The seventeenth century was the start of intensifying contact between Europe and China as travel narratives transmitted in ever more detail the economic and cultural achievements of the Chinese empire, their trade, arts, and religion to Europe. At the same time, European travelers and local traders carried silver bullion from the New World and European material culture and ideas to the Middle Kingdom. To foster cross-disciplinary conversations, the Forums on Seventeenth-Century British Literature and Ming and Qing Chinese’s collaborative session highlight work on global circulation and exchanges between Europe, especially the British Isles, and China.

Our four presenters, from English and Chinese studies, in short 13-minute presentations, examine how cosmological, scientific, and aesthetic ideas traveling cross-culturally reshaped epistemological frames and inflected fictional forms, from Ming adventure novels to English lunar speculative fiction. Through case studies, the presentations reflect on what ideas traveling across linguistic and cultural boundaries can tell us about the myriad paths that cross-cultural knowledge transmission take. They probe the heterogeneous origins of knowledges and conceptual frameworks and hypothesize new methodologies for global comparative work.

In “Chinese Sea Novels and the Making of the Modern World,” S. E. Kile considers how the European idea of the world as a globe manifested in late Ming adventure novels. In 1584 Matteo Ricci introduced for the first time in Chinese the European argument that the earth is an aqueous globe, though three centuries would pass before it would be accepted in scholarly circles. The idea of the earth as a globe joined an already complex range of visions of the world, including the flat, square traditional Chinese world of “all under heaven” and the Buddhist notion of “shijie 世界” (Sanskrit “loka”), which points toward the impermanence of mundane things. Following Margaret Cohen's postulation of the early modern English "sea novel" as an "international form of international fiction," Kile studies late Ming sea novels to chart an alternate but simultaneous path toward global modernity. In addition, he considers whether the literary archive can support the idea of a global early modernity.

Andrea Yang in “China in the Moon: Technology, Cosmology, and Orientalism in Francis Godwin’s Lunar Voyage” focuses on Godwin’s utopian fiction The Man in the Moone (1638), depicting a fantastical voyage to the moon and to China. Examining Godwin’s sources—Matteo Ricci’s journals, either in Nicolas Trigault’s 1615 Latin edition or as redacted by Samuel Purchas, Juan Gonzáles de Mendoza’s Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (1588), and Richard Hakluyt—in relation to his text, she studies how their ideas shaped the spatial, cultural and racial connections Godwin draws between the lunar world and Ming China. Godwin positions the lunar sphere and China as othered spaces attainable and knowable only through Western technological innovations and epistemology. Yang thus argues that early modern cosmological knowledge production and strategies of colonial expansion were mutually constitutive.

Paize Keulemans in “Mapping the Empire’s Watery Ways: The Grand Canal in Early-Modern Chinese Painting, Dutch Travelogues, and French Thought” investigates how scholars, painters, and cartographers from China and the West employed the image of China’s Grand Canal to imagine empire as a grand, inter-connected body of man-made arteries. Drawing on a rich variety of texts, maps, and images, he highlights how late-Ming concepts concerning canals, rivers, dikes, and dams critically informed “Western” thinking on imperial networks and on the importance of control of watery networks to the exercise of state power, mercantile profits, and the free-flow of scholarly knowledge. Connecting early-modern Chinese and Western modes of thinking on China’s Grand Canal, this paper reveals how different traditions contributed to conceptual frameworks that shaped the modern age.

Finally, David Porter in “Metaphor as Method” considers historical shifts in comparative work between China and Europe to explore possibilities for new methodologies. Seen as Eurocentric, comparative approaches—whether comparison of discrete phenome or the study of movements of texts, artefacts, and ideas through channels of trade, religious or tributary missions, or colonialism–have recently fallen into disfavor, with more attention paid to translation, transculturation, assimilation, appropriation, exchange, and circulation. Porter considers what is lost in the general disavowal of comparisons to develop an alternative conception of comparison that dodges the familiar essentializing hazards of binaristic approaches. He does so by embracing the more fluid epistemology of metaphor, concluding with a consideration of how this method might enhance our ability to leverage our substantial cognitive capacities for analogical thinking even within a post-Eurocentric frame.