James Raven 
Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century 
Ideas and Materialities c. 1650–1850

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.

Innehållsförteckning

1. Introduction –
James Raven

Part One: Knowledge and Reception

2 .Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver’s Museum –
Richard Coulton

3. ’Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment –
Alexandra Ortolja-Baird

4. Monsters, Myths and Methods: The Making and Global Reception of a Norwegian History –
James Raven

5. The
Lettres chinoises and its Shaping of Contrasting Perceptions of China –
Trude Dijkstra

6. An American Reception of
Clarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social Library –
Sean Moore

Part Two: Images and News

7. Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of England –
Isabelle Baudino

8. From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the Late Eighteenth Century –
Jean-François Dunyach

9. The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles –
Francesco A. Morriello

10. Newspapers and Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of the
Gaceta de Madrid in the Spanish Caribbean –
Cristina Soriano

Part Three: Multiple Diffusions

11. Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s
Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions –
Despina Magkanari

12. The Diffusion of the Qur’an in Private Enlightenment Libraries –
Alicia C. Montoya

13. The Unexpected Dynamics of Christian Text Transmission in Colonial South Asia and Myanmar-
Graham Shaw

14. Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China –
Cynthia Brokaw

Conclusion –
James Raven

Select Bibliography

Index

Om författaren

James Raven is a Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Royal Historical Society. He was previously Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, and Professorial Fellow and Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford.