This blog is about global civility in the early modern and Enlightenment periods. It follows in the footsteps of travellers, who shaped a discourse of global civility as they encountered representatives of the powerful Ottoman Empire. These travellers, mostly globetrotting Englishmen, were intent on extending their trading networks and increasingly looked beyond Christian Europe for ways to achieve their commercial goals. Coupled with contemporary religious rivalries between Catholic Spain and Protestant England, commercial and geopolitical considerations shaped English interest in the Mediterranean, in which the Ottoman Turks had an empire, which straddled the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. Famously described by Richard Knolles in 1603 as ‘[t]he glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terrour of the world,’^[1] the Ottomans at once fascinated and terrified European travellers because of the exotic appeal they exuded and the military capabilities they undoubtedly possessed.

When English traveller Henry Blount set out to survey the Ottoman Empire in 1634, he wanted to see whether ‘the Turkish way appeare absolutely barbarous, as we are given to understand, or rather an other kinde of civilitie, different from ours.’^[2] Blount’s intellectual rationale, as Gerald MacLean has demonstrated, is immediately apparent: ‘the human intellect desires knowledge, and since experience of difference increases knowledge in proportion to increase in difference, the desiring intellect craves experience of radical difference.’^[3] But rather than choosing to represent this radical difference in predominantly political or military terms, Blount pointed to a specifically social dimension to cross-cultural discourse: ‘The most important parts of all States are foure, Armes, Religion, Iustice, and Morall Cuftomes.’^[4] Distinct from laws and located outside the strictly political sphere of government, ‘Morall Cuftomes’ –  or more broadly defined, manners –  were, for Blount, what would make or break a society. Indeed, as Anna Bryson has shown, ‘[c]ourtesy and civility were among the values central to Tudor and Stuart assumptions and fears about the social and political order.’^[5] When they travelled abroad, Englishmen carried this social and cultural baggage, including their preoccupation with manners, with them wherever they went. And in a cross-cultural context observing unknown manners, customs and social conventions, despite their unfamiliarity, was crucial for any stranger in foreign lands.

In the age of expansion, then, these concerns acquired cross-cultural significance and transcended the limited scope of the emerging early modern nation states in Europe that were torn apart by religious strife. And since Blount could not satisfy his curiosity in ‘our North-west parts of the World’, the logical conclusion was to travel to ‘the South-East’ where people ‘should bee more averse, and strange of behaviour.’^[6] His desire for ‘knowledge’, which ‘advances best, in observing of people, whose institutions much differ from ours’, thus led him to the East where the Ottomans had established magnificence and stability under an imperial umbrella.^[7] Explaining his approach, Blount wrote that

customes conformable to our owne, or to such wherewith we are already acquainted, doe but repeat our old observations, with little acquist of new. So my former time spent in viewing Italy, France, and some little of Spaine, being countries of Christian institution, did but represent in a severall dresse, the effect of what I knew before.^[8]

Blount’s eagerness to leave behind tradition and question bequeathed wisdom is a landmark in the development of both travel-writing and the discourse of global civility. He was ready to be favourably impressed by the Ottomans and willingly shared with his contemporaries the fruits of his labour accumulated in the East. One of them, Bishop Henry King, even wrote a panegyric praising his friend’s achievements. Offering a comprehensive body of knowledge of the Levant and its rulers, the Voyage ‘at once informed’ him of the Ottomans ‘and cur’d’ his desire to

travel.^[9] Most importantly, however, Blount’s ‘piercing judgement does relate/The policy and manage of each state’^[10] by transforming, in Gerald MacLean’s phrase, ‘travel writing from the collecting of interesting anecdotes about other cultures into a systematic programme of knowledge.’^[11] Most importantly, however, the Turks of Blount’s Voyage are never the caricatures that anti-Islamic propaganda in early modern Europe used to paint; rather, he represents them as highly efficient managers of a global empire that was civil in its own right, since it achieved stability at a time when the political situation in Europe was both fickle and fragile.

After its inception in the seventeenth century, as I have argued elsewhere, global civility was also emphatically practiced in the eighteenth.^[12] Buttressed by the cosmopolitan impetus of Enlightenment philosophy, this discursive formation provided European travellers with a lens through they could both view and represent other cultures at the same time as it allowed them to share their hard-won knowledge with readers at home. For example, Henry Abbott’s A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (1789) casts the encounter between himself and his Arab guides in the rhetoric of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, including the caravan leader and his men in an inclusive and global vision of cross-cultural reciprocity.^[13] It offers a vivid account of Abbott’s adventures among his Arab guides, their beasts of burden and the environmental conditions to which he was exposed. Abbott sets himself apart from many of his countrymen on the Desert Route to India, recommending to treat the Arab guides ‘with common civility.’^[14] He insists on the dignity of his ill-reputed hosts and rationalises their behaviour within a comprehensive and comparative perspective of human conduct although other writers often saw the desert Arabs as little more than the human equivalent of their beasts of burden.

Abbott’s jocund account is an enticing invitation to the Syrian Desert, forming part of a larger literary tradition that Srinivas Aravamudan has identified as ‘Enlightenment Orientalism.’ According to Aravamudan, ‘Enlightenment Orientalism brings to life the conjectural, the counterfactual, the transcultural and the cosmopolitan,’^[15] and Abbott’s itinerary plays out along these lines when he decides to entrust himself to the care of the desert Arabs. His epistolary day-to-day account represents specially adapted techniques required for survival in an unknown, and for outsiders unknowable, ecosystem and strives to ascertain the dignity of the ill-reputed desert Arabs: ‘They are not treacherous, they are not wantonly cruel, nor unworthy of trust, nor hypocrites, nor are they mercenary.’^[16] By favourably representing the members of his host culture and challenging ‘erroneous narratives’ about them, Abbott translates into action central ideas of the Enlightenment, such as the disinterested quest for new knowledge and the relation of unknown cultural practices, in an environment in which his contemporaries probably least expected it.^[17]

Title Image: Frederick the Great at court, image accessed here

[1] Knolles, Richard, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from The first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie, 5th ed., (London: Adam Islip, 1603), 1.

[2] Blount, Henry, A Voyage into the Levant (London: John Legatt, 1636), 2

[3] MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel, English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 135

[4] Blount, Voyage, 61.

[5] Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 3.

[6] Blount, Voyage, 2.

[7] Ibid., 1.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Henry King, ‘To my Noble and Judicious Friend Sir Henry Blount upon his Voyage,’ in George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period. 3 vols. (1905; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Vol III., 223 – 226, here 225 (line 98).

[10] Ibid., 226, (line 118)

[11] MacLean, Looking East English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 179.

[12] Sascha R Klement, Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636 -1863 (Bielefeld: Transcript Publishing, 2021) [forthcoming].

[13] Compare Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 202-03: ‘As for the rubric of Orientalism, it is worth recognizing that the restricted geography of nineteenth-century Orientalism made it a function of space, whereas forms of Orientalism extant until the late eighteenth century invoked a broader comparative perspective that was neoclassical in its inclusion of Oriental cultures, religions, practices and polities within a general transcultural framework’ [emphasis in original].

[14] Henry Abbott, A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789), 7.

[15] Aravamudan, 253.

[16] Abbott, Trip, 12.

[17] Ibid., 3.