The ‘long eighteenth century’ saw a dramatic increase in European contacts with Asia, some (but not all) of which were colonial in character. The period saw the production of a voluminous travel literature that was consumed by interested European publics, and which in turn contributed, in myriad ways, to the development of European cultures. Jürgen Osterhammel draws on this literary tradition “to challenge the conventional postcolonial wisdom that sees all attempts to understand ‘the East’, including those of an era ‘before empire’, as invariably imperialistic and contaminated by European fantasies of power” (p. x). Osterhammel's book is an important addition to the body of scholarship which, without apologising for the history of European imperialism or ignoring the ways that knowledge creation was often bound up with the colonial project, has sought to challenge the Manichaean logic of Saidian postcolonialism.

Unfabling the East is a revised and expanded English-language edition of a work originally published in German in 1998. It benefits from the availability of new sources and editions published during that interval, as well as recent contributions to intellectual history such as J. G. A. Pocock's monumental series on Edward Gibbon, Barbarism and religion. Osterhammel's rare expertise in a variety of languages and intellectual traditions means he is well-equipped for his daunting task, which demands intense engagement with a multi-lingual corpus. Drawing widely on English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Russian material, Osterhammel provides a magisterial survey of a diverse and extraordinarily rich body of literature. His presentation and analysis of this material will be of particular service to English-speaking readers who, in these pages, may well make their first acquaintance with some significant authors and texts.

Osterhammel's “Introduction: Looking to the East” is excellent, and should serve as a primer for those unfamiliar with the field. Eloquently and concisely elaborating the main postcolonial critiques of Enlightenment travel writing, he rebuts both the postmodernist “model of autistic discourse [which] alleges the fictitious, figmentary nature of all representations of foreign cultural and social conditions”, as well as the “model of disillusioned humanism”, with its scepticism about the possibility of genuine transcultural understanding (p. 12). Osterhammel rejects the notion that early modern European texts on the Americas and Asia constitute “an epistemological disaster”, whose study “can be justified, at best, by demonstrating how in each case non-European cultures were misrepresented, distorted, and disfigured in the age of European global conquest”. To be sure if this were the case, “Entire libraries of literature on America, Asia, and Africa would then consist of nothing but testaments to European folly and hubris that should be consigned to oblivion” (p. 15). To the relief of librarians everywhere, Osterhammel argues persuasively against this perspective.

It would be wrong, of course, to ignore the budding role of colonialism in shaping European attitudes towards Asia in the late eighteenth century, or to deny the relationship between the expansion of European power and the wider availability of cultural information. But, equally, it is incorrect to paint an unvariegated picture of European hostility and/or fear towards Asian cultures. One cannot help but be struck, when reading Unfabling the East, by the depth of interest shown in Asiatic cultures by a diverse range of European travellers and thinkers. While some expressed mere academic curiosity, others passionately advocated for both the historical and present-day merits of Asian civilisations, and sought to apply the example of Asiatic countries to European conversations about “savagery and civilisation, progress and decadence, governance and justice, the wealth and poverty of nations, the rights and happiness of women, truth and falsehood in religion” (p. 17).

Osterhammel defends the tradition of Enlightenment critics of colonialism. Even those who accepted the legitimacy of European expansion in principle, such as Edmund Burke, “still kept watch for violations of justice in the certainty that the same standards of right and wrong applied to the entire human race”:

An example of the kind of lesser-known character who figures in Osterhammel's survey is the mathematician and Sinologist Thomas Manning (1772–1840), Honorary Chinese Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the first Englishman to visit Lhasa. Frustrated by the lack of knowledge about China in late-eighteenth-century Great Britain, Manning conceived an ambition to explore China in the hope that a familiarity with its ways of life, manners, and customs would provide new insights to enrich European cultures.Footnote ¹ To that end, he set about learning Chinese, and resided in Asia between 1807 and 1817. One of the highlights of his career was an ambitious attempt to enter China overland, via Tibet, in 1811–12, the details of which he recorded in an intriguing, highly personal narrative journal.Footnote ² As Osterhammel observes, Manning displayed an unusual “immunity to the era's clichés about Asia” (p. 150): “Manning was one of the most honest Europeans in Asia and also one of the least prejudiced. He neither believed in European superiority nor sought to put Asia on a pedestal” (p. 151). Osterhammel regrets that Manning died without publishing “a single line” on China, but he did actually publish an essay on Chinese jokes in 1826; and the edition of his journey to Tibet first appeared in 1876 (not 1879).

While the author's treatment of his sources is masterful, the density and inherent difficulty of the material, combined with the book's length, could make it heavy going for casual readers. Moreover, by comparison with the first half of the book (“Pathways of Knowledge”), the second half (“The Present and the Past”) is problematic. Here, Osterhammel takes a broadly thematic approach, examining how European authors applied various concepts (societal development, “despotism”) and social categories to the study of Asian cultures. The literary works that resulted were more heterodox than is often assumed. However, Unfabling the East is less successful when grappling with thornier issues of sociology, than it is when surveying travel literature. This is especially apparent in later chapters such as “Societies” and “Women”, which explore demanding and complex questions like slavery and polygamy.

When dealing with slavery, for example, Osterhammel's approach tends towards an unsatisfying cultural relativism. Far from denying the widespread extent of slavery in eighteenth-century Asia, he nevertheless tends to downplay its significance and severity. Osterhammel observes that it was only in Western Europe that “slavery was not the fate of a considerable proportion of the population” (p. 400). Yet, noting that slavery “was present to some degree almost everywhere in Asia”, Osterhammel suggests that “only Europeans were in charge of slave owning societies” (pp. 401–402). Nowhere in Asia was slavery “socioeconomically predominant”, which is presumably why Asian societies are not to be categorised as “slave owning”: most Asiatic slaves were employed in the home, rather than on plantations, and were “often held for limited terms in bondage for debt” (pp. 401–402). But the fact that slavery was not socioeconomically predominant would be cold comfort to those souls who yet remained in bondage. Moreover, Osterhammel observes that “there were no Asian countries where slaves formed a majority of the population” (p. 403); but this is a demographic bar which not even Roman Italy could clear.Footnote ³ If we take the Ottoman Empire as an example, and allow that slaves were treated on the whole more mildly than those in the New World, this is still only a difference in degree, rather than kind.Footnote ⁴ Revulsion to the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the New World does not make it incumbent to take at face value the self-justifications of polities where slavery remained widespread until much later in the nineteenth century.

Such criticisms are minor in the context of an ambitious and worthy undertaking such as this, and Unfabling the East is a valuable and timely work. The legacy of Enlightenment travel writing is a vital part of Europe's cultural and intellectual heritage, and as European societies seek to build and agree upon a shared sense of their own history, the defence and promotion of this inheritance has a key role to play.