a storm of indignation that an intervention could no longer be avoided. In 1827, Great Britain, France, and Russia flouted the rules of international law and the Vienna “System of Peace” to launch a joint action against the foes of Greek liberty. Their destruction of a Turko-Egyptian fleet at Navarino saved the rebels from almost certain defeat.

The image of Ottoman rule as barbaric and essentially un-European was nothing new. It had been cultivated for years by sections of the European intelligentsia, but the wave of philhellenism that swept across Europe in the 1820s gave it broader appeal. With the Greeks now taking up arms to win their freedom, the image acquired political significance for the first time. Volunteers from abroad like Lord Byron flocked to join the cause, which could be understood—by analogy to the resistance of the Classical Hellenes to the Great King of Persia—as the revolt of an entire continent against Asiatic darkness. A note of uncertainty nonetheless crept into the ideological campaign to make Greece the frontline of Western civilization. Had the Greeks of the early nineteenth century really been able to preserve their ancient Hellenic identity intact through the vicissitudes of two millennia? Might they not have succumbed to the oriental ways to which they had for so long been exposed? Were they really one of us?50

Turkey would not be geographically confined to Asia until 1920, when it was forced to relinquish its last territories on the European mainland (excluding Istanbul and its surroundings). Yet even in the early nineteenth century, the “Asiatic” character of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, along with that of Turkish civilization in general, was scarcely in dispute. Ethnic cleansing of the Turkish population in the territories lost by the Ottoman Empire could be justified without difficulty. Most of his contemporaries would have disagreed with the young Joseph Hammer that “Asia” began at the Bosphorus. For them, it started wherever the Balkan border of the Ottoman Empire happened to be found at the time.

ASIA: THE PREEMINENT CONTINENT?

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was perhaps deliberately targeting the anti-Turkish hysteria of the philhellenes when, in his masterful sociological survey of the populace of Constantinople (1822), he included the Greeks among the “Orientals”—“in consideration of their origins in the East, already sufficiently proven by the affinity of their language with the oriental tongues.”⁵¹ Drawing on his intimate firsthand knowledge of the country, the great Orientalist shone a critical light on attempts to represent the Greeks of his own time as the direct descendants of the Classical Hellenes and inheritors of an authentically “occidental” identity. At the same time, Hammer-Purgstall cited a tradition that saw ancient Greece as a cultural offshoot of the ancient Orient. This idea was commonplace in late-eighteenth-century scholarship, albeit not universally accepted.⁵² There was broad consensus, though, that Europe should be viewed within the larger context of Eurasia.⁵³ Shortly after the First World War, Paul Valéry described Europe as a western appendix to Asia (“un petit cap du continent asiatique”), asking what this geographical reality signified for Europe’s cultural self-awareness.54 Such a notion was entirely unremarkable in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.⁵⁵ As late as 1808, Alexander von Humboldt could still liken Europe’s (climatic) relationship with Asia to that of Brittany with the rest of France.⁵⁶

The influence of militantly expansionary Asiatic tribespeople—Huns, Arabs, Mongols, and Turks—on the history of the Mediterranean, in particular, was a central, much-discussed topic in early modern universal history writing.⁵⁷ An awareness that Europe did not develop in splendid isolation, evolving instead through constant cross-cultural exchange with Asia, temporarily submerged from view in the nineteenth century, only to be rediscovered in our own time by a new generation of historians.⁵⁸ To this was added the oft-repeated topos of Asia as the source of all civilization. Of the three main parts of the ancient world, late-seventeenth-century authors contended, Asia was the most fertile and possessed the most genial climate. The birthplace of religion, the arts, laws, urban society, and monarchic government,⁵⁹ it was also a theologically privileged place in the universe, the setting of mankind’s creation in the Garden of Eden and scene of Christ’s earthly sojourn. By the end of the eighteenth century, faith in the physical localizability of the Garden of Eden had all but vanished, yet Asia’s prestige had largely withstood the skeptical onslaught of a disbelieving age. Study of the continent was still highly recommended, for it represented “the ancestral homeland of the entire human race,” the wellspring of all civilization,⁶⁰ and the “fatherland of the most rational among the enduring positive religions.”⁶¹ In addition, Asia had bestowed more tangible benefits on Europe in the form of its viticulture and much of its agriculture, including “its noblest fruit trees.”⁶² In 1793, the Göttingen historian Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren, summarized the early modern judgment of Asia in his important work, Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt (Historical Researches into the Politics, Intercourse and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity, 1833). Heeren arrived at the conclusion:

Of the three divisions of the ancient world there is none which more attracts and rewards the attention of the philosophical historian, engaged not in the investigation of individual nations but of the human race, than Asia.63

Heeren was writing during the French Revolution, at a time when Europeans tended to see their own civilizational preeminence confirmed chiefly in the field of scientific endeavor. He therefore continued:

Even when we trace the progress of the arts and sciences, notwithstanding the pains which the nations of the West have bestowed in cultivating such pursuits and conferring upon them, as it were, an impress of their own, we find ourselves uniformly recalled to the East as the place of their origin; and it is there that we discover the native seat not only of our own religion, but of all other modes of belief which have become at any time predominant in the world.⁶⁴

Although Heeren was mainly interested in Asia’s past, he advised studying its present as well. The devaluation of modern Asia in favor of a remote classical past, accessible only in ancient texts and architectural monuments, has rightly been identified by Edward Said as a key characteristic of Western “Orientalism.”⁶⁵ It was a view shared by neither Heeren nor his contemporary, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who adroitly combined antiquarian research with commentary on the current state of the Ottoman Empire.

While the reputation of ancient Asia remained consistently high throughout the eighteenth century, representative judgments on how Asia was faring in the present were markedly more critical around 1800 than they had been a century before. One indication of this was the precipitous decline in the continent’s perceived economic standing. In 1673, John Ogilby was not courting ridicule when he claimed in his handsomely produced compendium, Asia, that the world’s greatest empires and trading powers lay in Asia, a continent “ennobled with several grand Prerogatives over the rest.” All the bullion pouring in from the newly exploited gold mines of the Americas could not outweigh the fabulous treasures of the East.66 Wyndham Beawes, in his very well-informed merchant’s manual from 1754, drew on the latest travelers’ reports concerning the world beyond Europe’s borders to paint the picture of a dynamic and flourishing economy. In his account, Asia was not simply passively awaiting the arrival of a band of colonial adventurers to plunder its riches at will; on the contrary, it was a vibrant economic powerhouse that tolerated European merchants and trading houses only within specially allocated niches, a finding that has since been amply confirmed by historical scholarship.⁶⁷

By 1800, however, Asia as a whole strikes a majority of observers as economically backward and in need of revitalization through European commercial enterprise. Whereas Heeren, writing at the end of an era, sought to reaffirm Asia’s dignity as the preeminent continent, a widely read English author, William Guthrie, had in 1771 already arrived at a very different judgment, one that was to be pronounced ever more frequently and stridently in years to come:

Asia next claims our attention; which however, though in some respects the most famous quarter of the world, offers, when compared to Europe, extremely little for our entertainment or instruction. In Asia, a strong attachment to ancient customs, and the weight of tyrannical power, bears down the active genius of man, and prevents that variety in manners and character, which distinguishes the European nations.⁶⁸

Comparing Europe with Asia was nothing new at the time. Indeed, the privileged position formerly reserved for Asia in the history of the world resulted precisely from the contrast drawn with Europe. What was new, in a writer like Guthrie, was the idea that Europe and Asia were engaged in a developmental contest that Asia had already lost. Many saw grounds for triumph in this. “For a long time Asia played a leading role in the world,” we read in a French encyclopedia from 1796, “little is left of this but memories.”69 A more sophisticated thinker, the French revolutionary politician Volney, registered his dismay at the lack of freedom and primitive conditions he encountered on his travels in the East: “All Asia is buried in the most profound darkness.”⁷⁰ But was this unique to Asia? Volney avoided such a crude dichotomy between East and West. He found equally deplorable the oppressive conditions in European nations where serfdom had yet to be abolished.⁷¹ For Volney, Asia might no longer be the preeminent continent but at least it still had a future.

CHARACTER AND ENCYCLOPEDIA

In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Europe left its mark on the New World while still lingering in the shadows cast by an older world. The cultural prestige of a bygone Asia, which was above all an Asia of the Old Testament, remained undimmed. News reports from China, eagerly devoured by European savants, seemed to suggest that the Orient was still capable of enormous cultural productivity. Yet hopes for intercultural dialogue, such as those raised by Leibniz around 1700,⁷² were to be disappointed. Over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, European thought freed itself from what now, from an appalled distance, was perceived to be a debilitating and oppressive tradition that continued to weigh down on Asia. That tradition included Europe’s own fixation on Asia.

While there may have been areas of cultural convergence in the past, such as the chivalric orders of the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages,⁷³ the relationship between Europe and Asia was now increasingly construed in antagonistic terms. Situations of dramatic conflict were particularly well-suited to expressing this. Enlightenment historians had almost invariably blamed the Crusades on Christian fanaticism and misguided worldly ambition. William Robertson, a historian not usually prone to severity in judgment, pronounced them “a singular monument of human folly,”⁷⁴ depicting Saladin, the sultan who spearheaded the reconquest of Jerusalem, in a far more sympathetic light than the Christian invaders of Palestine. Jean-Baptiste Mailly’s history of the First Crusade (1780) struck an altogether different note. Now, for the first time, emphasis is placed on the clash of civilizations: “It is Europe against Asia.”75 Interpretive templates are simplified. “Europe” and “Asia” become more clear-cut in their differences, moving apart and taking up positions on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm. Not by chance, it was precisely a late bastion of the Enlightenment in Heeren who warned against overly sweeping generalizations on the subject of Asia and drew attention to the continent’s cultural diversity.⁷⁶ In the introduction to his historical and ethnographic overview of Asia, he strikes a balance between generalizations of the most cautious kind and sensitivity to the specific complexion of particular landscapes, nations, and cultures. Heeren’s contemporary Conrad Malte-Brun, the doyen of French geography and Napoleon’s favorite geographer, expressed himself with far less restraint—but also far more in keeping with the zeitgeist—when pontificating in 1812 on “the moral character of the Asiatic peoples.” Its essential trait: “immobility.”⁷⁷

At the time he wrote these words, the stereotypes of “Asia” and “the Asiatic” that would go on to dominate the nineteenth century were already gaining ground. Conceptual homogenization went hand in hand with dichotomization. A narrower view of Asia was emerging, one that identified the Orient with Islam and left no room for the non-Islamic inhabitants of Egypt (such as the Copts) and the Levant, for example. Around the turn of the century, a new intellectual claim became increasingly prominent: the idea that it is possible to reach through the veil of exotic appearances to grasp the timeless essence of Asia and its people. Hippocrates had already spoken in general terms of the debility and torpor of the “Asiatics.”⁷⁸ “The Asiatic differs from us in morality and psychology,” reads the programmatic introduction to a new Orientalist journal established in 1806.⁷⁹ Knowledge that makes claim to such apodictic certitude has the advantage of providing ready orientation. The particular is quickly reduced to the universal. The Ottomans are “perfected Asiatics”: one only needs to know Asiatics to know the Ottomans, too.⁸⁰ Prejudices and preconceptions are confirmed even when they appear to be falsified. Someone who believes that “the Oriental is a liar,” for example, will be all the more impressed when he encounters truthfulness among the Javanese and Malays, since it contradicts the “general deficiency of oriental nations in this quality.”81 The exception proves the rule.

In the end, an entire continent contracts into a literary type. In 1824 James Justinian Morier, a retired English diplomat widely traveled in Iran, initiated the genre of the ethnographic novel with The Adventures of Hajji Baba. It became an instant bestseller. Morier set out to present “manners and customs” in a format that held no surprises for a public familiar with the narrative conventions of the European picaresque novel. The novel deploys local color with considerable plausibility and skill, and is thus far removed from the fantasies of cruel despots, conspiring court eunuchs, and scantily clad harem girls penned by his peers. It is also not the anti-Persian diatribe it was taken to be in Iran shortly after its appearance. Hajji Baba, a small-time swindler from a poor artisanal background, is depicted as a charming rogue. He muddles along from day to day, getting by with the help of tall tales and outright lies, and rises to high office before suffering a fall from grace. He lacks the rational mind, fixity of purpose, and high seriousness that distinguish the modern European. Life here is cheerfully endured fatality. Hajji Baba combines all the qualities that his creator wishes to ascribe to the Persian national character. More than that: Hajji Baba is the Oriental, the Orient made flesh and blood.⁸² At the same time, the picaresque figure of Hajji Baba was by no means rejected in Iran as a degrading Orientalist cliché. Mirza Habib Isfahani’s Persian translation of 1886 became an inspiration for Iranian liberals and revolutionaries.⁸³

The concentration in a single character of everything that typifies the continent at the end of our epoch stands opposed to a very different organization of knowledge about the Other from the dawn of the eighteenth century. In 1697, Barthélemi d’Herbelot published a folio volume with the imposing title, Bibliothèque orientale ou dictionnaire universal contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peoples de l’Orient (Oriental Library, or, Universal Dictionary Containing Every Thing Requisite to the Knowledge of the Eastern Nations).84 D’Herbelot’s work gathered together the fruits of half a century’s research—mostly French—into the Near and Middle East. At the initiative of Cardinal Mazarin, then Colbert, French scholars had been commissioned to collect Greek manuscripts, Roman coins, and anything else connected with classical antiquity, including manuscripts in oriental languages.⁸⁵ The Royal Library in Paris thereby became home to the greatest trove of oriental manuscripts in all Europe. D’Herbelot, who could read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish⁸⁶ and in 1692 was made professor of oriental languages at the Collège de France, was probably better acquainted with this material than anyone else. His great work was based almost entirely on earlier publications and original manuscripts in the various regional languages. Following his death, it was furnished with a programmatic introduction and ushered into print by his friend, Antoine Galland, the translator of the Thousand and One Nights. Encyclopedic in scope, it became the eighteenth century’s unsurpassed authority on the geography, history, and culture of the Near and Middle East.⁸⁷ Edward Gibbon, for instance, acknowledged it as one of his chief sources on the history of the Arabs and Turks.⁸⁸

D’Herbelot and Galland’s “Orient” is not the world of an Islam diametrically opposed to the West. Both men—Galland even more so than d’Herbelot—understand the Orient as a space for intercultural encounter and exchange, and they devote extensive coverage to Christian and Jewish minorities in the Islamic sphere. Furthermore, both discern an overarching continuity extending from the world of the Old Testament and Greco-Roman antiquity to the Byzantine Empire and reaching all the way down to the present. Rather than emphasizing the contrast and clash of civilizations, the two authors are more interested in showing their complementarity and mutual influence. The Bibliothèque Orientale consists of over eight thousand alphabetically arranged short articles.⁸⁹ By eschewing any systematic ordering of his own and dispensing with a master narrative, d’Herbelot leaves the discursive field as wide open as possible.90 Generalizations about the Orient are studiously avoided. Such thematic breadth and dispersion conveys the impression of an immense, infinitely varied civilization that militates against any reduction to its supposed “essence.” The world evoked in the work’s more than one thousand pages has the inexhaustible variety of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, which in Galland’s translation was directed at the same contemporary readership. Numerous entries on place communicate a sense of the Orient’s vast extent and size. D’Herbelot’s work stands for a perception of non-European cultures that resists the urge to essentialize the foreign, to boil it down to a few easily recognizable features.

EUROPEAN PRIMACY AND PROVINCIALISM

Even in periods when Asia was still viewed with respect, voices proclaiming Europe to be the most valuable part of the world were never lacking. Just a few years after Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India, Portuguese authors were disputing Asia’s superiority.⁹¹ By the second half of the eighteenth century, the idea of European primacy had become commonplace. The geographer, Johann Georg Hager, made the point succinctly: “Europe may be the smallest part of the world, but it is the best.”⁹² In 1783, the far-from-parochial-minded voyager, polymath, and natural historian, Johann Reinhold Forster, father of the more famous Georg Forster, saw Europe as having attained an “ultimate peak of perfection”; ten years later, the English philosopher and founding theorist of anarchism, William Godwin, called it “the most civilized and favored quarter of the world.”⁹³ In 1785, Anton Friedrich Büsching, more a collator and well-informed synthesizer than an original thinker in his own right, summarized the arguments of his contemporaries:

Europe may be the smallest of the Earth’s four continents, but it should be considered the most important: 1) because none is better farmed; 2) because it is mightier than the other three combined; 3) because Europeans have subjected to their dominion the greater part of the rest of the Earth’s surface, or made themselves fruitful therein, just as they alone have connected the Earth’s main parts with each other through their seafaring, travel and trade; 4) because Europe has for many centuries been the principal seat of the arts and sciences; and 5) because Europeans have brought knowledge of the world’s true Lord and Savior to the four corners of the Earth.94

Büsching wrote these words at a time when the first signs of industrialization had not yet given Europe an edge over commercially advanced economies and exporters of manufactured goods such as India and China.⁹⁵ Europe’s economic advantages were still to be found in agriculture, in the excellence of its farming practices, while its political precedence could not yet—four years before the end of the ancien régime—be said to lie in the higher level of freedom enjoyed by its people. Europe’s true superiority was shown in the dynamism of its expansion: in the spread of its rule through force of arms, in its thriving settler colonies, in its ability to create a modern global system through “seafaring, travel and trade,” in its propagation of Christianity through missionary activity. In the late eighteenth century, almost nobody believed that European predominance might have a biological or racial foundation. The Göttingen professor, Christoph Meiners, was an exception: in 1793, he anticipated later race theories in seeing “the stock of light and fair … nations” as destined to attain a position of world-historical supremacy.⁹⁶

Even if Asia, in the judgment of the eighteenth century, was the place where the arts and sciences had originated, Europe later became their “principal seat,” as Büsching puts it. The abbé Dubos, taking up an idea from Fontenelle,⁹⁷ found a striking image for the same thought in 1719: the fine arts and sciences had never strayed far from Europe except to take an occasional turn on southern shores, so to speak (“pour se promener, s’il est permis de parler ainsi, sur les côtes de l’Asie et de l’Afrique”).⁹⁸ Dubos included warfare among the sciences, and Edward Gibbon considered the rational perfection attained by the Greeks and Romans in this field to have been instrumental in allowing the West to outmatch and overpower the East.99 The science of politics, according to Dubos, had also suffered comparative neglect in Asia. To be sure, there was more to this than a simple opposition between European liberty and Asiatic despotism.¹⁰⁰ Henry Brougham, the liberal reformer and later British Lord Chancellor, found “[a] perfect knowledge of the arts of administration” only in Europe,¹⁰¹ detecting slow progress toward greater civic freedoms and public oversight of monarchies even in absolutist states. Brougham attributed this progress in part to the civilizing effects of trade, but also to the general dissemination of knowledge and education brought about by the printing press. Barely a few years after the French Revolution had cut a deep ideological cleft through Europe, he calmly and confidently predicted the spread of a “modern system” of rational politics across the continent. Even under nonconstitutional monarchies, the excesses of princely passions could still be curbed through “the indirect influence of a numerous and enlightened people.”¹⁰² Violent passions were, of course, the hallmark of barbaric despotism.

The further the eighteenth century advanced, the more it seemed obvious to European commentators that Europe had outstripped Asia in the natural sciences, above all. Yet it was not until the early nineteenth century that the idea became widespread that in Europe—and only in Europe—knowledge of nature acquired through the sciences could successfully be converted into control of nature. The geographer Malte-Brun was one of the first to state this directly, ascribing the triumph of European civilization chiefly to its technological prowess: “We alone subject even the most fearsome powers of nature to our will.”¹⁰³ The epoch of the great colonial engineering projects looms on the horizon.

Büsching’s third argument for the superiority of modern Europe—that it is the only civilization to have created communication and trade networks crisscrossing the globe—is undoubtedly correct. It should not, however, be read as blatant justification for imperialist and colonialist practices. Eighteenth-century authors were more sensitive than nineteenth-century theorists of imperialism to the process of globalization playing out before their eyes. To witness the emergence of a world society, all they needed to do was visit one of the many port cities strung out along the coastlines of Europe. Their astonishment at the dramatic nature of this development is often palpable in their writings. None expressed this astonishment with greater wit or artistry than Edward Gibbon, the foremost European historian of the age and one of its best prose stylists, who discerned the beginnings of globalization in the impact of Genghis Khan’s campaigns on the fishmonger trade in England. “It is whimsical enough,” writes Gibbon, “that the orders of a Mogul khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered the price of herrings in the English market.”104

Others commented just as perceptively, albeit less cleverly, on the worldwide connections emerging at the time. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trade, travel, and conquest brought nations closer together, gradually blurring the distinctions between different ways of life.¹⁰⁵ To many of his contemporaries, the economic links being forged between continents were plain to see. Europe had organized trans-Atlantic trade routes with African slaves and sugar,¹⁰⁶ and it consumed vast quantities of goods from India and China, paying for them with silver shipped from the mines of Mexico and Peru.¹⁰⁷ In 1754, Wyndham Beawes made a further observation that historians would not rediscover until the 1970s: global trade had not begun with European expansion into overseas markets; Arab merchant vessels had long plied the seas between Asia, Africa, and Europe.¹⁰⁸

Several authors hyperbolically or prophetically celebrated Europe’s rise to global dominance. In 1801, three quarters of a century before the dawn of the age of imperialism, the abbé de Pradt, a prolific writer with particularly sharp antennae for international developments, noted that Europe was something like the capital of the world: it had discovered the secret of making others work for its own profit and filling state coffers with “tribute from around the world.”¹⁰⁹ Others, less cynically, felt the need to preach the virtues of enlightenment, emphasizing the worldwide dissemination of European knowledge and good morals: cutting-edge scientific research was already being carried out in Calcutta and Lima;¹¹⁰ ideas and fashion trends shuttled back and forth between continents; long sea voyages were becoming safer and more comfortable thanks to better ships, the successful campaign against the terrible mariners’ disease, scurvy, and the establishment of seafarers’ lodges in Asia; educational standards were improving all around the world.111 Johann Reinhold Forster, who knew a thing or two about travel, having sailed with his son Georg on Captain Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe from 1772 to 1775, saw seafaring—whether for purposes of trade or scientific inquiry—as a “bond” uniting the entire human race in fellowship and amity:

The bond of conviviality and love, which from time to time may slacken among the children of men, is often strengthened and tightened by travel at sea. Once compelled by dire necessity to set aside the proud spirit of indifference, and to accept the help and solicitude of strangers, one learns to see that a man and a nation do not exist for their own sake, but rather to provide mutual assistance and support.¹¹²

Yet travel, especially when ventured solely “for the satisfaction of curiosity,” was something only “civilized nations” undertook, and Europe alone had turned it into a global industry. Immanuel Kant likewise saw the continents growing ever more closely interlinked through trade, but he judged the consequences of this new wave of commercial activity far more skeptically—and also far more realistically—than Johann Reinhold Forster, normally an irascible character but here subject to a rare fit of Panglossian enthusiasm. Kant had observed the frequency with which trade in Asia paved the way for full-blown conquest and colonization. In his late text, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795), he showed an understanding for why the Japanese and Chinese restricted rights of access to their countries, even if that meant obstructing the free movement of people, ideas, and goods. Like Montesquieu, Johann Reinhold Forster, and many others, Kant foresaw that “continents distant from each other can enter into peaceful mutual relations which may eventually be regulated by public laws.”113 Yet the philosopher sounded a note of caution:

If we compare with this ultimate end the inhospitable conduct of the civilized states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great. America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc. were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counted as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), foreign troops were brought in under the pretext of merely setting up trading posts. This led to oppression of the natives, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race.

China and Japan (Nippon), having had experience of such guests, have wisely placed restrictions on them. China permits contact with her territories, but not entrance into them, while Japan only allows contact with a single European people, the Dutch, although they are still segregated from the native community like prisoners.¹¹⁴

Kant, who kept himself well-informed in remote Königsberg, was acutely aware of the globalizing tendencies of the age. Sensing the ambivalence of enlightenment and power politics, he sought legal means to ensure that the increasing integration of the world, while driven by European interests, would prove beneficial to all concerned. Europeans should not be permitted to ride roughshod over the rights of natives in their bid to conquer new markets and territories. Kant therefore proposed a “Weltbürgerrecht” or cosmopolitan right. What he understood by this was not so much untrammeled freedom of movement as the right to travel abroad and visit other countries without let or hindrance. He wanted to outlaw colonialism, a demand so radical that even the revolutionaries in France refused to support it. None of his contemporaries thought through the dilemma of early globalization and European predominance as deeply as Kant.

August Ludwig Schlözer in Göttingen, at once the least elegant writer and most astute synthesizer among the European historians of the Enlightenment, was similarly exercised by the emergence of a network of relations spanning the entire globe. Unlike Kant, however, he did not view the problem from a normative standpoint but was more interested in its implications for the writing of history. Schlözer was far from advocating a historiography that celebrated Europe’s rise over other civilizations. Alongside the Romans and medieval Germans, he included the Chinese, Arabs, Mongols, and Turks in his list of the “major races” of history, the leading nations that had built up a world empire, whereas the Greeks and Egyptians ranked only among the “merely significant races.”115 Grounded in late-eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, Schlözer’s world history abstains from the kind of teleological narrative that sees history culminating in the Europeanization of the world. It seeks out “concatenations spanning countries and centuries”¹¹⁶ in earlier epochs, and it employs “apt comparison”¹¹⁷ between historical phenomena in different civilizations—or, as Schlözer neutrally states, different parts of the world—to discover points of convergence and divergence between developmental stages. Echoing Francis Bacon, Schlözer identifies modern Europe’s achievements less in its rise to global hegemony, the line taken by Büsching and especially the abbé de Pradt, than in technical breakthroughs such as the “compass, gunpowder, paper, print, spectacles, clocks and the post.”¹¹⁸ “With the help of these inventions, we discovered three new worlds and proceeded to subjugate, plunder, cultivate or lay waste to them.”¹¹⁹ Although formulated within the intellectual horizon of the late Enlightenment, Schlözer’s far-reaching reflections on what a non-Eurocentric history of the world might look like still bear thinking about today. If, for all that, Schlözer was still swayed in his judgment by the civilizational advances made in Europe over the previous three centuries, then this is hardly surprising: no author claimed the complete equality of all lands and nations at the time.

In the eighteenth century, there were those who were convinced of modern Europe’s world-historical superiority.120 They attributed to people like themselves—that is, Europeans in countries like France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands—“a degree of culture that raises us far above our contemporaries in the other parts of the world as well as the most enlightened people of antiquity” (Schlözer).¹²¹ Yet they did not have to assert this by rejecting and denigrating other civilizations. To Schlözer we owe the important insight that the creation of a worldwide trade and communications network—the modern global system initiated by the European powers—first made possible a global historiography that went beyond a disconnected summation of national and regional histories. European expansion first created a global epistemic framework within which a wide array of historical subprocesses could be ordered. Like the earlier Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time, a monumental work produced by a team of British authors that appeared in sixty-six volumes between 1736 and 1766 and sought to give non-European history its due,¹²² Schlözer allows us to glimpse the possibility of an inclusive Eurocentrism.

For the philosopher of history Johann Gottfried Herder, modern Europe’s primacy also proved compatible with a conception of universal history that respected what was unique to other civilizations.¹²³ The same holds true for Sir William Jones, one of the Orient’s most energetic and successful advocates in Europe, who translated and promoted research on the literature, law, and history of almost every Asiatic culture.¹²⁴ Jones never for a moment doubted Europe’s superiority. But while he praised its achievements as “transcendently majestick”¹²⁵ and upheld the aesthetic normativity of Greco-Roman literature throughout his life, he still treasured Persian poetry and the Indian Sanskrit epics. Such inclusive Eurocentrism characterized the Enlightenment from first to last. Not until the nineteenth century, when intellectual horizons narrowed to reflect the cultural preferences and prejudices of white male imperialists, did it give way to an exclusive Eurocentrism.