Book Review

Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia, translated by Robert Savage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 676. $35.00 (cloth).

Introduction

     In 1693, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, a judge in Calabria, realized he was fed up: with his work, his family, and life in general. A man of some means, he decided to give in to his abiding wanderlust. For the next five years, he circumnavigated the globe, the first person to undertake such a journey using the scheduled transportation services of the time. He visited Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Iran, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb's camp, and Malacca. He remained in China for eight months, finagling an audience with the Kangxi emperor, before crossing the Pacific aboard a Manila galleon for a year-long stay in Mexico. When he returned home, he penned an account of his voyages that became a bestseller, despite, or perhaps because of, some of his perceived flights of fancy. In time, most of his claims would bevindicated.

     Though the scale of Gemelli Careri's odyssey was unique, he was not alone in his adventures. During the eighteenth century, the Scot Alexander Hamilton, Hungarian Count de Benyovsky, French officer Charles-François Tombe, and many other Europeans undertook great Asian journeys. Travel narratives like these are an important genre among world history scholars. World History Connected, for example, devoted all of its 2013 issues to the subject. The travels of the adventurers described above are all recounted in Jürgen Osterhammel's fascinating Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia. But as his title implies, Osterhammel is after something more specific.

     He is interested in the ways these travelers interpreted Asia and passed that knowledge onto readers back home in Enlightenment-age Europe. Before the twentieth century, travel writing was the key way Europeans learned about Asia. Osterhammel explicitly rejects the conclusions of Edward Said and other postcolonialists that travel narratives only tell us about Europeans' views of themselves; he argues instead that these texts often provide useful information about Asia. Travelers were neither simply mythmakers nor strict chroniclers—they were both—and Enlightenment thinkers were genuinely interested in the outside world.

     Osterhammel's central argument "is that the Enlightenment's discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism" (x). It is easy to miss the nuance of his argument, as he is only claiming a degree of openness on the part of Europeans: they often remained somewhat patronizing in their views and routinely thought that aspects of European life were better than those in Asia. Still, this measure of receptivity was often expansive and sometimes quite generous. The admittedly cumbersome neologism "unfabling" in the English title refers to Enlightenment efforts to understand Asia rationally and systematically; it replaces a word in the German title for "disenchantment," in reference to Max Weber's term for the disappearance of a sense of transcendence in the modern world.

     A few comments about the structure and organization of the book are in order. First, the sources Osterhammel includes in his examination fall within the period he refers to as "the long eighteenth century." The starting point, 1680, indicates a period when many acknowledged Enlightenment thinkers began authoring philosophical works, as well as a "belated early modern age" for much of Asia (23). At the far end, 1830 functions as a rough terminus to the long century and the start of an era when industrialization shifted the equilibrium between Europe and Asia decisively in favor of the former.

     Second, the book is divided into two parts. The first part, "Pathways of Knowledge," explores the mechanics of travel, encounter, observation, and reporting; the second, "The Present and the Past," considers the substance of that reportage.

     Third, as readers of his earlier Transformation of the World are aware, Osterhammel likes to write big books. In Unfabling the East, he exhaustively canvasses European perceptions of Asia, an important subject worthy of the detailed attention he devotes to it. Though modest by comparison with its predecessor, the present work runs more than five hundred pages of text, nearly two thousand endnotes, and a bibliography of more than fifteen hundred items.

     Finally, for a book so ambitious, detailed, and potentially esoteric, it is remarkably readable, due to Osterhammel's crisp writing and disdain for jargon. This is an especially welcome feature given the tendencies of much writing that deals with Orientalism and postcolonialism.

Pathways of Knowledge

     "Pathways of Knowledge," the book's first section, begins with a chapter that explores eighteenth-century European perspectives on Asia and Europe's relation to it. Europeans often viewed Europe as connected to or even as an extension of Asia. And when they regarded Asia as a whole, Europeans did not routinely see it as weak and backward. Even when they recounted Eurocentric stories, they were still generally "inclusive," rather than "exclusive" in their Eurocentrism (x). Europeans, that is, may have viewed themselves as superior to Asians, but they considered both to be members of one large community, rather than belonging to entirely distinct communities. Osterhammel argues that despite their ethnocentrism, European intellectuals often demonstrated the ability to transcend their own culture and see the world through foreigners' eyes, which including the ability to acknowledge foreigners' criticisms of Europe itself candidly.

     Osterhammel provides captivating descriptions of how arduous overland travel was at the time and how little that changed until the introduction of railroads, though sea travel did become faster in this era. Like Gemelli Careri, other Enlightenment-era travelers purposely went to increasingly "exotic" locales as once remote places became better known to Europeans. Some at the time distinguished between those who traveled for low motives, such as a simple sense of entertainment, and those who had loftier aims. According to veteran adventurer Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, "The true traveler is someone who loves all men as his bothers and who, untouched by pleasures and needs, beyond grandeur and baseness, praise and blame, riches and poverty, passes through the world without striking root in any particular place, witnessing good and evil without regard to who caused it and the causes peculiar to each nation" (174).

     The expeditions of the most attentive travelers shared a number of features: a detailed work plan, careful logistical and scientific preparation, and daily recording of results. Travelers in the era before European imperialism largely journeyed on their own and, consequently, faced dangers and hardships, including pests, illness, hunger, extortion, theft, lost equipment, disappointed expectations, even death. In this environment, knowledge of Asian languages was essential; some ventured out without the requisite linguistic skills and struggled through, while other Europeans mastered an impressive number of languages. John Leyden apparently understood forty-five, and Johann Reinhold Forster, a comparatively modest seventeen.

     High purpose travelers ideally engaged in a three-step empirical process to maintain the nobility of their venture: they attempted to put own interests aside; engaged in "autopsy," or viewing everything they could with their own eyes; and only then rendered judgment. Of course, Europeans also required deep knowledge of Asian texts. If, as William Jones, president of the Asiatik Society of Bengal explained, "All the Asiatik nations must be far better acquainted with their several countries than mere European scholars and travelers," such texts were an indispensable supplement to eyewitness investigation (202). Of course, none of these adventurers' experiences mattered to anyone but themselves until their reports became available in some form. Converting travel notes, some of which were never intended for public disclosure, into readable, accurate, and affordable formats could be daunting. A skeptical reading public, unable to corroborate travelers' claims independently, established criteria for the trustworthiness of such reports.

The Present and the Past

     Having surveyed the long, challenging, and often intriguing process of collecting evidence about Asia and making it available to a reading public, Osterhammel turns to the substance of their reportage. Unlike later Europeans who bifurcated the world into a static Asia and a dynamic Europe, those in the eighteenth-century, he argues, generally understood Asia in more nuanced ways. For example, they recognized that the region was often a forum for violent revolution, the opposite of statis. Given the size of Asia's population, such violence dwarfed that of, say, the English Civil War. European observers avoided another false dichotomy, as they refrained from simply taking the side of "civilizations," and often showed sympathy for "barbarian" peoples.

     Despite his broad defense of Enlightenment thinkers' broadmindedness, Osterhammel acknowledges that these intellectuals introduced a trope that would do significant damage for more than a century: the Oriental despot. Though genuine Asian despots were rare in that era, Osterhammel argues, Enlightenment figure Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu developed an elaborate and influential typology of this figure. Osterhammel is keen to point out that other Enlightenment figures like Voltaire rejected the theory outright, while the lesser known Anquetil-Duperron argued that the typology was simply a justification for European imperialism.

     In their analysis of Asian society, Europeans showed both great subtlety and occasional glaring weaknesses. They offered high praise for the nature of hospitality in Asia, particularly in the Arab world. They acknowledged having greater freedom of movement in this region than Muslims would have had in Europe. On the other hand, European views of Indian caste are less commendable. To be fair, some European interpretations were nuanced, tending to view the caste system as a social or economic taxonomy, but assessments of the system were more often crude and critical. Such conclusions, Osterhammel thinks, reflected a weak spot in European empiricism, where preexisting biases overwhelmed cool analysis. Similarly, travelers' assessment of the roles of Asian women was a mixed bag. Some saw only oppression, while others recognized subtle variations in women's experiences. Harems, one of the quintessential categories of Said's Orientalist critique, did indeed allure European travelers. Describing harems was often a way for male (and sometimes female) travelers to project their own erotic fantasies, by reporting on supposedly scandalous goings-on in the seraglio. But a few accounts more thoughtfully presented harems as complex social, not erotic, phenomena, demonstrating that "the sensationalist exoticization of dusky oriental women was neither inevitable nor predetermined by the discursive conditions of the epoch" (460).

     So when did everything begin to go wrong? According to Osterhammel, around the second quarter of the nineteenth century a slow shift began to take place from the "inclusive Eurocentrism," which "regarded European superiority as a working hypothesis subject to correction in individual cases," to "exclusive Eurocentrism," which "took such superiority as axiomatic" (489). The growth of European economic, industrial, and military power played a central role in this changed viewpoint. But Enlightenment theories of civilization also played a part in shifting ideas and values, "opening up a space for a secular civilizing mission whose ideologists clamored for their chance to impose their will on a crisis-ridden, vulnerable continent" (517).

Conclusion

     There are few things to dislike about Unfabling the East. It is an absorbing, wide-ranging text. Occasionally, it seems to aim for too much comprehensiveness and the narrative devolves into a series of lists, but this happens relatively rarely. Also, as indicated above, the subtlety of Osterhammel's assessment of Enlightenment thinkers is not always apparent. He is clearly fond of them as a group and anxious to rescue them from opprobrium. Writers who are more critical of Asian cultures, like Montesquieu, a poster-child for the Enlightenment, sometimes become foils against which the nobility of more progressive authors shines forth. Still, Osterhammel typically remains nuanced throughout the book's duration. This text is probably too long for all but the most unusual survey courses. Individual chapters, on the other hand, would make excellent material for reading or lecture. However they might ultimately make use of Unfabling the East, world history teachers would uniformly benefit from reading it.

Dave Neumann (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Assistant Professor of History Education at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. His research explores transnationalism, American religion, the Cold War, Southern California, and historical thinking. His publications include Finding God through Yoga: Paramahansa Yogananda and Modern American Religion in a Global Age (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and articles in The History Teacher, The Journal of Religious History, Religion and American Culture, Southern California Quarterly, Social Education, and The Social Studies. He can be reached at djneumann@cpp.edu.