Review by SFI Professor Cris Moore
Andrea Wulf is a historian, writer, and an SFI Miller Scholar. I’m fortunate to have read several of her books, each of which opens a window onto the science and philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries — from Alexander von Humboldt’s founding of biogeography, to the international campaign to observe the transit of Venus in the midst of war, to the German Romantics’ quest for self-definition. Her style is both precise and personal, giving us a sense of the extraordinary people who led these efforts, and how their drive for discovery animated them.
In her newest book, The Traveler, Wulf gives us George Forster. He was an explorer and naturalist who embraced encounters with other cultures. He possessed an extraordinary broad-mindedness, seeing dignity and universality among everyone he met. As Wulf writes, “He found kinship where others found inferiority.” His views would be rare in any age — including, sadly, our own — but they were an especially brave departure from the imperial aims of Europe at the time.
George began his career at the age of 10 with an expedition from Germany to Russia and the Kalmyk Steppe. At 17 he joined James Cook’s expeditions to the Antarctic and the Pacific. While these expeditions included a domineering father, who later grasped at many of George’s achievements as his own, George quickly emerged as an independent observer of the natural and human world.
Wulf writes that Forster “observed with both his mind and his heart.” He sought to learn the language, beliefs, and practices of each society they met, including the Māori, Tahitians, and Tongans, and approached them as humans worthy of respect. When Europeans responded to what they viewed as theft or trespassing with deadly violence, he recognized the legitimacy of the islander’s perspectives. “Surely these people had a right to look on our men as a set of invaders,” he wrote. For him, the colonial conceit that these people were mere “savages” to be subdued or “civilized” was impossible to maintain.
Importantly, his respect for these cultures was not naive romanticization or empty relativism. He decried the commodification of women, and was disgusted by how male islanders forced them to offer sex to the Europeans (and how many Europeans cheerfully accepted). He recognized that suffering, wickedness, and war existed among the Pacific peoples, and sadly concluded that “great imperfections cannot be excluded from the best of human societies.” No culture has a monopoly on good or evil.
Nevertheless, the structure of these societies inspired political views that he would take back home with him. In Tahiti, he wrote admiringly that “The lowest man in the nation speaks as freely with his king as with his equal.”
Wulf traces how this democratic instinct became central to his maturing politics: later he wrote: “The happiness of the tame slave is just as fictitious as the happiness of the free savage.”
On his return, Forster was made a member of the Royal Society (at the age of 22!), and his book A Voyage Around the World was well-received. He befriended multiple intellectuals of the age, including Benjamin Franklin and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and corresponded with Lessing and Goethe. On his travels, he was feted and celebrated by strangers, academics, and socialites. Wulf, through his letters, paints a dizzying picture of his reception in the salons of high society.
Despite these heady beginnings and good connections, Forster was isolated and overworked during much of his career. He took positions in Vilnius and Mainz rather than in the cultural centers where he would have flourished. He was burdened by loneliness, his finances, and an unhappy marriage in which his egalitarian instincts – to share his wife with other lovers – were stretched to the breaking point.
Despite all this, Forster was incredibly productive. He publicly disputed the racial theories of Immanuel Kant and others who justified slavery on the basis of European superiority. He also travelled and wrote with the young Alexander von Humboldt, who later revered him as a mentor and a naturalist. Along with all his humanistic perceptions, Forster was also a gifted observer and illustrator of plants and animals.
Near the end of his life, Forster was given an opportunity to act on his revolutionary ideals. When the French army took over Mainz, where he was head librarian, Forster welcomed them as the instrument of liberty. With fiery speeches, he became a leader of the Mainz Republic, and traveled to Paris to ask for it to become part of France — where he found the Reign of Terror in full swing.
As Wulf carefully and movingly details, Forster’s feelings about the revolution swung back and forth. On seeing the jockeying for power, the endless denunciations, and the busy guillotine, he wrote: “this court of blood is a disgrace of the revolution.” But later on he rationalized, writing that “the benefits of the revolution” required the “rivers of blood” and the “raw power of the crowds.” To this reader, his first reaction is truer to his human instincts of his youth.
Meanwhile, the Prussians and Austrians had retaken Mainz, extinguishing Forster’s brief republic and rendering him stateless. Germany viewed him as a traitor, and many of his intellectual and literary friends had distanced themselves from him when he embraced the Revolution. He died in poverty and illness in Paris in 39, far too soon.
Despite this sad end, Wulf makes the arc of Forster’s life glorious. She ends with an epilogue tracing his lasting impact on science, literature, and politics.
George Forster embodies the hopeful hypothesis of liberal science: that if we observe the world with an open mind, we will inevitably be drawn to a love for all the creatures in it, and all the forms of humanity upon it. Time will tell if that is true. For now, Andrea Wulf deserves our thanks for introducing us to this wonderful character.
MORE
- September 3, 2026: The Traveler was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.