A Singular Case: Debating China's Political Economy in the European Enlightenment
Journal
American Historical Review
Journal Volume
123
Journal Issue
3
Pages
923-924
Date Issued
2018
Author(s)
Abstract
Ashley Eva Millar’s excellent work A Singular Case: Debating China’s Political Economy in the European Enlightenment fills an important gap in early modern China-Europe studies because it is one of the first attempts to survey Western attitudes toward the commercial, governmental, and scientific aspects of Chinese society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her focus is on the British and French traditions, and the book is divided into five main sections, covering views of China’s commerce, foreign trade, government, military, and science and technology. Not limiting herself to the period’s incipient economic theorization (by Montesquieu, David Hume, François Quesnay, and Adam Smith), Millar is also careful to include information from more general sources, such as missionary and travel reports, Jesuit compilations, popular geographies, and universal histories. This is entirely appropriate, since modern distinctions between the scholarly disciplines and between literary genres were much more fluid than they are now, just as period knowledge about foreign lands was a peculiar combination of fact and fiction exchanged between eyewitnesses and armchair travelers, scholars and hack writers, and those who lauded China and those who vilified it.
Type
journal article