Locke and Travel literature

By the time of his death, Locke owned one of the largest collections of travel literature ever assembled in Britain. It comprised 195 books, including the massive collections of Ramusio, de Bry, Thévenot, Hakluyt, Purchas, and the accounts of the voyages of Hariot to Virginia, de Léry to Brazil, Sandys to the Ottoman Empire, Gage to the West Indies, and Choisy to Siam. His library also hosted accounts of minor voyages, many volumes of maps and a set of ethnographic illustrations “of the inhabitants of severall remote parts of the world espetially the East Indies”1. Locke’s works, journals and commonplace books bear witness to his great interest in travel accounts, and the enormous impact the reading of them had on the development of his views on human nature, social custom, religion, ritual, comparative government, coinage, medicine, and many other matters. Numerous scholars have investigated the reasons underlying Locke’s enthusiasm for travel accounts, which he seems to have regarded more as a locus of potentially useful information than as a source of entertainment. The contributions in the volume shed new light on this.