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.

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.

Despina Magkanari is Research Associate at IZEA (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung) -Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg. Her main research interests lie in the transnational history of Oriental studies, the history of Turkology, and the history of Area Studies.