SOURCE: Irimia, Mihaela. “Defoe and Cantemir: Eighteenth-Century Explorers, West and East.” In 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Vol. 3, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Laura Morrow, pp. 239-49. New York: AMS Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Irimia compares Cantemir's The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire and Defoe's A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, finding that the authors are linked by their early eighteenth-century analyses of Empire.

I want to look at Defoe and Cantemir as explorers in space and time. In so doing, I will consider two works that are given relatively little attention, if any at all, today. One is A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, which we could easily dismiss from the terrain of literature because it looks so much like a Whitaker avant la lettre, or a Baedeker before...