This fine book, a revision of the author's Oxford DPhil, operates on two argumentative planes: history of the human sciences, and the discourse of ‘orientalism’. On balance, more attention is devoted to the former, but it is the latter that lurks beneath the surface of the text, often emerging to shape its external form. The author's commitment is to treating a branch of humanistic scholarship of the later seventeenth century in the terms developed over the past two decades by historians of science. Thus it is patronage, networks and book history that supply much of the thrust of this book.

Dew's powerful claim here is that oriental studies in France, in their mature form, should be associated with Colbert. Read alongside Jacob Soll's recent book, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (2009), his treatment allows us to evaluate in a much more sophisticated way the impact of Louis XIV's chief minister on the development of intellectual culture in his time. What we find is that he adapted practices already current in the Republic of Letters to the needs of the state, borrowing and refining, but basically coopting the one for the other. These achievements, we find, shaped patterns of cognition in ways that endured into later times. This alone ought to lead to a significant re-evaluation of the political significance of the learned world of the seventeenth century. The involvement of the French state in the advancement of learning is a subtext; oriental studies, because of factors local to the seventeenth century and to France, was the context in which this was played out to a great extent. Of course, much of what Dew studies was present and active in the first half of the seventeenth century as well, but without the formal administrative self-consciousness and centralization which Colbert brought to the job.

Dew devotes specific chapters to key figures: Barthélemy d'Herbelot, Melchisedech Thévenot and François Bernier. These are chosen because they are familiar as important crystallizers of oriental learning and because they can be seen as occupying representative positions at the nexus of learning, patronage and collecting. They have also been central to existing narratives of the history of oriental studies and thus help bridge older and newer approaches. And that is an important point to make about this book: it does not engage much with familiar ‘disciplinary’ histories of oriental studies; indeed, one will not find here the still-needed history of oriental studies in the seventeenth century. What one does find, however, is something else, also needed: a carefully nuanced reading, using the latest tools, of the ways in which learning was promoted and the shape it eventually took. The rhetorics and formats of scholarship are the focus here and implied is the role this has in presenting the content in informed ways. Other key figures of the time, such as Mabillon and Montfaucon, make cameo appearances, but one feels keenly on those occasions that to really understand orientalism in Louis XIV's France one needs to see the connections in breadth, not only understand the processes in depth. The presence of a concluding chapter on Confucius Sinarum Philosophus suggests the range of the issues under discussion, but also opens up the wider question of ‘what is the Orient?’

In fact, while not making an ideological argument the core of his work, Dew cannot avoid tangling with the spectre of Edward Said's Orientalism, an argument whose baleful influence on this subject seems now finally to be abating. The work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Joan-Pau Rubiés on India, of Suzanne Marchand on nineteenth-century German scholarship, of Guy Stroumsa on historians of religion, and now Dew on later seventeenth-century France add to the sense that we are now finally waking up to the complexity of a historical phenomenon after too long spent in reducing it either to positivism or to ideology. Books like Dew's will help show generations to come that the ways and means and whys of studying the Orient in early modern Europe are much more nuanced and polyvalent than most people believed not so very long ago.