The Cosmopolitan Evolution: Travel, Travel Narratives, and the Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century European Consciousness

Critical works such as Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans (1999) and Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) study the influence of Europe upon the colonized and also how the colonized resist its over-generalizing and oppressive drive; but, these and other works have failed to examine the impact of the 'foreign' on the European consciousness. The Cosmopolitan Evolution argues that reciprocity exists between the cultures and that this relationship has not yet been sufficiently explored. Working from the concept of cosmopolitanism and incorporating textual evidence from philosophy, drama of the English Renaissance, seventeenth-century travel narratives, and eighteenth-century literature, this book explores the interactions between the European consciousness and the foreign. Binney also chronicles the development of cosmopolitanism from a form of representative universalism, which seeks to enfold all humans under one ideal, towards complex universalism, which seeks to account for alternate and particular views.