For all that scholars have challenged the notion that the novel rose in conjunction with Enlightenment individualism, empiricism, and the modern nation-state, it’s still largely seen as an essentially Eurocentric form that can tell us much about how authors and readers thought about the rest of the world but little about the world itself. Ultimately turning to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas as an example, this chapter makes a case for how decentralizing Europe from our perceptions of eighteenth-century geographical discourse changes what literary scholars might see and say about the continuities between the realist novel and the global contexts from which it grew.