A book I will recommend to you is Michael Allin's "Zarafa", the story of how a young female giraffe travelled from the Sudan to delighted reception in Paris as the beautiful African stranger that she was. (Michael Allin also wrote the screenplay for Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon", amazingly enough.)
One gripping theme is the character of Napoleon's brilliant and foolhardy expedition against British interests in India via Egypt (where he proposed to conquer his way to Delhi, take the British Empire's jewel, and thereby defeat his foes without having to contest their sea power). Military history, surely, but also (and quite by accident) the first tentacle of European Enlightenment to set its foot on the backwards Orient.
In one direction, we all know well the story of bold explorers, rationalist ideas from the century of humanism, and American Revolution.
In another direction, we know well the opening shot of European upheavals signaled by the overthrow of the Bourbon kings in France and the ensuing waves that constructed Occidental political modernity over the course of the 19th century.
In a third direction we are familiar, post hoc, with post-colonialist ideas. These days we call Americans imperialists for pushing their politics (and self-interest) on everybody, and that's more or less the problem with all colonialism.
But I, for one, have not much thought about the unfolding of colonialism as an event intertwined with the very flourishing of intellectual movements in Europe itself. To be sure, this is one of the world's great hypocrisies seen in retrospect: as the French were declaring the "Rights of Man" and British having Glorious Revolutions, their troops and navies were enslaving millions of people and not at all to their betterment. India can thank Britain for the railroads, but that's really about it and not worth the cost.
So what did the lumieres think of themselves, as they went off and plundered worlds far off?
De Las Casas, for example, was arguing for a while already that native peoples had souls (since the 16th century). And contemporary arguments to that effect resulted in the abolition of slavery in the First French Republic for example.
What is interesting, however, is to think of Napoleon and his army of 30,000 men accompanied by the 250 greatest savants of the time -- experts in engineering, anthropology, biology, philosophy, languages, and so on. He took an army of scientists with him, to study and give counsel as he conducted his long campaign. He, himself, held the chair of mathematics on their counsel (awarded to him by their vote, and so honored by it that he never missed a meeting). Napoleon said, surveying the Mocattam quarries of the Pyramids, "I found myself a conqueror in Europe like Alexander; it had been more to my liking to march in the footsteps of Newton." While there, the little genius also converted to Islam (for political reasons) and wore a turban.
When the British fleet swooped in and destroyed the French fleet of 400 ships, left waiting for his return, Napoleon was trapped with his army on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. To attend to instability back home, Napoleon ran the British blockade with a few of his closest military and scientific advisors, essentially abandoning his army behind him.
The remaining army of scientists set to work inventing Egyptology. The greatest men of science of the age, all assembled in the exceedingly foreign and strange land of the pharaohs did it all -- collected animals and insects, recorded movements of the Nile, surveyed the feasibility of a canal to the Indian Ocean, investigated the tombs and pyramids, and so on.
Though the army was eventually defeated by the Ottomans and the British, the scientific contingent was not.
Egyptology, the blooming science that followed, was the bold new domain of the day. On their modernizing missions, they were studying the ancient and bizarre lands they encountered with the curiosity they had applied to planets and chemicals.
The adventuring general of the French Republic with his scientists and counselors, exporting the values and methods of Enlightenment-- it is really a charming image of Napoleon.
Posted by amol at September 20, 2002 05:47 PM