Working from the concept of cosmopolitanism and incorporating textual evidence from philosophy, drama of the English Renaissance, seventeenth-century travel narratives, and eighteenth-century literature, The Cosmopolitan Evolution, explores the interactions between the European consciousness and the foreign. The book also chronicles the development of cosmopolitanism from a form of representative universalism, which seeks to enfold all humans under on ideal, towards complex universalism, which seeks to account for alternate and particular views.