Cultural Bias and Orientalism in The Travels of Marco Polo
This paper examines how cultural bias and Western Christian ethnocentrism pervade The Travels of Marco Polo, shaping the narrator's representation of Middle and Far Eastern peoples and customs. Drawing on Ronald Latham's edited translation, the paper analyzes the text's prologue, descriptions of Kashmir, Bengal, and the court of Kublai Khan to demonstrate how Orientalist sensationalism, religious prejudice, and a desire to sell books combined to produce a skewed and exoticized portrait of Asia. The paper argues that the author's perspective — whether Marco Polo's own or shaped by compiler Rustichello — consistently privileged Western Christian norms and rendered unfamiliar cultures as spectacle rather than reality.
- Introduction: Authorship, Accuracy, and Bias: Contested authorship and scholarly debates about the Travels
- Orientalism and Ethnocentrism in the Travels: Exoticism and ethnocentrism as pervasive narrative features
- The Prologue's Christian Framework: Christian language in the prologue establishes cultural bias
- Hierarchies of Familiarity and the 'Other': Syntactic ordering reflects Western hierarchy of peoples
- Exotic Peoples: Kashmir and the Sensationalism of Difference: Kashmir description as sensationalized religious otherness
- Rationality and Residual Bias: Bengal and the Court of Kublai Khan: Slight rationality near Khan's court but bias persists
- Conclusion: A Western Spectacle of the Orient: Bias reflects shared European worldview, not individual failing
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in close textual analysis, quoting specific passages from the Travels and unpacking their language at the sentence level — for example, dissecting the syntactical ordering of "Christians or Pagans, Tartar or Indian" to reveal an embedded hierarchy.
- It maintains a clear and consistent central thesis — that Western Christian ethnocentrism colors the entire text — and returns to it at each stage of the analysis rather than drifting into plot summary.
- The paper situates its argument in a broader historical context (the Crusades, pre-Renaissance Europe, the commercial market for travel literature), giving the bias analysis cultural and material grounding.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained ideological critique through close reading. Rather than simply cataloguing examples of bias, it explains the mechanisms by which that bias operates — syntactic positioning, selective omission of everyday cultural detail, religious framing, and commercial motivation — showing how form and content together construct an Orientalist worldview.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by establishing the text's contested authorship and existing scholarly debates, then introduces its central thesis about Western Christian bias. It moves inward from the prologue's framing language to specific regional descriptions (Kashmir, Bengal), tracking how exoticism intensifies and shifts across the narrative. A brief pivot notes the slightly more rational tone near Kublai Khan's court before the conclusion draws the argument outward, connecting Marco Polo's bias to a broader and enduring problem of cultural objectivity.
Introduction: Authorship, Accuracy, and Bias
Taking Marco Polo largely at his word, translator and editor Ronald Latham tells us in his introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo that the thirteenth-century Italian explorer was not lying when he claimed, in the prologue of the book, that he "had traveled more extensively than any man since the Creation" (Latham 7). Surely this claim helped to sell copies, and the tales of Marco Polo's travels were a bestseller in his own time; the book continues to be read and to generate a fair amount of scholarship even today. A cursory overview of current criticism reveals that most scholarly debates revolve around the historical accuracy and veracity of Marco Polo's claims. Latham himself notes that there "are other features of the book that are as likely to be due to Rustichello [the compiler and author to one degree or another of the Travels] as to Marco" (Latham 18). Other critics have suggested that Marco Polo inflated his own and his family's stature, while still others argue that he had little or nothing to do with the book at all and merely told some stories to Rustichello that were then hugely embellished.
Orientalism and Ethnocentrism in the Travels
Regardless of who actually wrote which portions of The Travels of Marco Polo, a certain strain of Orientalism and exoticism runs through the book — one that would come to pervade European culture for centuries to come. The narrative's descriptions of the villages and courts that Marco Polo encounters are full of fantastical imagery and references to magic and sorcery. No doubt part of this, like the claim made in the prologue, was an attempt to sell copies; sensationalism sold then just as it does today. But at the heart of this sensationalism is an ethnocentrism that is readily apparent throughout much of the book.
The strangeness of Middle and Far Eastern cultures would certainly have been shocking to a fifteen-year-old encountering them for the first time — if he truly did encounter everything he describes — but the narrator's tone is shaped not so much by surprise as by judgment. There are many moments throughout the text where the narrator's own Western and Christian culture bars him from seeing — and thus representing — the other cultures encountered in the Travels in a fair and objective light. Whether the result of first-hand observation, a compilation of stories heard from others, or even outright invention, the text bears definite evidence of the perspective that created it. The Western and Christian culture of the author colors his account of the Middle and Far East to a considerable extent.
Works Cited
Polo, Marco (attributed). The Travels of Marco Polo. Trans. and ed. Ronald Latham. New York: Penguin, 1958.
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