Book Review

Harry Liebersohn's Aristocratic Encounters was preceded by many works dealing with the impact of European views of indigenous people of the Americas. The works of Roy Harvey Pearce, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Anthony Pagden, and Hugh Honour all examined literature, history, ideology, and art. Those authors traced cultural and intellectual trends in Europe and America that created the notion of the "Indian" in literature and art on which Liebersohn builds.

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Liebersohn's contribution claims that upper-class Europeans and the intelligentsia needed to create "Indians" in their own image. He posits that the men of France and Germany were drawn to Native Americans to reaffirm their own nobility and notions of aristocracy during the era of democratic revolutions. The author tells us that "an aristocratic discourse on American Indians" appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in French and German writing following the French Revolution due to attacks on the aristocratic classes and their values. Some European aristocrats saw American Indians as "fellow aristocrats" and were drawn to those appearances, activities, and values found in the faraway "noblemen." Liebersohn considers his work part of "a burgeoning transatlantic, and even transnational, form of historical writing; it moves across national boundaries to ask how Europeans understood cultures vastly different from their own."

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