Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestiço, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.

These essays examine European travel writing from 1500 to 1800, with an emphasis on travel to the East Indies, Africa, and the Levant. By focusing on voyages to the East, the essays allow the voices of marginalised travellers to speak.

Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travel writers, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs.

This book investigates the operations of memory over time through three case studies: the famous anthology by Richard Hakluyt memorializing the feats of Elizabethan voyagers, the eccentric autobiography of Captain John Smith, and the little known history of early modern Newfoundland.

This ground-breaking collection reveals the networks of interrelation between Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic. As people, ideas and goods moved back and forth across the North Sea – or spread further afield in the vanguard of globalisation and empire – Anglo-Dutch relations shaped all aspects of life, with profound implications still relevant today. A diverse range of expert scholars share new research in their discipline, ranging across technology, trade, politics, religion and the arts. Different aspects of this history of competition, alliance, migration and conflict are taken up by each chapter, providing the reader with detailed case studies as well as the broader background and its historical roots. Anglo-Dutch Connections in the Early Modern World aims to be both accessible and innovative. It will be essential to students and researchers interested in European politics, intellectual history, and shared Anglo-Dutch society, while showcasing current research in multiple facets of the Early Modern World.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

This book illuminates a lesser-known aspect of the British history of travel in the Enlightenment: that of the Royal Society’s special contribution to the “discovery” of the south of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour. By exploring primary source journal entries of philosophy and travel, the book provides evidence of how the Society helped raise the Fellows’ curiosity about the Mediterranean and encouraged travel to the region by promoting cultural events there and establishing fruitful relations with major Italian academic institutions. They were especially devoted to revealing the natural and artistic riches of the Bourbon Kingdom from 1738 to 1780, during which the Roman city of Herculaneum was discovered and Vesuvius and Etna were actively eruptive. Through these examples, the book draws attention to the role that the Royal Society played in establishing cultural networks in Italy and beyond. Tracing a complex path starting in Restoration times, this new insight into discourse on learned travel contributes to a more challenging vision of Anglo-Italian relations in the Enlightenment.