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Part II is designed to cover the eighteenth century, up to the period of the French revolution. These dates are not Procrustean, however, and the earliest texts date from the 1690s while the latest is from an account of the British embassy to China published in 1797. Nonetheless, the centre ground of this part concerns the European Enlightenment and the attempts of those touched by it to come to terms with the sense of a rapidly expanding world. This period of European expansion was ushered in by surging forces of capitalist development in spheres as different as finance and agriculture, as well as connected but distinct technological progress – not just the epochal invention of the steam engine but contemporary advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The primary content of Part II concerns the dimension of representation. Arguably, representations are always formed in dialectical interplay with the material dimension, but in the eighteenth century the material dimension in question was unusually expansive, marking a step‐change in the emergence of modernity, technical, industrial and institutional.

There is a tendency in much contemporary thought influenced both by Postmodernism and by post‐colonialist theory to either minimize or abrogate altogether that distinction between the material and representational dimensions; in effect to regard the Enlightenment as a sort of ideological camouflage for imperialism. By the same token, the Enlightenment’s typical supposition of the universal applicability of its sense of the capacities of humankind is widely seen as a mask for the interests of a particular section of humanity, namely bourgeois – or otherwise ruling‐class – European men. This is not the position of the present anthology. While no one working in the contemporary period can fail to take on board the force of post‐colonialist ideas, nor to ignore the critique of the universalizing pretensions of the Enlightenment couched in terms of an acknowledgement of difference, nonetheless it is to court the most barren reductivism to assimilate science and the humanities to military and commercial adventurism without acknowledging some measure of their relative autonomy.

By the same token, though, it is easy for contemporary self‐appointed defenders of Enlightenment values to slip into a Panglossian inability to admit the many bad things that have come from it, as well as an equivalent inability to recognize the many good things that can proceed from rejecting unconstrained rationalism. Again, that is not the position from which the selections in the present anthology have been made. Criteria of testability and rational argument seem to be little short of the bedrock of a modern, secular civilization. But the separation of fact and value can scarcely be said to have survived intact a critique rooted in a sense of the ease with which values, as well as interpretations of ‘facts’, are pervaded by material interest and the operation of power. We have tried to resist the siren song of a tendentious diminution of all things European, even as we have also tried to maintain due scepticism for the unthinking export of ‘Western values’ – or what normatively passes for them – in the fissured contemporary conjuncture. We have, in sum, attempted to represent in as even‐handed a form as we have been able, both the rough and the smooth of eighteenth‐century European thought about the cultures of other parts of the world with which Europeans came into contact in that extraordinarily dynamic period.

Divided into three thematic sections, Part II continues the format of Part I. These sections maintain the emphases of the earlier period, but with slightly different inflections. Thus the third section of Part II directly continues the focus of the third section of Part I: reflections of armchair thinkers based in Europe during the period of the emergence of the modern academy. Sections IIA and IIB are, however, organized slightly differently from IA and IB, though again on the basis of a geographical distinction.

The first section concerns the European encounter with the diversity of the Orient, mixing together two different registers: imaginative and scientific. In this connection, it is important to note that although Edward Said’s famous account of ‘Orientalism’ (understood as the systematic ideological construction of the image of a subordinate culture rather than a factual account of a geopolitical entity) situates its beginnings in the final decades of the eighteenth century, its principal focus is on the nineteenth, and hence Said’s strictures bear upon Parts III and IV of the present volume rather more than this one.

This is perhaps also the place to note an important distinction concerning the construction of European knowledge about the wider world. Said’s account of Orientalism, and that of many post‐colonialist writers following him, applies most securely to the period of the ascendancy of the modern colonial empires, especially the British and the French, after the mid‐eighteenth century. Part I included a wide range of considerably earlier texts concerning European encounters with the East, and also – from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – with the newly discovered continent of America. Many of those voices emanated from the early modern Portuguese and Spanish empires, and from the reception of their accounts in England and France. Part I took this story up to the end of the seventeenth century, while Part II addresses the eighteenth‐century European Enlightenment up to the French Revolution. As part of the ongoing process of scholarly debate over the terms of the initial ‘Orientalist’ and ‘post‐colonialist’ challenge to normative European accounts of world history (touched on again in the introductions to Parts IV, VII and VIII), Benjamin Schmidt has made a powerful case for the existence of a transitional period between the early phase of European encounters with the world and the onset of the period of full‐blown imperialism. This he locates in the approximate century between the end of the European Thirty Years War, signalled by the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Seven Years War of 1756–63. For Schmidt, this is the key period within which a distinctively ‘European’ identity coalesced (or rather, was constructed), and did so moreover against an equally homogenized image of an exotic world, projected onto Asia and America alike.

This binary – and mutually defining – construction of Europe as the norm, and the rest of the world as its exoticised Other, is, on Schmidt’s account, significantly a production not so much of the emergent and expansive British and French imperial blocs as the distinctive Dutch formation. The period coincides with the contraction of the Dutch overseas empire in Brazil, the West Indies and India under increasing pressure from the rise of England, and the shift of Dutch capital into an international mode of the kind described by Arrighi as an ongoing cycle in the development of modernity involving a dialectic between territorial state organizations and more transnational networks. Phases of domination by the latter have been notably conducive to traffic in culture and knowledge as well as in material goods. For Schmidt, it is this period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in which the parameters for European domination of the world become articulated at the level of representation – both visual and verbal. This dense conjunction of travellers’ tales, early natural science and proto‐anthropology extends across the chronological spans of Parts I and II of Art in Theory: The West in the World. In an anthology without pictures, we are restricted to tracing the development of changing ideas as expressed in words. Our periodization must therefore of necessity be regarded as provisional, and more appropriate to some media rather than others. It is beyond our present scope to represent the specifically visual dimension of this constructed representation of the world across a wide range of artefacts including not only paintings – in such genres as still life and landscape – but also prints, decorated objects and surfaces in both two and three dimensions, such as ceramics and wallpapers, as well as maps and the plates of illustrated books.

This complex matrix of changing representations of the world (at the interactive levels of both (visual) art and (verbal) language) and the flows of power inscribed in economic, military and political relations in the world, is where we can ultimately trace the changing ideas of art with which the present anthology is by definition concerned. Yet that is to say everything and nothing. In the end, we can neither accept traditional accounts in their entirety, or indeed revisions of them in their entirety, but nor can we wish them away. In terms of a conventional history of art and of design, the eighteenth century was long understood in terms of a series of now‐questioned style labels such as ‘baroque’, ‘rococo’, ‘neo‐classicist’, ‘picturesque’ and, most pertinent to the present volume, ‘chinoiserie’. Most of these, it has to be confessed, still linger on in our heads, however much more recent work has insisted on relating the art to deeper sociohistorical trends: absolutism, parliamentary democracy, land enclosures, nascent industrialization and the Seven Years War for global supremacy fought out between Britain and France and their respective allies. Steering a course between these differing emphases, the first section includes examples of both fictional and factual accounts of what made ‘the Orient’ seem different from Europe. These range from pioneering ‘Orientalist’ accounts of Islamic culture by figures as different as Antoine Galland and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to the exotic fantasies of the Arabian Nights and William Beckford’s Vathek. A different take on the sense of Eastern ‘difference’ can be found in Montesquieu and Goldsmith: both using fictional oriental characters, Persian and Chinese respectively, to shine a critical sidelight on the corruption and artificiality of their own societies.

Further selections concern the impact of an idealized notion of China, and the pervasive fashion for things Chinese which gained ground in Europe during the eighteenth century. These range from more or less plausible rehearsals of the virtues of Chinese material culture, especially gardens, to the quite different note struck by George Staunton’s deflationary encounter with the realities of China which derived from first‐hand experience gained during his participation in the British Embassy to China led by Lord Macartney in 1793. Standing somewhere between the idealized exotica and Staunton’s plain assessment of China stands Sir William Jones’s proposal to found a Society for the study of ‘Asiatick’ culture. Jones is now sometimes criticized for having relied on the researches of uncredited Indian assistants, but be that as it may, his Enlightenment‐inspired admiration for and curiosity about Indian culture stands in marked contrast to the normative attitude of British imperialists in the nineteenth century.

One of the recurring problems facing us in these early parts of the anthology, and discussed in the introduction to the book, concerns the relative unevenness of the written historical record: the fact that we have more textual accounts by European writers about their encounters with the wider world than we have reports by Arabic, Indian, Chinese, African or American writers of encounters with Europeans. Nonetheless, other kinds of trace do exist, notably those in the broad field of the visual arts. To single out only a few, these include Mughal miniature paintings in India, some of which contain figures in modern European dress as well as visual representations of motifs taken from the Christian Bible. Eighteenth‐century Japan saw the development of ukiyo‐e prints, depictions of the ‘floating world’ of contemporary urban modernity in the capital Edo – the very images which in the mid‐nineteenth century became a stimulus for French artists of the nascent avant‐garde seeking to arrive at adequate representations of their own ‘modern life’. Certain of the Japanese prints show clear evidence of a fascination with European perspective and play off against each other the characteristic effects of a Japanese engagement with surface, colour and contour and a European representation of perspectival recession. In West Africa, metalworking in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Benin grew out of a long indigenous tradition of bronze casting. Three‐dimensional cast metal sculptures often include images of Europeans, probably Portuguese mercenaries working for the Oba, as well as soldiers accompanying the Portuguese traders themselves. But something else is happening with the unique Benin ‘plaques’ which adorned the Oba’s palace. There can be no proof, but there is a possibility that these resulted from West African artists seeing two‐dimensional printed illustrations in Christian Bibles.

One of the most extensive of these interactions took place in eighteenth‐century China, where a number of Jesuit missionaries worked in the Qing emperor’s court in both map‐making and painting. Some became integrated into Chinese court culture and had long careers there, including Guiseppe Castiglione, who adopted the Chinese name Lang Shining, and worked in China from 1715 until his death in 1766. During this time he worked on many large‐scale paintings in what has been described as a ‘hybrid Chinese‐Western style’, recording important imperial events in which a Chinese approach to landscape painting is combined with European perspective space in which the figures are deployed. In both China and India, other hybrid forms of art evolved in which native artists painted European figures in a ‘native’ style, either for sale to colonial merchants or soldiers and their families to commemorate their time in the ‘exotic’ East, or for export sale in Europe itself. All of these kinds of visual art, as well as related craft work, if they can be read and accorded due prominence in the historical record, can enrich and complicate the sense we have of the multifarious encounters of people living in the wider world with the Europeans who forced themselves into those worlds in the centuries before fully fledged modern imperialism became the order of the day (cf. Wood, Western Art, 2014).

Section IIB involves a change of focus. Rather than Europe’s long‐standing fascination with the riches of the East, this section concentrates on the variety of ‘New Worlds’ that European expansion encountered in the eighteenth century. The first of these – America – had of course been known about for some time, and the earliest accounts can be found in Section IB. The Spanish plunder of South America had already made it for some time one of the richest countries in Europe. But by the eighteenth century, Spain was in decline, and it was the plantation economies of the Caribbean, based on the institution of quasi‐industrialized transatlantic slavery, that made the most notorious contribution to enabling Europe’s definitive take‐off into modernity. It was at this point that cities like Bristol and Liverpool, based on the proceeds of the ‘triangular trade’ between Britain, West Africa and America, became crucial building blocks for the emergent British Empire. The section includes several texts bearing upon questions of material culture, race and slavery in the Americas. And for the first time, we are able to record not only the accounts of Europeans but also the dissenting voices of those on the receiving end of European power.

The second main focus of this section lies on the other side of the world. By the final third of the century, the protracted struggle between Britain and France for global domination was in the process of being concluded. After the American revolution, Britain lost the United States, but in the same geopolitical shake‐out, gained India – which went on, of course, to become the so‐called jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. We include here extracts from William Hodges’ late‐eighteenth‐century account of his travels in India, and the monuments he observed. Hodges’ narrative is one of the few extended reports by a professional artist of his own first‐hand reactions to the art of a distinctively different culture.

One of the extraordinary things about Hodges is that he had already had experience of an even more radically distinct society, having been the official artist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1772–5. Hodges did not write about Oceania, but he left an unparalleled visual record of its people and their material culture. Cook had actually been preceded in the Pacific by the French navigator Bougainville, and it was Bougainville’s sensational account of Tahiti as a ‘new Cythera’ – the mythical birthplace of Venus – that set the tone for the early European perception of the cultures of Oceania. Cook’s prolonged encounters were of a different order. We have included a representative selection from the many thousands of pages of first‐hand testimony from the three Cook voyages. For the first time since Columbus’s discovery of America – more than 250 years earlier, be it noted – and for the last time in human history, an entirely unknown world fell under the gaze of European artists, scientists and adventurers. The accounts given here record the unstable mixture of admiration, puzzlement, disgust and more‐or‐less‐improvised recourse to comparisons with familiar things from Europe that made up the warp and weft of these encounters. Indeed, one of the hardest things for us to grasp about these first encounters with Pacific societies is that the Europeans involved – scientists and artists no less than seamen – almost literally did not know what they were looking at. Beyond the rudimentary category of the ‘noble savage’, and some sense of a distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ derived from classical antiquity and bolstered by the experience of America, the eighteenth‐century travellers had little in the way of a conceptual framework with which to comprehend the worlds they had pushed themselves into. The Cook voyages form one of the most acute instances wherein eighteenth‐century proto‐Empire and eighteenth‐century Enlightenment found themselves walking side by side, and often they did not know what to do with each other.

It is in the final section, Part IIC, that we find the beginnings of a more developed sense of human social evolution, ideas that were contemporaneous with the fraught encounters with a wider world that were taking place in America and the Pacific. This was the ‘stages’ – or ‘stadial’ – theory of human development that was principally worked out by thinkers of the French and Scottish Enlightenments. For reasons of space, we have been unable to represent the full range of these developments by Turgot, Helvetius, Goguet and others in France, and in Scotland the work of Kames, Robertson and Adam Smith among others. Instead we have attempted to encapsulate the basic outline of the theory in its most developed form in one short document by the Glasgow‐based historian and legal theorist John Millar. In the words of Ronald Meek, the historian of these debates, ‘Millar’s great achievement was to transform the four stages theory and the more general ideas associated with it into a true philosophy of history’ (Meek, Social Science, 1976, p. 161). The legacy of the ‘stages’ theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, it represents an attempt to respond within a secular rather than a religiously validated framework to undeniable facts about material progress and complexity of social organization. On the other, however, it can be seen to lay the ground for later, nineteenth‐century ‘evolutionist’ accounts of humankind, which joined with ‘scientific racism’ to underwrite the ideology of the ‘civilizing mission of empire’.

It falls, however, to certain other statements by European philosophers of the period to bear out more fully Said’s thesis about Orientalism; and indeed to provide traction for the wider attack on the hypocrisy of ‘Enlightenment for some but not for others’ that has come to be the defining feature of so much radical scholarship since the 1970s. It must be said that not all are equally culpable. Smith and Millar are not nineteenth‐century ‘scientific racists’. Even more so, Denis Diderot offers a glimpse of imaginative insight into the deleterious consequences of European expansion. But the aberrant reflexes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant remain shocking, whether these lapses are or are not taken to disable their wider views on the significance and desirability of reason, enlightenment and progress. The present anthology is premised on the belief that they do not. However, by the same token, the philosophy of Enlightenment seems neither to have been as enlightened as its protagonists thought themselves, nor as their successors systematically made them out to be through the institutions of education and other forms of cultural reproduction over the next two hundred years.

But at the same time, some other voices can, by contrast, be seen to be beginning the long haul of breaking out of a restricted, solely Graeco‐Roman sense of the lineage of European culture. One of the key instances of this in respect of art, in the then‐emergent field of art history, can be found in the interchange between Winckelmann and Herder: the former doing much to establish the conventional sense of a specific and independent European tradition rooted in the example of classical Greece; the latter, in his posthumous ‘memorial’ to Winckelmann, disputing that account and introducing an early example of cultural relativism into the history of art.

In similar fashion to the situation we noted in the Introduction to Part I, the registration in eighteenth‐century European art of all these changing ideas is manifold, but subordinate. Explicit images of the wider world are relatively few. The work of William Hodges and other artists of the Cook voyages to the Pacific, notably Sidney Parkinson and John Webber, is exceptional. But none of them have loomed large in the canon, at least until recently when Hodges has received some of his due. India is the site of the majority of such representations, which are for the most part profoundly inflected by the presence of the East India Company, and behind it, the shadow of the British state. Apart from individual portraits, some of the most complex representations of these cross‐cultural encounters can be found in the work of Johann Zoffany and the Irish painter Thomas Hickey.

In a different register, the world also leaks into representations of life in the metropolis, in instances such as the presence of black servants. Within the normative family portrait or conversation piece, however, such figures are for the most part as marginal within the image as Hodges and Hickey have been to the canon.

The experience of today’s post‐colonial, multicultural societies ill‐prepares one to understand a Europe in which people of non‐European descent formed only a small minority. It is true, of course, that during the eighteenth century there were considerable numbers of black servants to the well‐to‐do, some of them freed slaves, some of whom achieved prominence. In Britain, these included Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, as well as Samuel Johnson’s manservant Francis Barber. Some, though few, made it into art. Hogarth’s representations of black people, mostly servants, are famous, and many other aristocratic portraits feature black retainers. But people of non‐European heritage were less evident than they are today, and those who achieved notice, even more so. A figure such as ‘Dido’, the daughter of an English sea‐captain and an African slave woman, came to enjoy the status of cousin to Lady Elisabeth Mansfield, niece of the Lord Chief Justice, whose later judgement in the Somerset case proved such a benchmark for race relations in Britain. Dido is represented in an enigmatic portrait as being on apparently equal status with her cousin. Anyone of ‘rank’, or even patronized by a person of rank, could become a temporary celebrity. The Polynesian Mai (‘Omai’), who came to England with Joseph Banks after Cook’s first voyage, was one such, and had his portrait painted by no less a figure then Joshua Reynolds. The Chinese artist Tan Chit Qua, who maintained a successful career as a ‘face‐painter’ to the fashionable in places like Bath, was included by Zoffany in his collective portrait of the Royal Academicians.

Beyond the genre of the portrait, European landscape painting also registered, to a degree, the impact of the world beyond Europe. In particular, a sub‐genre of the ‘colonial picturesque’ has been recently canvassed, which seems to have functioned as a way of normalizing strange and often threatening landscapes, as well as the alien presence of Europeans in them, for an audience at home in the imperial metropole. On the whole, however, both the burgeoning colonies and the people in them, on whom the primitive accumulation of metropolitan wealth in large part depended, are a presence but yet do not loom large in eighteenth‐century European art.

Arguably, the most significant and widespread images of the wider world occur in the form of allegorical representations of the Four Continents. No English country house is complete without its female busts of Europe – classically robed and helmeted – Asia, America and Africa, distinguished by exotic headdresses and, in the case of the last at least, not infrequently bare‐breasted. The culminating image of this subject is surely, however, not a sculpture but the enormous ceiling painting by Tiepolo in the palace at Würzburg: a teeming depiction of exotic animals, equally exotic foreign merchants, and a cornucopia of trade goods that threatens to spill down the walls into the viewer’s own space. It is, furthermore, not just ‘fine art’ that we need to be looking at during the eighteenth century: the greatest impact of the wider world can be felt not in ‘fine art’ but in European design. ‘Chinoiserie’ is felt across the continent in a multiplicity of aristocratic houses in the form of pavilions, bridges, screens, wallpaper, ceramics, furniture and even, as at Claydon in England, a whole ‘Chinese’ niche for sitting in and drinking tea. For the European upper classes, the world was growing closer, in every possible way.