Sezione 5. I rapporti tra Europa e Cina in epoca moderna: raccolte di fonti e saggi storiografici

Capitolo I, "L'Eurasia fra nomadi e sedentari" (pp. 15-38; cap. II, "Il miraggio della conversione", pp. 39-51.

Adriano Prosperi, "Lo specchio del diverso", in J. Gernet, Cina e cristianesimo, (1982), Casale, Marietti, 1984, pp. ix-xxiv

Filippo Mignini, "Matteo Ricci e la Cina dei Ming", in Matteo Ricci, Descrizione della Cina, Macerata, Quoidlibet, 2011, pp. 145-180

Questa voce del Dictionnaire Montesquieu online presenta le idee del président sulla Cina, inserendole nei dibattiti contemporanei.

Fa parte di Etiemble, Conosciamo la Cina ?, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1972, pp. 59-87

Fa parte di D. A. Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others, New York, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 41-68

Abstract
The Middle Kingdom, as a relatively unknown advanced civilisation, held a unique position in Enlightenment thought, as Europeans tried to understand a widening world and their own place in it. European views of China in the early modern period have been widely studied.
While the predominant paradigm has been to analyse a shift from sinophilia to sinophobia, disagreements over the extent, nature and timing of this shift suggest that the rigid juxtaposition may not always be useful. In order to highlight the importance of the particular topic to the constructions of China in eighteenth-century European thought, this paper examines the way primary sources and scholars viewed one particular aspect of China: Its system of government.
This paper will consider views of China related to Adam Smith’s main duties of government (the art and science of war, the administration of justice and public institutions) and how these duties were to be paid for (the public revenue). Discussions of China’s government married interest in the advanced civilisation of China with that characteristic Enlightenment project to define, explain and reflect on the meaning of civilisation and progress. A surprising degree of consensus is found, calling into question the conventional juxtaposition of sinophilia and sinophobia. Moreover, eighteenth-century European observers did not approach China with assumptions of superiority; on the contrary, there was a degree of civilisational relativism in their outlook, and at times China was seen as offering useful lessons. This approach also allows us to consider those questions with which Enlightenment thinkers did not turn towards China for answers, and ask the reasons for such omissions. China was dismissed as a useful model because it was deemed in many ways to be a unique case that could not be worked into the universal models that characterised the European Enlightenment.

Saggio compreso nel volume Encountering Otherness. Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern European Culture, Trieste, EUT, 2011, pp. 205-222.

"This paper examines the European confrontation with and conceptualization of the China trade in the early modern world, and in particular during the Enlightenment. International trade was of central importance to Enlightenment conceptions of wealth. As Daniel Defoe – the famed champion of the merchant class – wrote, “the rising greatness of the British nation is not owing to war and conquests, to enlarging its dominion by the sword, or subjecting the people of other countries to our power; but it is all owing to trade, to the increase of our commerce at home, and extending it abroad”1. European philosophers and a broader set of commentators that included popular geographers and merchants hotly debated international trade. These debates portrayed China as having a more cautious, restricted view of foreign trade"

Sono qui riprodotte le pagine introduttive e una porzione del II capitolo della raccolta documentaria pubblicata nel 1954 da Fairbank e Ssu-yü e riedita nel 1979.