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    Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia
    Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia
    Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia
    Audiobook25 hours

    Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia

    Written by Jürgen Osterhammel

    Narrated by Ric Jerrom

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    About this audiobook

    How Enlightenment Europe rediscovered its identity by measuring itself against the great civilizations of Asia

    During the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan.

    Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe's formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism--and condescension toward Asia—prevailed.

    A momentous work by one of Europe's most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes readers on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9780691193045

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    4/5

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    • 5/5
      excellent book, narrated with care and liveliness, except it's jarring to hear Leibniz, a name that recurs, mispronounced IPA : lɪˈbɪnɪz, /ˈlaɪbnɪts/;

      3 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Verbose, pompous, meandering and lacking focus, discipline or proper editing. The return to the reader for each hour slogging through the text does not warrant the time or effort required.