During 1774–75, George Bogle visited Bhutan and Tibet to negotiate trade and commerce from India through Tibet to China on behalf of the East India Company. He stayed for an extended period at the Tashilhunpo monastery near Shigatse and developed a close relationship with Lobsang Palden Yeshé, the Third Panchen Lama. After his return, Bogle's journey remained little known outside official circles until Clements Markham published Bogle's journals in 1876. Since then, the story of Bogle's sympathy for Tibetans and his extraordinary relationship with the Panchen Lama has been told many times, most recently by Kate Teltscher in High Road to China (2006), an excellent narrative of the journey and a dual biography of Bogle and the Panchen Lama.

Gordon T. Stewart's original research and close reading of archives in Britain and India compares Bogle's journey to Francis Younghusband's violent encounter with Tibetans in 1903–4. Stewart uses the comparison to argue against scholars who would hold that the Enlightenment led inexorably to Empire. Anyone interested in the British encounter with Tibet will learn something from Stewart's detailed and even-handed reading of sources. His broader assessment of the transition from Enlightenment to Empire, however, is less satisfying and ultimately shows the limits of an empiricist reading of the imperial archive.

Journeys to Empire persuasively treats a wide variety of issues, including Bogle's hopes to make a fortune in India, his encounter with the Panchen Lama, and Younghusband's strategic use of the earlier mission. Stewart reads Bogle's correspondence with family, friends, and his patron, Warren Hastings, to portray a complex figure who was an open-minded traveler as well as an opportunistic and mercenary Company agent. Bogle and the Panchen Lama each left accounts of their encounter, and Stewart includes a valuable discussion of the Panchen Lama's guide to Shambala and Bogle's contributions to this work. He also offers a fascinating discussion of Younghusband's use of “history as a weapon of diplomacy” (157). In 1903, Younghusband read Markham's edition of Bogle's journal while waiting in a Tibetan camp for permission to proceed and was inspired to thank Tibetan officials for the hospitality that Bogle had received from the Panchen Lama in one of his former existences. Permission was granted, and the Tibetans exhibited the gifts Bogle had presented, also strategically using the “memory” of the earlier journey. “These Tibetans take a lot of teaching,” Younghusband wrote, though Stewart's analysis would be stronger if he had followed the studies by James Hevia of such lessons and guest rituals (172).

Stewart also investigates Bogle's “domestic arrangements” with Tibetan and Bengali women. He reviews the evidence marshaled by Hugh Richardson to suggest that Bogle had two daughters with a Tibetan woman, probably a niece of the Panchen Lama, who were sent to Britain for their education. Bogle had other children in Calcutta, and his estate paid a pension to a widow in Bengal. Stewart refers briefly to debates between William Dalrymple, Gyan Prakash, and Durba Ghosh about such relationships but concludes that all approaches should be applied, and the evidence is too fragmentary to know the truth. Yet it is unclear why the silence in the Bogle written archive, which was purged in the early nineteenth century, should be so amplified or deepened that the oral tradition of Tibetan daughters in the family is rendered mute.

Stewart views Bogle as an ambiguous agent of the Enlightenment and Younghusband as a less problematic representative of Empire. “In Bogle's case, while the Enlightenment may have contributed to his imperial posture, the Enlightenment also acted as a brake on his European assumptions of superiority. In Younghusband's case there seemed to be no brakes at all” (208). To provide a “bridge” between the two men, Stewart elaborates an excursus on the evangelical Charles Grant to exemplify new racial thinking and attitudes toward gender and sexuality. At times, Stewart emphasizes that Enlightenment and Empire were intertwined in Bogle, and at others he strenuously denies that a path led from Enlightenment to Empire. Stewart criticizes a position he attributes to Greg Dening and Stuart Schwartz that knowing the other led to dispossession of the native.

Journeys to Empire repeatedly idealizes these categories of Enlightenment and Empire. “Acknowledging the complexity and contradictory nature of the Enlightenment, we can say that while the Enlightenment did indeed lead to imperial outcomes, as we saw with Bogle and commerce, there was no single ‘enlightenment project’ that led exclusively to European imperial mentalities of the 1800s” (232). This is fine as far as it goes, but Stewart prefers a capitalized “Enlightenment” to describe a consistent movement in the eighteenth century and argues for the existence of “a Primordial empire, as it were, that informs all of world history” and has been similar in every epoch (186, 259).

Yet alternate readings of Bogle's cross-cultural sensitivity and Younghusband's cultural superiority are also available. Kate Teltscher and Laurie Hovell McMillan have argued that Bogle's writing is “sentimental” and modeled more on Laurence Sterne or Mary Wortley Montagu than “enlightenment,” Scottish or otherwise. This eighteenth-century “sentimentality” provides a more promising context and potential explanation for Bogle's perspective on Tibet. Stewart sees Bogle's journey as “a meeting of two versions of enlightenment—one largely secular, the other entirely spiritual” (11). This dichotomy itself is the product of the nineteenth-century study of Buddhism, when philologists first translated nirvana as “enlightenment,” defined Tibetan Buddhism as Lamaism, and began to study “world religions.” Younghusband's position as an agent in Tibet and as a spiritual seeker in later years cannot be understood without taking account of these transformations.

Stewart aims to recapture the complexity of the history of empire by embracing its contradictions, but his empiricist reading makes it difficult to sustain any claim about “Enlightenment” or “Empire,” apart from the assertion of complexity. Donald Lopez has argued that Westerners and Tibetans have become “prisoners of Shangri-La” by adopting the representation of Tibet as the pure and remote Shangri-La that developed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century study of Tibet. Perhaps it is time to recognize that the full complexity of the past will remain elusive as long as historians of Europe remain prisoners of Enlightenment and Empire.