“Savages, Romans, and Despots is an informative, valuable, delightfully readable book. It will be particularly interesting to those unfamiliar with how writers of the early modern period envisioned themselves through their real and imagined encounters with people of other times and places. Anthropologists and intellectual historians alike will be enticed by this highly accessible account to approach these major thinkers anew.”

Lawrence Rosen, Princeton University

“Launay has taken a familiar theme and utterly transformed it. No other account of the European self-imagining through the mirror of multiple others covers so wide a range of peoples and places with such acuity and verve as he has done—this is an original, compelling, and persuasive book.”

Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles

“Original, persuasive, and accessible, Savages, Romans, and Despots offers a fascinating narrative on ideas of time, space, and history—both of the observer and of the observed society. Launay’s strong sense of history and context in the study of anthropology’s prehistory effectively relinks anthropology to wider currents in contemporary social thought.”

Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College

"This book, 'more than twenty years in the making' (p. 221), reflects the long, slow, deliberate reading of great authors, forgotten explorers, and contemporary scholars who have shaped the concepts of 'others' which have defined 'ourselves' as modern Europeans. It is a learned, highly readable volume."

Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines

"Launay’s vast scope of knowledge and evident erudition are major strengths of this book. . . .this is a remarkably comprehensive survey of philosophical representations of human difference in early modern Europe. It is clearly written enough for students and general readers, and scrupulously researched enough to provide new information to specialists in the field."

American Historical Review

"Savages, Romans and Despots takes the reader on an intellectual journey across the centuries. . . . Launay brings his training as an anthropologist to reread familiar and less familiar authors from innovative angles to provide new insights about how Europeans understood themselves geographically, temporally, and historically."

H-France Review

"To the question of how early modern Europeans developed their sense of self, Robert Launay. . . provides a comprehensive answer in Savages, Romans, and Despots. He argues that early modern Europeans constructed their identity in contrast to non-European ‘others’. Launay circumvents a theoretical debate on what ‘the Other’ is and rejects a uniform historical definition. Instead, he pragmatically allows the ‘others’ to be any contrasting representation of non-European peoples, which often took the form of ‘savages’, ‘Orientals’, ‘ancients’ and ‘despots’. . . .The result is a rich and rewarding book with many cases of how European thinkers employed the representation of ‘others’ in their texts on political theory, philosophy, history, missionary expeditions, law and religion."

European History Review