With the publication of his rich and impressive study Edmund Burke and India in 1996, Frederick Whelan made his mark as one of the most compelling scholars of the study of European political thought and its encounter with the extra-European world. He reads with both interpretive generosity and a sharp critical eye; he is an always reliable guide through the nuances of the thinkers he addresses; and his work is laced with original and acute observations. This fine collection of essays contributes to his consistently distinguished body of work. It is a pity, indeed, that it did not appear earlier. All but one of the essays were first written between 1996 and 1999, and given the explosion of work on political theory and empire over the last decade, such a volume would have been a welcome contribution earlier in the cycle. (As an aside, the volume would have been better served had the publishers not, as it appears, switched the title and subtitle: Sultans and Savages is more striking and memorable than the word-searchable title they used.)

The volume consists of five essays on broadly Enlightenment-era thinkers (Whelan notes the difficulties of placing Hegel in that category). In addition to thoughtful and remarkably thorough treatments of canonical thinkers such as Hume, Burke and Hegel on the stated theme, it includes welcome attention to thinkers not sufficiently well known among political theorists: in particular, excellent treatments of the French Orientalist and Montesquieu critic Abraham Anquetil-Duperron and of the circle of Scottish Enlightenment social theorists and conjectural historians beyond Smith, including William Robertson and John Millar. Several of the essays engage with the work of Edward Said, which, despite its outsized influence on literary and historical scholarship since the 1978 publication of Orientalism, has been addressed only belatedly and often obliquely by political theory as a discipline.

Whelan's essays are largely exegetical both in the sense that they rely almost exclusively on textual analysis—there is little treatment of historical contexts, whether purely intellectual or more broadly social, political, or cultural contexts—and in the sense that he is generally concerned not to criticize or evaluate the authors in question but, rather, to give an account of their views. The essays sometimes have a slightly formalistic quality, as they work through an array of relevant topics in the work of each thinker. This makes them extremely useful resources, especially the case in the essays on Hume and Hegel. But this reader at least yearned for something more of Whelan's own arguments, both because of his obvious erudition in the political thought of the period and because of the fineness of his judgments when on offer in this book.

The strengths as well as the possible limitations of Whelan's approach are on view in the essay on Hume that opens the volume. Particularly given the scattered location of Hume's treatments of non-Europeans, it is helpful and eye-opening to have them brought together and analyzed as a whole, as participating in various eighteenth-century “discourses” that invoked non-European societies: discourses of the primitive (the primitive mind, the noble savage), Oriental despotism, and Chinese stagnation in particular. At the same time, if we compare this approach to the intensive attention to various contexts that we find in other recent treatments of Hume as a participant in what is coming to be called the “global eighteenth century,” such as those of Emma Rothschild and of John Pocock, Whelan's approach can sometimes feel disembodied, even as it offers more sustained attention to the thinker's arguments.

Rothschild's recent essay, “David Hume and the Seagods of the Atlantic” (in The Atlantic Enlightenment, eds. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, 2008), demonstrates the degree to which the contemplative and “indolent” Hume, who might seem “a distinctively unAtlantic figure,” exhibited, in his life and his political-philosophic concerns, the “universe of oceanic connections” in which he lived. Rothschild's treatment of the various worlds of global commerce and war that intersected with Hume's own life elucidates his many discussions of trade and conquest, and non-Europeans, in his political essays. Whelan sometimes briefly invokes such historical context in this volume, as he did more extensively and to great effect in his Burke book, where, given Burke's own deep involvement in the imperial politics of his day, such contextualization was indispensable in a way that it is arguably not here. Whelan and Rothschild agree on a number of conclusions: that Hume was highly, but also sporadically (especially compared with contemporaries such as Smith or Robertson), attuned to global themes; that for all his interest in empire and the non-European world, it seems his core philosophical principles were formed before he had much knowledge of distant societies and were little altered by further information; and that his notorious claim that “negroes” are “naturally inferior” to whites, to which both devote some attention, remains perplexing in light of his thought as a whole. Whelan argues that notwithstanding that isolated comment, Hume was “on the whole remarkable for the minimal consideration he gave” (p. 42) to the hypothesis that differences among peoples can be explained biologically or with reference to origins. He cites Lord Kames's polygenism as the “most illuminating comparison,” though Kames's views were quite idiosyncratic. Rothschild somewhat more critically notes the controversy Hume's claim provoked in its day, when it was immediately seized on by defenders of slavery and excoriated by abolitionists, a controversy she notes that Hume himself must have been aware of, though he appears not to have remarked on it in writing.

Whelan ends his Hume essay with a typically pithy, informative, and thought-provoking treatment of Hume on imperial wars and the law of nations, in which Hume appears at once strikingly radical in his critique of imperial expansion and also rather complacent about European abuses of the laws of war in such contexts.

In his essay on Scottish conjectural theory, Whelan devotes welcome and unusual attention to the Scots' use and adaptation of their key ethnographic sources, the work of the French Jesuits Joseph-François Lafitau and Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix. This rich essay, written later than the others, is the one most interested in intellectual exchanges and contexts and also perhaps the most explicit in its evaluation of its subjects. Whelan observes the tension between the sociological and the normative aspects of Scottish stadial theory, in which terms from indolent to barbarian are used in both senses, with ambiguity. He nicely dissects the Scots' contradictory approaches to evidence, noting that to a perhaps surprising degree, given these thinkers' seeming desire to describe native American societies as accurately as possible, their use of ethnographic detail was theory driven (and their interests centered on property regimes and modes of subsistence), so that they often departed significantly from the emphases of their French sources, whose authors had their own quite different concerns, notably, proselytism in the case of Lafitau and geopolitics in the case of Charlevoix, who traveled as a secret envoy of the French government.

As Whelan notes, the sustained attention to non-European societies that began with the period in question “expanded the domain of political theory” (p. 164) and introduced the tension between universalist claims and recognition of cultural particularity as a central locus of philosophical activity, as it remains. While noting the thinkers' varied judgments of European empires and rightly insisting that they did not always furnish ideological support for the subordination of others, Whelan downplays somewhat the imperial context of these authors' reflections, arguing that the attention to non-European subjects was not “dominated or constrained by the project of empire” but, rather, was due to the “philosophical ambitions” of the Enlightenment (p. 175). We might grant theoretical coherence or autonomy to their reflections while still insisting that increasing European commercial and military dominance over swaths of the globe, and accompanying conflicts within Europe as well as beyond it, were the conditions in which these reflections, perforce, took place. The shape of philosophical concerns and discourses—most centrally the discourse of civilization and barbarism—arguably could not but reflect those conditions even if they did not always acknowledge them. In the end, these are quibbles about a compelling treatment of Enlightenment thought and its often self-critical orientation to the world.