Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

About the Book

This book is a biographical and illustrated account of the life of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French national who traveled extensively for almost forty years of his life—travels that took him to most of the European countries, to the Ottoman Empire, to Persia, to Southeast Asia, and to India. This writer cannot think of any other personality, at any time in history, who wandered around for so long and for so far. Tavernier has a number of achievements to his credit—achievements of having written extensively on the areas he traveled, the people he met, and the diverse activities he pursued. His memoirs became a blockbuster in the seventeenth century, outshining any other publication of the time—even of those who were known to be heavy with ideas.

About the Author

Dr. Harish Kapur is professor emeritus at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. The author has spent much of his academic career teaching international relations to graduate students and monitoring their PhD dissertations on a wide array of global subjects. He was a recipient of numerous awards from different European and US foundations, including a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that resulted in his appointment as research associate of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University. Perhaps the most recent and most prestigious award he has received is his nomination as an outstanding intellectual in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries along with one thousand intellectuals from all over the world by Cambridge Biographical Centre in the United Kingdom. Before joining the Graduate Institute in 1961, Dr. Kapur officiated as the deputy legal adviser in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, where he had been, among other things, assigned the responsibility of protecting Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco. While teaching international relations, Professor Kapur devoted much of his time to an analysis of the foreign policy of states with a focus on the former Soviet Union, China, Taiwan, India, and the European Union. Most of his writings have been published in Europe, the United States, and India.