Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636-1863

Abstract

Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, the author adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections, and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, this book shows that both travel and travel-writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than reductive Eurocentric histories often suggest.