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    Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: A Life
    Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: A Life
    Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: A Life
    Ebook159 pages1 hour

    Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: A Life

    By Harish Kapur

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    About this ebook

    This book is a biographical and illustrated account of the life of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French national who traveled extensively for almost forty years of his lifetravels that took him to most of the European countries, to the Ottoman Empire, to Persia, to Southeast Asia, and to India.

    This writer cannot think of any other personality, at any time in history, who wandered around for so long and for so far.

    Tavernier has a number of achievements to his creditachievements of having written extensively on the areas he traveled, the people he met, and the diverse activities he pursued.

    His memoirs became a blockbuster in the seventeenth century, outshining any other publication of the timeeven of those who were known to be heavy with ideas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse UK
    Release dateJun 19, 2013
    ISBN9781481795951
    Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: A Life
    Author

    Harish Kapur

    Dr. Harish Kapur is professor emeritus at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. The author has spent much of his academic career teaching international relations to graduate students and monitoring their PhD dissertations on a wide array of global subjects. He was a recipient of numerous awards from different European and US foundations, including a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that resulted in his appointment as research associate of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University. Perhaps the most recent and most prestigious award he has received is his nomination as an outstanding intellectual in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries along with one thousand intellectuals from all over the world by Cambridge Biographical Centre in the United Kingdom. Before joining the Graduate Institute in 1961, Dr. Kapur officiated as the deputy legal adviser in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, where he had been, among other things, assigned the responsibility of protecting Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco. While teaching international relations, Professor Kapur devoted much of his time to an analysis of the foreign policy of states with a focus on the former Soviet Union, China, Taiwan, India, and the European Union. Most of his writings have been published in Europe, the United States, and India.

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      Jean-Baptiste Tavernier - Harish Kapur

      2013 by Harish Kapur. All rights reserved.

      Timethy à La Chance (Collaborator For Illustrations)

      Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material, reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the author would like to apologise and would be glad to hear from them.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      Published by AuthorHouse 06/17/2013

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-9594-4 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-9593-7 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-9595-1 (e)

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Introduction

      Chapter 1   The Early Years: The Emergence Of A Traveller

      Chapter 2   Persia: Exposure To The Muslim World

      Chapter 3   Mughal India: Search For Pearls

      Chapter 4   Southeast Asia: Alienation With The Dutch

      Chapter 5   Switzerland: Peace And Retirement In Aubonne

      Chapter 6   Prussia: Search For Power

      Chapter 7   The End

      Chapter 8   Evaluation

      List of Illustrations

      Technical Dimension

      Appendices

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Char_img_1.jpg

      Dr. Harish Kapur is professor emeritus at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

      The author has spent much of his academic career teaching international relations to graduate students and monitoring their PhD dissertations on a wide array of global subjects.

      He was a recipient of numerous awards from different European and US foundations, including a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that resulted in his appointment as research associate of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University.

      Perhaps the most recent and most prestigious award he has received is his nomination as an outstanding intellectual in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries along with one thousand intellectuals from all over the world by Cambridge Biographical Centre in the United Kingdom.

      Before joining the Graduate Institute in 1961, Dr. Kapur officiated as the deputy legal adviser in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, where he had been, among other things, assigned the responsibility of protecting Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco.

      While teaching international relations, Professor Kapur devoted much of his time to an analysis of the foreign policy of states with a focus on the former Soviet Union, China, Taiwan, India, and the European Union. Most of his writings have been published in Europe, the United States, and India.

      ALSO BY

      HARISH KAPUR

      Soviet Russia And Asia 1917-1927: A Study of Soviet Policy Towards Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan

      The Soviet Union And The Emerging Nations: A case Study of Soviet Policy Towards India

      The Embattled Triangle: Moscow, Peking, New Delhi

      The Awakening Giant: China’s Ascension in World Politics (also in Chinese)

      China in World Politics

      L’historien Et La Relations Internationales: Recueil D’ Etudes: En Hommage à Jacques Freymond (edited by Harish Kapur, Saul Friedlander and Andrè Rezler)

      The End of An Isolation: China After Mao (Edited) (Also in Chinese)

      China And the European Community: The New Connection

      As China Sees The World: Perception of Chinese Scholars

      Distant Neighbours: China And Europe

      India’s Foreign Policy 1947-1992: Shadows and Substance

      Diplomacy Of India: Then And Now

      Diplomatic Journey: Emerging India

      Taiwan In a Changing World: Search For Security

      Foreign Policies Of India’s Prime Ministers

      India Of Our Times: An Experiment In Democracy

      5300.jpg

      To

      Barbara

      For her active encouragement

      In the writing of this book

      5302.jpg

      PREFACE

      T his is an attempt at a biography—of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a 17 th century French traveller, who wandered around in Asia for almost forty years, spending much of the time in India.

      My fascination with him arose from my own Indian origin, compounded with the fact that I had lived for more than twenty years in a small Swiss town of Aubonne, where Tavernier had resided for fifteen years in the seventeenth century, peacefully living in the Chateau of Aubonne, writing his memoirs and renovating his dwelling.

      Nowhere had he lived for so long, during his adult years, and nowhere had he pursued a more peaceful life than in the Chateau.

      Inspired by the stories he often heard from his father about the world at large, he began his travels with an innocent determination to see places. However, his journeys turned into a seeker after gemstones. who finally became the leading gemmologist of his time—a gemmologist to whom many turned to for advice and trade, and who is known to this day. He was also the one who discovered some of the leading jewels of his time—jewels that were sold by Christie within the last couple of decades for fabulous prices.

      The great traveller was by no means an intellectual, and cannot be compared to the well-known thinkers of his time; but through the years, with the forceful encouragement of King Louis XIV, and of ghost-writers, his extensive memoirs became blockbusters all over Western Europe, and were translated into numerous European languages. His travelling made him famous, and so did his writings.

      This biography is essentially based on his memoirs, on the historical backdrop of the time, and on a whole series of contemporaneous writings that I was fortunate to come across in my research including extensive conversations with some who have wide experience of biographies.

      The writing of biography can prove to be more problematic than classical studies of international relations or political science; for biographical opus involves the scrutinisation of the personality of the actor, of seeking out the dark recesses of his mind, of tracking down the different explanations of his behaviour, etc; whereas the classical subjects tend to rationally investigate societal actions, including their evolution.

      While, James Boswell, the great biographer¹ may have a point in suggesting that nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him,² we would—if we were to follow this argumentation—be deprived of a large chunks of history that is closely connected with or is made by men of consequence.

      The value of this short study can be discerned from the fact that this is really a second biography after the one that was published in French as far back as 1886-a biography that brings out the essentials of his fabulous life at the time, surfaces the travels he had made, and the routes he had discovered during the forty years he was on the road.

      While venturing into this publication, I was ably assisted by friends who knew something, about gems, or who were equally fascinated by the traveller, or who had the technical knowledge of constructing a coffee table book, as, hopefully, will be the case with this one

      In this connection I am grateful to Francois Perrin, and Julie Langenegger, not to speak of my wife, Barbara, whose encouragement in the construction of this book was crucial.

      I must, however, express my particular gratitude to Timotey A. LaChance for his continuously active cooperation in the designing and operationalisation of this book. It would have been indeed difficult to construct this publication without his able help.

      INTRODUCTION

      J ean-Baptiste Tavernier is incomparably the greatest traveller of the 17 th century. «If the first education,» he confessed, «is like second birth, I can say that I came to the world with the desire of travelling.» ³ And travelling he did.

      Travernier spent more than forty years of his adult life just moving around—to Western Europe, to the Balkans and to Asia. While much of his initial West Europan travels were apparently motivated by a fervent desire to see places—his arrival in the Balkans generated an added interest in actively participating in the Thirty Years’ War—a war that had brutally decimated the whole continent.

      His travels in Asia (Turkey, Iran, India and Southeast Asia) finally developed into a new objective—the objective of trading to apparently improve his declining financial resources, for there is no evidence that he worked during travels. He traded in many items, but one that made him famous and rich was jewellery in all its forms.

      Much of the relations he had established with men of consequence in the Asian countries were dominated by the knowledge he

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