Travel and colonialism

Travel and travel narratives shaped the way we understand the colonial and postcolonial world, and their importance to postcolonial studies has generated several book-length accounts in recent years. Colonialism encompasses the stories of many kinds of travellers with many motives, European merchant venturers, colonial officials, explorers, missionaries, settlers and others become bound together with people of the colonized spaces, who themselves, as we will see, engaged in travel between their homelands and the world beyond.

Colonization may have begun, as was once remarked of the acquisition of the British Empire, ‘in a fit of absent-mindedness’, but it rapidly evolved into a way of consolidating these encounters in an emerging structure of conscious power and dominance. In the same way the early, random stories of encounter, which emerged as Europeans moved out to new lands, rapidly evolved into accounts that sought to impose European patterns and ideas on the experience of their expanding physical world. A full account of colonial travel literature might best begin by analysing some of the early ways the world was represented by these first random travellers beyond the then known world and how their narratives both shaped the imaginations of those who followed and inspired their curiosity and their cupidity. It might also consider how travel narratives began to shift the perspectives of Europeans as they began to embrace the wider horizons the travellers and their accounts brought home.