Showing results for "michael keevak"

This text is a timely and wide-ranging study providing essential background to the development of global modernity through the European encounter with China. Considering differing notions of peace, empire, trade, religion, and diplomacy as touchstones in the relations between China and Europe on mutuality, the book examines five encounters with France, Portugal, Holland, the pope, and Russia between 1248 and 1720, and reflects on concepts that the West took for granted but which did not su...

The story of how East Asians became "yellow" in the Western imagination—and what it reveals about the problematic history of racial thinkingIn their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the cat...

While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginatio...