12

Cosmopolitan Prejudice

PAULO LEMOS HORTA

The contradictions of cosmopolitanism came into focus in the summer of 2016 as commentators struggled to explain both the triumph of Brexit and the populist appeal of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In this shifting political landscape, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat sought to disabuse readers of the New York Times of the notion that the cosmopolitanism of the economic and cultural elites in New York and London amounted to a genuine openness to difference. Taking issue with a media narrative that opposed tribalism and cosmopolitanism, Douthat suggested that this new species of “global citizens” behave much like a tribe. Sharing the same set of values and defining themselves against the same out-groups, these cosmopolitans take advantage of the new technologies of globalization to circulate within a zone of “comfort and familiarity.”

One might readily agree that “[g]enuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing” and that the “global-citizen bubble” distinctly limits encounters with real cultural difference. Cosmopolitanism in its most vigorous form should entail a willingness to be transformed by an experience of the foreign rather than just the comfort of belonging to a global elite. When Douthat searches for historical examples of a more meaningful engagement with cultural difference, however, his choices represent a new set of contradictions. “There is,” he claims, “more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.” This abrupt turn to the age of empire for examples of a more authentic cosmopolitanism suggests an odd nostalgia for a time when the world seemed to offer examples of impenetrable strangeness to be mastered by daring feats of exploration and cultural immersion. This era may provide an antidote to the increased homogeneity of our contemporary world, but the mixture of tolerance and prejudice in this model of imperial cosmopolitanism does not provide a solution for the challenges of our contemporary political culture. Douthat’s suggestion that empire “made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists—sometimes out of the same people” is certainly applicable to figures like Richard Burton,1 but what does this mean for our understanding of the limits of cosmopolitan tolerance?

A more nuanced understanding of Burton’s status as a cosmopolitan is offered by the liberal philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah, who uses the famous explorer and translator as a point of departure to consider questions of ethics and belonging in his seminal study of cosmopolitanism. Appiah marvels at Burton’s ability to “go native” again and again during his travels in South Asia, Africa, Arabia, and the Americas, but is also attentive to the distinct limits of Burton’s empathy—most evident in his acceptance of the institution of slavery. Thus Burton takes on two roles in Appiah’s work: both the cosmopolitan who seeks out the experience of difference and the counter-cosmopolitan who cannot quite escape the residual prejudices of his early upbringing.2 A closer look at the remarkable feats of immersion and impersonation that characterized Burton’s time abroad, however, suggests that the acquisition of bias was a critical part of Burton’s cosmopolitan self-fashioning. If Burton provides a remarkable example of the empathetic adoption of foreign cultural values, he also provides an example of the way in which tolerance and prejudice are intertwined within cosmopolitan experience.

Burton’s reputation as a poster boy for cosmopolitanism rests upon the extraordinary feats of travel, language acquisition, and cultural immersion that characterized his career as a colonial officer, explorer, and diplomat. From his first postings in colonial India, Burton deliberately sought to fashion himself in the image of the foreigner to pursue his goal of undermining the complacent sense of superiority of “John Bull” abroad. The key to this exercise in self-fashioning was Burton’s remarkable acquisition of foreign languages—in his estimate, more than thirty. Passing six language exams in seven years, Burton attempted to rival the achievements of those Anglo-Indian officers and diplomats who sought to rule Britain’s Indian empire through their expertise in “Oriental” languages, but he also self-consciously set himself apart from this class of administrators. Claiming that those “who prided themselves most on their conversancy with native dialects and native character, are precisely those persons who have been the most egregiously, the most fatally, outwitted and deceived by the natives,”3 he deliberately cultivated the perspective of the cosmopolite who could move effortlessly between multiple vernacular languages and imperial cultures to achieve a more accurate understanding of this protean environment.

The most impressive of Burton’s deeds was arguably his plan to complete the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in 1853 in the guise of Mirza Abdullah, an Arab-Persian from the north shore of the Persian Gulf. This was the persona that Burton established during his service with the East India Company and which he resurrected as he set off on his most challenging experiment in foreign cultural immersion, hoping to surpass the achievements of earlier European “pilgrims” like Jean Louis Burckhardt. In 1853, Burton disembarked in the port city of Alexandria en route to Mecca in his “old character of a Persian wanderer,” boasting in his travelogue that local servants would mistake him for an Ajami, a Persian Muslim. Yet the stranger had miscalculated. Mirza Abdullah found himself unwelcome in Cairo due to the prejudice against Persians, who were thought to be “clever and debauched.” To salvage his trip, Burton decided to dispense with one identity and reemerge as a Pathan, an Afghan born and raised in India. Mirza Abdullah thus became Sheikh Abdullah. In the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, Burton elaborated upon the fine adjustments necessary to inhabit this new identity. Even the simple act of drinking water as a Muslim raised not in Persia but in India required “no fewer than five novelties.” This tour de force—taking on not one but two distinct Muslim personae in quick succession—would make Burton famous.4

Against the benefits of cultural immersion in any one culture, Burton consistently asserted the importance of the cognitive expansion that extensive travel provided. He conceived of his practice of disguise as enabling a cosmopolitan experience that would disrupt familiar patterns of thought. To travel was to be stripped of one’s illusions about home and educated in un-belonging. Viewed from the perspective of Scinde, Burton contended, the English attachment to romantic conceptions of English identity rooted in rural belonging appeared ridiculous. “I regret to say,” Burton wrote, “that the Scindians … having no word to explain your ‘home,’ attach none of those pretty ideas to the place in question.”5 Burton would promote the translation of foreign works into English as an essential means of introducing the same cognitive dissonance into the national culture, allowing readers “the enormous advantage of being capable of comparing native with foreign ideas and views of the world.”6 In his own translations, he sought to deprovincialize English concepts about what constituted literature, good taste, and good style. Determined to “foreignize” the English language, Burton displayed an uncompromising commitment to neologisms, foreignisms, and the preservation of the sound effects of the original text in his translations.7 He sought to mirror the impact of foreign travel by unsettling expectations with unknown vistas, like undiscovered countries.

Appiah admits to a lifelong fascination with the figure of Burton, generated after encountering his translation of The Thousand and One Nights as a child. At fourteen, he read a biography of Burton and was struck by his apparent ability to be “a Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a Sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among Catholics.” In Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, Burton is presented as being “something of a freak of nature in his ability to penetrate different cultures—to ‘go native,’ as we say, and do so time and time again.” In this capacity, Appiah deploys Burton as exemplary of the kind of openness to other cultures that he sees as essential to the cosmopolitan. He thus emphasizes the “voracious assimilation of religions, literatures, and customs from around the world” that mark Burton “as someone who is fascinated by the range of human invention, the variety of our ways of life and thought,” to the point that “he could see the world from perspectives remote from the outlook in which he had been brought up.”8 Burton thus embodies the second defining feature of Appiah’s model of cosmopolitanism: the ability to recognize “that human beings are different and that we can learn from each other’s differences.” While few are capable of Burton’s freakish gift for cultural immersion, Appiah contends that “most of us have the ability to some lesser degree: we can often experience the appeal of values that aren’t, exactly, our own.”9

If Burton’s talent for cultural immersion serves the purposes of Appiah’s argument in some respects, other examples of the Victorian traveler’s perspective are more difficult to reconcile with the concentric circles of belonging that characterize cosmopolitanism in the philosopher’s work. While Appiah’s model of cosmopolitanism serves to affirm his own affiliation with multiple overlapping communities defined by relationships of kinship and love (as an Asante, a Ghanaian, an American, and as the bearer of his mother’s British heritage), the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Burton’s experience seems to lead instead to a sense of loss and un-belonging. This aspect of Burton’s cosmopolitanism appears as an important undercurrent in the insightful psychological reading by biographer Fawn Brodie, who suggests Burton felt a “restlessness” and a “fluidity of his identity” that meant that he “felt at home no place.” Jean-François Gournay likewise interprets the “frenzy of Burton’s activity as translator” as the continuation of a series of disguises that speak to an elusive quest for identity.10 In a reversal of the familiar sense of the cosmopolitan at home everywhere, Burton seems to have been at home nowhere.

Like Douthat, Brodie links Burton with T. E. Lawrence, another cosmopolitan known for his ability to sympathetically engage with Arab culture. Lawrence’s autobiography indicates that he mirrored Burton in recognizing the cognitive gains of immersion in a foreign culture: “The effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes; they destroyed it all for me.” However, what was lost was not easily replaced: “Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other.… Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.”11 For Burton too, the adoption of a new cultural persona provided him with a lens to see through the conventions of his late Victorian era. It was this unraveling of familiar English assumptions about culture, and in particular sexuality, that constituted the cosmopolitan education he sought to provide readers of his travelogues and translations. In his commentary on The Thousand and One Nights, he declared his intention to shock contemporary Englishmen out of what he termed their nineteenth-century prejudices—cultural, religious, and sexual.

The worlds through which Burton moved were not as easily reconciled as the concentric circles of belonging described by Appiah. More illuminating of Burton’s cosmopolitan practice, and his self-fashioning as Mirza Abdullah, is the notion of cosmopolitanism offered by American historian Thomas Bender. Drawing upon the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, Bender reverses the usual experiential meanings associated with cosmopolitanism. While some might argue that the cosmopolitan is comfortable in all settings and in all cultures, Bender suggests that cosmopolitan experience should entail some degree of discomfort. The cosmopolitan is someone prepared to be unsettled by an encounter with difference, which should prompt not only an inquiry into this novel experience but also a reevaluation of one’s own identity. This is the cosmopolitanism that we seem to encounter in Burton’s writings—a cosmopolitanism with the potential to transform.12

The progressive potential within foreign immersion is most evident in Burton’s critical comments on the practices of British imperialism. In his travelogues of Scinde, for instance, Burton launched a scathing attack of British policies designed to stamp out indigenous practices and to force local subjects to assimilate to English manners, laws, beliefs, and dress.13 Burton objected to any quest to rid the territory of traditional practices such as sati, and he argued that Britain, as the greatest Muslim empire of its age, should govern its territories with a more sympathetic understanding of Muslim mores. Burton’s mockery of British imperial policy as a crude form of plunder uninformed by the needs of local populations has led scholars to dub him a critic of empire. Yet Fawn Brodie, who remains the most incisive of his many biographers, was closer to the mark in observing that he was “not so much against Empire and imperialism [as] frustrated with a second-rate, amateurish, bumbling, arrogant, mismanaged Empire.” Even as he railed against English imperialism, he praised French, Dutch, and Portuguese examples of colonial rule. What Burton wanted to see was a form of imperialism that was more knowledgeable of and sympathetic to local mores and more successful in raising local standards of living through modes of industrialization that might alleviate “chronic poverty.”14 He sought a more cosmopolitan imperialism that was both more attentive to local values and bolder in its use of this knowledge to pursue the objectives of colonial rule. Burton thus suggested that the British administrator in India keep his Muslim subjects in line by threatening them with cremation, an unthinkable punishment that would have precluded an afterlife according to Muslim belief.

Again and again Burton asserts the value of immersing oneself in alternative cultural practices, but in ways that lead to problems in applying contemporary definitions of cosmopolitanism. While Appiah holds on to some notion of a universal, Burton’s repeated reinvention of his own value system in different cultural contexts seems to lead into a relativism that excuses too much. This position is perhaps most provocatively stated in Burton’s travelogue of the Congo: “Conscience is a purely geographical and chronological accident.… And what easier way to prove that there is no sin however infamous, no crime however abominable, which at some time or in some part of the world has been or is still held in highest esteem?”15 Burton’s descriptions of black Africans as “hideous” and “bestial” encapsulate the racism that underpins his acceptance of the institution of slavery in Central Africa, and in this respect he fails what Appiah deems the other essential imperative for the cosmopolitan—to recognize “our responsibility for every human being.” In Central Africa, Burton seemed to reach the limits of a cosmopolitanism based on sympathetic identification. As Dane Kennedy argues in his recent biography, Burton tended to react with hostility when he encountered a context in which he could not pass as an insider.16 Racial difference proved to be an impenetrable barrier to achieving a sense of solidarity during his travels in Central Africa.

For Appiah, Burton’s example serves to illustrate the sobering recognition that prejudice is not derived solely from ignorance, and that intimacy need not lead to “amity.”17 In the end, however, he attributes Burton’s failings to a counter-cosmopolitanism rooted in the biases left over from his early education in Englishness. I would argue in contrast that one should not so quickly abandon the idea that these prejudices were a product of Burton’s successive cultural immersions—that they were part of a cosmopolitanism produced in intimate contact with the foreign rather than being a residue of resistance to the cognitive impact of cultural difference. The adoption of local biases was essential to Burton’s attempt to fashion new identities that would allow him to insinuate himself in a new ethnic, national, or religious community.

This interplay between going native and internalizing native prejudices is an overlooked constant in Burton’s attempts to articulate a distinctive cosmopolitan perspective. In his earliest South Asian travelogues, Burton expressed a firm rejection of what he perceived to be the prevalent biases among British Orientalists and colonial administrators against Muslims and in favor of Hindus. Reversing this valuation, he developed a strong preference for the Persian “race” as he developed a deep friendship with his Persian language teacher, Mirza Mohammad, and began to cultivate his own identity as a Persian Muslim in a series of local expeditions. “The gifted Iranian race,” Burton claimed, was “physically the noblest and the most beautiful of all known to me.” The Sindhis, in contrast, were described as a “semi-barbarous race”—a “half-breed between the Hindoo, one of the most imperfect, and the Persian, probably the most perfect specimen of the Caucasian type.” As Fawn Brodie observes of these South Asian travelogues, “Burton is always involved; he admires, he disapproves, he hates, he loves; he judges; he scoffs; he scorns.”18 If, as the biographer notes, he always “feels, passionately and intensely,” I would add he does so with particular communities, and against other communities defined in terms that replicate local categories.

Burton’s desire to contest conventional judgments of religious communities outside the Anglo-American mainstream is on display once again in the travelogue that chronicles his nine-month trek across America in 1859–60. Highlighting a three-week stay among the Mormons of Salt Lake City, The City of the Saints displays the intertwining of tolerance and prejudice characteristic of much of his travel writing. Rejecting contemporary portraits of Mormonism as “venomous,” Burton seeks to normalize the position of the “Mormon Mecca” among the many holy cities that he has visited over his lifetime of travel, placing it alongside the Muslim sites of pilgrimage as well as Memphis, Benares, Jerusalem, and Rome.19 The description of Burton’s arrival in Salt Lake City—his first sight of the valley after emerging from the Wasatch Mountain canyon—is one of his most lyrical pieces of writing and may be placed alongside his record of his first sighting of Medina in the Personal Narrative, where he seems to share the pious enthusiasm of the pilgrims. The “lovely panorama of green and azure and gold” seemed to him “fresh as it were from the hands of God,” and the view of the lake, “bounding the far horizon, like a band of burnished silver,” made him understand why believers felt the “Spirit of God pervades the very atmosphere.”20

Appiah’s liberal theory of cosmopolitanism may be seen as a rejection of the claims of such religious communities given the opposition it sets up between the liberal values of tolerance, epistemic modesty, and open-mindedness and what he terms the “toxic” cosmopolitanism of evangelical Christianity, the colonialist’s civilizing mission, and the “apocalyptic nihilism” of the terrorist.21 In Burton’s writing, global religions and their capitals are not presented as the antithesis of cosmopolitanism, but rather as representative of an alternative set of values too readily dismissed in mainstream England. Burton marshals statistics to demonstrate Salt Lake City to be a site of immigration for many thousands of Europeans, rather than an isolated refuge for castoffs and renegades. While he emphasizes the sizable British presence in the city, he would concur with a French traveler’s depiction of Salt Lake City as a place where “English, Scotch, Canadians, Americans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Italians, French, Negroes, Hindoos, and Australians” converge “to live more than brothers in perfect harmony.”22

There is evidence that Burton sought to immerse himself in the distinctive perspective of the Mormons and hence to write about their community from an insider’s perspective. He spent at least three days in September 1860 taking copious notes in the Historian’s Office of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Brigham Young himself granted Burton more than the customary attention due to a famous foreign visitor and personally showed him the city. Burton’s travelogue presents the Mormon leader as singularly capable and without pretense or vanity, and offers a defense of the practice most condemned in contemporary portraits of Mormonism—polygamy. Drawing from a comparative perspective nurtured by his many journeys, Burton presented polygamy among the Mormons as natural and moral. While the “Mormon household has been described by its enemies as a hell of envy, hatred, and malice, a den of murder and suicide,” Burton argues that the “same has been said of the Moslem harem.” He asserts that both these assessments reflect “the assertions of prejudice or ignorance,” and provocatively ventures that “in point of mere morality the Mormon community is perhaps purer than any other of equal numbers.”23 Burton mocks the absurdities reported in other travelogues of Utah, such as the report of outdoor stables where Mormon wives would have been stored like animals. Contemporary reviews of The City of the Saints in London would interpret Burton’s sympathy for the Mormons as credulity.24

While distinctive in his sympathy for the Mormons and impassioned in his defense of polygamy, Burton also used his travelogue of America to articulate sharp opinions of a series of other groups: Western Americans, “mountain men,” French Canadians, and Native Americans of thirty different named tribes. Burton claimed to be eager to meet the native peoples in peace and in battle and boasted of having acquired knowledge of the practices of scalping and totem carving, but in reality, as biographers have observed, he had minimal if any contact with native peoples. His references to natives as deceitful, lying, and thieving are largely derived from his fellow travelers. Biographer Edward Rice concludes that in this case Burton’s opinions were “formed, sadly, not by experience but by the prejudices of his companions.”25 Historian David Wrobel contends that Burton generally avoided contemporary stereotypes of the noble savage and the uncivilized barbarian, but he seems to have drawn on the conventional wisdom of other travelers to write with assurance of the various merits of different native tribes. If his interest in the spiritual beliefs of Native Americans signals that Burton possessed some degree of sympathy, he was not above volunteering military advice on how to best subjugate rebellious tribes.26

When Burton sought to inhabit a foreign identity—whether that of the Arab or the Mormon—he tended to internalize the quarrels, sympathies, and antipathies of that group—in sum, its biases. This proved to be a difficult match with his role as a British diplomat, which began in 1861 with a minor posting in Fernando Po, an island off the west coast of Africa, but eventually took him to Brazil, Damascus, and Trieste. Burton’s writings from his diplomatic postings in Brazil once again reflect the intermingling of openness and bias that characterized his efforts to navigate foreign ground. In South Asia he had already developed a fascination with the Portuguese as representative of an alternative mode of cosmopolitan empire—embodied for Burton in the poetry of Camões.27 In Brazil this identification became even more intense as he sought to reverse what he saw as an English bias in favor of the Spanish and against the Portuguese with characteristic vehemence. He took great umbrage at the description of Brazil as “[b]irds without song, flowers without perfume, men without honour, and women without honesty.” Such a sentiment could only be spoken by “a stranger, after a few months’ residence, who can hardly speak a connected sentence of Portuguese.”28 Finding in print the observation, “Strip a Spaniard of all his good qualities and you have a Portuguese,” Burton caustically rejoined, “Strip a Portuguese of his thrift and industry, supply him well with bigotry and a pride which has nothing to be proud of, and you have a Spaniard.”29 Burton not only championed the Empire of Brazil, but he mocked the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores, extending sympathy to the “wondruous physical civilization[s]” of the Aztecs and Incas vanquished by “a band of … Barbarians.”30

Not surprisingly, Burton’s championing of the Empire of Brazil was manifest politically in his support for its continued practice of slavery. Burton’s thoughts on its survival in Brazil after its abolition elsewhere represent the corollary to his support for a cosmopolitan ideal of empire adapted to local norms. Burton was not making a universal and universalizing argument for the continuance of slavery in the world, but rather a particular apology for the Brazilian imperial government’s rationale for the continuation of slavery. It is a defense of cultural exceptionalism of a piece with his case for polygamy among the Mormons in America or for the Hindu rites of sati that British colonial administrators abhorred. In Brazil, Burton sided with majority local opinion against the fashion of Europe and the instructions he received from the British Foreign Office. In cultivating a special kinship with the local inhabitants rather than the British government and the citizens he was supposed to be representing, Burton publicly jettisoned those elements of British public opinion and foreign policy that might have made him less welcome among the local elite.

In Brazil, Burton parlayed a relatively modest posting as consul at Santos into sojourns at the imperial court in Petropolis, where he befriended the Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II. Long after Burton was posted elsewhere, the two men remained friends, and in the last year of his life, the former emperor, living in exile in Paris, would even attempt a translation of the Thousand and One Nights into Portuguese. Would this degree of favor and intimacy have been possible had Burton fulfilled his obligation as a diplomat to articulate British policy on the contentious issue of slavery? Can one infiltrate cultures, be accepted as a foreigner, without embracing local prejudices? Is not the sharing of prejudices, the recognition that a bias is reasonably held, one of the first thresholds to be passed for any degree of cultural immersion and social acceptance? Appiah observes that anthropologists tend to accept and explain practices that metropolitan readerships find shocking—from genital mutilation to cannibalism—but what of embracing a tribe’s hatred for a neighboring tribe, or endorsing its enslavement of it?

The controversial issue of Burton’s anti-Semitism may be the most important test of how the experience of cultural immersion might impact the balance of tolerance and prejudice in the cosmopolitan traveler. Burton’s early letters demonstrated his sympathy and even his repeated identification with the predicament of Jews in Europe. As late as his Brazilian sojourn in the 1860s Burton would observe, in a confession that reflects the odd contradictions of his cosmopolitanism, “Had I choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish—of course the white family.”31 Accusations of anti-Semitism crystallized around Burton’s time as British consul in Damascus, where his identification with the local Muslim population was accompanied by a critical attitude toward Jewish merchants and Christian missionaries.

Burton arrived in Damascus with a well-established affinity for Arab culture and Islam and an ability to pass as an Arab sheikh that he continued to put to use on the streets of the city. Whether or not he was simply adopting the perspectives of his Muslim subjects, Burton’s inclination was to question the policies of previous British consuls who had offered support to the local Jewish and Christian population. Predictably, the “first unpleasantness” that Burton protested to the Foreign Office was the distribution of “Christian tracts” among the Muslims of Damascus by the superintendent of the British Syrian school at Beirut.32 In addition to alienating Christian missionaries, Burton angered the Jewish community by refusing to aid Jewish creditors under British protection because he deemed that they had acted as usurers “in ruining villages and imprisoning destitute debtors upon trumped charges.”33 This was despite his earlier assessment of the majority of the Jewish population as “hard-working, inoffensive, and of commercial integrity, with a fair sprinkling of the pious, charitable, and innocent people.” The letter of protest prepared by London’s Chief Rabbi Sir Francis Goldsmid suggests that the perceived anti-Semitism of Burton’s actions was seen as a newly acquired prejudice and speculates that perhaps it was the influence of his new Roman Catholic wife, Isabel.34 Suspicions would turn into virulent accusations of hatred as Burton was accused of torturing Jewish boys suspected of marking crosses next to mosques to incite anti-Christian sentiment. The result was a parliamentary inquiry that led to Burton’s recall from Damascus. In this context, Burton’s mode of cosmopolitan identification was of little help in managing the tensions between religious communities.

Anthony Appiah faults Burton for the perceived insufficiency of his cosmopolitanism. In this view, Burton is cosmopolitan in some respects, counter-cosmopolitan in others. This insufficiency might be more accurately termed an asymmetry: Burton is remarkably receptive and open in his attitude to some foreign cultures, but not to others. Appiah’s assessment dovetails with the observations of Edward Said and Dane Kennedy, who conclude that however much time Burton might have spent abroad, he ultimately inhabited bubbles of Englishness and inherited English prejudice. However cosmopolitan Burton’s views might have been in relation to Islam, in other respects the Englishman and the Victorian showed through, along with attendant prejudice about black Africans or Jews. Applying Said’s framework, it might be argued that Burton inherited assumptions from the texts produced by earlier generations of Orientalists. Even those who did travel were beholden to assumptions inherited from previous scholars and travelers and broader English attitudes toward foreign cultures and faiths.

But what if the remarkable malleability and openness to foreign cultures and practices that led Burton to be more tolerant than his London-bound contemporaries in some respects also contributed to his being more prejudiced in others? Why assume that the cosmopolitan ethic that calls for openness and receptivity to foreign mores and the possibility of being transformed by cross-cultural encounter will lead to tolerance rather than bias? Why not regressive prejudice as well as avant-garde tolerance? Appiah himself notes that coexistence leads to enmity as well as amity. I would contend that Burton’s ability to “go native” in many different contexts entailed a certain talent for absorbing and articulating foreign beliefs and prejudices. Burton’s identification with the host cultures he privileged as civilized reflected a lack of concern with other local constituencies that had been victimized or oppressed. Part and parcel of Burton’s cosmopolitanism was the impulse not to criticize slavery, or sati, or polygamy. In his strong identification with particular foreign cultures, Burton also took pride in reproducing and rationalizing their low opinion of perceived rival and enemy cultures. Burton took sides with the Persians against the Turks, with the Portuguese against the Spanish, and in general with Muslims against proponents of other faiths (inclusive of Christianity). Most controversially, he sought in his posting in Damascus to justify local prejudice not only against missionaries but also against Jewish creditors under British protection. Burton—“the collector of worlds”—seems to have picked up prejudices as quickly and as vociferously as he collected languages.35

Rather than rejecting Burton’s biases as counter-cosmopolitan, they should be understood as integral to his self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan. Why assume that prejudice is inherited from one’s home culture and tolerance learned from travel and experience of the world abroad? Why interpret Burton’s biases as representative of the Victorian Englishman, and his tolerance as a result of his experience of other cultures? What Anthony Appiah identifies as Burton’s extraordinary malleability in foreign cultural environments does indeed make him an important test case for cosmopolitan ethics, but any attempt to excise the acquisition of prejudice abroad from our study of cosmopolitan experience impoverishes our analytical vocabulary. A consideration of prejudice showcases the limitations of holding out Kipling, Lawrence, and Burton as foils to metropolitan elites in an era that assumes an opposition between nativists and cosmopolitans. Another project, as Thomas Bender suggests, is to seek out historical and contemporary examples of cosmopolitan practices more open to introspection and the reevaluation of core allegiances and assumptions. Given the concerns expressed from a variety of political vantage points in recent commentary on Brexit and Trump, we must be attentive to the risks of complacency and self-mythologizing in our assumptions of cosmopolitanism and seek other models in the practices of a broader range of social groups not only in New York and London but in Accra and Rio de Janeiro.

NOTES

  1  Ross Douthat, “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism,” New York Times, July 3, 2016, SR9. The column elicited a series of influential responses, among them Daniel Drezner, “The Truth of Cosmopolitanism,” Washington Post, July 5, 2016.

  2  K. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 1–8.

  3  Richard Francis Burton, Scinde: or, the Unhappy Valley, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), I: 3.

  4  Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), I: 10–18.

  5  Burton, Scinde, I: 182.

  6  Richard F. Burton, “Translators,” Athenaeum, February 24, 1872, #2313, 241–43. He felt Oriental literatures were well taken care of due to the demand determined by British imperial and foreign office priorities. In his argument for translation Burton stressed the need to fund translations from “smaller” languages, ranging from Flemish to Brazilian Portuguese.

  7  On Burton’s philosophy of translation, see Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 245–247.

  8  W. H. Wilkins, The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton (New York: Dodd Mead, 1897), 712, quoted in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism in a World of Strangers, 6. Appiah’s lifelong interest in Burton shared in conversation at the old Downtown Campus, New York University, Abu Dhabi, March 1, 2013.

  9  Appiah, Cosmopolitanism in a World of Strangers, 4–11.

10  Fawn Brodie, “Notes on Burton,” Huntington Library; Jean-François Gournay, L’appel du proche-orient: Richard Francis Burton et son temps, 1821–1890 (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1983), 124.

11  Quoted in Fawn Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 104.

12  Thomas Bender, “The Cosmopolitan Experience and Its Uses,” in this volume.

13  Respectively Burton, Scinde, I: 182 and II: 278.

14  Brodie, “Notes on Burton,” Huntington Library. On imperial policy, see Burton’s review of D. Mackenzie Wallace, “Egypt and the Egyptian Question,” Academy, January 19, 1884, no. 611, 46. He expressed a similar enthusiasm for industrialization in his commentary to The Lusiads.

15  Richard F. Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla-Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle), I: 185–186.

16  Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 89.

17  Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 4–11.

18  Burton, Scinde, I: 283, 284; Fawn Brodie, “Notes on Scinde: or The Unhappy Valley [London: 1851],” Huntington Library.

19  David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 57.

20  Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 240–241.

21  K. Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 220.

22  Quoted in Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier, 59.

23  Quoted in Brodie, The Devil Drives, 186.

24  As the Athenaeum complained, in its review of The City and the Saints of November 30, 1861, quoted in Brodie, The Devil Drives, 187–188.

25  Edward Rice, Captain Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2001), 431, 436.

26  Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier, 55.

27  Paulo Lemos Horta, “ ‘Mixing the East with the West’: Cosmopolitan Philology in Richard Burton’s Translations from Camões,” in A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, ed. S. Akbari and K. Mallette (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2013), 82–99.

28  Richard F. Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil, 2 vols. (London: 1869), 1: 409.

29  Richard F. Burton, “Review of A. B. Ellis West African Islands,” Academy, March 7, 1885, no. 670, 163.

30  Richard F. Burton, The Lands of the Cazembe. Lacerda’s Journey to Cazembe in 1798, translated by Captain R. F. Burton (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1978), 38 n.

31  Burton, Exploration of the Highlands of the Brazil, I: 402–3 n.

32  “Damascus, the Case of Captain Burton, late H. B. M.’s Consul at Damascus.” London, March 1972. Foreign Office Blue Book on Burton, 3.

33  Quoted in Brodie, The Devil Drives, 256. The Huntington Library preserves a copy of Burton’s eight-page letter on the subject of his recall from Damascus to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, dated 14 Montagu Place, Montagu Square W. October 16, 1871. B. J. Kirkpatrick, ed., A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Richard Burton, K. C. M. G. Held by the Royal Anthropological Institute (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1978), 34.

34  Brodie, The Devil Drives, 256.

35  The quoted phrase is Iliya Troyanov’s from his fictionalized biography of Burton, The Collector of Worlds (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).