Isabella Bird treated non-Western civilizations as deserving respect, not conquest

Evidence

By 1882, the work was in its seventh edition; the last (eighth) edition, published by Putnam’s, appeared in 1912. The book has been translated into French. This was only one of many books by Isabella Bird. Each of her journeys produced at least one volume. All are still worth reading. She was an enthusiastic photographer, and carried the cumbersome apparatus of those days so that she could take her own pictures in remote places. Her books on China, Korea, and Japan show an extraordinary ability to wander off the beaten track of Western European thought. “We go forward with ‘a light heart,’” she warned in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1900), “along with other European empires, not hesitating, for the sake of commercial advantages, to break up in the case of a fourth of the human race the most ancient of earth’s existing civilizations, without giving any equivalent… . It is essential for us to see quite clearly that our Western ideas find themselves confronted, not with barbarism or with debased theories of morals, but with an elaborate and antique civilization which has many claims to our respect and even admiration.” — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 15

Categorization

• XREF: Bird’s anti-imperial warning foreshadows the same critique of the ‘civilizing mission’ found across my imperial historiography shelf (A Mission to Civilize, Black Marxism). — connects to: Isabella Bird’s travel writing rejected Victorian imperial condescension toward other peoples — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 16

Related

• Isabella Bird’s travel writing rejected Victorian imperial condescension toward other peoples (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Isabella Bird’s travel writing rejected Victorian imperial condescension toward other peoples #corroborates (0.95) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 16