Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu

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ORIENTAL DESPOTISM AND EUROPEAN ORIENTALISM: BOTERO TO MONTESQUIEU

JOAN-PAU RUBIÉS London School of Economics and Political Science

A The issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to dis- tinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientiﬁc and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important diﬀerences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.

True and legitimate Government is necessarily limited... the observance of laws, the preservation of liberty and the love of one’s country are the fertile sources of all great things and of all ﬁne actions. Diderot, Encyclopédie

Oriental Despotism as a European Fantasy Few examples within the history of ideas seem as likely to fit within the controversial “orientalist” thesis popular in post-colonial historiog- raphy as the concept of “oriental despotism,” especially as it was famously formulated by Montesquieu (albeit ultimately on the basis of Aristotle) as central to the political thought of the Enlightenment. The historical influence of the concept which Montesquieu crystallized in the Esprit des lois needs little argument, since (as Franco Venturi showed) it was widely discussed within the Enlightenment, and, for example, cast its shadow upon the early justification and criticism of the British conquest

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of India.1 The case for treating the European image of Asian despotism as a pure fantasy, made by writers like Alain Grossrichard in his Structure du sérail (1979), is plausible enough, as it is rooted in contem- porary sources.2 As he notes, it was Voltaire who, reacting against Montesquieu, wrote of despotic governments that “it is quite wrong that such a government exists and, it seems too, quite wrong to think that it could ever exist,” placing the issue of ﬁctionalization at the heart of the criticism of European images of Asia.3 However, recent discussions of “orientalism,” supported by an increasing body of historically-informed scholarship (contrasting with the largely ideological emphasis of the orig- inal debate), have made it clear that the issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far form simple. Whilst Voltaire would seem to justify, at least in part, the critical emphasis of later writers like Edward Said (whose “Foucaultian” perspective appears in retrospect to be rather “Voltaireian”), in fact, I would argue, the history of the concept of oriental despotism is still in need of reassessment.4 For the sake of clarity, the “orientalist” thesis can be broken down into two propositions, which I will illustrate with reference to our case: First, and above all, “orientalism” is a pseudo-science. European dis- courses about “the East,” and especially those concerned with such sweeping concepts as “oriental despotism,” did not respond