Political Judgement between Empirical Experience and Scholarly Tradition: Engelbert Kaempfer's Report on Persia (1684-85)

Abstract

The article attempts a reconstruction of the ways in which the pro duction of knowledge about Persia was organised by Engelbert Kaempfer in his writings. This late seventeenth century German traveller to Asia has been unfailingly commended for his critical empiricism. While this has been taken for granted in thefield of natural sciences—Kaempfer was a famous physician and botanist—it is more difficult, when searching for the foundations of his judgement about the political system of Persia, to distinguish between experience and scholarly tradition. The article provides a survey of the information Kaempfer had to rely upon. A comparison between these sources and the report itself gives us some insight into the processes through which the production of socio-political knowledge about an alien world took place and how the encounter with the alien exercised an influence on the political judgement of a seventeenth century explorer.