Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by sprague
Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia by Jürgen Osterhammel, Jürgen Osterhammel
4.0
You might think that history is about trying to understand some underlying truth, a reflection of reality that, once grasped, will let you predict other, bigger truths.
For example, simply knowing that America was originally colonized by Europeans from England would let you predict a whole set of corollary facts about the language, religion, institutions, skin color, and more.
But you could equally start with the insight that modern America was populated by people who were forcefully abducted and shipped here. That assumption would let you predict that today’s America would be full of people who continue to struggle against oppression to this day.
Which definition of history is “correct”? Both cases have predictive power, both are abstractions that let you make more, follow-on forecasts about what the current world will be like.
Osterhammel’s book claims that the last fifty years of Asian studies have been dominated by people who have trouble recognizing the underlying reality of the history of European discovery of Asia.
So this book is an attempt to discuss Asia on its own terms, with extensively researched examples of various travelers and writers who discussed Asia in ways that left marks on European's attitudes about it to this day.
For example, simply knowing that America was originally colonized by Europeans from England would let you predict a whole set of corollary facts about the language, religion, institutions, skin color, and more.
But you could equally start with the insight that modern America was populated by people who were forcefully abducted and shipped here. That assumption would let you predict that today’s America would be full of people who continue to struggle against oppression to this day.
Which definition of history is “correct”? Both cases have predictive power, both are abstractions that let you make more, follow-on forecasts about what the current world will be like.
Osterhammel’s book claims that the last fifty years of Asian studies have been dominated by people who have trouble recognizing the underlying reality of the history of European discovery of Asia.
So this book is an attempt to discuss Asia on its own terms, with extensively researched examples of various travelers and writers who discussed Asia in ways that left marks on European's attitudes about it to this day.