Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century

A pioneering exploration of how differences in production and circulation of texts conveyed ideas around the world in a period of exceptional social, political and intellectual change.

A pioneering exploration of how differences in material textual forms conveyed and altered ideas in diverse but connected parts of the world in a period of exceptional social, political and intellectual change.

Technological advances during the long eighteenth century brought new and exciting intellectual exchange between peoples in different parts of the world. Mutual unfamiliarity with textual forms - those sent to as well as received from Europe - also made knowledge transfer unpredictable and problematic.

This volume examines how differences in the material production and circulation of textual objects transformed the ways in which knowledge was formulated and received between 1650 and 1850. Essays focus on diverse regions of Britain and Europe, European colonies in the Caribbean and North America, India and East Asia. The volume engages with varied and changing perceptions of China in Europe, the transmission of Christian texts in colonial South Asia, the cross-cultural circulation of natural history and Orientalist knowledge, and the diffusion of the Qu'ran in European Enlightenment libraries.

In pursuing global perspectives, thirteen cultural and literary historians, collectively reassess Eurocentric interpretations of a republic of letters, a public sphere, an invention of the self and a reading revolution. They further challenge the extent to which European periodizations of 'the Enlightenment' map onto processes of technological and intellectual change in other regions of the globe.

1. IntroductionJames Raven
Part One: Knowledge and Reception
2 .Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver's MuseumRichard Coulton
3. 'Useful' Translations in the Milanese EnlightenmentAlexandra Ortolja-Baird
4. Monsters, Myths and Methods: The Making and Global Reception of a Norwegian HistoryJames Raven
5. TheLettres chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China Trude Dijkstra
6. An American Reception ofClarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social LibrarySean Moore
Part Two: Images and News
7. Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of EnglandIsabelle Baudino
8. From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the Late Eighteenth CenturyJean-François Dunyach
9. The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser AntillesFrancesco A. Morriello
10. Newspapers and Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of theGaceta de Madrid in the Spanish CaribbeanCristina Soriano
Part Three: Multiple Diffusions
11. Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d'Herbelot'sBibliothèque orientale and its EditionsDespina Magkanari
12. The Diffusion of the Qur'an in Private Enlightenment LibrariesAlicia C. Montoya
13. The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and MyanmarGraham Shaw
14. Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century ChinaCynthia Brokaw
ConclusionJames Raven
Select Bibliography
Index