ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to recreate the geographical, political and cultural contexts within which British accounts of Europe were produced, read and reviewed between 1750 and 1800. The public literary arena, especially as supervised by Monthly and Critical Reviews, is influential in accommodating and even encouraging the cheerful proliferation of distinctively characterized travel writers during the second half of eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1800 alone, the known world expanded at a prodigious rate. Cook's comprehensively documented discoveries opened a new continent and entirely new peoples for Western investigation, provoking religious and philosophical disorientation. Stuart Tave describes eighteenth-century British 'humour' or 'character' as 'empirical, liberal and expansive, scientific, democratic and commercial'; it emphasized 'variety and the individual rather than conformity and class'. Perhaps most respectable among the available discourses of eighteenth-century travel writing were those of mercantile and economic good sense. These would manifest themselves as an assiduous detailing of 'Trade, Manufactures, and Produce of Countries', and of their trading potential.
