Before Orientalism

In this richly detailed discussion of later medieval European travellers’ accounts describing eastern Asia, Kim Phillips argues for a distinctively pre-colonial set of attitudes towards Asian peoples, cultures and spaces that was marked, not by a desire to possess, but by wonder, curiosity and pleasure at their diversity. Phillips’s argument hinges on two comparisons, one geographical and the second chronological. Geographically, the travellers’ accounts she considers here describe the ‘far east’ of China, India, Mongolia and southeast Asia, rather than the near-eastern region of the Holy Land, where a significantly more fraught religious and political landscape led to very different traditions of travel-writing. Chronologically, as suggested by her title, Phillips argues that late-medieval attitudes towards these far-eastern peoples and cultures were distinct from the early medieval ‘marvels of the east’ literary and cartographic traditions, on the one hand, and the later Orientalist writings that developed in parallel with modern colonial conquest, on the other

Ancient history · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Art · China · Colonialism · East Asia · Literature · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Travel writing · Wonder · Asian Studies and History · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

• Between improvement and sacrifice

  Open Access•Diego Andreucci, Christos Zografos•Political Geography•2022

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