Globalising China

My PhD thesis (Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian Exchanges, and the Early Modern Sciences) examined how the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 transformed the sciences in Europe. The dissertation argues that early modern European writers selectively appropriated Chinese scientific practices and knowledges as a resource with which to exercise political power at home.

My PhD was awarded the 8th Dissertation Prize of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology's (IUHPST) Division of History of Science and Technology (DHST) and the Coventry-Emsley Prize for the most outstanding PhD in Classics, History, Philosophy or Theology from St Edmund's College, Cambridge. The DHST award committee judged the thesis as follows: "A remarkable scholarly achievement, this work presents a bold thesis: the social, political, and environmental crises of mid-17th-century China during the Manchu takeover profoundly shaped European knowledge production. These upheavals disrupted long-held assumptions about the natural world, society, and human history, raising fundamental questions about evidence, universality, and the reliability of established ways of knowing. Through detailed case studies, the author compellingly links these Chinese crises to the emergence of new intellectual paradigms in Europe."

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the Manchu conquest of China in the mid-seventeenth century transformed several ostensibly “European” sciences in the early modern period. The “Tartar war” between the weakened Ming dynasty (1368-1644), peasant rebels, and the Manchus—a semi-nomadic population from northeast Asia—was experienced first-hand by several Jesuit missionaries proselytising in China. During the unstable interregnum, Jesuits sought patronage from disparate warring factions, offering their astronomical expertise to help various pretenders secure the “Mandate of Heaven” to rule legitimately over China, hoping to ensure their mission’s survival. By engaging with Chinese and Manchu astronomical labourers, reading Chinese treatises on cosmology, agriculture, cartography, history, and moral philosophy, and interacting with scholar-officials and military commanders, Jesuits learned extensively from local technoscientific discourses and practices. Between 1653 and 1658, the Tridentine missionary Martino Martini (1614-1661) served as a “procurator”—responsible for promoting the China mission in Europe—and a representative of the new, Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1636/44-1912). In Europe, Martini published accounts of the Ming-Qing War (1654), China’s geography (1655), and its history (1658) with commercial printers, reaching a wide, interconfessional readership. He courted patronage from powerful Habsburg rulers and defended the Jesuits’ involvement in Chinese sciences and politics at an audience with Pope Alexander VII. As this dissertation contends, Martini’s successful mobilisation of disparate political, religious, commercial, and scholarly networks across a turbulent Eurasia enabled his laudatory accounts of Chinese sciences to convince an extraordinarily wide audience. In turn, during the long eighteenth century, European writers drew—often polemically—on Martini’s accounts of Chinese agriculture, astrology, cartography, chronology, cosmology, ethnography, military cultures, and moral philosophy to articulate new solutions to contemporary technoscientific, social, and political crises. As such, the dissertation argues that Manchu and Chinese cultures of knowledge, mediated by Jesuits, occupied an important and underappreciated role in Enlightenment sciences.