| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Framed in a discussion of post-colonial approaches to the British Empire's influence on culture, a close reading of Captain Donald Campbell's late eighteenth-century travelogue contextualises the personal particularities in his assessments of Habsburg Europe, Ottoman West Asia and Mysorean/British South Asia. His is an imagination in which the bonds of 'religion' ameliorate the 'otherness' of continental Europeans, while his concept of 'enlightenment' learning is deployed to understand the Ottomans. Only in the case of South Asia is the very humanity of the 'other' denied. I argue that this landscape of otherness reflects the coincidence of the interests of his 'self' and the 'Empire', which overlap most thoroughly in South Asia. Campbell's travelogue is of value to post-colonial approaches, as it is a particularly poignant example of the manner in which the particularities of the 'self' contribute to the construction of broader cultural discourses permeated by 'Empire'.
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