Travel Books

                     Travel Books 
                                  

There are many reasons why individuals have traveled beyond their own societies. Some travelers may have simply desired to satisfy curiosity about the larger world. Until recent times, however, did travelers start their journey for reasons other than mere curiosity. While the travelers' accounts give much valuable information on these foreign lands and provide a window for the understanding of the local cultures and histories, they are also a mirror to the travelers themselves, for these accounts help them to have a better understanding of themselves. 

Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of large, imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about their realms. The Greek historian Herodotus reported on his travels in Egypt and Anatolia in researching the history of the Persian wars. The Chinese envoy Zhang Qian described much of central Asia as far west as Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) on the basis of travels undertaken in the first century BCE while searching for allies for the Han dynasty. Hellenistic and Roman geographers such as Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder relied on their own travels through much of the Mediterranean world as well as reports of other travelers to compile vast compendia of geographical knowledge. 

During the postclassical era (about 500 to 1500 CE), trade and pilgrimage emerged as major incentives for travel to foreign lands. Muslim merchants sought trading opportunities throughout much of the eastern hemisphere. They described lands, peoples, and commercial products of the Indian Ocean basin from east Africa to Indonesia, and they supplied the first written accounts of societies in Sub-Saharan West Africa. While merchants set out in search of trade and profit, devout Muslims traveled as pilgrims to Mecca to make their hajj and visit the holy sites of Islam. Since the prophet Muhammad's original pilgrimage to Mecca, untold millions of Muslims have followed his example, and thousands of hajj accounts have related their experiences. East Asian travelers were not quite so prominent as Muslims during the postclassical era, but they too followed many of the highways and sea lanes of the eastern hemisphere. Chinese merchants frequently visited southeast Asia and India, occasionally venturing even to east Africa, and devout East Asian Buddhists undertook distant pilgrimages. Between the 5th and 9th centuries CE, hundreds and possibly even thousands of Chinese Buddhists traveled to India to study with Buddhist teachers,  collect sacred texts, and visit holy sites. Written accounts recorded the experiences of m any pilgrims, such as Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing. Though not so num erous as the Chinese pilgrims, Buddhists from Japan, Korea, and other lands also ventured abroad in the interests of spiritual enlightenm ent.

 Medieval Europeans did not hit the roads in such large num bers as their M uslim and East Asian counterparts during the early part of the postclassical era, although gradually increasing crow ds of Christian pilgrims flowed to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago deCom postela (in northern Spain), and other sites. A fter the 12th century, how ever, m erchants, pilgrims, and missionaries from medieval Europe traveled widely and left num erous travel accounts, of w hich Marco Polo's description of his travels and sojourn in China is the best know n. As they became familiar with the larger w orld of the eastern hemisphere—-and the profitable commercial opportunities that it offered—European people w orked to find new and m ore direct routes to Asian and African m arkets. Their efforts took them not only to all parts of the eastern hemisphere, but eventually to the Am ericas and O ceania as well.

 If M uslim and Chinese peoples dominated travel and travel writing in postclassical tim es, European explorers, conquerors, m erchants, and missionaries took center stage during the early m odern era (about 1500 to 1800 CE). By no m eans did M uslim and Chinese travel come to a halt in early m odern tim es. But European peoples ventured to the distant corners of the globe, and European printing presses churned out thousands of travel accounts that described foreign lands and peoples for a reading public w ith an apparently insatiable appetite for new s about the larger w orld. The volume o f travel literature w as so great that several editors, including G iam battista Ramusio, Richard Hakluyt, Theodore de Bry, and Samuel Purchas, assembled num erous travel accounts and made them available in enorm ous published collections. 

D uring the 19th century, European travelers made their way to the in terior regions o f A frica and the Am ericas, generating a fresh round of travel writing as they did so. Meanw hile, European colonial administrators devoted num erous w ritings to the societies of their colonial subjects, particularly in Asian and A frican colonies they established. By midcentury, attention was flowing also in the o ther direction. Pain fully aw are of the military and technological prow ess of European and Euro-Am erican societies, A sian travelers in particular visited Europe and the U nited States in hopes o f discovering principles useful for the reorganisation of their own societies. Among the m ost prominent of these travelers w ho made extensive use of their overseas observations and experiences in their own writings were the Japanese reforme r Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.

By Arsalan Qureshi