Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment

Casanova's belief that England 'is different in every aspect from the rest of Europe' was increasingly shared in the eighteenth century by England's body politic. But just what was it that made it - or, indeed, not just England but Britain more generally - different? Swelling patriotism led increasing numbers of British travellers to comb the far reaches of Europe and make assessments, comparisons, analyses and judgements about the relative state of civility between themselves and their neighbours. This study examines a range of British travellers' perceptions of Europe and charts their quests to explore and contrast far-flung European frontiers - to Lapland, to the eastern provinces of the Russian empire, the Levant. Using a wide range of eighteenth-century travel accounts, Dolan demonstrates how these narratives were often informed by and designed to address contemporary historical and scientific assessments of the status of modern European civilisation.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preparing the Course Northern Frontier: Scandinavia Eastern Frontier: Russia and its Frontier Southern Frontier: Greece and the Levant Coming Home Notes and References Bibliography Index

About the Author :
BRIAN DOLAN is Research Lecturer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of East Anglia. After earning his PhD at the University of Cambridge he taught historiography of science at Umea University in Sweden, and the history of the life sciences at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He has published on the history of scientific illustration, geology, and chemistry, and is the editor of Science Unbound: Geography, Space, and Discipline (1998).

Review :
An exciting addition to that space on the scholar's bookshelf between Edward Said's Orientalism and Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes. It focuses on the literature of travel, but by targeting areas on the margins of Europe visited at the turn of the nineteenth century by English travellers - notably, the Far North and the Middle East - it unpicks easy assumptions about 'West' and 'East' and presents a more complicated, yet intellectually more sophisticated and more satisfying account of cultural encounter in a key stage in the formation of concepts of national identity and ethnographic science.' - Colin Jones, Department of History, University of Warwick 'A thoughtful and far-reaching account that uses travel to throw fresh light on eighteenth-century thought. Aside from the inherent importance of the subject this is a great pleasure to read.' - Jeremy Black, Professor of History, University of Exeter Through the writings of Clarke and other travellers, Dolan provides a fascinating picture of how peoples on the margins of Europe were depicted and defined...The book is particularly successful in explicating intellectual history of different kinds and relating it to the travel reports. The polymath traveller of the eighteenth century had interests ranging from botany to political economy. To make all these comprehensible to the reader, as Dolan has, is no small achievement.' - Katherine Edgar, The Times Literary Supplement