The Enlightenment and Asia: Recent Historiographical Perspectives

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2018

Osterhammel takes pains to nuance the oversimplified vision adopted by a good number of scholars and critics in the wake of Edward Said's massively influential Orientalism, published in 1978. While Clarke's complaint was that Said's book dealt little if at all with the "far" East (East Asia), Osterhammel's thesis rests less on geography than on the significant chronological distinction between the 18 th and 19 th centuries. In short, many European "orientalists" of the 18 th century, nurtured by the empiricism, humanism, "polycentric" cosmopolitanism, and (a better sort of) universalism of the European Enlightenment, took a balanced and, at times, a surprisingly positive view of Asia. This was a more positive conceptualization in its constituent parts and as a wholethough part of the argument is that the better critics avoided the temptation to offer generalizations about Asia or "the orient" (393-394). According to Osterhammel, this would change by the early 19 th century, when, for a number of complex reasons, the discourse about Asia became much more negative and simplified, colored by new ideas of racial hierarchy as well as a growing sense of the West's "manifest destiny" to subdue (and simultaneously "liberate") the world. And, he argues, we in the early twenty-first century still tend to read the entire history of East-West relations through 19 th-and 20 th-century Western "cultural imperialism" (and correspondent Asian cultural nationalisms). Osterhammel spends a fair number of pages discussing the concept of the "high" traveler, who, while appealing to "elevated outlooks and firmer principles", may in fact be the prototype for the 19 th-century colonist; i.e., one who aims to conquer new realms for science, religion, and civilization. And yet, Osterhammel wants to hold on to at least a few of these "high" travelers, such as Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), the Comte de Volney (1757-1820)-as well as to "armchair theorists" such as Montesquieu (1689-1755), who is here praised as the "the creator of a general framework of a general social science" (386). These individuals, in his estimation, came closest to attaining the Enlightenment ideal of the "philosophical" observer (185-86). This is, then, a story of decline and, perhaps, also one of missed opportunities. And here the critic might raise some hackles, for Osterhammel verges on overstating his case, as important as it may be. In addition, by virtue of its detail, this book comes close to the "pointless prolixity that irritates the reader through a profusion of minutiae" lamented by one connoisseur of overseas travel literature (216). Having said that, the chapter on "Encounters" is, to this reader, the most poignant of the book, as when Osterhammel waxes lyrical on the "transcultural regularity of play" that helped in some cases to loosen the "entanglements of objective of casting "a light on the last decades of the Spanish Empire in North America and on the role of Spain in the American Revolutionary War by bringing to life the world of Bernardo de Gálvez" (8), there is hardly a central thesis in the study. The reader is thus responsible for interpreting the significance not only of many of Gálvez's actions but also, in the end, of his extraordinary life. An exploration of the 200 pages of endnotes explains this problem of exposition and methodology. The author draws most of his evidence from an impressive, painstaking review of practically all that has been written and published about Gálvez since the eighteenth century. Other authors' works drive the narrative of certain sections of the book, partially eclipsing Quintero Saravia's own voice and his equally impressive and valuable original research. Among the study's most interesting findings is that, early in his life, Gálvez became a sort of expert in North American Indian affairs, one who contributed to changes in imperial policies and regulations. On the whole, the specialist reader will find that this book has a lot to tell us about the Spanish Enlightenment, colonial administrative reform (the so-called Bourbon Reforms), imperial borderlands, and military history.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2008

French Studies, 2012

2008

Indra Sengupta, Situating German Orientalist Scholarship. Edward Said, Orientalism, and the German Predicament

2015

Edward Said’s historically influential work entitled Orientalism delivers a new and profound way of understanding culture and society through the historical context from which those views originate.