Introduction: Europe and East Asia in the Eighteenth Century

In 1690s, an Italian jurist, Gemelli Careri, traveled to East Asia on his own, a rarity at a time when Europeans usually were sponsored by various missionary orders, trading companies, or governments. His account, translated into English a decade later as A Voyage Round World in John and Awnsham Churchill's collection of travels, runs to 605 folio pages and provides perhaps most detailed description of Far East by an individual who was not trying to curry favor with foreign officials for his order, employers, or monarch. The longest section of his travelogue is devoted to his visit to China in 1695-96. (1) Careri's description of China echoes a century of Jesuit praise of wealth and culture of Middle Kingdom, and his assessments leave little room for European posturing about superiority of Christian West. After a lengthy description of people and industries of China, he asserts that the Reader may perceive that Chineses are very sharp Witted, and exceed Europeans in Ingenuity as well as in morality: Chinese Merchants value themselves upon being Just, and are really so, for their Oath is Inviolable; and they will hazard their Head to keep their Word (4:372). Concluding his praise of Chinese agriculture, transportation, and economic prosperity, Careri maintains that no Man of Sense will doubt, but that Emperor of China is richest Monarch in World; not only because of Extent of his Empire, but because his Subjects do not only blindly Obey, but Adore him (4: 395). Judging from popularity of his account, most of his contemporaries were willing to accept his confirmation of what they already suspected or knew: world in which they lived was dominated economically by China, and to a lesser extent Moghul India; as Claudia Schnurmann puts it, compared to Far East's progressive medicine, industry, and savoir vivre, even Dutch, although highly sophisticated from a European perspective, at best measured up to what today would be considered 'third world' inhabitants in Asian eyes. (2) The essays in this special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation explore in different ways implications of Schnurmann's assessment, registering paradigm-shattering work of world historians such as Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, J. M. Blaut, Frank Perlin, Paul Bairoch, and Geoffrey Gunn. (3) Each of contributors examines a particular text or collection of texts in order to shed new light on ways in which Western Europeans described their encounters--real or imagined--with powerful empires of Far East: Moghul India, Tokugawa Japan, and Ming and Qing China. Rather than simply adding these regimes to a long list of countries and regions susceptible to European hegemony, essays that follow challenge both traditional and revisionist accounts of early modern world--accounts that simply assume preeminence of western Europe in world commerce; that describe its rise as foreordained by its technological and scientific superiority, its socioeconomic liberalism, and its Enlightenment values; and that treat all of its contacts with East as harbingers of colonization and de facto imperial control of much of Asia by mid-nineteenth century. Jeannie Dalporto rereads Elkanah Settle's popular tragedy, The Conquest of China by Tartars (1676), to argue that playwright uses a fanciful reimagining of Qing conquest to mediate anxieties about succession crisis looming in England. The advent of Manchu dynasty, cast in stylized conventions of Restoration love and honor, enacts a theatrical fantasy--both idealized and fervently desired--for an ideologically compelling means to resolve seemingly intractable political conflicts. Eun Kyung Min also explores significance of China in late-seventeenth-century England by calling attention to crucial role that Middle Kingdom played in battle of books that pitted defenders of pristine, ancient values against progressivist narratives of self-styled moderns. …