Europe’s Early Modern ‘Tolerance’ Toward Asia

On October 25, 1944, while the German Nazis were destroying the capital of Poland, Warsaw, among the many buildings they razed was a library: Biblioteka Ordynacji Krasińskich. With it, they destroyed all the known Polish accounts of travels to South Asia in the 18th century. There were only two such confirmed accounts. Each had been written in completely different circumstances, by authors apparently unrelated to one another, and yet both manuscripts somehow ended up in the same library – and unluckily too.

The travelogues had been written by Polish nobles who found employment in the forces of Western European forces that by the 18th century were firmly established in the Indian Ocean. T.A. Dzwonkowski spent four years (1789-1793) in the region, from South Africa to the Dutch East Indies, as part of a military expedition of the ruler of the Netherlands. J.M.K. Wikliński, a half-French, half-Polish noble, served in the French army, and for a large part of the 1770s was posted on Mauritius and in South India. Despite the 1944 destruction of the Warsaw library where both texts were held, two more copies of each of the manuscripts were located elsewhere.

A particularly interesting aspect of both travelogues is that the two Polish nobles were full of tolerance and admiration for the people of the Indian Ocean.

Dzwonkowski’s account is mostly nonjudgmental. Even when writing about aspects of Asian culture that he must have found completely alien, he mostly notes them down matter-of-factly. The Hindus in India worships trees and cows, and call the latter “mothers”; the Sinhalese worship snakes, he writes, without any additional commentary. The Polish noble does not cast judgment even when mentioning the Hindu custom of widow-burning (which is one place of his account where most of us, at least me, do have a strongly negative moral opinion).

Interestingly, both Polish travelers also encountered couples in which a European man had married anAsian woman, which is similarly accepted without editorializing. In the case of Dzwonkowski, he met a Polish Jew who owned a plantation on Sri Lanka and whose father had married a local woman. He similarly met a Polish officer who had married a Southeast Asian woman. There are barely two to three paragraphs in Dzwonkowski’s whole travelogue that we would consider racist, if we applied a modern lens.

The other Polish traveler, Wikliński, in turn, is full of judgment, but it is mostly positive – sometimes even full of soaring admiration. He stayed in the capital of Mysore, a strong South Indian state, and called the palace of its ruler “the most beautiful place in the world.” Wikliński went on to write: “I find it strange that our continent perceives all Asian nations as simple and uncivilized peoples; those nations have been gifted more by God’s providence than us.”

What is most striking is that both of these Polish authors are actually “anti-colonial” and that too in a period when slow conquest was yet to turn into full-fledged colonialism. This is even more striking given that both of the Polish nobles served colonial European powers. Dzwonkowski vehemently censured the usage of Catholicism as a means of conquest by the Portuguese; he was also very critical of the Dutch rule on Sri Lanka and in Southeast Asia. In the latter case, he pointed out that the Dutch would destroy all nutmeg tree cultivation on the Moluccas that was not under their control, to root out any competition. He concluded: “This is merchant politics: it is better to chop, to burn or to drown than leave anything else to others for their use.” Such accounts stand in stark contrast to the later justifications of European rule over Asia as bringing progress and justice.

For Wikliński the issue is a bit more complex: he is very critical of the European rule in India but not of its French variety. It should be added that Wikliński wrote in French – Dzwonkowski, in turn, wrote in Polish and years after he stopped serving the Dutch. When writing his account, Dzwonkowski had clearly settled down and harbored no further ambition of going back to Asia. Wikliński, in turn, must have hoped the French would employ him again when he was writing his memoir. Thus, Wikliński did not spare harsh words about Europeans in India, and repeated several times that the Indian rulers want to get rid of European dominance, but at the same time he added that those rulers would happily pay someone to help them do so. In his vision, that “someone” was to be the French, who would earn a fortune by expelling the British and the Dutch from India.

And thus one is prone to ask: Why do these two travelogues stand out? Is it because we have a very small sample here and the authors randomly turned out to hold similar views? Or is it because the authors were Polish and thus did not represent a colonial European power (especially not one present in Asia)? However, they still represented the White race and the Christian civilization, the representatives of which by the 18th century, for all we know, did feel in some ways superior to Asians. The already-quoted passage from Wikliński indicated this: “I find it strange that our continent perceives all Asian nations as simple and uncivilized peoples.” Wikliński did not perceive Asians that way, but admitted that other Europeans did.

These questions will remain likely unanswered, barring an undiscovered trove of Polish travelogues. However, a broader conclusion that I could risk is this: Yes, before the 19th century Europe mostly did feel superior to Asia, but less than in the 19th century, and not in every way.

In the 18th century, even the British in India did not behave simply like aloof White masters. British firearms used in India in that period were not more advanced than Indian ones; British men would often marry Indian women (or, more commonly, keep them as lovers), and some of them would strive to learn Indian languages, rather than impose English on Indians. One of the most established historians of early modern India, the late C.A. Bayly, concluded as much in his “Empire and Information”: through the 18th century, the British did not feel that superior to Indians; some of them even respected parts of Indian scientific knowledge.

That changed in the 19th century – the period that saw the birth of the “White man’s burden” narrative. Until a certain point in the 18th century, clashes between Europeans and Indians brought various results, including European losses, thus probably inspiring a cautious respect toward the enemy. But by the mid-19th century, the British had conquered most of India. Several European powers then proceeded to conquer Africa. In the same period, European advantages in technology, including warfare, became more pronounced; sometimes even crushing.

Instead of the 18th century British efforts to master the languages of Indian elites, such as the Persians, in the 19th century they simply began to expect Indian elites to learn English. In the United Kingdom, nascent evangelizing societies insisted that colonialism must be accompanied by proselytism; thus missionaries were mostly given a free hand to spread Christianity. Finally, the introduction of more comfortable steamship travel, and opening of the Suez Channel, which shortened the journey from Europe to India, meant that British women could more easily move to South Asia with their husbands, putting an end to the practice of keeping Indian wives.

This is not to say that in the 16th-18th century, the picture was all rosy and that Europeans would come to India to play cards, drink wine, and go hunting with their Indian peers. Of course, they had come to purchase spices for the lowest possible price, and their trade policy soon turned to coercion and then to conquest. It is also clear that many of them detested Indians.

I am, for instance, currently reading the 18th century dispatches of British envoys and officers from Indian royal courts, some of which are full of contempt and distrust for Indians (unlike the accounts of Dzwonkowski and Wikliński). And thus, it is certainly important to differentiate between different authors, with an eye toward each one’s background and motives. A Polish author would indeed feel much less pressed to justify military conquest and strong-arm mercantilism than a British, a French, or a Dutch one. At the same time, in some ways many of these earlier authors, including Western Europeans, were still more tolerant – though only in comparison, of course – than their 19th century successors.

None of the above should, of course, lead us to pretend that there was no European colonialism, or to claim that it somehow should be justified. Yet, it is worth pointing out that at times, the European pre-modern narratives on Asia were complex, and not entirely devoid of open-mindedness and admiration.