Includes bibliographical references (pages 1028-1057) and index.

I Encountering the World
IA Figures of Wealth and Power
Robert of Clari / from The Conquest of Constantinople - Giovanni di Pian de Carpini (John of Carpini) / from his Journey to the Court of Kuyuk Khan - Marco Polo / from The Travels - Sir John Mandeville / from his Travels - Various authors on artistic and cultural relations between Italian city states and the Ottoman and Mamluk empires during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries - (i) Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini / Letter of introduction for Matteo de Pasti to Mehmed II - (ii) Marin Sanudo / from his diary for August - (iii) Mehmed II / to the Venetian Senate - (iv) The Venetian Senate / Letter to Mehmed II - (v) Luca Landucci / from his Florentine diary - (vi) Leonardo da Vinci / from a letter to Sultan Bayezid II before - (vii) Tommaso di Tolfo / from a letter to Michelangelo - Giovanni da Empoli / On India, Ceylon and the Spice Islands - João de Castro / from Roteiro de Goa até Dio - Simão de Melo / from an inventory of his goods - Johann Huyghen van Linschoten / On Indian religious art - Duarte de Sande / from An Excellent Treatise of the Kingdom of China - Matteo Ricci / from his journal - Jean‐Baptiste Tavernier / On the Peacock Throne.
IB Across the Ocean Sea
Christopher Columbus / Two texts from his first voyage to America - Amerigo Vespucci / Letter to Lorenzo Pietro Franco de Medici - Hernán Cortés / Two letters from Mexico - Bartolomé de Las Casas / from Apologetic History of the Indies - Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) / from History of the Indians of New Spain - First Provincial Council in Lima 1551–/ On the destruction of Indian sacred sites - Jean de Léry / from History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil - Thomas Harriot / from A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia - Bernardo de Balbuena / from Grandeza Mexicana - Juan Rodriguez Freile / On the legend of El Dorado - John Lok / A Voyage to Guinea in the year - Olfert Dapper / On the city of Benin - William Dampier / The first encounter with Indigenous Australian people.
IC Scholarly Responses
Anon. / from the Inventory of the Palazzo Medici - Albrecht Dürer / from his diary of his journey to the Netherlands - Thomas Platter / On Mr Copes cabinet of curiosities - Michel de Montaigne / On the Cannibals - Christopher Marlowe / from Tamburlaine the Great - Francis Bacon / Of Plantations - Francis Bacon / from New Atlantis - Martin de Charmois / from his Petition to the King and to the Lords of his Council - Dorothy Osborne / from letters to Sir William Temple - Thomas Hobbes / Of the Naturall Condition of Mankind - John Tradescant / from the Museum Tradescantianum, or A Collection of Rarities - John Dryden / on the Noble Savage - Aphra Behn / from Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave - Charles Perrault / from Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns - William Temple / On the distinctiveness of Chinese gardens - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz / from Preface to Novissima Sinica - John Locke / Of Property, from Two Treatises of Government.

II Enlightenment and Expansion
IIA The Orient in Fact and Fancy
Antoine Galland / Preface to dHerbelots Bibliothèque Orientale - Anon. / from The Arabian Nights Entertainments - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu / Letters from the Turkish Empire - Charles‐Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu / from Persian Letters - Joseph Addison / from The Pleasures of the Imagination - John Shebbeare / The taste of England at present … - Oliver Goldsmith / from The Citizen of the World - Sir William Chambers / from A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening - Sir William Jones / from his Discourses to the Asiatick Society of Bengal - William Beckford of Fonthill / from Vathek - Sir George Staunton / from his account of the Macartney embassy to China .
IIB Curiosities and Colonies
Hans Sloane / from The Natural History of Jamaica - Jonathan Swift / from Gullivers Travels - Louis Antoine de Bougainville / On Tahiti - A selection of texts from the Cook voyages to the Pacific - (i) Joseph Banks / On two figures and a Marae, or temple precinct, in Tahiti - (ii) James Cook / Two accounts of the practice of tattooing (a) in Tahiti (b) in New Zealand - (iii) James Cook / On the people of Australia - (iv) William Wales / An account of music and dancing in Tahiti - (v) George Forster / An account of artefacts at Tonga - (vi) George Forster / On the stone statues and wood carvings of Easter Island - Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne / An exchange of letters - Manuel Amat y Junyent, Viceroy of Peru / Letter on Casta paintings - Ignatius Sancho / Letter to Jack Wingrave - William Hodges / from Travels in India - Thomas Jefferson / from Notes on the State of Virginia - Olaudah Equiano / On the Middle Passage - William Beckford of Somerley / from A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica - Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) / On revolution, slavery and the Wedgwood medallion.
IIC Changing Ideas and Values
David Hume / from Of National Characters - Jean‐Jacques Rousseau / from A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences - Comte de Caylus / from A Collection of the Antiquities of Egypt - Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet) / from Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations - Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet) / from Essay on Taste - Immanuel Kant / from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime - Johann Joachim Winckelmann / from The History of Ancient Art - John Millar / Notes on the Four Stages theory of human development - Denis Diderot / Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville - Johann Gottfried Herder / from A Monument to Johann Winckelmann - Samuel Johnson / On the state of nature - Antoine Quatremère de Quincy / from Egyptian Architecture - Joshua Reynolds / from his Discourses - Edward Gibbon / Reflections on civilization and barbarism.

III Revolution, Romanticism, Reaction
IIIA History: Between Spirit and Science
Johann Gottfried Herder / from Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man - Charles Bell / from Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting - Friedrich Schlegel / On the Language and Philosophy of the Indians - Joseph Fourier / from Historical Preface to the Description of Egypt - Edward Moor / from The Hindu Pantheon - Richard Payne Knight / from An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology - John Flaxman / Style - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel / from Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel / from Lectures on the Philosophy of World History - John L. Stephens / from Incidents of Travel in Yucatan - Arthur Schopenhauer / On Human Nature - Gottfried Semper / from The Four Elements of Architecture.
IIIB Visions of the Exotic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / Kubla Khan - Maria Edgeworth / from The Absentee - George Gordon, Lord Byron / from The Giaour - Thomas De Quincey / from Confessions of an English Opium‐Eater - Johann Wolfgang Goethe / from the West‐Eastern Divan - Giacomo Leopardi / from Zibaldone - Alfred, Lord Tennyson / from Timbuctoo - Eugène Delacroix / Letters and notes on his journey to North Africa - George Catlin / Letter from the Mouth of the Yellowstone River - John Constable / from Discourses - David Roberts / From his travels to Egypt and the Middle East - Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres / Notes on the Turkish Baths.
IIIC Missionaries, Managers and Resistance
Thomas Paine / from Rights of Man - William Blake / from America, a Prophecy - Mirza Abu Talib (or Taleb) Khan / from his Travels - Lady Maria Nugent / from her journal - William Wordsworth / To Toussaint LOuverture - James Mill / from The History of British India - Percy Bysshe Shelley / Ozymandias - Henry Salt and Joseph Banks / Two letters - John Davy / from An Account of the Interior of Ceylon - William Ellis / from Polynesian Researches - Ram Raz / from Essay on the Architecture of the Hindús - Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay / Minute on Indian Education - James Mallord William Turner, William Makepeace Thackeray and John Ruskin / Three texts relating to J. M. W. Turners Slave Ship.

IV Modernity and Empire
IVA Enduring Fictions and Transformed Spaces
Théophile Gautier / from Art in 1848 - Théophile Gautier / On Gérôme and Artistic Orientalism - Théophile Thoré, writing as William Bürger / from New Tendencies in Art - Edmond and Jules de Goncourt / on Japanese art - Various authors on Japanese art and the painting of modern life - (i) Charles Baudelaire / from a letter to Arsène Houssaye - (ii) Émile Zola / On Manet - (iii) Edmond Duranty / On the new painting - (iv) Stéphane Mallarmé / from The Impressionists and Edouard Manet - (v) Théodore Duret / On Japan - (vi) Félix Fénéon / from The Impressionists in 1886 - (vii) Vincent Van Gogh / On Japan - Philippe Burty / Ancient Japan and Modern Japan - Joris-Karl Huysmans / from A Rebours - Pierre Loti / from The Marriage of Loti - A cluster of texts on Gauguin and Oceania - (i) Paul Gauguin / from three letters written before leaving for Polynesia - (ii) Paul Gauguin / from Noa Noa - (iii) August Strindberg and Paul Gauguin / from an exchange of letters - (iv) Paul Gauguin / from Avant et après, Atuona, Hiva‐Oa - Hermann Bahr / Review of the Japanese exhibition at the sixth exhibition of the Vienna secession.
IVB Society, Evolution and the Idea of Race
Robert Knox / from The Races of Men - Joseph‐Arthur, Comte de Gobineau / from The Inequality of Human Races - Solomon Northup / from Twelve Years a Slave - John Ruskin / from The Two Paths - Ernest Renan / from The Position of the Shemitic Nations in the History of Civilization - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels / On the emergence of the world system - Karl Marx / On the Asiatic mode of production and modern capitalism - The First International / Address to the people of the United States of America - Edmond de Goncourt / from the Goncourt Journal - Charles Darwin / from The Descent of Man - Friedrich Nietzsche / Signs of Higher and Lower Culture - Encyclopaedia Britannica / Ninth edition: Negro - W. T. Stead / To All English‐speaking Folk - R. H. Bacon / from Benin: The City of Blood - Rudyard Kipling / The White Mans Burden.
IVC Anthropology, Museums and the Origins of Art
Owen Jones / from The Grammar of Ornament - Edward Tylor / from Primitive Culture - Augustus Lane‐Fox Pitt‐Rivers / Principles of Classification - J. G. Frazer / from The Golden Bough - Ernst Grosse / Ethnology and Aesthetics - Henry Balfour / from The Evolution of Decorative Art - Alfred Haddon / from Evolution in Art - Alois Riegl / from Problems of Style - Alois Riegl / The Place of the Vapheio Cups in the History of Art - George Birdwood / Conventionalism in Primitive Art.
IVD The World in View: Travellers and Teachers
Gérard de Nerval / from Scenes of Life in the Orient - Gustave Flaubert / On the pyramids - Hiram Bingham / from A Residence of Twenty‐One Years in the Sandwich Islands - Sir Colin Campbell / Letter to Lord Stanley - Andrew Nicoll / A Sketching Tour of Five Weeks in the Forests of Ceylon - Robert Fortune / from A Residence Among the Chinese - James Fergusson / from History of Indian Architecture - Rajendralal Mitra / from Indo‐Aryans - Robert Louis Stevenson / On the South Seas - C. H. Read and O. M. Dalton/ Works of Art from Benin City - Henry Ling Roth / Primitive Art from Benin - Mary Kingsley / from West African Studies.

V The Significance of the Primitive
VA Authenticity, Form and Feeling
A cluster of short texts on the initial encounter of the European avant‐garde with African art - (i) André Derain / Letter to Maurice de Vlaminck - (ii) Maurice de Vlaminck / On his discovery of African art - (iii) Henri Matisse / On his encounter with African Art - (iv) Pablo Picasso / On his visit to the Trocadero museum - Wilhelm Worringer / from Abstraction and Empathy - Roger Fry / The Art of the Bushmen - Guillaume Apollinaire / Exoticism and Ethnography - Franz Marc / Letter to August Macke - Franz Marc / The Savages of Germany - August Macke / Masks - Emil Nolde / On Primitive Art - Alexander Shevchenko / Neo‐Primitivism - Henri Matisse / On his visits to North Africa - Paul Klee / On his visit to Tunisia - Hermann Bahr / from Expressionism.
VB The Reach of Empire
James A. Hobson / from Imperialism - Charles Augustus Stoddard / from Cruising Among the Caribbees - Edward Wilmot Blyde / West Africa Before Europe - Kakuso Okakura / from The Ideals of the East - Sister Nivedita / Introduction to Okakuras The Ideals of the East - W. E. B. Du Bois / from The Souls of Black Folk - from the Harmsworth History of the World / On the degeneration of indigenous Australians - Ananda Coomaraswamy / The Aims of Indian Art - E. B. Havell / The New Indian School of Painting - Lucien Lévy‐Bruhl / from How Natives Think - Leo Frobenius / from The Voice of Africa - Sigmund Freud / from Totem and Taboo.
VI In a World of Colonies
VIA Modern, Primitive, Universal
Guillaume Apollinaire / On the Art of the Blacks - Guillaume Apollinaire / On African and Oceanic sculptures - Roger Fry / Negro Sculpture - Florent Fels et al. / Opinions on Negro Art - Herbert Read / from Art Now - James Johnson Sweeney / The Art of Negro Africa - Alain Locke / African Art: Classic Style - Robert Goldwater / A Definition of Primitivism - Margaret Preston / Paintings in Arnhem Land - Henry Moore / Primitive Art - A cluster of short texts by American painters of the 1940s / on primitive art and myth - (i) Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko / Statement - (ii) Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko / from The Portrait and the Modern Artist - (iii) Jackson Pollock / Answers to a questionnaire - (iv) Barnett Newman / Pre‐Columbian Stone Sculpture - (v) Barnett Newman / Art of the South Seas - (vi) Barnett Newman / Northwest Coast Indian Painting - (vii) Jackson Pollock / Statement - (viii) Mark Rothko / from The Romantics were prompted ….
VIB Western Civilization: For and Against
Rosa Luxemburg / from The Accumulation of Capital – an Anti‐Critique - Hermann Hesse / The European - Ezra Pound / from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - Oswald Spengler / from The Decline of the West - Rabindranath Tagore / from Creative Unity - The Third International / The Black Question - W. E. B. Du Bois / Criteria of Negro Art - Franz Boas / from Primitive Art - Alain Locke / Art or Propaganda - Sigmund Freud / from Civilization and Its Discontents - Alfred Rosenberg / from The Myth of the Twentieth Century - Leo Frobenius / Reflections on African Art - Walter Benjamin / Experience and Poverty - Narranyeri (attributed to David Unaipon) / A Blackfellows Appeal to White Australia - Edmund Husserl / from The Vienna Lecture - Julius Lips / from The Savage Hits Back - Fernando Ortiz / The Social Phenomenon of “Transculturation” - Eric Williams / from Capitalism and Slavery.
VIC The Challenge of the Avant‐Garde
Voldemārs Matvejas/Vladimir Markov / Negro Art - Carl Einstein / from Negerplastik - Tristan Tzara / Chanson du serpent/Song of the Snake - Oswald de Andrade / Cannibalist Manifesto - Sergei Eisenstein / The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram - Len Lye / Two letters - The Surrealist group in Paris / Dont Visit the Colonial Exhibition - The Surrealist group at the Sorbonne / from Legitimate Defence - The Surrealist group in Paris / Murderous Humanitarianism - Michel Leiris / from LAfrique fantôme/Phantom Africa - Antonin Artaud / What I Came to Mexico to Do - Josef Albers / Truthfulness in Art - Art et Liberté group, Cairo / Long Live Degenerate Art - Aimé Césaire / from Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - Claude Lévi‐Strauss / The Art of the Northwest Coast - Pierre Mabille / The Jungle.

VII Independence and the Post-colonial
VIIA Resituating Theory and Politics
Jean‐Paul Sartre / from Black Orpheus - Aimé Césaire / from Discourse on Colonialism - Claude Lévi‐Strauss / from Tristes Tropiques - Roland Barthes / African Grammar - Frantz Fanon / from On National Culture - George Kubler / from The Shape of Time - Michel Foucault / from The Order of Things - Edward Said / from Orientalism - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari / from Mille plateaux - Johannes Fabian / from Time and the Other.
VIIB Exhibitions, Museums and Histories Reimagined - André Malraux / from Museum Without Walls - Aimé Césaire / On the institution of the museum - Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen / from The Family of Man - Roland Barthes / The Great Family of Man - Georges Bataille / The Cradle of Humanity - Léopold Sédar Senghor / from the First World Festival of Black Arts - Robert Farris Thompson / Yoruba Artistic Criticism - Ian Burn / Art is what we do, culture is what we do to other artists - Linda Nochlin / from The Imaginary Orient - Luis Camnitzer / Report from Havana: The First Biennial of Latin American Art - William Rubin / from Primitivism in 20th Century Art - James Clifford / Histories of the Tribal and the Modern - Martin Bernal / from Black Athena.
VIIC Beyond Modernism
David A. Siqueiros / Towards a New Integral Art - Kazuo Shiraga / The Shaping of the Individual - Ad Reinhardt / Timeless in Asia - George Maciunas / Fluxus Manifesto - Anni Albers / Tapestry - Hélio Oiticica / from General Scheme of the New Objectivity 196and Tropicália - María Teresa Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa / Tucumán Burns - Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore / from War and Peace in the Global Village - Robert Smithson / Incidents of Mirror‐Travel in the Yucatan - Nam June Paik / Global Groove and the Video Common Market - Joseph Beuys / Manifesto on the Foundation of a “Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research” - Terry Smith / The Provincialism Problem - Robert Morris / Aligned with Nazca - Lothar Baumgarten / from Conquering the Southern Continent in the Haze of a Sixpenny Cigar - Alfredo Jaar / Statement.
VIID Asserting Identity
F. N. Souza / Nirvana of a Maggot - James Baldwin / Princes and Powers - Uche Okeke / Growth of an Idea 195and Natural Synthesis - Aubrey Williams / The Predicament Of The Artist In The Caribbean - Larry Neal / from The Black Arts Movement - Frank Bowling / Its Not Enough to Say Black is Beautiful - Faith Ringgold / Interview on For The Womens House - Papa Ibra Tall / Negritude and Contemporary Plastic Art - Edward Kamau Brathwaite / from Contradictory Omens - Rasheed Araeen / Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto - Ana Mendieta / Introduction to Dialectics of Isolation - Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer / De Margin and De Centre.

VIII The Global Turn
VIIIA Critical Revisions: Theory and History
Rasheed Araeen / Why Third Text? - Peter Wollen / Tourism, Language and Art - Homi K. Bhabha / The Postcolonial and the Postmodern - Arjun Appadurai / from Modernity at Large - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri / from Empire - Irit Rogoff / On visual culture - Richard Bell / Bells Theorem: Aboriginal Art – Its a White Thing - Dipesh Chakrabarty / from Provincializing Europe - Immanuel Wallerstein / from World‐Systems Analysis - James Elkins / from is Art History Global? - Partha Mitter / Decentering Modernism - Fredric Jameson / from A Singular Modernity - Aruna DSouza / Introduction to In the Wake of the Global Turn - Peter Weibel / Modernity Reset: Renaissance 2.0.
VIIIB: Diversity, Translation, Creolization and Identity
Stuart Hall / New Ethnicities – Édouard Glissant / Creolisation and the Americas – Sonia Boyce and Manthia Diawara / The Art of Identity: A Conversation -- Paul Gilroy / from The Black Atlantic -- Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez‐Peña / Interview with Anna Johnson -- Sarat Maharaj / Perfidious Fidelity; the Untranslatability of the Other -- Gordon Bennett / Letter to Jean‐Michel Basquiat -- Antonio Benítez‐Rojo / Three Words toward Creolization -- Edward Said / The Art of Displacement -- Fred Wilson and Kwame Anthony Appiah / Fragments of a Conversation -- Homi K. Bhabha / Another Country -- Yinka Shonibare / Interview with Bernard Müller -- Fiona Tan / Other Facets of the Same Globe -- Lubaina Himid / We are Us not Other -- Kara Walker / A Sonorous Subtlety: an interview with Kara Rooney -- Fred Moten / On the art of Chris Ofili, from Blue Vespers.
VIIIC Global Art and the Museum
Jean‐Hubert Martin / Preface to Magiciens de la terre -- Rasheed Araeen / from The Other Story -- Llilian Llanes Godoy / Introduction to the Third Havana Biennial -- Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss / Foreword to Global Conceptualism-- Salah M. Hassan and Olu Oguibe / from Authentic/Ex‐Centric -- Okwui Enwezor / The Black Box -- Artforum / Roundtable discussion on Global Tendencies-- Kwame Anthony Appiah / Whose Culture is It Anyway? -- Chin‐Tao Wu / Biennials Without Borders? -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak / Sign and Trace -- Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg / From Art World to Art Worlds -- Clémentine Deliss / Stored Code and Foreign Exchange.
VIIID Concerning the Contemporary
Geeta Kapur / Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories -- Slavoj Zizek / Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism -- Nicolas Bourriaud / from Relational Aesthetics -- William Kentridge / Interview with Dan Cameron -- Grant Kester / A Critical Framework for Dialogical Practice -- Terry Smith / from What is Contemporary Art? -- Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, Chika Okeke‐Agulu, Alexander Alberro, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson and Andrew Perchuk / Responses to a questionnaire on The Contemporary -- Ai Weiwei / Epilogue to his blog -- Francis Alÿs / Francis Alÿs: A to Z -- Romuald Hazoumè / Cargoland -- Gerardo Mosquera / Beyond Anthropophagy -- Xu Bing / On Holding a Retrospective -- Doris Salcedo / A Work in Mourning -- Hito Steyerl / If You Dont Have Bread, Eat Art! -- Art & Language / from Flags for Organisations.

Art in Theory: The West in the World is a ground-breaking anthology that comprehensively examines the relationship of Western art to the art and material culture of the wider world. Editors Paul Wood and Leon Wainwright have included 370 texts, some of which appear in English for the first time.

The anthologized texts are presented in eight chronological parts, which are then subdivided into key themes appropriate to each historical era. The majority of the texts are representations of changing ideas about the cultures of the world by European artists and intellectuals, but increasingly, as the modern period develops, and especially as colonialism is challenged, a variety of dissenting voices begin to claim their space, and a counter narrative to western hegemony develops. Over half the book is devoted to 20th and 21st century materials, though the book’s unique selling point is the way it relates the modern globalization of art to much longer cultural histories.