Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jürgen Osterhammel is professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Konstanz. He is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious academic award. His books include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century and, with Jan C. Jansen, Decolonization: A Short History (both Princeton). He lives in Freiburg, Germany.

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"A most formidable work of history. Osterhammel s linguistic and scholarly breadth allows him to examine an unusually wide range of writers, countries, and regions, thereby complicating ideas about what was European and Asian during the long eighteenth century. In addition, his expertise in global history enables him to situate these relationships between myriad cultures and individuals in still wider and longer contexts. The result is a triumph."--Linda Colley, author of Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850

"Jürgen Osterhammel is perhaps the subtlest, most wide-ranging historian of Europe s relationship with the rest of the world writing today. A brilliant and persuasive book that is also a pleasure to read, Unfabling the East will change forever our vision of Europe s tangled, sometimes tragic, but inescapably formative relationships with its most significant other."--Anthony Pagden, author of Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West

"Europeans have observed Asia for many centuries, but in the course of the long eighteenth century, their perspective changed away from the curiosity, careful depiction, and at times admiration embraced by Enlightenment thinkers to the unquestioning and facile dismissal of the continent. In this careful and erudite study, Osterhammel--one of today s most important historians--shows impressively that dismissing these thinkers as Orientalists fails to capture an often astonishingly modern strand of cosmopolitan thought. An eloquent and carefully researched book, essential reading for this new Asian age."--Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

"Jürgen Osterhammel is perhaps the subtlest, most wide-ranging historian of Europe s relationship with the rest of the world writing today. A brilliant and persuasive book that is also a pleasure to read, Unfabling the East will change forever our vision of Europe s tangled, sometimes tragic, but inescapably formative relationships with its most significant other."--Anthony Pagden, author of The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters

"Erudite, original, and lively. Osterhammel defends the Enlightenment from the charge of Eurocentrism and portrays in sparkling detail its humane legacy of self-criticism and communication with other cultures."--Harry Liebersohn, author of The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific

"Osterhammel is truly a world historian--he can explain what the non-European side of the story looks like."--Suzanne L. Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship