Desktop versionMobile version

Exploring the Interior

 | 
Karl S. Guthke

I. “The great map of mankind unrolled”

3. At Home in the World: Scholars and Scientists Expanding Horizons

Full text

The Emergence of the Idea of Global Education in the Eighteenth Century

1“The proper study of mankind is man” – but why include the exploration of the ways of New Zealand cannibals? In the second half of the eighteenth century Europeans had an answer: awareness of the world at large and its inhabitants would result in nothing less than a new, comparative understanding of human nature in general – and of themselves in particular.

  • 1 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, III, ed. George H. Guttridge (Cambridge (...)
  • 2 Georg Forster, Werke, Akademie-Ausgabe, V, 295.
  • 3 Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 1970), 89; Burke: see n. (...)
  • 4 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 1. Abt., II, 82. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic (...)

2From about mid-century, scholars, scientists, and public intellectuals championed this idea, intrigued by what Burke called “the great map of mankind”1 unfolding under their eyes in the increasingly numerous accounts of expeditions to remote corners of the world. Unlike the voyages of an earlier age, undertaken for profit or the saving of savage souls, the “philosophical voyages” of the “second age of discovery,” with their naturalists and anthropologists aboard, while not always innocent of political or commercial motivation, were designed to gain more knowledge of the world and especially a more adequate “idea of our species.”2 To qualify as an educated person, it was no longer sufficient to look inward or to study European cultural history all the way back to Antiquity; global, rather than traditional humanistic education was becoming the order of the day. As Burke, Herder, and others postulated, Europeans should now turn their attention to contemporary Persia, Egypt, China, and Japan rather than ancient Greece and Rome and take cognizance of the various degrees of “barbarism” and “refinement” (Burke) encountered in distant latitudes and longitudes; “to study man,” Rousseau claimed, “one needs to learn to look in the distance.”3 What counted now, as the horizon was widening, was the encounter, ideally in person, but realistically through reading travel accounts, with non-European ways of living, thinking, and feeling; these were considered, at least in principle, to be just as valid as the occidental ones and therefore an invitation to rethink and reconfigure the Europeans’image of themselves. What beckoned as the prize of such an endeavor was a “truly wise life” (“echte Lebensweisheit”)4.

  • 5 Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, III (München, 1972), 269, https://archive (...)
  • 6 Neueste Sammlung merkwürdiger Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend, ed. Hermes, I (Braunschweig, 1836 (...)

3By the time Victoria came to the throne, the idea had come close to being a cliché, even in the (non-colonizing) German lands whose “unfamiliarity with the world”, Lichtenberg had attested in 1778, was “unusual.”5 In 1836 Karl Heinrich Hermes, a prominent anthologist of exotic travelogues for the young, felt that it was now agreed that “no part of the earth, no nation, no matter how remote, must remain unknown to us, if our education (“Bildung”) is not to be highly deficient.”6 Global education had become an integral feature of the Enlightenment.

The Role of Scholars and Scientists

  • 7 Geschichte der Schiffahrten und Versuche, welche zur Entdeckung des Nordöstlichen Weges nach Japan (...)

4The emergence of the concept and the reality of global education did not just happen; it was brought about by the intellectuals of the age. Not limiting themselves to mere rhetoric, they pursued specific strategies and undertook concrete steps to ensure that the new concept would once and for all make the educated classes feel “at home” in parts of the world that their parents had, at best, known as mere names or fabled locations, as Johann Christoph Adelung put it.7 These strategies and practices may be grouped under three headings (among which there is, however, some overlapping): accumulation, consolidation, and organization of knowledge about the extra-European world; transfer of such knowledge inside and outside the scholarly community; advancement of such knowledge beyond the status quo.

Accumulation, Consolidation, and Organization of Knowledge

5Knowledge has to be consolidated and organized to yield its significance and allow for systematic augmentation. Such consolidation and organization takes two forms (not entirely new, but significantly invigorated in the eighteenth century): the collection and pertinent arrangement of plant, animal, and cultural specimens from non-European parts of the world, and the critical assembling of what has appeared in print concerning those regions. The former would lead to the establishment of institutions such as botanical and zoological gardens and ethnological museums, the latter to universal histories, encyclopedia entries, and, above all, to collections of travel accounts and book series specializing in exotic travelogues, with libraries taking a middle position between institutional and publishing enterprises.

  • 8 Jean-Marc Drouin and Luc Lienhard, “Botanik,” Albrecht von Haller: Leben—Werk—Epoche, eds. Hubert (...)
  • 9 P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Ag (...)

6Botanical and zoological gardens that scholars established (with the help of a vast network of overseas contacts) everywhere in Europe – from Albrecht von Haller’s Göttingen and Carl von Linné’s Uppsala to Buffon’s Jardin du Roi and Joseph Banks’s Kew Gardens, from the Imperial Menagerie at Schönbrunn to the zoo added to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – recreated foreign habitats, with the accent on the exotic strongest perhaps in the Jardin d’Acclimatation des végétaux exotiques in Nantes.8 More important from an anthropological viewpoint were (in the absence of nineteenth-century Völkerschauen à la Hagenbeck) ethnological museums featuring the artifacts of exotic populations. Evolving from earlier “cabinets of curiosities” both natural and artificial, these collections included Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s “Ethnologische Sammlung”, incorporated into the Göttingen University Akademisches Museum in 1773, Hans Sloane’s myriad of artifacts (ranging from bark textiles to fishing hooks) that were acquired through an Act of Parliament in 1753 and incorporated into the British Museum as well as the turn-of-the-century acquisitions of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. They all held sizeable contingents of objects brought home by the “philosophical voyagers” of the time, Cook and the Forsters prominently among them.9 Similarly, Napoleon’s Egyptian loot, secured thanks to the expertise of scores of savants recruited for his military expedition of 1798, ended up in various European collections, including the British Museum, which to this day displays the Rosetta Stone that was one of the major objects of scholarly interest and cultural consequence at the time, opening up, after Champollion’s decipherment, a whole new intellectual world.

  • 10 Blumenbach, Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte, ed. and trans. J. G. Gr (...)
  • 11 Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, Die Wunderkammer: Die Kunst-und Naturalienkammer der Franckeschen Stiftun (...)

7That such collecting activity, which brings into the Europeans’full view the worldwide diversity of cultural self-expression, has an educational aspect is self-evident. Johann Gottfried Gruber, a universal historian, spelled it out in 1798 apropos of Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa: nothing less than “true humanity” had developed from the new awareness of such diversity.10 More concrete were the 1741 instructions for guides in the “Wunderkammer” of the Francke Foundation in Halle (which boasted Egyptian mummies, ritual objects from India, articles of clothing from China and Greenland among its many artifacts): the main purpose of the collection was “to bring the whole world (natural objects as well as artifacts) together here in miniature, […] not just to be looked at but for the benefit of local pupils as well as others so that early in life they may gain a better idea of God and the world.”11

  • 12 Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und die “große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden, 2001).
  • 13 Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 1. Abt., VII, 183, 216–217; cp. Guthke (n. 12), 90–91.
  • 14 Cited from Bernhard Fabian, Selecta Anglicana: Buchgeschichtliche Studien zur Aufnahme der Englisc (...)
  • 15 Hans Plischke, Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs Einfluß auf die Entdeckungsreisenden seiner Zeit (Gött (...)

8As for the newly emerging written knowledge about the world at large, the obvious collection points were the libraries, private, public or in between. Goethe’s systematic efforts, as director of the Ducal library, to secure vast amounts of exotic travelogues for Weimar have only recently been uncovered.12 He also described what he believed the reading of such works would provide for the general reader in landlocked provincial Germany: “magnificent instruction,” “thorough insight,” “pure humanity,” in a word: such works “enlighten” us – surely a broadly educational effect.13 It was, however, the Göttingen University Library that established itself as the foremost eighteenth-century German treasure house of recent travelogues. This was due to the farsighted educational initiative of Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, the spiritus rector of the young university, who issued a “decree that voyages and travel accounts were to be acquired as comprehensively as possible,”14 and to the untiring curatorial efforts of classics professor Christian Gottlob Heyne, who was director of the library from 1763 on. The Göttingen holdings of travelogues served as source material for the scientific disciplines that were just then establishing themselves: geography, anthropology and ethnology. Both Blumenbach and Christoph Meiners, the other leading Göttingen ethnologist at the time, could plausibly claim that they had read, for the benefit of their scholarly work, every exotic travel account that the library owned.15

  • 16 Guthke (n. 4), 42–48.
  • 17 See the pertinent chapters in Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, e (...)

9Meiners called his ethnological survey of the “great map of mankind” Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785). Such universal histories sprang up everywhere now (Isaak Iselin, August Ludwig Schlözer, Voltaire, Herder, etc.), and they might just as well have been called ethnological surveys, as Gruber, the editor of one of them, frankly admitted.16 The towering monument of the genre, the seven-volume Universal History (London, 1736–1744), was not slow to point out the educational value and function of such a conspectus of “all Times and Nations”: “Every judicious Reader may form […] Rules for the Conduct of this Life” as he becomes an “Eye-witness” of world history – and thereby of the ways of exotic populations (I, v). Much the same can be claimed for the many comprehensive encyclopedias published in several European languages at the time whose précis of knowledge about the non-European world derived from the myriad travel accounts of the century as well. Recent studies have tellingly brought to light just how such encyclopedic enterprises functioned in popularizing an enlightened awareness of expanding horizons, thereby offering their readers a compact course in global education.17

  • 18 William E. Stewart speaks of the “Verwissenschaftlichung” of such collections in the second half o (...)

10Of similar interest as vehicles of communication addressing audiences within or beyond the fringes of the scholarly community are those enterprises (often firmly in the hands of bona fide scholars such as Haller, A. G. Kästner, J. R. Forster, C. D. Ebeling, J. Bernoulli, Blumenbach, and the cartographer John Green) that critically coordinated those proliferating exotic travelogues that were the source material of encyclopedia entries, universal histories, and ethnographical treatises. The resulting compilations of such travel accounts – several of them at any rate, notably Blumenbach’s Sammlung seltener und merkwürdiger Reisegeschichten (1785) and Thomas Astley’s New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (4 vols., 1745–1747, incomplete) – aspired to critical evaluative procedures in the selection, correction, revision, arrangement, authentication, and annotation of their material, unlike their predecessors.18

  • 19 Sammlung kleiner Hallerischer Schriften, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1772), I, 135–138.
  • 20 On Campe, see Stewart, 236–249; on Hermes, see n. 6; on schoolbooks, see Guthke (n. 4), 73–82; Wal (...)
  • 21 Haller, I, 138; Goethe, Werke, 1. Abt., XXXIV/1, 354–355; Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hin (...)

11Astley’s compilation, which was translated into French and German, also hinted broadly at the educational effect and ideal implied in the purveyance of such reliable information about faraway lands and peoples; speaking of the “Knowledge […] attained of the greater Part of the Earth, till then quite unknown,” it stated: “By these Discoveries, a new Creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth, seemed to be opened to the View of Mankind; who may be said to have been furnished with Wings to fly from one End of the Earth to the other, and bring the most distant Nations acquainted” (I, 9). Awnsham and John Churchill, in their Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), had been more concrete: readers could, “without stirring a foot, compass the Earth and Seas, visit all Countries and converse with all Nations” (I, lxxiii). Haller, a lifelong avid reader of travelogues, “whose mind contains the world” as the motto to J. G. Zimmermann’s 1755 biography had it, described the educational value to be derived from such reading in 1750, in the preface to a collection of travel accounts entitled Sammlung neuer und merkwürdiger Reisen, zu Wasser und zu Lande: “Through [such accounts] we become familiar with the world and compensate somewhat for the lack of personal experience.” Being educated (“erzogen”) in a country whose citizens all share the same beliefs, morals, and opinions, Europeans are prone to “prejudice.” To overcome it, nothing is more commendable than familiarity with many peoples of different customs, laws, and mindsets. As a result, one arrives at a true understanding of human nature and of oneself. This in turn means that one becomes attuned to the “voice of nature […] which all peoples share,” be they Romans or Khoikhoi, Swiss or Patagonians.19 The same large-scale educational thinking was the rationale behind the publication of seemingly interminable series of individual travelogues such as those launched, with the advice of Goethe, Blumenbach, and other scholars, by Friedrich Justin Bertuch from his Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar (along with his various ethnological and geographical handbooks, journals, and school books). But it was Johann Heinrich Campe, followed by the abovementioned Hermes, who made this rationale explicit by addressing his several series of travelogues, principally about non-European regions, to the school-age population, and we have Hermes’word for it that Campe, by enlarging knowledge of the world and its peoples in this way, did indeed succeed in revolutionizing what Hermes emphatically called “Bildung” in German-speaking territories, by the beginning of the nineteenth century at the latest. Further confirmation of the ideal of global education taking hold is to be found in the upswing of geography teaching in schools, championed as early as 1769 by Herder as a way of “bringing about an era of Bildung in Germany,” with learned authors of textbooks frequently making the point that global education was now, by the mid-eighteenth century, entering into serious rivalry with humanistic pedagogy.20 The conviction of various scholars, Haller, Goethe, Kant, Georg Forster, and Antoine Galland included, that reading travelogues was equivalent to travelling the world had evidently borne fruit: travelogues “worked to bring about Bildung of every reader” (according to Forster).21

12With these observations, the consolidation and organization of knowledge have already shaded into the diffusion or transfer of educationally relevant information.

Transfer of Knowledge

  • 22 Hallers Netz: Ein europäischer Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufklärung, eds. Martin Stuber et (...)

13Hoarding knowledge was not one of the ideals of the age; true enlightenment lay always in the future, and cooperation via communication was the preferred way of approaching it. The exchange of scholarly and scientific information was stepped up and expanded in the course of the century; correspondence crossed the seas and the continents. E. Handmann’s portrait of Wilhelm August von Holstein-Gottorp of 1769 shows the prince holding a letter in one hand and resting the other on a globe.22 Haller’s worldwide net of correspondents is only one case in point. Johann David Michaelis, Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks and Guillaume Raynal come to mind, not to mention the academies, the Royal Society, and the Institut de France with their “corresponding members” the world over. Epistolary communication was supplemented and formalized by the rise of specialized journals, many of them geographical and ethnological. By 1790–1792 Johann Samuel Ersch’s Repertorium über die allgemeinen deutschen Journale und andere periodische Sammlungen für Erdbeschreibung, Geschichte und die damit verwandten Wissenschaften amounted to three substantial volumes. The role of such geographical and ethnological journals in the spread of global education is highlighted in 1790 in the preface to one of them, the Neue Beyträge zur Völker-und Länderkunde: “We are only just beginning to get to know the earth and its inhabitants and with them, ourselves.” The author is none other than Georg Forster, who, like his father, had himself contributed a great deal to this growing familiarity with “them” (and thereby with “ourselves”) through his Reise um die Welt, his several translations and editions of overseas travel writings as well as through numerous reviews of such books.

  • 23 See Guthke, Der Blick in die Fremde: Das Ich und das andere in der Literatur (Tübingen, 2000), 11– (...)
  • 24 Helmut Peitsch, ‘“Noch war die halbe Oberfläche der Erdkugel von tiefer Nacht bedeckt’: Georg Fors (...)

14At a time when books in foreign languages were hard to get hold of on the continent, reviews were among the mainstays of geographical and ethnological journals. Like the books themselves, they bridged the gap between the distant lands and that continental provinciality that Goethe, among others, lamented time and again. Haller reviewed scores of French and English exotic travelogues, guided by his conviction, stated above, that they furthered that global awareness, indeed, “Bildung,” that was the order of the day.23 Georg Forster, always eager to take up that cause, agreed; to quote a recent critic: “In addressing a ‘common reader,’ Forster’s reviews […] reveal their closeness to the British Reviews he used; so it is no coincidence that one encounters their formula informing reviews of travelogues – ‘pleasurable instruction’ – again and again.”24

  • 25 See Guthke (n. 4), 60–62 on Kant; 43–44 on Schlözer; Plischke (n. 15), 6 on Blumenbach; Carhart, 2 (...)

15Outside the print medium, knowledge about faraway lands and populations was transferred – as a regular feature of the formal educational process – in the form of university lecture courses based on travelogues. In the last third of the century, the major continental venue for such transfer (apart from Königsberg where Kant promulgated prejudice along with information) was Göttingen, with Blumenbach, Meiners, Schlözer, Arnold Heeren and Johann Heinrich Plath25 regularly holding forth on “die große weite Welt” for the benefit of students aspiring to be men of the world in a country that did not as yet have much contact with the non-European world.

  • 26 John Lockman, trans. Travels of the Jesuits into Various Parts of the World (London, 1743). On the (...)

16Another instrument that diffused information about exotic parts of the world was – apart from reports, pro and con, on slavery in Africa, America and the Caribbean – the writings of missionaries about the ways and beliefs of overseas natives to whom they were bringing the gospel. Above all, it was the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1702–1773, translated in part by John Lockman in 1743, with their ethnological value fully recognized and their proselytizing expunged) that provided rich source materials about the populations of China, California, India, South America and other parts of the world for works like Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations – all of them creating that wider horizon that enabled the reorientation from eurocentric to global education.26

  • 27 On Haller, see Guthke (n. 23), 35–37; on the Danish missions, see Peter Stein, “Christian Georg An (...)
  • 28 Michael Harbsmeier, “Pietisten, Schamanen und die Authentizität des Anderen: Grönländische Stimmen (...)
  • 29 On natives brought to Europe, see Bitterli, 180–203, esp. 187 ff.: “Der eingeborene Besucher als S (...)

17Much the same is true of the reports of Danish Lutheran missionaries on the natives of Greenland and the Coromandel coast (extensively commented on by Haller with regard to the emerging view of human nature in a global context) as well as those of St. Thomas in the Caribbean.27 In addition, these Danish missionary activities supply a case history for a different type of encounter with indigenous populations. In 1724 two Eskimos were persuaded by Hans Egede, the founding father of the Danish colony, to sail with him to Copenhagen and to demonstrate their rowing, spearing, and other skills in the Royal Park in a grand show honoring the king on his birthday. Carefully recorded were not only the reactions of the Danes to this folkloricethnological spectacle, but also the Greenlanders’feelings about life in Denmark.28 In a sense, this was nothing new. Exotic natives had been exhibited – there is no more tactful word for it – ever since around 1500 when Vespucci returned with a large number of American Indians; one such group inspired Montaigne’s essay on cannibalism later in the century. Yet what is different in the “second age of discovery” is that such “visitors” were not merely curiosities to be marvelled at but objects of serious ethnological inquiry and reflection leading ultimately (as did Montaigne’s speculations) to an anthropological “Who are we?”29

  • 30 On Omai as an object of study, see Michael Alexander, Omai: “Noble Savage” (London, 1977), 72, 99, (...)
  • 31 Bitterli, 195; Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, eds. Michel Bideaux and Sonia Faessel (Paris, (...)
  • 32 Bougainville, 233.
  • 33 Marshall and Williams, 267.
  • 34 N.-T. Baudin, Mon Voyage aux terres australes, ed. Jacqueline Bonnemains (Paris, 2000), 61; J.-M. (...)

18The most famous cases are those of the South Seas islanders Omai and Aotourou, brought to Europe by Tobias Furneaux, Captain Cook’s second-in-command, and Bougainville, respectively. Lichtenberg’s encounter with Omai was perhaps the most fundamental learning experience of his life, prompting haunting questions about what it means to be civilized – or not. Omai was more or less the same, morally and otherwise, as the people surrounding him at the London tea table on that 24 March 1775. Or was he: the polygamist, eating his salmon almost raw, sporting a watch, but not caring to consult it? Conversely, was there not something “savage”, even cannibalistic, about Europeans?30 As for Aotourou: Buffon, Charles de Brosses, d’Alembert, Helvétius, and Diderot all engaged in exploratory conversations with him; La Condamine wrote an extensive anthropological report on his interview sessions with him.31 But more than anybody else, it was Bougainville who gained from Aotourou “insights about his country during his stay with me” in France.32 In fact, these new insights led Bougainville to “introduce some drastic revisions into the second edition of his book”, Voyage autour du monde (1771), concerning, inter alia, the barbarous class distinctions and aristocratic tyranny in Tahiti33 – the island he had originally described as paradise on earth, “Nouvelle Cythère.” With the point of reference for any aspiration to global education thus becoming ambiguous, it is no wonder that the instructions prepared for some of the subsequent exploratory voyages specified that natives should be brought back for further study and debriefing by experts in various fields.34

19This specification offers a hint of what was perhaps the most important role of scholars in the transfer of knowledge that laid the foundations for the emerging ideal of global education. The fruitfulness of such cultural diffusion depended to a large extent on the qualification of the interlocutors interacting with the natives. Only scholars with expertise pertinent to particular fields of learning could be in a position to enrich, refine, and contextualize the information solicited through their knowledgeable questioning and observation.

  • 35 Cited from Marshall and Williams, 281.
  • 36 Michaelis, Fragen an eine Gesellschaft gelehrter Männer, die […] nach Arabien reisen (Frankfurt, 1 (...)

20Command of the languages of the natives was the most elementary sine qua non. Jesuit missionaries were well aware of this and well prepared; other travellers, however, were all too often barred from the insights that mattered most. Captain Cook put it in a nutshell. “He candidly confessed to me,” reported Samuel Johnson’s Boswell, “that he and his companions who visited the south sea islands could not be certain of any information they got, or supposed they got […]; their knowledge of the language was so imperfect [that] anything which they learned about religion, government, or traditions might be quite erroneous.”35 Not surprisingly, therefore, Michaelis in 1762, Constantin-François Volney in 1787 and Joseph-Marie Degérando in 1800 insisted that learning the pertinent native languages was an indispensible prerequisite for “philosophical voyages” as they had developed by that time.36

  • 37 For the more or less complete story of this, see Marshall and Williams; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die En (...)

21The time was right. For quite apart from the practical value of such linguistic competence, the scholarly study of some non-European languages such as Arabic, Persian (and Sanskrit) was establishing itself throughout the eighteenth century as an academic subject in British and continental universities and outside academia as well. Needless to add, such study was pursued in conjunction with, and as an aid to, more broadly cultural and religious studies, dramatically enlarging familiarity with Oriental philosophy and literature, and with Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Barthélemy d’Herbelot (in the late seventeenth century) and William Jones, Charles Wilkins, Michaelis and Johann Jakob Reiske in the eighteenth are the big names here, followed around the turn of the century by the Schlegels and those many savants making up Napoleon’s entourage who produced the twenty-three volumes of the Description de l’Égypt (1809–1823), that monumental treasure trove of exotic lore, which, together with other sources, added a whole new dimension to global education, not to say fashion, much as contacts with China had done earlier. The labors of all these scholars bore fruit in innumerable highly specialized academic treatises, such as those published in the proceedings of the Asiatic Society, founded in Calcutta in 1784 by Jones, and of its various European offspring, as well as in grammars and dictionaries, encyclopedic handbooks, and critical editions of key cultural texts.37

  • 38 On Sloane and Kaempfer, see Marshall and Williams, 87.
  • 39 Werke (n. 2), VII, 69.
  • 40 Les Mille et une nuits, trans. Antoine Galland (n. 21), 21; Goethe, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 1. Ab (...)
  • 41 Forster, Werke, VII, 286–287.
  • 42 Werke, XI, 183.

22More conducive to the idea of the global education of the general reader and non-specialist intellectual were, no doubt, the translations produced by these scholars of non-European cultures. In particular, they were renderings of (and commentaries on) texts of signal cultural importance, such as the Bhagavad Gita (by Wilkins), the Sakuntala (by Jones), the Koran (by George Sale), and the Arabian Nights (by Antoine Galland), but also of works like Engelbert Kaempfer’s late seventeenthcentury pioneering account of Japan which Sloane arranged to have translated from the unpublished German manuscript into English in 1727, thus opening up a whole new world fifty years before the book appeared in German.38 But how might a mere translation contribute to the new educational concept? In the most general terms, Georg Forster pointed out, nothing short of “Aufklärung” was being brought about by translations of such books that emerged in the second age of discovery.39 To be more specific, two literary instances concerning highly influential works may suffice, one from early, the other from late in the century. Galland, in the avertissement of his Mille et une nuits (1704–1717), saw the cultural significance and educational value of these tales (for Western readers) in their presentation of “the customs and the way of life [“mœurs”] of the Orientals, […] their religion, partly pagan, partly Mohammedan,” adding that all this, indeed the totality of Oriental social life from the highest to the lowest, is observed in these “Arabian tales” with greater skill than in travelogues – and travelogues were, after all, the foundational texts of what Goethe called “cosmopolitan culture” as distinguished from the more common parochial “inward culture” or of what Georg Forster championed as “general” (that is: global) “Bildung” as distinguished from “local Bildung.”40 The second instance comes from Georg Forster’s introduction to his translation of the Sakontala (1791; from the English of Jones). This work allows European readers to “empathize with a different kind of thinking and feeling, different ways of life and different customs.” As a result, they enjoy the increase of their knowledge (“Wissen”). “Wissen”, however, in this context is really that broader experience that allows us to reach our full human potential. For the highest degree of “perfection” (“Vervollkommnung”) cannot be reached until “one has actually received the totality of impressions that experience can furnish” – which is indeed nothing less than the purpose of human life. And that can be achieved, apparently, through familiarization with faraway countries, such as India. They can provide us with that variety of experience that will eventually yield “a more adequate concept of mankind” (“richtigeren Begrif der Menschheit”)41 – or, more to the point in the present context: such “experience” of the distant other will generate “Bildung” as Forster put it in a review of his essay on Captain Cook.42 Here, of course, he has travelogues in mind, not literary works.

Advancement of Knowledge

  • 43 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XVIII (1694), 167.
  • 44 Bougainville, 57.
  • 45 On criticism of existing travelogues, see the remarks on pp. 82-83 on Astley’s and Blumenbach’s co (...)

23Returning, then, to accounts of exotic voyages, which were the main source of global education as they “enlarg[ed] the Mind […] of Man, too much confin’d to the narrow Spheres of particular Countries,”43 one wonders: what were the specific scholarly strategies designed to make sure that such “Bildung” or “Aufklärung” (Goethe, Forster) would actually result from them – rather than confirmation of prejudice and repetition of outdated yarns about Patagonian giants, ape-like Calibans, mermaids and the like? The news brought home in travelogues had to be checked for accuracy and correctness. These qualities were of course guaranteed by the scholarly expertise of some of the travellers: Carsten Niebuhr, Volney, and Humboldt come to mind most readily. Even so, tall tales gave travellers a bad press. As a traveller and seafarer, Bougainville remarked polemically, he was considered a liar by definition.44 Learned criticism of the questionable veracity of travel writing was in fact common, not only in some of the collections of such writings, but also in reviews as well as in subsequent travelogues covering the same ground. In this spirit Haller called for more accounts of travels not to hitherto unexplored regions but to those that had been misrepresented in earlier writings; for what made a “philosophical voyage” truly philosophical (an instrument of research, in other words) was the thorough scientific grounding of its explorations. This is what was increasingly demanded by the patrons, promoters, and intellectual organizers of such enterprises, e.g., Sloane, Banks, Haller, Michaelis, Georg Forster, Blumenbach, Degérando, as well as by the scholarly and scientific societies and academies of the time (notably the Royal Society, the Institut de France, and the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme).45

24The principal form that this endeavor took were the instructions and questionnaires for specific research expeditions prepared by savants of the sponsoring institution with a view to directing and sharpening observations and investigations. In what follows, the focus will be the contribution of these instructions to the rise of the ideal of global education.

  • 46 3rd ed. (London, 1799), viii; for the ethnological and cultural emphasis, see pt. 2, sec. 1–3. Oth (...)

25The connection between scholarly and scientific instructions, long-distance exploratory travel, and the widening scope of personality formation was summarized in 1772 by John Coakley Lettsom in The Naturalist’s and Traveller’s Companion, one of several compendia of directions suitable for expeditions to all parts of the world and covering all scientific and scholarly disciplines, prominently including, in Lettsom’s case, anthropology and the examination of the indigenous peoples’culture or “way of living.” The study of “the manners, customs, and opinions of mankind; agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; the state of arts, learning, and the laws of different nations, when judiciously investigated, tend to enlarge the human understanding, and to render individuals wiser, and happier.”46

26Particularly relevant to the achievement of this (broadly speaking) educational ideal were those sections of the ad hoc (as distinguished from all-purpose) travel directives that concerned the exploration of the ways of indigenous populations (rather than the natural world of minerals, plants and animals). Focusing on instructions that include this cultural aspect (and ignoring commercial and political components that are often, but not always, present) one finds that certain points of emphasis appear as leitmotifs over the decades, sometimes repeated verbatim.

  • 47 Byron’s Journal of his Circumnavigation, 1764–1766, ed. Robert E. Gallagher (Cambridge, 1964), 4.
  • 48 Carteret’s Voyage Round the World, 1766–1769, ed. Helen Wallis (Cambridge, 1965), II, 304 (John Wal (...)
  • 49 Ibid.

27One such point is the requirement to treat the indigenous peoples with “civility and respect” and indeed to “cultivate a Friendship” with them, while at the same time being careful “not to be surprised.”47 In the 1760s this instruction was even issued (by the Admiralty) to those captains who, like John Byron, John Wallis, and Philip Carteret, received no scientific directives and had no scientists aboard. In these cases the instruction does not imply any anthropological interest in the indigenous way of life as authentic alternative modes of existence deserving the consideration of Europeans. For even if the travellers are asked to “get the best information you can of the Genius, Temper and Inclinations of the Inhabitants,” the context is unmistakably the imperialistic one of “taking Possession of convenient Situations […] in the Name of the King of Great Britain.”48 In this context some knowledge of the inhabitants would, of course, be desirable as possession was to be taken “with the consent of the Inhabitants.”49 To throw this into relief, it is useful to compare the instructions that Robert Boyle had given in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665–1666 (and published in book form in 1692) for an early version of research travel: they include no hint of political conquest – and no admonition on how to treat the natives. Being strictly scientific and guided by anthropological curiosity, they gave more (and more detailed) directions as to what was to be observed about the indigenous populations and their frame of mind, and also pointedly envisioned the ultimate, broadly human, not to say educational, relevance of such new knowledge: “True Philosophy” and “the wellfare of Mankind” (I, 140–143, 188–189).

  • 50 Rudolf Trillmich, Christlob Mylius (diss. Leipzig, 1914), 135, 137; see also Haller’s “Instruktion (...)
  • 51 Carsten Niebuhr und die Arabische Reise 1761–1767, ed. Dieter Lohmeier (Heide, 1986), 63–65. For M (...)
  • 52 Carsten Niebuhr, 85.

28The instructions for the “philosophical voyagers” of the second age of discovery, unlike those for Byron, Wallis, and Carteret, generally followed Boyle’s line of inquiry. In some of them dominion was not even a subordinate motivation. Christlob Mylius, sponsored by Haller, in the early 1750s was to conduct observations in America “which a philosopher and natural scientist can make of the nature of the country and its inhabitants.”50 Much the same may be said about Humboldt’s travels. Niebuhr’s Danish-sponsored expedition to Arabia (1761–1767), for which Michaelis drew up both the royal “Instruktion” and the one hundred specific scholarly questions (Fragen) that were to guide the explorations, was to concentrate to some extent on securing information that would be useful to Biblical and even philological studies, but his resulting Beschreibung von Arabien (1772) is mostly about the way of life, the customs, social conditions, and scholarly accomplishments of the Arab population of what is now Yemen. Yet this, too, was in keeping with both the Fragen and the royal instruction, which required, inter alia, that “the ways [“Sitten”] and inclinations of the people” were to be reported on. Interestingly, the requirement to exercise “the utmost courtesy” in all encounters with the indigenous populations occurs in the royal instruction as well, specifying further that the travellers should “not contradict their religion, even less ridicule it even implicitly”; they are to refrain from everything that might “aggravate” them and to take care to avoid the impression that their activities might do harm and never to indulge in verbal or physical violence.51 Clearly, such caution implies respect for the foreign culture rather than the tactical manœuvering of conquistadors such as Wallis. In other words, the foreign culture is viewed as a valid alternative to the familiar Christian and European one. To be sure, the specifically scholarly perspective of Niebuhr’s resulting publications does not allow him to hold forth on the idea of global education implied in such an attitude; but a recent editor at least hints at it when he says that Niebuhr provided “the foundation for the intellectual resurrection of the Old Orient”; without his efforts “we would presumably not be in a position today to write the history of the culture which is, after all, the foundation of our western civilization.”52

  • 53 Folkwart Wendland, Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), I (Berlin, 1992), 91; The Journals of Captain C (...)

29In other instructions, we find side by side the requirement to study the culture of the natives (and to treat them with respect) on the one hand, and the charge to take possession of territories only with the consent of the local population, or at least to secure the commercial interest of the seafaring nation, on the other. But beginning with Cook’s first voyage (1768–1771) and Peter Simon Pallas’s expedition to northern Asia (1768–1774), the former is no longer a mere means to the end of the latter as had been the case with Byron, Wallis, and Carteret. Scientific investigation now comes into its own with naturalists and anthropologists pursuing their mandated agenda on “philosophical voyages,” even though there may be some uncertainty in retrospect as to which of the two objectives takes center stage. Pallas, according to the Imperial Academy’s instructions largely worked out by himself, was to record the “ways [“Sitten”], customs, languages, traditions, and antiquities” of Siberian tribes; Cook, the Admiralty demanded, was to “observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives […] and endeavour to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, […] shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard” (with all due caution, to be sure). The guidelines furnished to Cook by the Royal Society went even further, in keeping with its exclusively anthropological interests: the indigenous populations “are human creatures” and “possessors of the several Regions they inhabit”; they should not be fired upon unless absolutely necessary [!] and generally be “treated with distinguished humanity”; their “Arts” and “Science,” their religion, morals, and form of government are worthy of respectful attention.53 All this is evidently stipulated in the spirit of that acceptance of the “other” that is the first step to global education.

  • 54 Numa Broc, La Géographie des philosophes (Paris, 1975), 290. La Pérouse’s instructions are to be f (...)
  • 55 The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas 1819–1821, ed. Frank Debenham (London, 1 (...)

30Very similar were the circumstances of the 1785–1788 circumnavigation of La Pérouse, whose instructions did speak of political and commercial objectives (as did Cook’s and Pallas’s) but also, and extensively, of those of science and “natural history.” Instead of Bougainville’s two naturalists, La Pérouse took an entire “académie”54 along. Among many other phenomena of scientific interest, its members were to study “the Genius, the character, the ways (“mœurs”), the habits, the temperament, the language, the form of government and the number of the inhabitants” (I, 48), in other words: the culture of indigenous populations. And again, this project was to be carried out in the spirit of the utmost respect for the other culture; the friendship of the natives was to be sought (if with all due precautions against a surprise attack); force was to be avoided at all cost; “much gentleness and humanity towards the natives” was de rigeur, combined with an effort to “improve their condition” – shades of la mission civilisatrice (I, 51–54). This seems to have become the tenor of such instructions; as late as 1819–1821 one hears an echo of it in the directives issued to Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen who, with a team of savants aboard, explored the Antarctic regions at the behest of Tsar Alexander I and the Imperial Academy of Science with a view to an “extension of human knowledge” and no (apparent) interest in territorial gain.55

  • 56 Baudin (n. 34), 75 (quotation), 79 (quotation), 99. On the relative importance of anthropological (...)
  • 57 François Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, ed. Anthony J. Brown (Adelaide, 2006), (...)
  • 58 Both are reprinted in Aux Origines de l’anthropologie française, eds. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin ( (...)

31Most directly in the wake of La Pérouse’s instructions, not excepting the emphasis on la mission civilisatrice, are the directives for Nicolas-Thomas Baudin, the captain of the 1798–1800 scientific (and only secondarily political and commercial) expedition to Australia, sponsored by the Institut de France and the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme. The directives, issued by the Secretary of the Navy and the Colonies, explicitly refer, in the context of “the conduct to be observed toward the natives,” to those for La Pérouse. They make a point of enjoining the several scientists aboard to “study the inhabitants” along with plants and animals, but the anthropological, ethnological, and broadly cultural focus was clearly the dominant one for this voyage, most explicitly in the eyes of the Société.56 It should have benefitted, above all, from the most elaborate and thoughtful instruction of the age, one that looms large in the beginnings of ethnology and is “recognised today as a classic of social anthropology.”57 This is Joseph-Marie Degérando’s booklet Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (Paris, 1800, published by and written for the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme). From the point of view of the present study, it is of particular interest because it insists that the ultimate goal of the study of indigenous peoples is the promotion of global education. To be fair, this is also the point of François Péron’s argument for the Baudin expedition and the primacy of its anthropological focus, in his fifteen-page brochure Observations sur l’anthropologie (Paris, 1800).58 For Péron, however, the greatest benefit of the study of the “barbarians,” of “their moral and intellectual qualities, […] their dominant passions [and] ways of living,” consists, in somewhat starry-eyed Rousseauian fashion, in providing an antidote to the evils of European civilisation. This antidote is the closeness to nature of “people less civilized” who are more in touch with their “instinct” than the “degenerate and depraved man in society” (3, 4, 7, 9, 10). Degérando, in his fifty-seven-page brochure of instructions for the Baudin expedition, is rather more sophisticated, though no less enthusiastic about his project.

  • 59 Forster, Werke, Akademie-Ausgabe, VII, 49–55.

32His overall guiding principle is Pope’s “The proper study of mankind is man”; “the wise man is one who knows himself well” (1). The “philosophical traveller” (“voyageur philosophe,” 4) achieves that end by observing others and comparing himself to them, thus arriving at “general laws” of human nature (2). The others will be of “different degrees of civilisation” (3), but it is especially “the savages […] from whom we can learn” (“objet d’instructions pour nous-mêmes,” 4). True, la mission civilisatrice does enter into this (5), counterbalanced, however, by “our [European] corruption” (56): neither European “civilization” nor the “savage” life is perfect. But the main thrust of the argument is that Europeans now need to learn what they do not as yet know about these others, namely their culture: their mindsets and their “moral habits,” their “mœurs” and passions, their laws and social organizations, their religious convictions (7–9). Degérando then proceeds to list, on no less than forty pages, what exactly needs to be done, in the field, to gain this knowledge: a comprehensive anthropologist’s and ethnologist’s guide to the observation of the physical, social, intellectual, and psychological life of unfamiliar cultures, specifically “savage” ones. The net result of such investigations would be a richly detailed image of the life of the other. And once Western man compares himself critically to this image, thereby readjusting his self-image and thus achieving full realization of his formative potential, nothing less than a “new Europe” would come into being (55). In this spirit, Degérando concludes his booklet with a visionary anticipation of “a new future”: a worldwide culture resulting from the mutually respectful and self-critical familiarity of the “savage” and the “civilized”. This is a veritable utopia, “a new world,” similar to what Georg Forster had envisioned decades earlier:59 all mankind globally aware, fraternally united, “happier and wiser,” “perfectionnement” triumphing at last over the “egotism” prevalent in civilized society as it is (1, 56).

Conclusion

  • 60 The standard English history of the German idea of “Bildung” is W. H. Bruford’s The German Traditi (...)

33Looking back from the vantage point of our own age – an age that increasingly favors “outward bound” global education over the “inwardness” of classical humanistic “Bildung” (commonly rendered as “self-cultivation”)60 – one cannot fail to see merit in the various endeavors of eighteenth-century scholars to open up new horizons. These endeavors consisted in the accumulation, consolidation and organization of knowledge concerning the non-European world, the transfer of such knowledge within and beyond the republic of letters, and the advancement of such knowledge beyond the status quo. The most eloquent of these scholars, Degérando, writing, not coincidentally, at the very end of the century, after nearly half a century of “philosophical voyages,” shares these endeavors, but he goes one step further, indulging in a glowing vision of a Golden Age of global awareness which creates that universal “happiness” that the age craved like no other. Of this vision some of us today may be skeptical. But who would say that the eighteenth-century scholars championing global education in their various ways were on the wrong track?

Notes

1 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, III, ed. George H. Guttridge (Cambridge, 1961), 350–351.

2 Georg Forster, Werke, Akademie-Ausgabe, V, 295.

3 Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 1970), 89; Burke: see n. 1; Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden (Frankfurt, 1985–2000), IX/2,70.

4 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 1. Abt., II, 82. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see Karl S. Guthke, Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen, 2005), 9–82.

5 Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, III (München, 1972), 269, https://archive.org/details/LichtenbergSchriftenUndBriefeBd3

6 Neueste Sammlung merkwürdiger Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend, ed. Hermes, I (Braunschweig, 1836), V–VI.

7 Geschichte der Schiffahrten und Versuche, welche zur Entdeckung des Nordöstlichen Weges nach Japan und China von verschiedenen Nationen unternommen worden (Halle, 1768), 3, http://www.e-rara.ch/download/pdf/15216751?name=Geschichte der Schiffahrten und Versuche welche zur Entdeckung des Nord% C3% B6stlichen

8 Jean-Marc Drouin and Luc Lienhard, “Botanik,” Albrecht von Haller: Leben—Werk—Epoche, eds. Hubert Steinke et al. (Göttingen, 2008), 309 (Linné); Hubert Steinke and Martin Stuber, “Haller und die Gelehrtenrepublik,” ibid., 400–401 (Haller); Lucille Allorge and Oliver Ikor, La Fabuleuse Odisseé des plantes: Les botanistes voyageurs, les Jardins des Plantes, les herbiers (Paris, 2003); Hector Charles Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks, K. B., P. R. S.: The Autocrat of the Philosophers (London, 1952), ch. 2; P. Huard and M. Wong, “Les Enquêtes scientifiques françaises et l’exploration du monde exotique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extrême orient, LII (1964), 143–154.

9 P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 58–59; Hans Plischke, Die ethnographische Sammlung der Universität Göttingen: Ihre Geschichte und ihre Bedeutung (Göttingen, 1931); E. St. John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and his Circle (London, 1954), ch. 11; Sir Hans Sloane, ed. Arthur MacGregor (London, 1994), 228–244; James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas, eds. Brigitte Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger (München and New York, 1998); Justin Stagl, Eine Geschichte der Neugier: Die Kunst des Reisens 1550–1800 (Wien, 2002), 142–152.

10 Blumenbach, Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte, ed. and trans. J. G. Gruber (Leipzig, 1798), V–VI, http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/blumenbach_menschengeschlecht_1798

11 Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, Die Wunderkammer: Die Kunst-und Naturalienkammer der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle (Saale) (Halle, 1998), 37.

12 Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und die “große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden, 2001).

13 Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 1. Abt., VII, 183, 216–217; cp. Guthke (n. 12), 90–91.

14 Cited from Bernhard Fabian, Selecta Anglicana: Buchgeschichtliche Studien zur Aufnahme der Englischen Literatur in Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1994), 187.

15 Hans Plischke, Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs Einfluß auf die Entdeckungsreisenden seiner Zeit (Göttingen, 1937), 3–4; Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 228–229 (Meiners). See ibid., 228–240: “The Scientific Use of Travel Reports.”

16 Guthke (n. 4), 42–48.

17 See the pertinent chapters in Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Göttingen, 2006).

18 William E. Stewart speaks of the “Verwissenschaftlichung” of such collections in the second half of the eighteenth century; see his Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn, 1978), 53. On John Green as editor of the New General Collection, see Horst Walter Blanke, “Wissenserwerb—Wissensakkumulation—Wissenstransfer in der Aufklärung: Das Beispiel der Allgemeinen Historie der Reisen und ihrer Vorläufer,” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, 140. Blumenbach’s critique is reprinted in Plischke (n. 15), 75–78.

19 Sammlung kleiner Hallerischer Schriften, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1772), I, 135–138.

20 On Campe, see Stewart, 236–249; on Hermes, see n. 6; on schoolbooks, see Guthke (n. 4), 73–82; Walter Steiner and Uta Kühn-Stillmark, Friedrich Justin Bertuch: Ein Leben im klassischen Weimar zwischen Kultur und Kommerz (Köln, 2001), 121–128; Herder, IX/2, 32–33.

21 Haller, I, 138; Goethe, Werke, 1. Abt., XXXIV/1, 354–355; Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, preface; Forster, Werke, XI, 183 (quotation) and V, 296; Les Mille et une nuits: Contes arabes, ed. Jean-Paul Sermain, trans. Antoine Galland (Paris, 2004), 21–22; Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande (Leipzig, 1747–1774), I, dedication, http://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/vd18/content/titleinfo/11924790. Travel accounts were among the favorite books of eighteenth-century reading societies; see Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, eds. Paul Korshin et al. (Philadelphia, 1976), 162, 171.

22 Hallers Netz: Ein europäischer Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufklärung, eds. Martin Stuber et al. (Basel, 2005), 25.

23 See Guthke, Der Blick in die Fremde: Das Ich und das andere in der Literatur (Tübingen, 2000), 11–40.

24 Helmut Peitsch, ‘“Noch war die halbe Oberfläche der Erdkugel von tiefer Nacht bedeckt’: Georg Forster über die Bedeutung der Reisen der europäischen ‘Seemächte’ für das deutsche ‘Publikum,’” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, 171.

25 See Guthke (n. 4), 60–62 on Kant; 43–44 on Schlözer; Plischke (n. 15), 6 on Blumenbach; Carhart, 228–229 on Meiners; Plischke (n. 9), 29 on Heeren and Plath.

26 John Lockman, trans. Travels of the Jesuits into Various Parts of the World (London, 1743). On the influence of the Lettres édifiantes, see Urs Bitterli, Die “Wilden” und die “Zivilisierten” (München, 1976), 253; Lockman, I, xix–xx; see also Marshall and Williams, 83–86.

27 On Haller, see Guthke (n. 23), 35–37; on the Danish missions, see Peter Stein, “Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorps Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan […] als Enzyklopädie einer Sklavengesellschaft in der Karibik,” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereurpäische koloniale Welt, 175–192, and n. 28 below.

28 Michael Harbsmeier, “Pietisten, Schamanen und die Authentizität des Anderen: Grönländische Stimmen im 18. Jahrhundert,” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, 355–370.

29 On natives brought to Europe, see Bitterli, 180–203, esp. 187 ff.: “Der eingeborene Besucher als Studienobjekt.”

30 On Omai as an object of study, see Michael Alexander, Omai: “Noble Savage” (London, 1977), 72, 99, 101. On Lichtenberg and Omai, see Lichtenberg in England, ed. Hans Ludwig Gumbert (Wiesbaden, 1977), I, 105–106, 109–111. Cp. Lichtenberg’s speculations, unrelated to Omai, on the possible “savage” streak in Europeans in Guthke (n. 23), 93–97.

31 Bitterli, 195; Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, eds. Michel Bideaux and Sonia Faessel (Paris, 2001), 419–423.

32 Bougainville, 233.

33 Marshall and Williams, 267.

34 N.-T. Baudin, Mon Voyage aux terres australes, ed. Jacqueline Bonnemains (Paris, 2000), 61; J.-M. Degérando, Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (Paris, 1800), 53.

35 Cited from Marshall and Williams, 281.

36 Michaelis, Fragen an eine Gesellschaft gelehrter Männer, die […] nach Arabien reisen (Frankfurt, 1762), preface; Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785 (Paris, 1787), preface http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1041132; Degérando, 11–13.

37 For the more or less complete story of this, see Marshall and Williams; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (München, 1998); Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London, 2006). On Jones, see Bernd-Peter Lange, ‘“Trafficking with the other’: Ambivalenzen des frühen Orientalismus bei William Jones,” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, 273–286. For forerunners of sorts in the seventeenth century, see James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World (New Haven, CN, 2009).

38 On Sloane and Kaempfer, see Marshall and Williams, 87.

39 Werke (n. 2), VII, 69.

40 Les Mille et une nuits, trans. Antoine Galland (n. 21), 21; Goethe, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 1. Abt., LIII, 383; Forster, Werke, VII, 45–56.

41 Forster, Werke, VII, 286–287.

42 Werke, XI, 183.

43 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XVIII (1694), 167.

44 Bougainville, 57.

45 On criticism of existing travelogues, see the remarks on pp. 82-83 on Astley’s and Blumenbach’s collections, also Georg Forster, Reise um die Welt, preface, and R. W. Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660–1732, University Studies (Univ. of Nebraska), XXXII–XXXIII (1932–1933), ch. 2. Reviews: Stewart, 42–57; Haller: Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 1771, 871. Promoters and societies: Stagl (n. 9), 187–193, 327–330; Jean-Paul Faivre, “Savants et navigateurs: Un aspect de la coopération internationale entre 1750 et 1840,” Journal of World History, X (1966–1967), 100–103; Frantz, ch. 1; Stewart, 57–63; Sergio Moravia, “Philosophie et géographie à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, LVII (1967), 954–965. Banks was President of the Royal Society and of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, founded in 1788 for the purpose of “enlarging the fund of human knowledge”; on his organization of expeditions, see Cameron (n. 8), 86–92 and 325. Sloane preceded Banks as president of the Royal Society; on his role in planning expeditions, see Brooks (n. 9), 181–186. On Blumenbach’s encouragement of research travel, see Plischke (n. 15), 11–70; on Haller, see below, p. 94; on Michaelis, also on p. 94; on Forster, see his Reise um die Welt, preface; on Degérando, see his Considérations. On the new function of voyages as scientific research expeditions, see also Moravia, 959–993.

46 3rd ed. (London, 1799), viii; for the ethnological and cultural emphasis, see pt. 2, sec. 1–3. Other such compendia include Leopold Berchtold, Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers: A Series of Questions Interesting to Society and Humanity (London, 1789), https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2y5PAAAAcAAJ, and Volney, “Questions de statistique à l’usage des voyageurs” (1795 and 1813), Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1846), 748–752. For a bibliographical listing of instructions going back to the sixteenth century, see Don D. Fowler, “Notes on Inquiries in Anthropology: A Bibliographical Essay,” Toward a Science of Man: Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. Timothy H. H. Thoreson (The Hague and Paris, 1975), 15–32.

47 Byron’s Journal of his Circumnavigation, 1764–1766, ed. Robert E. Gallagher (Cambridge, 1964), 4.

48 Carteret’s Voyage Round the World, 1766–1769, ed. Helen Wallis (Cambridge, 1965), II, 304 (John Wallis’s instructions were used by Carteret, his second-in-command).

49 Ibid.

50 Rudolf Trillmich, Christlob Mylius (diss. Leipzig, 1914), 135, 137; see also Haller’s “Instruktion”, ibid., 140–142.

51 Carsten Niebuhr und die Arabische Reise 1761–1767, ed. Dieter Lohmeier (Heide, 1986), 63–65. For Michaelis’s Fragen, see n. 36 above.

52 Carsten Niebuhr, 85.

53 Folkwart Wendland, Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), I (Berlin, 1992), 91; The Journals of Captain Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Rochester, NY, 1999), I, cclxxx, cclxxxiii, 514–517; II, clxviii (second voyage). The “consent of the natives” requirement is still operative at this time (I, cclxxxiii; II, clxviii).

54 Numa Broc, La Géographie des philosophes (Paris, 1975), 290. La Pérouse’s instructions are to be found in Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde, ed. L. A. Milet Mureau, I (Paris, 1797).

55 The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas 1819–1821, ed. Frank Debenham (London, 1945), I, 1–3, 12–29; quotation: 19.

56 Baudin (n. 34), 75 (quotation), 79 (quotation), 99. On the relative importance of anthropological research vs. political goals in this expedition, see Jean-Paul Faivre, L’Expansion française dans le Pacifique de 1800 à 1842 (Paris, 1953), 106–113, and Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (1799–1804): Dès anthropologues au temps de Bonaparte (Paris, 2002), 280.

57 François Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, ed. Anthony J. Brown (Adelaide, 2006), xviii.

58 Both are reprinted in Aux Origines de l’anthropologie française, eds. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (Paris, 1978). On the Baudin expedition, see also Degérando, The Observation of Savage Peoples, trans. F. C. T. Moore (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1969), introduction, 1–58, Chappey, 246–292, and Brown, xiii–xl.

59 Forster, Werke, Akademie-Ausgabe, VII, 49–55.

60 The standard English history of the German idea of “Bildung” is W. H. Bruford’s The German Tradition of Self-cultivation (Cambridge, 1975).

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search