Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636–1863 by Sascha R. Klement (review)

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• Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636–1863 by Sascha R. Klement
• Nat Cutter

Klement, Sascha R., Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636–1863, Bielefeld, Transcript Publishing, 2021; paperback; pp. 270; R.R.P. €45.00; ISBN 9783837655834.

Sascha R. Klement's book presents a compelling argument for a framework of 'global civility' in British travel writing about the Ottoman Empire and South Pacific: a 'discursive formation' characterised by 'cultural cross-fertilisation, respect for the organisational structures and social differences of foreign polities, and the representation of mutually improving encounters in intercultural contact zones' (p. 11). Travelling Britons, prompted by 'situational exigencies' that required improvisation and cross-cultural cooperation, came to, at least temporarily, surrender their superiority and respond to the agency and subjectivity of the other (pp. 18–20). In so doing, Klement's travel narratives present a more constructive version of cross-cultural engagement than many postcolonial critiques which assume Britain's 'civilising mission and military power' as a 'historical constant' (pp. 11, 14).

Klement's first chapter considers Henry Blount's A Voyage into the Levant (1636), a mainstay of scholarship on English travel into the Islamic Mediterranean in the early seventeenth century, which has problematised, if not entirely overturned, the assumption of continuous British superiority. Blount's account presents the Ottoman Empire as a developed and powerful state with the capacity to match or even surpass European power, a society from which to learn. Klement distinctively argues that Blount also embodies a methodology of engagement for 'a citizen of a nation with imperial ambitions' to learn from those around them: a specific set of civilities, neither detestable to him or them (p. 42). Challenging [End Page 323] 'those who catechise the world by their own home', Blount divests his Englishness to observe a powerful empire (p. 42).

Klement's second and third chapters contrast two late eighteenth-century encounters with the Ottomans and Pacific Islanders to expose both important distinctions in knowledge and power and the shared production of global civility. Framed by Enlightenment sensibility, George Keate's Account of the Pelew Islands (1788) presents to an audience gripped by tales of the exotic and 'barbarous' a humanised tale of survival and mutual society through privation (p. 70). As the Palauans grant permission to East India Company sailors to build a new ship in exchange for armed support against neighbouring communities, they form a mutually beneficial arrangement without the usual flood of European goods and erosion of Pacific culture. Keate and Blount resonate with Klement's richly contextualised account of Henry Abbott's little-known A Trip […] Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (1789), the third chapter's focus, in a praise for the hospitality, courtesy, and friendship of the cultures they encounter, by their small but important exclusions (Blount derides the Ottoman Jews, and Keate the Malay Chinese, even as they praise their principal subjects), and by their unexpected and even anomalous nature—Blount rejects 'entrenched stereotypes' and 'religious propaganda', Keate 'goes further than most of his contemporaries', and Abbott disavows his stereotyped and ill-informed predecessors. Taken together, these three accounts provide a robust case for Klement's argument—global civility may be unusual, but it was certainly present.

As Klement traces subsequent developments in global civility, he runs into more contestable waters. In an abrupt shift from apparently conventional global civility in Keate and Abbott (1788–89), Klement points to George Barrington and Mary Ann Parker's accounts of Botany Bay (1793–95) as the moment when 'global civility starts to crack' (p. 13), followed by the 'representational ambivalence [and] colonialism' inherent in F. E. Maning's Old New Zealand (1863). But why is this principally a chronological difference, rather than a geographical one in which Indigenous Australians were generally perceived, and treated, distinctly from Pacific Islanders and Māori, or a literary one between the remediated dialogues of Keate (who did not participate in the voyage he describes) and Maning's fictionalised autobiography, against the more first-hand accounts found in Barrington and Parker? Klement draws heavily on edited editions and existing focused...