Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet, 1774-1904 (review)

This carefully researched and well-written study provides a significant if small additional piece of the puzzle that is the history of the British-Tibetan relationship. It is premised upon a historical comparison of two incursions from northern India into Tibet: the first between 1774 and 1775, by George Bogle under Warren Hastings, and the second between 1903 and 1904, by Francis Younghusband under George Curzon. This book also makes a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the evolution of British imperialism from just before to just after the nineteenth century, from Enlightenment open-mindedness to late-Victorian high imperialism. Gordon T. Stewart tells a good story, or several of them: the story of Bogle's journey from a Scottish Enlightenment upbringing to riches in India and a friendship in Tibet with the Panchen or Tashi Lama (Teshoo, as Kipling wrote); the story of "cross-cultural romances" between Anglo-Indian men and Asian women (74); and the story of Younghusband's application of evangelical and military training to an unsympathetic treatment of the Tibetans prior to joining the World Congress of Faiths, perhaps as a result of his exposure to Buddhism in Tibet. Given that these and other qualities recommend this book, why am I less than fully satisfied with it?

Perhaps disciplinary difference is part of the explanation. As Stewart, a historian, comments, the problem with the Western tendency to mythologize Tibet as a spiritual Shangri-La "is compounded by the fact that when Tibet is studied in Western universities the scholarly endeavor is most often located in departments of religion rather than history or anthropology or sociology." Journeys to Empire avoids reducing Tibet to a "site of exceptional religiosity" by marshalling historical details of "economic, political, cultural, and regional forces" (241). It succeeds in showing how Tibet was pressurized from inside by competition between the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama and from outside between China's fluctuating claims to sovereignty over it and British India's mounting pressure to secure it, whether diplomatically or militarily, as a free market and a trade route to China. Even so, this is neither a book about Tibet nor about Buddhism; it is about the relation between the Scottish Enlightenment and British imperialism as enacted in relationship to Tibet. I miss both a more Tibet-centered perspective and the related deep knowledge of Tibetan culture and Buddhism that religious studies and postcolonial scholars often bring to this subject.

Perhaps I unfairly expect this book to do other than its stated intention, which is clear enough in its subtitle. Thus Stewart concludes: "These two encounters between Britain and Tibet in 1774-1775 and 1903-1904 were not about religion either for the Tibetans or for the British. They were about empires and resistance to empires" (253). This argument is reasonably supported by Journeys to Empire, but then it lumps Tibet in as an empire comparable to Britain or China. The book also draws a questionable parallel between the bolstering of British imperialism by evangelical Christianity and the Buddhist hierarchy's exercise of political, economic, and religious authority in Tibet. While it warns against the Western mystification of Tibet, it closes by focusing on the Panchen Lama's 1775 guidebook to the mystical land of Shambala, rather than, for instance, upon daily monastic or economic life. Stewart finally remarks that "the serendipity of history had brought two human experiments in enlightenment together" (252). This equation of the European Enlightenment with Buddhist enlightenment-like the equation of the historical role of Christianity in imperial violence with that of Buddhism-oversimplifies European history and bespeaks a profound lack of knowledge about the history and doctrine of Buddhism. Equating the British Empire's exercise of aggression around the globe with the "empire" of Buddhist rule in Tibet reinscribes the prejudices associated with the Enlightenment and European...