Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century: Ideas and Materialities c. 1650–1850 (Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World)

✍ Scribed by James Raven

• Publisher: Boydell Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 427
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Front cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
Part One: Knowledge and Reception
2 Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver’s Museum
3 ‘Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment
4 Monsters, Myths and Methods: The Making and Global Reception of a Norwegian History
5 The Lettres chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China
6 An American Reception of Clarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social Library
Part Two: Images and News
7 Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of England
8 From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the late Eighteenth Century
9 The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles
10 Newspapers and the Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of the Gaceta de Madrid in the Spanish Caribbean
Part Three: Multiple Diffusions
11 Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions
12 The Diffusion of the Qur’an in Private Libraries, 1665-1830
13 The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and Myanmar
14 Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China
15 Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index