| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific. By Harry Liebersohn. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xx, 380 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-02185-1.)

The history of travel and of travel literature affords an attractive field for general readership and scholarly discourse. Though much has been written on wide-ranging topics, fewer detailed studies have been made that invite a greater appreciation of discovery and exploration and also venture into cultural and global history. Those in pursuit of knowledge who came in contact with indigenous peoples of the Pacific were part of the quest for scientific acquisition or missionary influence. The study of texts—literary history—and the study of the content of travel literature—intellectual summary and postulation—opens windows on intersecting worlds. The years 1750 to 1850—a century of literary and scientific growth of the enlightenment in revolutionary and post–French revolutionary Europe—witnessed the grasping of the realities of a global world stretching out via the sea from the North Atlantic. It was seaborne science. The image and the reality often failed to coincide, and what Europe saw and what it thought it saw could be widely different, and so by the end of the epoch, their world came to a crashing halt with Charles Darwin and Herman Melville. It could be argued that this intellectual and imaginary world never ended, for the dream still lives on, even in missionary circles, about what the wider world is and what the wider world needs. This book is timely, for it addresses, though not intentionally, aspects of globalization that invite the wringing of hands in many quarters.

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