Della Valle's naturalistic and antiquarian gaze owed a great deal to his immediate intellectual environment, but is impossible to understand without the three centuries and a half of travel writing which separated him from Marco Polo. It is in particular necessary to assess the impact of the multiplication of travel narratives throughout the sixteenth century. These were important, I would argue, not for their sheer quantity, but for the position which they occupied in a structure of discourse. They offered images of distant, other worlds, among which India was only one peculiar location. These worlds became far less distant because European presence was continuous, in the form of a colonial activity whose most important effect was not so much the establishment of western dominance (only relative in Asia in the sixteenth century) as the consolidation of structural interaction. The crucial issue is not therefore simply which images were transmitted (although they mattered), but also which was the authority given to travel literature within a multi-faceted cosmo-graphical discourse.

Within the cosmographical genres of the Renaissance, no theme had implications as profound as the analysis of human diversity, and especially cultural and religious diversity. The fundamental break-through, I have sought to argue, was not simply to record, but also to interpret difference. This, however, did not take place within a single ethnological practice.