Between the 1660s and 1730s, bookmakers, artists and artisans in the well-stocked ateliers of the Dutch Republic produced a new format of highly saleable exotic geography, which was non-partisan in outlook, strikingly visual in form, and uniquely adaptable for use across various genres and media. The aim of this stunningly rich, market-driven production was “to delight”. Gone were the parochial tales of imperial conquest and missionary endeavour—conveyed through first-person narratives—which had characterized the earlier phase of European expansion. In its place came broad-ranging and apolitical “descriptions”, Baroque “galleries” that mixed and matched “pleasurable” elements without regard to specific peoples or places, and widespread reproduction of such generically exotic iconography in the fine and material arts. The remarkable, Dutch-led production of exotic geography during this “post-Columbian, pre-Saidian moment” (16) created both a uniformly “European” consumer, and a commodified non-European world ready to be consumed. It further whetted European imperial appetites and “guided who and what Europe would ultimately become” (23).
Such is the original argument set forth by Benjamin Schmidt in his latest monograph, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Much like the books it studies, Inventing Exoticism is beautifully produced and copiously illustrated, with 24 colour plates and 179 figures in black-and-white. Unlike quite a few examples of the “van Meurs brand of geography” (28), it is also extremely well-written. After an introduction which situates the book’s contribution and addresses the reasons behind Dutch primacy in marketing the world—affluent hubs of commerce and collecting with lax regulation and little patron intervention, combined with high literacy rates, the availability of highly-skilled workmen, and commercial acumen—Schmidt, in four sizeable chapters, takes his readers on an impressive tour de force through seven decades of (mostly Dutch-made) exotic iconography as it appeared in books, atlases, paintings, porcelain, tapestries, cabinets, and other media. Schmidt’s effortless interweaving of book history, art history, and the history of global encounters will enhance the book’s wide appeal within early modern studies, while the book’s not overly scholarly tone will ensure its accessibility to non-specialists. On the other hand, some readers may regret the decision to relegate historiographical discussion partly to the endnotes.
Chapter 1, “Printing the World”, investigates the processes of production that characterized Dutch-made exotic geography. It introduces two of its leading exponents—the Amsterdam-based engraver and publisher Jacob van Meurs (c. 1618-1680) and the Leiden-based printer Pieter van der Aa (1659-1733)—and provides valuable information on paratexts, print runs, partnerships, and market practices. Its main intervention, however, lies in reassessing the notion of authorship. Developing earlier critiques by Rogier Chartier and others, Schmidt seeks to deprivilege the text and its putative author to foreground the book and the role of bookmakers in manipulating (“editing”) the diverse materials at their disposal: “Early modern books were … produced, not written” (47). While Schmidt convinces in showing how the entrepreneurial logic of book production shaped the way Europeans came to see the world, his stimulating hypothesis that this compels us “to reconsider the relationship between exotic geography and colonial action” would have merited more substantial follow-up (69).
Chapter 2, “Seeing the World”, deals with exotic geography’s “pictorial turn” (83) and interrogates how modes of witnessing related to truth claims. Pictures allowed the armchair traveller to observe and enjoy the world and enabled the learned to survey exotic data (naturalia, ethnography, antiquities) from afar. Yet the claim to faithful illustrations drawn to life—omnipresent in publishers’ sales pitches—coexisted with highly elastic atelier practices whereby engraved copperplates were recycled, revised, and refurbished, as well as circulated between works purporting to describe widely divergent places. The explanation offered by Schmidt is that Dutch-made exotic geography traded on “a semblance of seeing” (135), a constructed form of visual proof that upheld credibility even in the absence of actual sight, as was the case with the blind naturalist Georg Rumphius (1627-1702). Indeed, as borne out by Cornelis de Bruijn’s (1652-1727) sketches of Persepolis, the semblance of sight offered by scholarly authorities could even trump the on-site observations of the traveling artist.
Chapter 3, “Exotic Bodies”, analyses how exotic geography represented non-European people. Focusing on the twin themes of sex and violence, Schmidt argues that artists and publishers in post-1648 Europe strategically exported promiscuous sexuality and sadistic violence to the non-European world: “[T]he exotic body was characterized by its sensual appeal, capacity for pain, and racial ambiguity” (167). Alluring depictions of nudity (e.g., Albert Eckhout’s African Woman) or ghastly scenes of torture (such as in Jan Jansz Struys’s Reysen) were “staged” in piercing detail to be enjoyed as spectacles by voyeuristic Europeans. This had the effect of “priming the exotic body for European control” (167). The notion that European (male) observers portrayed non-European locales as sites of despotism and sensuality has become a commonplace in studies of early modern geographic writing. What sets Schmidt’s contribution apart, however, is the way he links constructions of somatic difference (especially somatic suffering) to burgeoning notions of European exceptionalism and the development of racial thinking.
The final chapter, “Exotic Pleasures”, explores the transfer of images across media (“transmediation”). In an ambitious interdisciplinary survey, Schmidt traces exotic motives across myriad sources, from frontispieces of books to map cartouches, panel paintings, tapestries, punch bowls, drug pots, and the wallpaper of a Bavarian hunting lodge. Here the author is at his best at demonstrating how indiscriminately icons from East and West were blended, differences conflated, and people, flora, and fauna brought together in the overcrowded compositions of a Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) engraving or Jan van Kessel (1626-1679) painting. It is also here that he makes the strongest case for the Europe-wide impact of Dutch-made exotic geography. Having argued that a shared “aesthetic of exoticism” (274)—implying “perfect chaos”, or “digressive[ness] by design” (328)—characterised the prolific output so highly prized by European consumers circa 1700, Schmidt’s “Epilogue” sets out how, by the mid-18th century, the “delightful” variety of exotic geography was attacked for its lack of “method”. Ironically, the author concludes, it was this ostensible absence of “order” that would entice Europeans to impose their own forms of imperial order on the exotic world.
Inventing Exoticism is a compelling book which will be widely read and discussed. While its core arguments have swayed this reader, doubts remain regarding the positioning of its historical moment (1660s-1730s) within the larger narrative of European expansion. In a broad-stroke discussion of geographical writing from the period 1492-1650, Schmidt maintains that, instead of stressing difference, such earlier sources sought to reduce the gap between Europeans and other peoples. Yet evoking familiar touchstones seems hardly exclusive to the days of Columbus and Cortés (we observe this with Johan Nieuhof, too), while emphatic articulations of difference were widespread well before the 1650s (think of cannibalism in early reporting on the New World, or the so-called “beastly” Africans mentioned by Hakluyt and Linschoten). Schmidt’s coupling of the rise in Dutch-made exotic geography with the decline of Dutch colonial fortunes is likewise somewhat problematic. Sandwiched between the VOC’s expulsion of the Portuguese from Cochin (1663) and its conquest of Makassar (1667), Van Meurs’s “empire of geography” (43) took off at what was, arguably, the high point of Dutch power in Asia (if not in the Atlantic). Finally, Inventing Exoticism raises the question in what ways geographic production shaped global encounters during (rather than after) the period covered by the book; a question that ensures that exotic geography will remain central to debates for some time to come.
