ABSTRACT
In the second part of the eighteenth century, when Smith’s foundation of political economy took shape, information on the ‘savage nations’ of North America, Asia, West Africa and the Pacific was rather extensive. At the end of the 1870s, “the Great Map of Mankind” (a phrase used by the English philosopher and political thinker Edmund Burke in a letter of 9 June 1777, to the Scottish historian William Robertson, on the occasion of the publication of Robertson’s History of America) was considered well known: “the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once.” This was primarily all the result of the vast accumulation of travellers’ accounts over more than two centuries following the discovery of America, the great event that changed the perception of the world by Europeans and caused the encounter with ‘other’ new peoples. There follows a survey of the most important and influential among them.
