Themes

European voyages to various parts of the known and unknown world were driven by ideas and ideologies, and were captured in diverse travel narratives. Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Voyages and Navigations of the English Nation (1589) compiled these narratives and highlighted not just the seafaring abilities of British adventurers but also the quest-motif. In the seventeenth century, travel accounts of voyages to the East Indies by Thomas Roe, Edward Terry and numerous others were reviewed in scholarly journals and the press, and were avidly read by a wide audience which eagerly consumed images of Asia, almost invariably portrayed as strange and exotic. These travelogues, with massive amounts of detailed information on routes, weights and measures, currency and cultural practices of the Other nations, were meant to inspire traders to voyage out, but also were informed by an ideology of exploration and a powerful sense of service to the nation. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Charter of the English East India Company (1600) in which the merchant adventurers were exhorted by the monarch to trade for the good of the realm and the pride of the English nation. And at no time were travel accounts of more value than in helping to frame the ideologies of colonial rule from the outset.

Exploration narratives flourished from the late eighteenth century, and gathered yet more momentum in the nineteenth with the journeys into Africa. Showcasing the courage and enthusiasm of the English discoverer, the writings of Henry Morton Stanley, Dr David Livingstone and others also served as ethnographic introductions to the “dark continent”, stereotyping the natives, establishing a racial and evolutionary hierarchy (Africans as primitives, Europeans as advanced) and creating the clear binary of East versus the West in the phenomenon called Orientalism. These together with exploration narratives from Asia sought to document Other cultures and present them in consumable forms in Europe. Contributing to Europe’s knowledge-based in the form of commentaries, translations and compilations, texts and materials – including plants and animals – such accounts were a vital force in the development of European Enlightenment views of the world.

In addition to explorations of the Other cultures, the drive to conserve them was codified in numerous projects which ranged in subject matter from the protection of the Aboriginals to the preservation of monuments and ancient structures. The museum, ethnographic documentation and the exhibition, meant to highlight, study, protect the Other culture, all proceeded concurrently. Extending the ideology of consumption and documentation from the earlier decades,  these narratives also commodified the Other for European consumption in the industrial exhibition, the emporium and the museum.

Having “proved” the inferiority of the Other cultures/races, Europe launched its ideology of improvement. The civilizational mission, as documented in numerous treatises on education, Christianity, social reform and governance, was an ideology of moral imperialism wherein the “superior” European colonizer saw itself as duty-bound to help the heathen and the barbarian colonized.

Philip Lawson’s book is a study of imperial exploration and ideologies till 1800. Auerbach and Hoffenberg’s collection on the 1851 exhibition studies the multiple modes of exhibiting and commodifying the Empire. Alan Lester’s Imperial Networks examines the networks and ideologies of imperialism, from settler to the humanitarian. Kathleen Davidson’s book demonstrates how the photograph and the museum aided imperial ideologies and practices.