Riches, power, trade and religion: the Far East and the English imagination, 1600–1720

Abstract

For many scholars, European relations with Asia in the seventeenth century remain an area of vague assumptions and misconceptions. Although there are obvious political differences between traditionalists, who celebrate the spreading of ‘civilization’ to the non-European world, and their revisionist critics, who decry the violence and ecological devastation of European imperialism, both camps share a fundamentally Eurocentric perception of early modern history. Both employ analytical models – colonialist or post-colonialist – which assume that the technological inferiority, economic backwardness, and political conservatism of oriental cultures spelled their inevitable defeat by European colonizers. This default view of European–Asian relations has been challenged vigorously in recent years by K.-N. Chaudhuri, J. M. Blaut, Frank Perlin, Paul Bairoch, R. Bin Wong, Andre Gunder Frank, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who argue – in different ways – that until 1800 an integrated world economy was dominated by India and China, and that our recognition of this domination requires a fundamental reassessment of both neoclassical and Marxian accounts of the economic ‘rise’ of the West. 1 In this essay, I draw on the work of these historians to challenge the theoretical values and historical assumptions that underlie Eurocentric accounts of global relations in the early modern period. In focusing on Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652; eight editions before 1700), I argue that seventeenthcentury writers in England did not automatically assume the cultural, economic,