Since the time when the human race first began to speculate about the origin of the universe there have been two cosmological models that have seemed particularly attractive to its imagination. One has been to derive everything in the world from a single primal origin, out of which the cosmos, in all its apparent complexity, evolves. The other has been to view the history of the universe as a battle between two opposing forces which contradict and undermine each other. The two views can be called monism and dualism. They are not the only possibilities. There have been systems that posit three, four or an indefinite number of principles, but most of these have also tended to assume one basic pair of opposites with one or more neutral or intermediate principles beside them; this too can be seen as a form of dualism.

The Mongol conquests produced the last in a series of realignments of the Turkic peoples, creating, more or less, the configurations in which we find them today. The earliest of these realignments was associated with the rise and fall of the Hsiung-nu polity (second century BC to mid-second century AD). This was the first of the attempts at a pannomadic state. Mao-tun, the “Great Shanyü whom heaven has set up”, the founder of the Hsiung-nu union, boasted in a letter to the Han Court that because of his efforts “all the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family.”2 Činggis Qan expressed similar thoughts regarding the “people having skirts of felt” i.e. living in feltcovered tents.3 Although it cannot be demonstrated that all the Eurasian nomads were, indeed, incorporated into the Hsiung-nu polity, substantial numbers of the Turkic nomads undoubtedly were. In its formative, “heroic” years of conquest and in the course of its collapse, a number of Turkic (and other) pastoral, nomadic peoples were brought into motion along China's northern frontiers and adjoining regions. Others were pushed westward, some making their way to what is today Kazakhstan and into the Caspian-Pontic steppelands. This marked the first large-scale movement westward of Turkic peoples from Inner Asia to Central Asia and thence to the Western Eurasian steppelands. The final stages of these migrations ultimately brought some of the nomads to Danubian Europe and the Hungarian Plain.

This essay is concerned with the career of a somewhat obscure figure in the early history of Orientalism, Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, who is however known both to aficionados of the early European manuscript collections in the West, as well as to historians of the more obscure aspects of the Enlightenment on the Continent. The occasion for the research on which this essay is based is, in large measure, a project intended to translate the extensive Persian letter-book that Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India; this translation, of a text entitled I jāz-i-Arsalānī (which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), has recently been brought to partial fruition by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, through the auspices of Oxford University Press (Delhi). In this context, it may be useful to reflect somewhat on the rather extraordinary career, and fascinating milieu, of Colonel Polier.

In 1824 the governor of the important southern Siamese city of Nakhon Sri Thammarat, and of the large region which fell under Nakhon's jurisdiction, was chao phraya Nakhon (Noi). He ruled the city from 1811–39 and was a man of extraordinary character, a vigorous and determined ruler who was reputed to be the son of a former king of Siam, Taksin. This attribution of royal birth was current in his own lifetime, and was recorded by Henry Burney in 1826, and by Lieutenant James Low a little later (Munro-Hay, in press). At that time the British, at war with Burma, Siam's western neighbour, were concerned by developments relating to the Rangoon expedition, and it was determined to send an envoy from the Government of India on a mission to the Siamese governor to discuss outstanding problems and possible co-operation.