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Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia
How Enlightenment Europe rediscovered its identity by measuring itself against the great civilizations of Asia
During the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, J�rgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan.
Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe's formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism--and condescension toward Asia--prevailed.
A momentous work by one of Europe's most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes readers on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.
During the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, J�rgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan.
Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe's formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism--and condescension toward Asia--prevailed.
A momentous work by one of Europe's most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes readers on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.
696 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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744 people want to read
About the author
Jürgen Osterhammel
52 books75 followersJürgen Osterhammel is professor emeritus of modern and contemporary history at the University of Konstanz.
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December 21, 2023A challenge in reviewing a big book, is to suggest that it is enticing rather than intimidating. This is a fantastic book and I would like to attract more readers to it, but it might be easier though just to stick to its intimidating aspects, the size, the weight, the number of pages, injuries known to have resulted from attempts to read this book, the number of dead bodies and sacks of rubbish recovered between base camp and the summit.
Perhaps part of what Osterhammel is doing is rehabilitating the Enlightenment (in regard to the European experience of Asia); rather than seeing Enlightenment thinkers and writers as only planting the seeds of the European sense of superiority that prevailed in the nineteenth century, Osterhammel shows the reader the openness of eighteenth century thought - which is what the title is implying - looking at Asia directly and not through the lens of myth and fable.
I don't think that this is an original or ground breaking idea but it is continually interesting over 517 pages of text to see the implications of it.
Or perhaps there is in Osterhammel's book, a somewhat Buddhist conception of needing to be mindful of our minds, and in particular our preconceptions the kind of things discussed in thinking fast and slow which they call heuristics.
Notable is that European travellers do not just regard powerful states like the Mughal Empire, Persia, and China as equals and even superior to the countries that they came from, but even smaller powers like Burma or Vietnam were viewed very positively, with visitors impressed by the prosperity of rural areas and the liveliness of the towns. By the end of the century though, writers were instead only prepared to acknowledge that particular institutions might be better than European equivalents while in the nineteenth century the tendency was to find everything in the Orient inferior to the Occident.
Or again while in the eighteenth century travellers adopted local habits of dress because it was practical, in the nineteenth century the tendency was to represent this as a choice undertaken for Romantic reasons - to go undercover, to avoid being murdered - though admittedly the example used for this is of Richard Burton (not the actor but the man who became British consul in Trieste) whose relationship with the truth was highly individual.
A lazy tip that I share with you to approaching this book would be to read the last chapter first, as it summarises Osterhammel's view, then if you want to dive deeper you know that you have the rest of the book to enjoy. Equally as with his earlier book The transformation of the World, you could read any chapter out of order. Each chapter in both books is a unit of thought that can be read independently of the whole.
Structurally I didn't have much sense of Osterhammel working towards a conclusion it's more a laying out of eighteenth century century understandings of Asian societies and seeing how these shift and settle into the attitudes that dominated Nineteenth century thinking, organised into thematic chapters.
Something that emerges is that those nineteenth century ideas, which to some extent, still haunt our thinking either implicitly, or as something you are reacting against, were essentially a new departure. We don't have to be a prisoner of them. Further, it was always really about Europe and trying to project out on to Asia the negative political evaluations that you can find in Aristotle and implicitly in other ancient authors too such as good democracies versus despotic monarchies. This was a problem once European authors began to attempt to evaluate political systems in an abstract manner. Jean Bodin would never have wanted to say that the government of Francois Ier was despotic, and indeed give the despotic aspirations of European monarchies of that period it would have been unwise to do so, however it was safe to say that the Ottoman Sultans were despots. Eighteenth century travellers and the writers who based their books on their accounts seemed never to be able to find any actual Asian despots. An occasional ruler might be a despot, but not the entire society that they studied, although they believed because theory told them so that there was such a thing as Asiatic despotism, it was just that it proved impossible to find institutional examples of it. Even the Crimean Tatars, upon examination, with their elected rulers and assembly of notables looked less like the terrifying horde of raiders of the past and more like a rational and effective government.
It struck me today that I don't know how representative the writers that Osterhammel were, perhaps there were others who were not as open and accepting as the ones who he refers to.
A curiosity of this rich and fascinating book is that he is adapting this revised translation into English as the standard edition of his work and not the earlier German original, there is a story in that alone I suppose. It is an endlessly interesting work, just as much as The Transformation of the World was, I can easily imagine myself getting drawn back to read this again.
Perhaps part of what Osterhammel is doing is rehabilitating the Enlightenment (in regard to the European experience of Asia); rather than seeing Enlightenment thinkers and writers as only planting the seeds of the European sense of superiority that prevailed in the nineteenth century, Osterhammel shows the reader the openness of eighteenth century thought - which is what the title is implying - looking at Asia directly and not through the lens of myth and fable.
I don't think that this is an original or ground breaking idea but it is continually interesting over 517 pages of text to see the implications of it.
Or perhaps there is in Osterhammel's book, a somewhat Buddhist conception of needing to be mindful of our minds, and in particular our preconceptions the kind of things discussed in thinking fast and slow which they call heuristics.
Notable is that European travellers do not just regard powerful states like the Mughal Empire, Persia, and China as equals and even superior to the countries that they came from, but even smaller powers like Burma or Vietnam were viewed very positively, with visitors impressed by the prosperity of rural areas and the liveliness of the towns. By the end of the century though, writers were instead only prepared to acknowledge that particular institutions might be better than European equivalents while in the nineteenth century the tendency was to find everything in the Orient inferior to the Occident.
Or again while in the eighteenth century travellers adopted local habits of dress because it was practical, in the nineteenth century the tendency was to represent this as a choice undertaken for Romantic reasons - to go undercover, to avoid being murdered - though admittedly the example used for this is of Richard Burton (not the actor but the man who became British consul in Trieste) whose relationship with the truth was highly individual.
A lazy tip that I share with you to approaching this book would be to read the last chapter first, as it summarises Osterhammel's view, then if you want to dive deeper you know that you have the rest of the book to enjoy. Equally as with his earlier book The transformation of the World, you could read any chapter out of order. Each chapter in both books is a unit of thought that can be read independently of the whole.
Structurally I didn't have much sense of Osterhammel working towards a conclusion it's more a laying out of eighteenth century century understandings of Asian societies and seeing how these shift and settle into the attitudes that dominated Nineteenth century thinking, organised into thematic chapters.
Something that emerges is that those nineteenth century ideas, which to some extent, still haunt our thinking either implicitly, or as something you are reacting against, were essentially a new departure. We don't have to be a prisoner of them. Further, it was always really about Europe and trying to project out on to Asia the negative political evaluations that you can find in Aristotle and implicitly in other ancient authors too such as good democracies versus despotic monarchies. This was a problem once European authors began to attempt to evaluate political systems in an abstract manner. Jean Bodin would never have wanted to say that the government of Francois Ier was despotic, and indeed give the despotic aspirations of European monarchies of that period it would have been unwise to do so, however it was safe to say that the Ottoman Sultans were despots. Eighteenth century travellers and the writers who based their books on their accounts seemed never to be able to find any actual Asian despots. An occasional ruler might be a despot, but not the entire society that they studied, although they believed because theory told them so that there was such a thing as Asiatic despotism, it was just that it proved impossible to find institutional examples of it. Even the Crimean Tatars, upon examination, with their elected rulers and assembly of notables looked less like the terrifying horde of raiders of the past and more like a rational and effective government.
It struck me today that I don't know how representative the writers that Osterhammel were, perhaps there were others who were not as open and accepting as the ones who he refers to.
A curiosity of this rich and fascinating book is that he is adapting this revised translation into English as the standard edition of his work and not the earlier German original, there is a story in that alone I suppose. It is an endlessly interesting work, just as much as The Transformation of the World was, I can easily imagine myself getting drawn back to read this again.
February 25, 2022
I first became aware of this work while reading Kati Marton’s recent biography of Angela Merkel, who brought this German historian into some meetings to discuss his ongoing work. When I tried to look up whether any of his work had been translated, I found that Princeton University press had just translated “Unfabling the East”. So I got it and started reading.
The book concerns various written accounts of countries in Asia that were written by westerners in the Enlightenment and especially the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. What were these accounts? They were largely the accounts of private individuals who had ventured to the East and come back to write up their experiences in book accounts that were widely circulated. The classic account was that of Marco Polo but there were many many more. Some of the accounts were from individuals on expeditions sponsored by governments to pursue some research purpose but by and large, these were individual accounts of travels to strange lands.
Yes, this is an historical account of travel books written largely in the two centuries before the explosion of European Imperialism in the 19th century and leading up to the 20th century, before the development of academic disciplines and the methods of history, anthropology, and sociology that provide the basis of serious studies of societies today.
Why do this? What is the problem that such a study addresses? There is a growing consensus that what we have come to view as standard histories are often deeply flawed by the ideological baggage supporting historical accounts. The revolution in histories of slavery in the US is just one example of this, albeit an important example.More generally, recent standard accounts have been seen as tainted by biases of European exceptionalism that takes Europe (and America) as occupying the pinnacle of culture and civilization while Asiatic societies are presumed to be underdeveloped, degenerate, or declining, which testifies to the superiority of western cultures and the deficiencies of Asiatic ones.
If there is a pro-European imperialist bias in 19th century accounts (and it seems reasonable to presume that), does that mean that all accounts of travel to Asia, including those from pre-Imperialism times, suffer from the same biases and errors.. Should all travel accounts be discarded as erroneous and biased?
This gets to the premise of the book. Professor Osterhammel examines travel accounts from the 17th through the 19th centuries. He finds that the Eurocentric biases of the Imperialist era are much less apparent in the 17th and 18th centuries.- the analysis of these writings (and there are lots of travel accounts that are reviewed) in comparison with those of the 19th century is fascinating and he makes the case that Europeans were not so certain of their superiority when the volume of travel to Asia really picked up. There are issues, however, that have to do with the discipline of the accounts, the language proficiencies of the writers, and the state of knowledge of these foreign societies and how they operate. In the 18th century, more effort was put into the missions that generated the accounts, the writers seem more knowledgeable and skilled at observatijon, with the result that these accounts could stand up to criticism and actually be informative about their target societies.
What is the takeaway from this study? The study is informative and clear about the need for readers to critically assess what they are reading and how value can be obtained from different sources. In an era of fake news and constant ideology in public discourse, the book is valuable today. For the most recent example, just consider the interplay of information sources and differing accounts in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Merkel was critical to the diplomacy over Russia and Ukraine in 2014 leading to the Minsk agreements. It is likely no accident that she was interested in Jurgen Osterhammel’s work on making sense of conflict accounts of different societies.
The book is surprisingly well written and the translator is to be commended. Studies like this are often real slogs to read but this book was well written and engaging.
The book concerns various written accounts of countries in Asia that were written by westerners in the Enlightenment and especially the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. What were these accounts? They were largely the accounts of private individuals who had ventured to the East and come back to write up their experiences in book accounts that were widely circulated. The classic account was that of Marco Polo but there were many many more. Some of the accounts were from individuals on expeditions sponsored by governments to pursue some research purpose but by and large, these were individual accounts of travels to strange lands.
Yes, this is an historical account of travel books written largely in the two centuries before the explosion of European Imperialism in the 19th century and leading up to the 20th century, before the development of academic disciplines and the methods of history, anthropology, and sociology that provide the basis of serious studies of societies today.
Why do this? What is the problem that such a study addresses? There is a growing consensus that what we have come to view as standard histories are often deeply flawed by the ideological baggage supporting historical accounts. The revolution in histories of slavery in the US is just one example of this, albeit an important example.More generally, recent standard accounts have been seen as tainted by biases of European exceptionalism that takes Europe (and America) as occupying the pinnacle of culture and civilization while Asiatic societies are presumed to be underdeveloped, degenerate, or declining, which testifies to the superiority of western cultures and the deficiencies of Asiatic ones.
If there is a pro-European imperialist bias in 19th century accounts (and it seems reasonable to presume that), does that mean that all accounts of travel to Asia, including those from pre-Imperialism times, suffer from the same biases and errors.. Should all travel accounts be discarded as erroneous and biased?
This gets to the premise of the book. Professor Osterhammel examines travel accounts from the 17th through the 19th centuries. He finds that the Eurocentric biases of the Imperialist era are much less apparent in the 17th and 18th centuries.- the analysis of these writings (and there are lots of travel accounts that are reviewed) in comparison with those of the 19th century is fascinating and he makes the case that Europeans were not so certain of their superiority when the volume of travel to Asia really picked up. There are issues, however, that have to do with the discipline of the accounts, the language proficiencies of the writers, and the state of knowledge of these foreign societies and how they operate. In the 18th century, more effort was put into the missions that generated the accounts, the writers seem more knowledgeable and skilled at observatijon, with the result that these accounts could stand up to criticism and actually be informative about their target societies.
What is the takeaway from this study? The study is informative and clear about the need for readers to critically assess what they are reading and how value can be obtained from different sources. In an era of fake news and constant ideology in public discourse, the book is valuable today. For the most recent example, just consider the interplay of information sources and differing accounts in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Merkel was critical to the diplomacy over Russia and Ukraine in 2014 leading to the Minsk agreements. It is likely no accident that she was interested in Jurgen Osterhammel’s work on making sense of conflict accounts of different societies.
The book is surprisingly well written and the translator is to be commended. Studies like this are often real slogs to read but this book was well written and engaging.
December 18, 2018
Ambiguities dissolved in the acid bath of professionalized rationality. The unfabling of the east led to a narrowing of intellectual horizons. Pedants set about ranking nations in regular league tables. Humor and irony gave way to sarcasm and condescending caricature. The assumption of European superiority poisoned intercultural good taste.
High time to rekindle a spark of High Enlightenment irony, recalling a time when it was still possible to praise the kindheartedness of cannibals and to see Asiatic nations as one's equals or even (in some respects) one's betters.
High time to rekindle a spark of High Enlightenment irony, recalling a time when it was still possible to praise the kindheartedness of cannibals and to see Asiatic nations as one's equals or even (in some respects) one's betters.
October 10, 2019
Yes it started off like an academic tome and it did take a bit getting used to but once the vast array of personalities discussed were made more familiar, it became an easy read (or listen in my case). The Longer Eighteenth Century lasted from around 1680 to the 1820s when a steady stream of European travellers made their way to the fabled East to marvel at the great cities and the pomp of oriental courts. According to Osterhammel, these travellers were genuinely curious about the Eastern cultures. They noted their observations and left behind a large body of travel literature. The situation changed around the turn of the 18th century. It started off with ranking of civilisations which gradually turned into the itch and desire to 'improve' the Orient, to exploit, to rule, to school and ultimately to civilise the civilisations that had existed for millennia without any such external efforts before. This was the "white man's burden" that turned into imperialism and evolved into something even more sinister later on. We are still living under the influence of the choices made in those decades.
December 30, 2019
An exhaustively researched history documenting the Western perceptions of Asia during the Enlightenment. Osterhammel does a brilliant job documenting the ways that Orientalism and Western attitudes of superiority were gradually constructed. While the argument and evidence are impressive, the book is hampered by its narrative construction. There are no discernible character arcs. There are no national stories. As such, it is often difficult to follow and remember which scholars or adventurers did what and when. This book will likely serve as a scholarly foundation for a more narrative history designed for a wider readership.
January 4, 2023
Libro muy interesante pero bastante denso. He tardado un par de años en acabarlo, lo he ido leyendo a ratos, aparcando su lectura y volviendo a sus páginas cada ciertos meses. Una mirada histórica y humanista de Asia por parte de numerosos viajeros, intelectuales, religiosos y académicos. Hay referencias a varios siglos, principalmente XVII, XVIII y IXX, con infinidad de notas, hechos y personas. Pienso volver a releer con calma lo subrayado y a hacerme un esquema con tan buena información.
October 12, 2022
Agree with the review who said it could do with more of a structure - it tends to bounce around all over the place, so you could really open it anywhere and start reading - BUT it’s nevertheless a brilliant and fascinating work that not only taught me a lot, but also introduced loads of great works that I now want to go read.
June 10, 2019
It raises the question how much does the West understand Asia today. Also I am curious as to how Asians regarded the West. It would be good to read the Asian, Korean and Chinese records of these encounters.
June 10, 2023
A triump of scholarship that will be useful to anyone from an Arabist to a China hand. Excellent read
December 18, 2022
You might think that history is about trying to understand some underlying truth, a reflection of reality that, once grasped, will let you predict other, bigger truths.
For example, simply knowing that America was originally colonized by Europeans from England would let you predict a whole set of corollary facts about the language, religion, institutions, skin color, and more.
But you could equally start with the insight that modern America was populated by people who were forcefully abducted and shipped here. That assumption would let you predict that today’s America would be full of people who continue to struggle against oppression to this day.
Which definition of history is “correct”? Both cases have predictive power, both are abstractions that let you make more, follow-on forecasts about what the current world will be like.
Osterhammel’s book claims that the last fifty years of Asian studies have been dominated by people who have trouble recognizing the underlying reality of the history of European discovery of Asia.
So this book is an attempt to discuss Asia on its own terms, with extensively researched examples of various travelers and writers who discussed Asia in ways that left marks on European's attitudes about it to this day.
For example, simply knowing that America was originally colonized by Europeans from England would let you predict a whole set of corollary facts about the language, religion, institutions, skin color, and more.
But you could equally start with the insight that modern America was populated by people who were forcefully abducted and shipped here. That assumption would let you predict that today’s America would be full of people who continue to struggle against oppression to this day.
Which definition of history is “correct”? Both cases have predictive power, both are abstractions that let you make more, follow-on forecasts about what the current world will be like.
Osterhammel’s book claims that the last fifty years of Asian studies have been dominated by people who have trouble recognizing the underlying reality of the history of European discovery of Asia.
So this book is an attempt to discuss Asia on its own terms, with extensively researched examples of various travelers and writers who discussed Asia in ways that left marks on European's attitudes about it to this day.
December 1, 2019
First of all, it isn't a bad book but it is hard to follow and when I finished it, I wasn't sure what I've learned. It is very accurate, and I believe every word of it ( if I could remember anything of it) but it isn't anchored, and that just isn't my thing. If the period spans different centuries, you just drown at the sea of facts and nuances.
January 29, 2019
Eine gute Übersicht, wie Europäer zur Europazentrismus gelangten und wie Überflächlichkeit immer trotz gründliche Analyse zu gewinnen scheint. Interessant. Gründlich. Bringt überraschende Zusammenhänge hervor.
October 28, 2017
Profunder Überblick zum Asienbild Europas, dazu gut lesbar. Kritisch, ironisch, emphatisch.
May 22, 2023
Sehr gute Mischung aus einzelnen Geschichten über europäische Reisende im 18. Jahrhundert und einer grösseren Geschichte europäischer Arroganz
August 9, 2025
An intellectual history and historiography of the origins and evolution of cross-cultural understanding at the dawn of the modern age? Yes please. This kind of thing is very much my bag - and this is superbly done.
Broken into multiple thematic chapters ("Traveling", "Savages and Barbarians", "Real and Unreal Despots", "Women", etc) and examining the evolution of Western conceptions of Asia and the very idea of "civilisation" from the likes of Montesquieu, Gibbon, Leibniz, Mill (Senior), Niebuhr, Voltaire, and many more less well known figures as the continent gradually became better known, this is at once deeply academic and very accessible.
It also successfully helps challenge contemporary assumptions about the critical thinking skills of people from three centuries ago, in the process contextualising the rise of many modern academic traditions as being grounded in a response to the failures of Westerners to effectively interpret unfamiliar cultures:
"it would be an exaggeration to deny eighteenth-century texts on Asia all relation to empirical reality... Contemporary readers were cleverer here than many later theorists. Hungry for knowledge of other cultures, they chomped through forests of literature on Asia in order to give European historical, anthropological, economic, and sociological discourses as universal an evidential basis as possible. They knew that there was no alternative to the literature produced by travelling eye- and ear-witnesses to translations from oriental languages. This is why they developed a critical methodology for reading these texts." (p.252)
And just as you start to see the entire book as being a precursor to the author's much longer history of the long 19th century (which I now really want to read despite having got intimidated by its length, tiny font size, and weight even in paperback), you get hit by a counter to the narrative you think has been building and start to see that this is far more than history - it's about the birth of attitudes that persist to this day:
"It would be short-sighted to burden Enlightenment theories of civilization with sole responsibility for the belligerence that Great Britain, France, and Russia started to display in Asia and North Africa in the 1790s... [But] A newly strengthened sense of European exceptionalism in the Napoleonic era, combined with an upsurge in intra-European nationalism, brought about a paradoxical result. On the one hand, it promoted a Eurocentric self-preoccupation that pushed Asia to the margins of public consciousness and elevated the collective narcissism of the world's number one civilization to previously unknown heights. On the other, it opened up space for a secular civilising mission whose ideologists clamoured for the chance to impose their will on a crisis-ridden, vulnerable continent... The civilization that took itself to be the best performing and most humane in the world did not wait for Asia to show an interest in it. It gave its laws to Asia."
If that doesn't describe the birth of the persistent Bush/Blair idea of liberal interventionism, I don't know what does.
Broken into multiple thematic chapters ("Traveling", "Savages and Barbarians", "Real and Unreal Despots", "Women", etc) and examining the evolution of Western conceptions of Asia and the very idea of "civilisation" from the likes of Montesquieu, Gibbon, Leibniz, Mill (Senior), Niebuhr, Voltaire, and many more less well known figures as the continent gradually became better known, this is at once deeply academic and very accessible.
It also successfully helps challenge contemporary assumptions about the critical thinking skills of people from three centuries ago, in the process contextualising the rise of many modern academic traditions as being grounded in a response to the failures of Westerners to effectively interpret unfamiliar cultures:
"it would be an exaggeration to deny eighteenth-century texts on Asia all relation to empirical reality... Contemporary readers were cleverer here than many later theorists. Hungry for knowledge of other cultures, they chomped through forests of literature on Asia in order to give European historical, anthropological, economic, and sociological discourses as universal an evidential basis as possible. They knew that there was no alternative to the literature produced by travelling eye- and ear-witnesses to translations from oriental languages. This is why they developed a critical methodology for reading these texts." (p.252)
And just as you start to see the entire book as being a precursor to the author's much longer history of the long 19th century (which I now really want to read despite having got intimidated by its length, tiny font size, and weight even in paperback), you get hit by a counter to the narrative you think has been building and start to see that this is far more than history - it's about the birth of attitudes that persist to this day:
"It would be short-sighted to burden Enlightenment theories of civilization with sole responsibility for the belligerence that Great Britain, France, and Russia started to display in Asia and North Africa in the 1790s... [But] A newly strengthened sense of European exceptionalism in the Napoleonic era, combined with an upsurge in intra-European nationalism, brought about a paradoxical result. On the one hand, it promoted a Eurocentric self-preoccupation that pushed Asia to the margins of public consciousness and elevated the collective narcissism of the world's number one civilization to previously unknown heights. On the other, it opened up space for a secular civilising mission whose ideologists clamoured for the chance to impose their will on a crisis-ridden, vulnerable continent... The civilization that took itself to be the best performing and most humane in the world did not wait for Asia to show an interest in it. It gave its laws to Asia."
If that doesn't describe the birth of the persistent Bush/Blair idea of liberal interventionism, I don't know what does.
July 5, 2025
Having read Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, I found this book to be somewhat familiar territory. He seems to have a consistent presentation style, offering a series of loosely connected thematic essays across the book's several chapters. Where his Transformation focused on the manifold changes of the 19th century, here we witness the evolution of European appraisals of Asia in, principally, the 17th through 18th centuries. At times there is an extension into the 19th century, but Osterhammel maintains that the 19th century discourse on "the East" was different enough from what prevailed during the Enlightenment-era.
What was so special about the Enlightenment era? It was, apparently, a mix of not-yet-secured complete military, economic, and political superiority, outward facing curiosity, generally increased contact via trade with the different peoples of Asia (except in Japan, due to isolationism), a culture of discovery and knowledge-sharing, and the germ of non-Christian universalism emerging in the Enlightenment. At the same time, there was still quite a bit of ignorance and a sense of incompleteness to European knowledge of Asia. This meant that accounts of Asian societies abounded, that they might be employed in discourses about Europe, and that they might be more objective and less uniformly contemptuous as was the case in later eras. Asian societies were also distant enough to be appreciated but still had a touch of mystery about them. The "ugly" face had not yet been made extremely clear, except maybe when considering the Ottoman Empire or some of the nomadic groups of Central Asia (there was still a memory of Genghis Khan).
Reading this, one gets a sense of the real roots of various longheld views within Western historiography, from Oriental despotism to the role of nomads to political-economic assumptions. The work would stand on those insights alone. But it goes further in articulating the roots of many wider cultural impressions that the West had of the East and outlining the influence that traveller's accounts had on topics from political philosophy to literature. It's outstanding, and given its thematic organization, is a wonderful reference material.
What was so special about the Enlightenment era? It was, apparently, a mix of not-yet-secured complete military, economic, and political superiority, outward facing curiosity, generally increased contact via trade with the different peoples of Asia (except in Japan, due to isolationism), a culture of discovery and knowledge-sharing, and the germ of non-Christian universalism emerging in the Enlightenment. At the same time, there was still quite a bit of ignorance and a sense of incompleteness to European knowledge of Asia. This meant that accounts of Asian societies abounded, that they might be employed in discourses about Europe, and that they might be more objective and less uniformly contemptuous as was the case in later eras. Asian societies were also distant enough to be appreciated but still had a touch of mystery about them. The "ugly" face had not yet been made extremely clear, except maybe when considering the Ottoman Empire or some of the nomadic groups of Central Asia (there was still a memory of Genghis Khan).
Reading this, one gets a sense of the real roots of various longheld views within Western historiography, from Oriental despotism to the role of nomads to political-economic assumptions. The work would stand on those insights alone. But it goes further in articulating the roots of many wider cultural impressions that the West had of the East and outlining the influence that traveller's accounts had on topics from political philosophy to literature. It's outstanding, and given its thematic organization, is a wonderful reference material.
March 27, 2023
This is a truly excellent book on the intellectual history of the European encounter with Asia. Deeply researched and heavily footnoted, it tracks the way in which the simultaneous revolutions in navigation, trade, and the intellectual life of Europe transformed the way in which Europe understood the world outside, how that understanding altered Europe's perception of itself and helped to advance some of the universalist principles that characterized the enlightenment. The book also chronicles the shift in the narrative as European engagement with Asia moved from trade, to conflict to mastery and how the enlightenment perceptions, which did remain significant in European intellectual life, were replaced among the political elite by the more self-justificatory notions of innate superiority that Said and others would come to critique.
The book has a striking intellectual honesty, especially in this day of diversity statements and the absolute conquest of the academy by critical and post-colonial theorists. The book more or less obliterates many of these authors who, in the mode of Kendi and Hannah-Jones are really polemicists and, to make their points, simply exclude the great majority of the literature. He also skewers people on the right who claim that the Enlightenment engagement with non-European cultures was largely for the purpose of using remote utopias to critique the current clerical and government regimes. He shows that the enlightenment thinkers engaged in a robust intellectual exercise, critiqued each other effectively into getting at truth, and that most of their utilization of Asian examples in contrast to European norms was fact based.
This is especially interesting in the arguments for merit over birth. The relative positions and efficacy of the Mughal/Hindu India and Ming/Qing dynasties were the relative feudalism of the Mughals, the complete stasis by birth in the Hindu countries and the merit based administration of the Chinese. These comparisons were used effectively in European debates about the advancement of state capacity in the major powers, including Austria and Prussia which did not have colonial/imperial missions to Asia but who did have significant trade and intellectual interactions with the region.
All in all this was an excellent book.
The book has a striking intellectual honesty, especially in this day of diversity statements and the absolute conquest of the academy by critical and post-colonial theorists. The book more or less obliterates many of these authors who, in the mode of Kendi and Hannah-Jones are really polemicists and, to make their points, simply exclude the great majority of the literature. He also skewers people on the right who claim that the Enlightenment engagement with non-European cultures was largely for the purpose of using remote utopias to critique the current clerical and government regimes. He shows that the enlightenment thinkers engaged in a robust intellectual exercise, critiqued each other effectively into getting at truth, and that most of their utilization of Asian examples in contrast to European norms was fact based.
This is especially interesting in the arguments for merit over birth. The relative positions and efficacy of the Mughal/Hindu India and Ming/Qing dynasties were the relative feudalism of the Mughals, the complete stasis by birth in the Hindu countries and the merit based administration of the Chinese. These comparisons were used effectively in European debates about the advancement of state capacity in the major powers, including Austria and Prussia which did not have colonial/imperial missions to Asia but who did have significant trade and intellectual interactions with the region.
All in all this was an excellent book.
January 13, 2024
Very ambitious treatment of the available literature about Enlightenment Europe encountering other civilizations, as well as a very thoughtful critique of both cultural relativism and also older Orientalist ideas. I particularly enjoyed the description of encounters in Safavid Persia, which inspired me to go read the letters of Jean Chardin. Osterhammel provides a pretty satisfying deconstruction of the concept of "Oriental despotism" by explaining it, simply put, as a projection of European anxieties about the tyranny of e.g. the Stuart and Capet monarchs. (In contrast to European moments of tyranny, Osterhammel argues, civilizations like Persia and China had their own quite prosperous balances of political power that would have been opaque to the cursory investigations of European travelers.)
Four stars for providing a powerful critique of an idea that had previously been strongly implicit in my education and for opening up the seventeenth through nineteenth century in Persia and China as a domain where I can really expand my own understanding of world history. I have thought about this book many times since reading it and Osterhammel's approach has been a strong encouragement that's brought me a lot of value.
Recommended companion books: Travel letters from Osterhammel's bibliography, The Clash of Civilizations, World Order
Four stars for providing a powerful critique of an idea that had previously been strongly implicit in my education and for opening up the seventeenth through nineteenth century in Persia and China as a domain where I can really expand my own understanding of world history. I have thought about this book many times since reading it and Osterhammel's approach has been a strong encouragement that's brought me a lot of value.
Recommended companion books: Travel letters from Osterhammel's bibliography, The Clash of Civilizations, World Order
March 4, 2025
This book details the complex relationship between Enlightenment thinkers and Asia, which is broadly defined by the author as referring from the Middle East to China and Japan, i.e., everything east of Europe. The approach of Enlightenment thinkers is described as a 'inclusive Eurocentrism,' i.e., while coming from a European standpoint, did not see European culture, customs or beliefs as necessarily superior to the East but, rather, regarded much of the East with admiration and, as such, generally honored the uniqueness of the East. The last chapter discusses the transition to the mindset of the Late Enlightenment, which, in contrast to the early and middle Enlightenment, adopted an 'exclusive Eurocentrism' which saw white European culture, etc., as inherently superior to Asian culture. It was here, inspired by the Napoleonic Era, that Imperialism came into its own, with European powers beginning to see themselves as the custodians of the world. The author helpfully pushes against a flatfooted, one-dimensional understanding of the age of the Enlightenment and its impact on the world. As such, this will be helpful reading for any serious student of this portion of history.
February 19, 2023
I was captive on a day of 12 hours on airplanes and in airports with this book. This was both a positive (few distractions) and a negative (a tedious read).
Why tedious? In part, the book is a German text appearing in English, victimized by the style of writing/argumentation and the translation. Further, the book’s chapters and the text within flow poorly. Lastly, for any of our colleagues who had the bad luck of taking a course in historiography (I did) in university, well, you’ll know what I mean!!
That having been said, there are many nuggets of insight in the book; but not enough for me to consider a re-read.
Why tedious? In part, the book is a German text appearing in English, victimized by the style of writing/argumentation and the translation. Further, the book’s chapters and the text within flow poorly. Lastly, for any of our colleagues who had the bad luck of taking a course in historiography (I did) in university, well, you’ll know what I mean!!
That having been said, there are many nuggets of insight in the book; but not enough for me to consider a re-read.
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July 5, 2024Osterhammel ofrece una aproximación al pensamiento europeo y cómo este percibía Oriente en el siglo XVIII. Así muestra, por una parte, cómo la Ilustración fue todavía un movimiento paneuropeo en el que las diferencias nacionales todavía no marcaban posturas opuestas, mientras, por el otro cómo ese mundo observaba al Otro —y entre el Otro a los pueblos que habitaban el Oriente, que para ellos iba desde el norte de África hasta Japón; una visión que permitió la formulación de la idea misma de Occidente, que ya para el siglo XIX se manifestaba en términos supremacistas—. Interesante, aunque, en algunos puntos llega a ser disperso.
February 27, 2024
I tried this book a few times. The subject matter seemed interesting. Then, as each chapter after another seemed so dreary, I reread the synopsis and realized it was a study of traveller books instead of being a traveller book itself or a summary of compelling traveller book content from hundreds of years ago.
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October 11, 2023An interesting book that Osterhammel is perfectly positioned to write. While this book Enlightenment-era European imperialism under an intense microscope, it remains frustratingly academic and disciplined. That's a plus or a minus depending on the reader.
November 16, 2024
Encouraging to learn that racial science and western smugness towards other cultures were not embedded in the fibers of the enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers were very curious about other cultures, trying to learn from everyone they could. The really bad stuff came later.
February 28, 2023
A very dense and scholarly book but it presents a very interesting view on enlightenments impact on the colonialism of the 19th century.
December 28, 2025
更像是一本详实而稍显冗长的文献综述，起初仍有许多精彩纷呈的发现，而越往后看得越不仔细，故而所记寥寥。本书重点呈现在18世纪之前即欧洲优先主义仍待发展的部份：在欧洲最初认识亚洲时的视角和理解。
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