Field Notes from an Armchair Ethnographer: Nicolaas Witsen’s Noord En Oost Tartarye

As a seventeenth-century Dutchman who served in both public-office in Amsterdam and on the board of the Dutch East India Company, Nicolaas Witsen was very much at the center of an expanding early modern economy. Among his interests were Russia and the vast expanses of Eurasia generally known in Europe as Tartary. Witsen never made it as far as Tartary himself but he published a massive account about it, Noord en Oost Tartarye (editions in 1692, 1705, 1785). Even if it long remained somewhat outside the canon of early modern ethnographies/travel literature about Russia and its borderlands, Noord en Oost Tartarye is the object of enquiry at the center of this paper exploring the composition and history/circulation of Witsen’s magnus opus.