Book review: Unfabling the East: Enlightenment Encounters with Asia, Jurgen Osterhammel (2018)

I bought this frustrating book at an independent bookstore in November.

A German historian can be especially interesting to read because he or she will take a different stance with regard to sources compared to a scholar of the Anglosphere. So, for example, in Osterhammel’s book there are plenty of German and French sources in addition to the usual suspects like Gibbon and Burke. At one point Osterhammel tries to come to grips with this problem and calls a British writer “typical” because “discursive”, giving support to my own negative feelings about his own work which felt to me like a catalogue rather than a story. His method being to take a theme and elaborate on it using examples from the literature, but in the event not moving very far away from the originary theme. Not far enough to be able to tell any individual’s story in any detail, although he returns to some characters time and time again in an effort to understand his subject. His method has the shortcoming that your emotions don’t engage very strongly with the material. I felt most of the time like I was reading a list rather than a narrative, and this problem added to my feeling of alienation due to the lack of familiar sources (apart from Captain James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks).

Taking Said as his launching point, Osterhammel looks at how 18th century intellectuals tried to understand the world that had been opened up by advances in Portuguese maritime exploration dating from the Renaissance. Parts of the world that had been places of fable were suddenly being written about in books that could be bought or borrowed in London or Berlin. Europe’s highly heterogeneous political and print culture promoted a wide range of ideas and the market for this kind of writing was such that travellers, once returned to Europe, had an incentive to publish their thoughts and experiences in narrative form.

In the 18th century things were different from the way they would become during the period – the 19th and early 20th centuries – of colonialism’s peak. 

This is because in the early 19th century attitudes in Europe toward Asia altered. So for example tourism appeared where, earlier, people had travelled with a specific purpose in mind. The way that Europeans thought about Asia became less tolerant in the 19th century, as well, and suddenly – as a friend of mine pointed out – it became undesirable (or even unthinkable) for East India Company factors to marry Indian women whereas before this had been routine. With the age of refinement that the 19th century – or, at least that part of it that fell after about 1830 – most certainly became, arrived a more rigid and unpleasant kind of exceptionalism and Osterhammel demonstrates what this looked like by focusing mainly on the earlier period. 

While he has produced a revisionist history – a corrective to commensurately rigid attitudes held by scholars in the Global South – that demonstrates impressive scholarship, it is precisely due to the lack of “discursiveness” – the quality he ridicules the British for using in their work – that the book is so hard to read. You skitter erratically across a rolling slew of facts that are as unstable as scree beneath your cognitive feet. This book was doomed from the outset because of the author’s typically German totalising impulse, a need to categorise every conceivable expression of any feeling or idea, like a crackpot amateur botanist on the hunt for that elusive growth that will make his name in the tables. I needed a hook on the wall upon which to hang the images my mind produced while reading. Unfortunately, Osterhammel gives few of these. Exhausted, I didn’t finish his book.