ABSTRACT
The movement of peoples, goods, and ideas around the world produced multifaceted cross-cultural encounters that sharpened sensitivity to national, ethnic, and religious identities. These encounters and the negotiation of identity they engendered are on vivid display in the bulky body of travel writing in the early modern period by Turks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Africans, and others as well. Historians have utilised many analytical tools derived from an orientalist outlook and debated the value and meaning of ethnographic accounts in understanding encounters and identities. Historians responding to the critique of orientalist perspectives have elucidated problems in using ethnographic sources to reconstruct encounters in the early modern period. The critical focus on ethnographic sources coincided with new modes of analysing encounters and identities that have significantly influenced our understanding of early modern history. Three important forms of analysis include ethnohistory, gender, and ethnology.
