ABSTRACT
Enlightenment thinkers, having inherited stereotypes of Asia passed down from antiquity, also had access to a growing body of information about the East from travelers, missionaries, and traders. This essay examines the comparative political schema of Montesquieu, who characterized Asia as the home of despotism, and then the universal historical sketch of Voltaire, who placed the creative childhood of the human race in China and India. Both used Asia to gain perspective on the West, but found that the West of their time had advanced ahead of Asia.
Then the focus shifts to early British imperial views of India, mainly those of sympathetic Orientalists like Sir William Jones and hostile reformers influenced by evangelicalism and utilitarianism. Jones and subsequent Western scholars made a positive contribution to the study of Indian traditions and linked Sanskrit and languages derived from it to the Indo-European linguistic family. Charles Grant, James Mill, and Thomas Macaulay were among those who held that the people of India were in dire need of Western reforming measures.
All of these trends (using Asia or parts of it in grand schemes, sympathetic scholarship, and hostile condemnations) have continued into the twentieth century as Asians have also made great strides in retrieving and evaluating their own traditions.
