“It may, perhaps, be laid down as an invariable maxim, that the condition of the female part of society in any nation will furnish a tolerably just criterion of the degree of civilization to which that nation has arrived” (John Barrow, Travels in China [1804]). Toleration and pluralism were central tenets of the liberal culture that evolved over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But so, too, was an obsessive ranking of different cultures according to “the degree of civilization” they had attained, which would become, in turn, justification for an expansionist British trade and imperial policy. In this paper, I’ll be looking at the way nineteenth-century British liberal culture negotiated the challenges of an alien and what it took to be illiberal cultural practice in China – footbinding – and at the way this and other alien practices, and the attitude towards women they implied, allowed the British to de-humanise the Chinese, becoming part of the self-vindication and self-absolution of an imperial nation. 

            In this paper, I examine the important contribution of the German naturalist Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World (1776/7) to eighteenth-century debates about race and the nature of humanity. Forster describes accompanying Captain James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific, drawing on the journals of his father naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and his experiences of working as his father’s assistant during the expedition. Nigel Leask describes A Voyage as “in many ways a milestone for romantic period travel writing, establishing the principles which would increasingly be demanded from scientific travel writers over the next half-century” [1].
            I investigate the relationship between Forster’s status as a pioneer of Romantic “scientific” travel writing and the racial taxonomy he proposes.  Forster depicts the multiplicity of Polynesian culture as a linear hierarchy, with whiteness associated with status and civility, and blackness with lowliness and labor. For instance, when describing Tahitian society, he predicts that the sun “will blacken” the skin of the laboring class “and they will dwindle away”, while the “pampered race… will preserve all the advantages of a superior elegance of form…and of a purer color by indulging their voracious appetite, and living in absolute idleness”. Forster supports this racial hierarchy with accounts of the indigenous peoples of Easter Island, the Friendly and Society Islands and New Zealand.  Forster argues that these racial differences demonstrate that South Seas societies had degenerated from their original condition of primitive virtue, and begun to emulate the inequality and corruption of European societies, forecasting that “[a]t last the common people will perceive these grievances, and…will bring on a revolution”. Forster contributes to Enlightenment thinking of the time by presenting his travel experiences as empirical data with which to address broader philosophical questions about the nature of humanity. But Forster is also proto-Romantic in his revolutionary anti-colonialism and his celebration of indigenous societies as “rough, passionate, revengeful, but likewise brave, sincere and true” [2].    I argue that Forster’s inverted model of racial hierarchies constitutes a fissure between existing Enlightenment and emerging Romantic models of race.

         [1] Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetic of Travel Writing 1770-1840: “From an Antique Land” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 41.

         [2] Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (London: B. White, 1777) p. 367, p. 536.

The intellectual and cultural archeology of Asia offers a fascinating glimpse of a scintillating yet intermittent stream of Reason-based thinking in the region. Despite its great social and ethical promise, despite its universal embrace and relevance, the Naturalist, Materialist approach of yore failed to become the dominant thought in Asia. What were the forces that pushed that tradition back into a civilizational memory lapse?  
 
 It is possible to reconstruct the glorious Rationalist thought traditions of Asia by examining the works of Scholars and Intellectuals past and present and by looking at their continued relevance in modern times. This would help establish that Freethinking and a secular understanding of society and of nature are indigenous to Asia too, consequently defeating the notion that Reason, Humanism, Human Rights and indeed Science are imports from the Western world. That argument and ruse would then no longer be available to tyrants and dictators, emerging and established, to claim that Universal values are alien to the region and hence inappropriate and unsuitable. The implication of a Postmodern approach to universal values and the idea of common humanity has had disastrous consequences, and not just in Academia where the fad appears to be now receding. Such an exercise to locate Reason in civilizations before and after the European will also help Reason clear the taint of having being associated with Colonialism and Imperial ambitions which went beyond the conquest of territories and a European project.  
 
 In this paper I would like to present the related key ideas and notions with the appropriate factual references to make my case.