From Civilisational Encounter to Microhistories: Putting Western Learning in Local Places

Western Learning has long been conceptualised as an intellectual encounter between Chinese and Western civilisations, an approach exemplified by Joseph Needham and Jacques Gernet’s classical works. Today, this framework is no longer satisfactory. As an alternative, we advocate a microhistorical approach, which historians of Catholicism have fruitfully used to reveal the plurality of local, regional and global networks that made Catholicism possible in particular places. Similar microanalysis allows the history of Western Learning to reconceptualise the Jesuits’ European traditions materially through the circulation of books, and to separate the Chinese reaction into the two geographically, chronologically, and socially distinct models of patronage, driven respectively by late Ming literati and by the early and mid-Qing court. We suggest further research on the circulation of Western Learning beyond Beijing and Jiangnan in the eighteenth century, particularly in the peripheral regions of the empire and in the rural textual culture of Catholic communities.