What is exoticism? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word exotic is of early seventeenth-century origin, derived from Latin via the Greek exotikos, meaning “foreign,” from exo, meaning “outside.” Unfortunately, Schmidt defines exotic only in the epilogue, whereas it would have been far more useful at the very beginning. By the mid-eighteenth century, exotic connoted things and people that had foreign and delightful attributes (325). Hardly an innocent word or concept, the exoticness that delighted European audiences did so at great expense to the culturally dispossessed. This study is unprecedented both in its range of visual material and its documentation of what Schmidt calls processes of “transmediation” to describe translation of imagery across media (295). Decontextualized from their original contexts of use, or manufactured for export in the first place, foreign things, people, places, and practices, as well as images and descriptions of them, were prized in European Wunderkammers, cultural geographies, atlases, maps, prints, paintings, and a wide variety of European-manufactured objects ranging from tapestries to teacups, wallpaper to whimseys. Images understood to be foreign were always on the move, restless, ambivalent, precessing simulacra. In the process, a wide range of unfamiliar material was reduced to a small body of conventional tropes, such as the images of disturbing, cruel, violent behavior that became naturalized by repetition (on an unimaginable scale) and prosaic application. Schmidt discusses the manner in which scenes of Chinese torture originating in Jesuit missionary accounts, for example, came to decorate pottery and provided repeating wallpaper patterns for stylish European interiors.

The strongest chapters of this book concern the ways in which the collaborative processes initially associated with the production of cultural geographies were similar to those used to manufacture goods that, Schmidt argues, are responsible for the construction of pan-European imaginaries. Schmidt concentrates on what he considers the crucial period in Europe’s co-construction of itself as a Continental entity and the rest of the world as its consumable playground: from the final third of the seventeenth century following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the Dutch Republic gained its independence, until the first third of the eighteenth century (16).

Pleasure, Schmidt argues, is the most important theme associated with exoticism in Europe’s coming to self-awareness on the backs of those it tried to subjugate and whose cultural productions it rapaciously consumed. Ancient Greek philosophers distinguished between the arts of utility necessary for life and the arts of pleasure, but by the time and in the sources that Schmidt studies this long-standing binomial pairing was apparently obscure — in the forms of material culture considered here, only pleasure mattered to Europeans. How this remarkable construction of the world as a site of desire and delight took place is the story that Schmidt tells in an introduction and four chapters arranged in roughly chronological order. He argues that a disproportionate amount of “exotica” issued from workshops located in the Netherlands, while a substantial quantity of “exotic goods” reached European consumers via Dutch shipping. Contributing to the Dutch role in staging this “exotic world” was the Dutch role in the world itself: by 1674, when the Dutch West India Company declared bankruptcy and the Dutch began to lose their relative market shares in Asia as well, Dutch makers of geography began to cultivate a broadly European perspective. This world-making process took place a century before the practices of Eurocentrism that were the subject of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Schmidt’s magisterial compilation of primary evidence extends Said’s and many subsequent postcolonial critiques, despite the fact that Schmidt positions himself in opposition by arguing that Said did not take into account the period during which the idea of Europe first emerged. Schmidt’s central thesis is that “exotic geography” generated both difference and sameness by suppressing imperial rivalries, and this required “crafty middlemen” who designed their geographies from an enormous assortment of sources. The fourth and final chapter studies the transfer of exotic motifs from the two-dimensional graphic arts to the three-dimensional decorative arts. The charting of “transmediation” is an invaluable contribution to the study of visuality, objectification, and gendering: Inventing Exoticism demonstrates that neatly packaged periods of history lose their discrete boundaries once a global setting is taken into account.