Imagining East Asia: The Failure of National Knowledge in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589–1600)

This chapter focusses on The Principal Navigations of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt. This massive collection of English exploits all over the known world, designed to boost national self-confidence, was first printed in 1589, that is, decades before the English actually set foot in East Asia. Literary encounters thus preceded personal ones and, the chapter suggests, the English failed in East Asia even before they managed to get there. Unable to procure first-hand knowledge by English writers, Hakluyt had to resort to copying reports by England’s Catholic rivals, thus undermining the highly patriotic ambitions of his own book project. At the same time, Hakluyt’s failure to come to terms with East Asia on the basis of specifically English information occurred together with a shift in perspective, away from a narrowly national one to a mercantile one – a shift of perspective that would eventually be crucial to England’s rise to power on the global stage of trade and colonialism. The essay makes a strong argument for studying representational strategies in literary texts about East Asia and linking them to socio-historical contexts of the cultures in which the target audiences – in this case, English and Western readers – abide.