History Department Alum, Benjamin Schmidt '94:
Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe's Early Modern World
Benjamin Schmidt
"Benjamin Schmidt has written a remarkable and remarkably innovative account of a remarkable phenomenon. Inventing Exoticism is a very substantial contribution to the study of the cultural history of early modern perceptions of the non-European world, to the history of the book, and to the history of the economics and the sociology of the flow of information. It shows for the first time just how instrumental the concern with the exotic was in the creation of the modern image of Europe and of Europe's place in an increasingly global world."—Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles
"A fascinating and brilliantly resourceful study of early modern Dutch geography. In energetic and readable prose, Inventing Exoticism marshals a wealth of carefully indexed details around big picture questions about how we see other regions and peoples."—Mary C. Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lavishly illustrated and impressively interdisciplinary, Inventing Exoticism narrates a vital chapter in the history of European exoticism and Europe's perception of its place in the world. It traces the production and consumption of early modern exotic imagery to elucidate processes of cultural mediation in an earlier age of empire.