5 - Exploration, cross-cultural contact, and the ambivalence of the Enlightenment

Summary

The eighteenth century was one of extraordinary geographical discovery. This is another way of saying that it was also an age of ever-increasing contacts between very different cultures. How those contacts took place, how they were received in Europe, and what debates they fostered, are the subjects of this chapter.

Exploration in order to gain new knowledge was a characteristic of the Enlightenment. Previous centuries had regarded new geographical knowledge as merely a by-product from voyages primarily aimed at loot and booty. At most, expedition leaders went to little-known territories as a way of interesting investors in parcels of land. The eighteenth century, however, began to regard exploration as a primary source of knowledge. Exploration in the Enlightenment was the first to be centrally concerned with the gathering of information about man and the natural world. Although geopolitical incentives, including taking possession of unknown lands, still motivated much travelling to unknown regions of the world, international cooperation between national scientific institutions to solve geophysical problems came very much more to the fore. In 1768, for example, observers were sent out from Lapland to Tahiti in order to observe the rare event of the passage of the planet Venus between the earth and the sun.