Pierre Loti was the most popular travel writer of his day. From the lands he visited during his career as a naval officer, which took him to virtually every corner of the globe, he quarried a large body of novels, short stories, and travelogues. The exotic decors for which he is best remembered belong to what is known today as the Third World. In Loti's day they were frontier lands over which rival European powers competed for supremacy. His works are in fact directly contemporary with what historians have called the age of imperialism, which, in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, brought most of Africa, together with large parts of Asia and Oceania, under European control. An undercurrent of anticolonialism runs through many of Loti's writings, though his position was in some respects more ambiguous than has often been thought. Toward the end of his life he engaged in a series of polemics in defense of the faltering Ottoman Empire, whose territories were the target of European designs.
