Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat

Roberts, Edmund, 1784-1836Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
983K words
Chapters
99

Tags

English Originals World HistoryPolitics Diplomatic RecordsVoyage NarrativeTravel GuideDocumentary Narrative19th CenturyExotic CultureCultural ObservationEthnography

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat by Edmund RobertsAuthor: Roberts, Edmund, 1784-1836,Language: English, Class: DS: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Asia, Release Date: Oct 30, 2013

Editor's review

This is Edmund Roberts's account of his 1830s embassy to the courts of Cochinchina, Siam, and Muscat, a primary source on early nineteenth-century Western relations with Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Its value is not literary narrative but a window onto court ceremonial, trading conditions, ports, and political arrangements as observed by an American envoy, useful to researchers of early American trade and diplomacy in Asia and of Southeast Asian regional history. The Project Gutenberg edition is easy to search and cite and suits comparative reading as a historical source. Note that the author carries the perspectives and prejudices of his time, and his judgments need corroboration against other contemporary materials. It is aimed at desk research, specialized writing, or readers interested in nineteenth-century Asian foreign relations, not at casual reading for plot.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface and itinerary first to establish the embassy's route and timeline, then move into the chapters.
  2. Mark passages on trade goods, tariffs, and court ceremonial for later topical searching.
  3. Keep a nineteenth-century map of Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula at hand to follow the route and ease spatial comprehension.
  4. Keep a critical distance from the author's value judgments and check key claims against other contemporary accounts.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this a good introduction to Southeast Asian history? Not really. It is an embassy itinerary without modern background or annotation, and its place names, titles, and trade terms are unfriendly to beginners. A better approach is to read a regional history survey first, then consult this as supplementary primary material for specific chapters.
Which regions does the book focus on? According to the title and contents, it mainly concerns the courts of Cochinchina, Siam, and Muscat and their related ports. Readers can divide it into three geographical sections, attending to local political structures, foreign trade conditions, and the embassy's dealings with each court.
What should I note about using the Project Gutenberg edition? It is a public-domain electronic text, easy to search, copy, and cite, but it usually lacks modern editorial notes and a scholarly introduction, and the layout is plain. When citing, check the original page information and note nineteenth-century spelling and punctuation differences, consulting other editions where necessary.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Roberts, Edmund, 1784-1836 Author · American · 1784–1836

Edmund Roberts (1784–1836) was an American merchant and diplomat. In the early nineteenth century he led embassies to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, concluding treaties with Siam (present-day Thailand) and Muscat (present-day Oman); these diplomatic missions constitute the main documented episodes of his life. His representative work, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat, records the journey of this embassy and belongs to the nineteenth-century genre of Western diplomatic and travel accounts, dealing with the politics, trade, and customs of Southeast Asia and the Middle East and offering value as historical source material. Public information is limited: details of his early life, education, and official career are largely unavailable, and only one of his works is held in this collection.