Robert D. Kaplan’s Travelogue Eastward to Tartary Compared to Two Academic Works

Robert D. Kaplan’s Travelogue Eastward to Tartary Compared to Two Academic Works

By Alvaro Alarcon
June 19, 2003
alvaro.alarcon@lycos.com










Robert D. Kaplan’s travelogue Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus is unmistakably different from the written studies of those regions by the scholars Thomas Magstadt and Michael Bradshaw. Magstadt wrote the text Nations and Governments: Comparative Politics in Regional Perspective and Bradshaw wrote World Regional Geography: The New Global Order. Kaplan attempts to give a whole picture of the regions he traveled to through his individual experiences while Magstadt and Bradshaw take a scientific approach to their study of the regions of the Balkans, Middle East, and Central Asia. Magstadt and Bradshaw are traditional scholars; they collect information from a wide variety of sources. Impersonal methods such as the analysis of statistics are emphasized. Kaplan’s explora...