The ethnographic impulse

The description of peoples, their nature, customs, religion, forms of government, and language, is so embedded in the travel writing produced in Europe after the sixteenth century that one assumes ethnography to be essential to the genre. In England this assumption became part of the justification for the most representative form of this writing, the travel collections published from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Already in 1577 one of the first of these collectors, Richard Willes, had announced that all branches of learning have their 'special times' of flourishing, and 'now' was the time of geography. In Renaissance learning geography, or cosmography, acted as an encyclopaedic synthesis for the description of the world. Therefore, the description of peoples became the empirical foundation for a general rewriting of ‘natural and moral history’ within a new cosmography made possible by the navigations of the period. As Awnsham and John Churchill wrote in the preface to their 1704 Collection of Voyages and Travels: