In 1777 Edmund Burke remarked that for his contemporaries "the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once." The period from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century had seen a massive increase in Britain's knowledge of the non-European peoples of the wider world, and this was reflected in the proliferation of travel accounts of every kind. This is a history of British perceptions of the exotic peoples and lands of Asia, North...