ABSTRACT
Modern European world travel literature, which was produced in the period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, is marked by the progressive discovery and scientific exploration of foreign cultures, territories, and ethnic communities, in which it exhibits its specific geophysical and geocultural “worldliness. The fundamental ambiguities and shifts that result from the productive force of comparative practices with regard to the development and transmission of new models of knowledge also characterize both the scientific appropriation and the geopolitical conquest or colonization of the world, as unfolded in French travel literature emerging in the context of European ‘world exploration politics’ around 1800. French travel literature, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, draws on a broad variety of comparative practices that developed in the course of the progressive discovery, scientific exploration, and colonial appropriation of foreign cultures during the Enlightenment.
