The great virtue of histoire philosophique was also its main flaw: generalization. As a his- toriographical model, it lent itself to a variety of subjects that had not been systematically addressed in earlier histories: art, trade, political systems, mœurs. As a style of reasoning concerned with the identification of causes and principles, cross-cultural and cross-tem- poral comparisons were part of its logic. Montesquieu compares the efficacy of political systems; Voltaire, the state of civilization in Europe, India, China, Persia, and the Arab world; Raynal, the colonial enterprise of various European powers both on a moral level and with regard to economic viability. Even Winckelmann, whose history of art is essen- tially the history of Greek art, defines its unique genius in comparison to that of other nations. Christoph Meiners, in his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785), ruled that universal history had so far been written unscientifically because it included all kinds of stray anthropological observations, and what was needed was a systematic Geschichte der Menschheit. ‘Geschichte’, in this title, means natural history as exemplified by Linnaeus and Buffon; rather than replacing universal history, it should complement it, abstracting away from historical events
None of these authors had first-hand experience of the foreign worlds they were talk- ing about. None of them ever left Europe; Winckelmann did not even see Greece. This was not an irreparable flaw: travel literature had become increasingly accurate by the 18th century. There are no antipodes or mermaids in the work of Chardin, De Bruijn, Kaemp- fer, Forster, De Maillet, or Carsten Niebuhr, and only very little cannibalism. (Forster, together with Captain Cook and the crew of the Resolution, had actually seen Maoris eat human flesh – the first Europeans to directly observe it.) De Brosses, in his compendium of travels to the South Seas, hypothesized that there should be a southern continent as
30 Smith to François de la Rochefoucauld, November 1785, in E.C. Mossner & I.S. Ross (eds.), The
Correspondence of Adam Smith (Works and Correspondence VI, Indianopolis: Liberty Fund 1987), 287;
quoted in Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 177
31 “In this want of direct evidence, we are under a necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture […] To this species of philosphical investigation, which has no appropriated name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History;” Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith” [1793], in Works Vol. VII (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown 1829), 31
counterweight to the Eurasian land mass; James Cook duly sailed there to find that it was not there. In the final chapter of Essai sur les Mœurs, Voltaire argues that Montesquieu’s depiction of Oriental despotism is extremely improbable because “Il y a partout un frein imposé au pouvoir arbitraire, par la loi, par les usages, par les mœurs”.32 If generalization
was a natural part of histoire philosophique, so was the logic of conjectures and refutations. These two were in a constant tension. Being a philosophical historian entailed both a commitment to empiricism and a low regard of the pedantic pursuit of trivial facts. What mattered, after all, were the causes of the wealth of nations, the origins of civil society, the functioning of political systems, and the reasons for the decline of great empires; not the antics of King Pharamond and Queen Boadicaea. Rousseau’s polemical stance, “Com- mençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne touchent point à la question”, is the ex- treme version of this attitude rather than its counter-Enlightenment mirror image. Even when its authors were not inclined to pose as philosophes, histoire philosophique had a ten- dency to the programmatic and the polemical. Gibbon, who was not strongly committed to écraser l’infâme even if he was describing ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’, none- theless became the subject of a heated polemic when he meddled with theological issues.
Two critiques stand out as examples of the tension between generalization and empir- icism. Both were not themselves philosophical histories strictly speaking, but they are illus- trative of the problem, and as critiques that see to improve upon philosophical constructs, they share the same style of reasoning. The one is Anquetil-Duperron’s book-length ref- utation of Montesquieu’s idea of ‘Oriental despotism’, in Législation Orientale (1778). The other is Georg Forster’s review of Meiners’ Grundriß in the Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung, 4-6 May 1789. Both Forster and Anquetil had spent their formative years in the East: For- ster as an assistant to his father as scientist on Cook’s second voyage, Anquetil as a young man in pursuit of Zend and Vedic texts, travelling to India on his own initiative at age 23. However, neither of them explicitly refers to his first-hand experience in these texts. Rather, both use a model of critique in which they systematically and exhaustively sum up counterevidence from other sources and internal contradictions in the positions of their opponents; according to Martin Gierl, discussing a different polemic, this was a common legal and theological model of disputation going back to the 17th century.33 Anquetil does
so by formulating three theses, already on the title page of Législation Orientale, all which go against the depiction of oriental despotism by “M. de M*”:
Que la maniere dont jusqu’ici on a representé le Despotisme, qui passe pour être absolu dans ces trois Etats, ne peut qu’en donner une idée absolument fausse.
Qu’en Turquie, en Perse & dans l’Indoustan, il ya un Code de Loix écrites, qui obligent le Prince ainsi que les sujets.
Que dans ces trois Etats, les particuliers ont des Propriétés en biens meubles & im- meubles, dont ils jouissent librement.
32 Voltaire, Essai sur l’Histoire générale, et sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations, depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à
nos Jours ([Genève: Cramer] 1756-57), Vol. VII, 29
33 Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft. Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie
These theses define the three sections of Législation Orientale. In the introduction, Anquet- il recounts Montesquieu’s definition of despotism as a state “in which a single individual, without laws, without rules, disposes of everything at whim”.34 According to Montesquieu,
such a government naturally results in religious fanaticism, cruelty, and indolence, making it impossible for the arts and sciences, commerce and agriculture to flourish. The first sec- tion of Anquetil’s work is then devoted to summing up the achievements of the Orient in religious tolerance, arts and sciences, commerce and agriculture, peacefulness, and civility in warfare (or at least, no greater atrocity than common in European and colonial wars). The second section consists of three parts describing the codes of law that obtain in the
34 Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Législation Orientale (Amsterdam: Rey 1778), 2 Image 22: Legal rhetoric and the scales of justice. Title page of Anquetil-
Ottoman Empire, Persia, and India; the third, again in three parts, deals specifically with laws and rights of property as attested in travel literature. This formal disputation fills only half of the book; the other half is filled with twelve long endnotes and 80 pages of appen- dices. All together, the work is ambigious in format between a polemical tract and a report on Oriental legal systems; it is not itself a philosophical history.
In spite of its systematic mode of disputation, Législation Orientale is a chaotic text: most of the main text consists of excerpts, translations, and comments, not to mention the endnotes and appendices. Although ‘M*’ is his main target, Anquetil takes issue with how the Orient is represented in most of the travel literature of his day, with the partial excep- tion of Chardin. He generally uses three argumentative strategies: 1. Showing that what the author denounces as ‘barbaric customs’ cannot be arbitrary despotism and is in fact either codified or well-established practice; 2. Pointing out examples of Eastern virtue and civility, or comparing reports of injustice and atrocity with equal injustice and atrocity in Europe; 3. Pointing to the legal function of religious systems and ancient texts. Regularly, Anquetil leaps to conclusions in identifying customs or texts as codes of laws; what is lack- ing in Législation Orientale is a systematic presentation of the workings of the Ottoman, Persian, or Mughal empires, rather than a critique of what others write about it.
Forster had a clearer sense of methodology than Anquetil. During their voyage with Cook, the Forsters kept a strict protocol in maintaining their journal and consistently took samples and used local informants. According to Hans Bödeker, their ethnological observations and reflexions have “ein vordem nicht erreichtes theoretisches Niveau und Problembewußtsein.”35 This may be exaggerated, but it is certainly in accordance with For-
ster’s own epistemological statements in the preface to the Voyage Round the World. Forster repeatedly insists on direct observation so as to achieve
a philosophical history of the voyage, free from prejudice and vulgar error, where human nature should be represented without any adherence to fallacious systems, and upon the principles of general philanthropy; in short, an account written upon a plan such as the learned world had not seen previously executed.36
Meiners, as reviewed by Forster, is the mirror image of that: no observation, no voyage, relapse into prejudice and error, fallacious systems, and a less than general love of mankind. From this standpoint the conflict with Meiners was inevitable, the more so because Mein- ers’ ambition to finally render the study of mankind scientific conflicts with the Forsters’ implicit claim to have already done so.
Forster’s review starts with eight points 1-8 of general criticism of Meiners’ work, and then list eight objections a-h against his central hypothesis. Meiners (1) uses unreliable sources, (2) quotes wrongly, (3) uses his sources uncritically, (4) contradicts himself, (5) heaps irrelevant data, (6) makes unsupported claims, (7) is unsystematic (‘unphilosophisch’),
35 Hans Bödeker, “Aufklärerische ethnologische Praxis: Johann Reinhold Forster und Georg Forster”, in H. Bödeker, P.H. Reill & J. Schlumbohm (eds.), Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750-1900 (Göttin- gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1999), 227-253: 230
so that no conclusions can be drawn from his material, and (8) is superficial, only spotting resemblances without investigating underlying causes. Meiners’ central hypothesis had been that mankind at large divides up in two races, Caucasian and Mongolian, which he had also characterized as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ on the basis of visual traits, with the former excelling over the latter in every respect. The Caucasian race subdivided into Celtic and Slavic, with Celtic, again, on top. This distinction was meant to form the basis of a more ‘scientific’ taxonomy of human races than the ‘superficial’ distinction between black and white; a histoire naturelle of mankind indeed. According to Forster, this was pseudoscience: Meiners (a) lacks sufficient proof, (b) neglects counterevidence, (c) praises everything Celt- ic, (d) deprecates everything Slavonic or Mongolian, (e) often praises in Celts what he dep- recates in Slavs or Mongolians, (f ) blames on race what could also be due to other causes, (g) holds that lower races cannot be improved and (h) accordingly denies the lower races human rights. In short, Meiners’ tract was worse than wrong, it was worse than nonsense, it was evil.
Anquetil’s critique of Montesquieu was unsuccessful. Législation Orientale was nei- ther reprinted nor translated, and the notion of ‘Oriental despotism’ continued to recur in influential works of Oriental history such as James Mill’s History of India (1818) and Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches (1827-33). In Heeren’s Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt (1793-96; reworked three times), Anquetil is even willfully neglected: Législation Orientale is ignored when Heeren speaks of natural despotic rule in Persia, Heeren prefers Kleuker’s retrans- lation of Anquetil’s translation of the Zend-Avesta over the French text, and Anquetil’s translation of the Upanishads is crushed in a footnote. Forster’s critique was more effective, to the extent that Meiners abandoned the topic and composed a completely revised racial theory twenty years later.37 In the meanwhile, however, the idea of a ‘Caucasian’ race was
taken up by his Göttingen colleague Blumenbach, who formulated a much more detailed taxonomy based on his impressive collection of human skulls, and thus became famous in his lifetime and infamous two centuries later as the founder of scientific racialism, even though Blumenbach sharply disagreed with Meiners on the issue of racial inferiority.38
Forster and Anquetil were not only attacking a doctrine about Oriental despotism or racial inferiority. They were also attacking a method: selective reading from travel lit- erature. Forster and Anquetil were themselves authors of travel literature, Forster in his Voyage round the World, Anquetil in the Discours Préliminaire to the Zend-Avesta; but they also added a new ingredient. Forster translated the Indian play Sakuntala from William Jones’ initial Latin translation, the first non-Western literary text to reach a large public in Germany. In the 1780s and early 1790s, father and son Forster, together their son/brother- in-law Mathias Sprengel, edited several journals that collected and translated (mainly) for-
37 Christoph Meiners, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen (Tübingen: Cot- ta 1811-16). Cf. Michael Carhart, “Polynesia and polygenism: The scientific use of travel literature in the early 19th century”, History of the Human Sciences 22:2 (2009), 58-86
38 Joachim Blumenbach, Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte (Leipzig: Breit- kopf & Härtel 1798), ch. 4
eign contributions to Völker- und Länderkunde.39 Anquetil confronted the reading public
with Oriental religious texts as old as the Bible, first the Zend-Avesta (1771) and then the Oupnek’hat [Upanishads] (1801-02); moreover, he was the co-author and driving force of Bernoulli’s Description Historique et Géographique de l’Inde (1786). Through this collecting and translating, the raw data of travel literature were transformed into, or replaced by, pro- cessed data, the subject of ethnology and philology.
The histoire philosophique of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Raynal was essentially a sci- ence of excerpts; so were 18th-century universal history and its philosophical variants. The problem with that was not that the outcomes were general; the problem was that the out- comes were also, to some extent, arbitrary. Some of the flaws in l’Esprit des Lois and the Grundriß could have been amended by simply looking better at the sources; but apart from individual shortcomings, there were also issues – such as the origins of the caste system or the division of Polynesian tribes – which cannot be resolved through reading travel litera- ture, and which require serious philological, linguistic, and ethnological study.
That study was just about beginning. Reports and scraps of ancient Sanskrit texts were already circulating in Europe in the 1750s, and Hyde in Oxford held an Avestan manu- script which nobody then could read, of which Anquetil was shown a transcript before going to India. Upon returning, he deposited over a hundred Sanskrit and Persian texts in 18 volumes at the Bibliothèque du Roi, listed in an appendix to the Zend-Avesta. The next-to-last appendix of Législation Orientale is a review of Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), just out in French translation, which Anquetil finds seriously defective but to which, “Malgré le vice inherent à la Compilation Angloise, je rends [justice] avec le plus grand plaisir”.40 Anquetil’s successors were to have similar reservations about his Zend-Avesta
from the moment it appeared. Kleuker, in the foreword to the German translation, wished that Anquetil had written in Latin rather than French: “Anquetils Übersetzung ist nicht nur vielfältig kalt und paraphrastisch, sondern selbst die Begriffe – man fühlts durch und durch – sind ihrem heiligen Feuerelement entrissen”.41 William Jones (then age 21) wrote
an incredibly pedantic anonymous “Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P***”, in which he disputes Anquetil’s knowledge of Old Persian and claims that his Zend-Avesta is too boring to be an authentic holy text. In response to these allegations, Kleuker included two dissertations on the authenticity of the source text in his translation, one by Anquetil, and one by him- self. Gibbon, who made extensive use of Anquetil’s translation in chapter VIII of Decline and Fall, concurs with Anquetil’s argument that a holy text full of tedious ritual and legal precepts in a dead language is unlikely to be fake, but expresses a few reservations about the
39 Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde, 1781-90; Neue Beiträge, 1790-93; Auswahl der besten auslän- dischen geographischen und statistischen Nachrichten zur Aufklärung der Völker- und Länderkunde,
1794-1800. Cf. Han Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German
Enlightenment (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press 2015), 330ff
40 Anquetil-Duperron, Législation Orientale, 310
41 Johann Friedrich Kleuker, Zend-Avesta: Zoroasters lebendiges Wort (Riga: Hartknoch 1776-78), Vol. I, xviii
Zend-Avesta as an argument against ‘Oriental despotism’.42 Doubts about the authenticity
of the text continued to be raised even after 1826 when Rasmus Rask, whose authority in these matters no one disputed, set out to settle the issue with his tract Über das Alter und die Echtheit der Zend-Sprache und des Zend-Avesta.43 Eugène Burnouf, then France’s
leading Indologist, published a corrected and updated translation with comments of the first section and a lithographed facsimile of the source manuscript (further discussed in chapter 6); that silenced most doubts, but the facsimile took twelve years to make, and the Commentaire sur le Yaçna (1833) never got beyond the immense volume I.
Forster’s own main contribution to ethnology was the Voyage. His attempts at a theo- retical treatise never got beyond a few sketches and essays (“Versuch einer Naturgeschichte des Menschen”, “Leitfaden zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Menschheit”). At the time of his death he was planning a journey to India, which even if he had lived would have been an unlikely plan in the next two decades of French-English war. If he and Anquetil ever met, it could only have been during his final months in Paris; there is no evidence of it from his letters. Politically, they were in different camps. Forster was in Paris as a re- presentative of the short-lived Mainz republic, and thus effectively an exile after its fall to Prussian troops in July 1793. One of his final works before the revolution reached Mainz had been a foreword to the translation of Thomas Paine’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, in which Forster draws the crucial dividing line in responses to the French Revolution between Burke and Paine, and though pretending neutrality so as to pass the censors, he rhetorically calls on reason to decide between the two. Anquetil, in Législation Orien- tale, follows the same argument as Burke would later use in his impeachment of Warren Hastings: he condemns British colonial expansion with an appeal to time-honoured rights