ABSTRACT
The description of peoples, their nature, customs, religion, forms of government and language, is so embedded in the massive amounts of travel literature produced in Europe after the sixteenth century that one is led to assume that ethnography is, almost inevitably, an essential part of the genre. In determining reasons for the growth of ethnographic travel writing in Europe it is crucial to analyse the relation between practical aims, ideological assumptions, and philosophical or scientific concerns. Travel literature, that is, the varied body of writing which takes travel as an essential condition of its production, appears in so many sub-genres that it is best defined in its plurality. The fundamental issue about the political dimension of the description of other peoples in travel writing is determining the extent to which ethnography and ethnology were essentially a justification, or a tool, for empire. The crucial change took place in the nineteenth century, at the height of Western imperialism.
