Marchand's impressive book is a welcome addition to the ever-growing literature on Germans' interactions with the wider world across a longue durée. This is a work of exacting detail and impressive erudition, a critical history of the practice of oriental studies in Germany based on the biographies of a daunting number of dedicated, but often forgotten, individuals. Its appeals are many. On the most basic level, it offers us an extensive introduction to the complex history of German Orientalism from its origins in Renaissance philology through World War I. At the same time, however, it provides us with a cogent alternative to the predictable scholarship that dominates so much of postcolonial studies.

Marchand's work demonstrates the virtues of treating the politics of oriental studies without, as she puts it, “presuming that those politics were primordially and perpetually defined by imperialist relationships” (p. xx). Indeed, avoiding the imperialist bandwagon, and the temptation to pen yet another analysis of German imaginaries, she has written a critical history of the practices and practitioners of oriental studies. Her goal is both to increase our familiarity with those people and their practices and to encourage us to recognize the ways in which more recent efforts at writing postcolonial and global history are “part of a much longer, and much more complicated, trajectory” (p. xxiii). That trajectory has deep roots, and it has long been driven by traditional, often fundamentally Christian questions that are too frequently overlooked by scholars eager to embrace either Saidian notions of “Orientalism” as a product of empire or methodologies steeped in discourse analysis.

While Marchand is quick to grant that knowledge can indeed lead to power, which, in turn, can facilitate domination, she is also keen to remind us that knowledge acquired through scholarly endeavors could just as well “lead to appreciation, dialogue, self-critique, perspectival reorientation, and personal and cultural enrichment” (p. xxv). That is a point worth repeating again and again. Not all Europeans' inquiries into other peoples and places were meant to facilitate political conquest, and few of them were totalizing. Rather, they were overwhelmingly ambivalent, posited by complicated individuals whose worldviews differed greatly from those we now hold and whose perspectives cannot be easily pressed into such totalizing categories as “German” or “European.” Marchand makes this explicit. Even when the linkages between power and knowledge collection were obvious, she shows that the outcomes were seldom predictable and the results were infrequently able to “contribute directly and unproblematically to empire building, or even to Eurocentric modes of thought” (p. 19).

The book is full of such useful correctives. To take just one example, Marchand joins a growing number of scholars bent on rehabilitating Johann Gottfried von Herder's inquiries. She reminds us that Herder “played a crucial role in launching a certain kind of historicism” and that “his Hebrew humanism” is “to be thanked” for the fact “that the Old Testament was not entirely swept away in the maelstrom of late Enlightenment philosophizing.” Herder was also critical for convincing later generations of the importance of hermeneutics. He was sensitive to “the ways in which translations can be a form of colonization,” and he “worried about Europeans' use of oriental languages for ‘deception and repression.’” Consequently, Marchand deems it “rather perverse to blame this orientalist for later evils” (p. 50), and she implores scholars to look elsewhere for the origins of the nasty turns that oriental studies took and supported at the end of the nineteenth century.

Most of all, she provides us with a timely reminder of the hazards of seeking political utility for humanistic endeavors. The division of the cultural sciences into multiple disciplines in which orientalists sought intellectual homes and professional careers proved treacherous for the participants' notions of Bildung and Wissenschaft. The “lonely orientalists” she portrays steadily working with their texts from the 1830s to the 1870s moved from an emphasis on theology to philology; yet they continued to face career prospects determined overwhelmingly by older patterns of academic respectability and cultural significance, and they gained few material rewards. Among those practitioners who avidly identified language groups, hierarchies, and lineages, there was little interest in constructing racialized human histories. Those who traveled had varied politics, and their interactions with non-Europeans were generally idiosyncratic and fleeting. As Marchand stresses, “they were not fully woven into the carpet of Weltpolitik, first of all because no such policy existed before the 1880s and secondly because the German states in this era were insufficiently powerful for local leaders to see German travelers as either particularly useful or particularly threatening” (p. 145).

The critical shift takes place with the generation she designates as “furor orientalis.” This was a generation “born and educated during the second Oriental Renaissance” whose “experience was shaped not, like that of previous generations, by cautious institution-building and philological positivism, but rather by specialization, the gradual evolution of new patrons, positions, and publication venues and, in 1884, the Reich's entry into the colonial race.” It was this generation that began to “claim general relevance for their fields of study.” To that end, they were “willing to advance grand-scale hypotheses without,” as their predecessors had attempted, “first mastering all the relevant languages or specialized literature” (p. 213). It was these actions that opened the door to “a winner-takes-all approach to the study of cultural origins; the preference for oriental paganism over the more established cultures of the book; and a generational critique of positivist practices” (p. 238). This was a much different generation of historians, whose critique of pure historicism was coupled with a more folkloric understanding of traditions, a “neoromantic return to the question of origins,” and a new willingness to embrace racial categories and quasi-racial elements that might provide utility for state and professional purposes.

Some sought positions in the new colonial institutions created for the “unabashed practical training” of careerists who would go abroad. Those careers, however, often demonstrated how difficult it could be for people trained in the philological-historical tradition to make themselves both useful and “scientific,” no matter how much they departed from that tradition. Most sobering, however, are the many ambiguities in these intellectual histories; they undermine any effort to trace out persistent, discursive antecedents for what followed. In many of her case studies, for example, great innovation in scholarship repeatedly accompanies irrelevance; the scientific colonialism that took shape “often had as its consequence the undermining of older forms of oppression and even of colonialism itself” (p. 383); and perhaps most disturbing, foundations laid for “a non-Eurocentric history of the ancient world could also provide the groundwork for a thoroughgoing racial reading of the past and present” (p. 487). Such ambiguities beg our consideration, and Marchand's engagement with these perplexing problems will make this book fruitful reading for a wide audience indeed.