Comparative Early Modernities: 1100-1800 023012089X, 9780230120891

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Previous Publications Between Men and Feminism (editor) Internet Culture (editor) Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England

COMPARATIVE EARLY MODERNITIES 1100-1800

Edited by David Porter

palgrave macmiUan

COMPARATIVE EARLY MODERNITIES

Copyright © David Porter, 2012. All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALCRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-12089-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comparative early modernities, 1100-1800 / edited by David Porter, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-12089-1 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Modern. 2. Comparative civilization. I. Porter, David, 1965CB357.C665 2012 909.83—dc23

2012010458

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2012 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction David Porter

Part I 1

Globalizing Early Modernity

A War of Worlds: Becoming "Early Modern" and the Challenge of Comparison

15

Ayesha Ramachandran

47

Eurasian Literature Walter Cohen

3

Asia-Centered Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World: A Methodological Romp

73

Luke Clossey

Part II 4

Comparative Cultural History

Pornography, Chastity, and "Early Modernity in China and England, 1500—1640

99

Katherine Carlitz

5

Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity

125

Richard Vinograd

6

Divergence in Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern Jack A. Goldstone

165

CON I I N IS

VI

Part III

Economies and States

7

Did China's Late Empire have an Early Modern Era? R. Bin Wong

8

Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China Martin Powers

9

Areas, Networks, and the Search for "Early Modern" East Asia Kenneth Pomeranz

Notes on Contributors Index

FIGURES

1.1

Jahangir Embracing Shah 'Abbas (Abu'l Hasan, ca. 1618-1622).

16

1.2

Gerhard Mercator andjudocus Hondius. From Mercator, Atlas (1613).

27

Jahangir Symbolically Killing Malik 'Anbar (Abu'l Hasan, ca. 1615—20).

30

Abu'l Hassan, Emperor Jahangir Triumphing over Poverty, circa 1620—1625. ^Vatercolor, 23.81 X 15.24 cm.

31

3.1

"Characteristics of the Early Modern World: Causation Flow Chart."

75

4.1

Xie chun yuan edition of Rou pu tuan (The Carnal Prayer Mat), n.d. Third frontispiece.

4.2

"Yu Shiyuan qi (The Wife of Yu Shiyuan)," from Huitu lienti zhuan (Illustrated Biographies of Notable Women),

1.3 1.4

Zhibuzuzhai edition. 4.3

4.4 4.5 4.6

"Zhang Xiaopian zui chun tu (Zhang Xiaopian drunk on springtime)," from Wu ji bai mei (One Hundred

100

114

Beauties of the Wu Region).

116

"Night Boat Ride," in R. H. Van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Brill, 2004), p. 231.

118

"Liu Cuige," Huitu lienu zhuan (Illustrated Biographies of Notable Women), Zhibuzuzhai edition.

119

"Ming Gong Wang Hou" (Empress Wang Ming Gong), from Huitu lienu zhuan (Illustrated Biographies of Notable Women), Zhibuzuzhai edition. Consort of Emperor Ming of the Liu Song dynasty (r.465-473). When the debauched Emperor Ming called out his dancing girls, she hid her face with her fan.

120

mi

5.1

FIGURES

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497—1543). Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve ('The Ambassadors'),

1533. Oil on oak, 207 X 209.5 cm. Bought, 1890 (NG1314). 5.2 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573—1610). The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 X 196.2 cm. Presented by the Hon. George Vernon, 1839 (NG172).

128

129

5.3 Diego Rodriguez Velazquez (1599—1660). Las Meninas (with Velazquez' self-portrait) or the Family of Philip IV),

1656. Oil on canvas, 276 X 318 cm.

130

5.4 Jan Vermeer (van Delft) (1632—1675). Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window. Ca. 1659. Oil on canvas, 83 X 64.5 cm.

131

5.5 Wu Bin (active ca. 1573—1620). Gavampati, from The Twenty-Five Great Deities of the Surangama Sutra. Album leaf, ink and colors on silk, 62.3 X 35.2 cm.

140

5.6

5.7

Min Qiji (1580-after 1661), publisher, "Oriole Reads Scholar Zhang's Love Letter," Illustration to Act 10 from a set of twenty Illustrations ofXixiangfi (Romance of the Western Chamber), 1640. Multicolor woodblock prints on paper, 25.5 X 32.2 cm.

149

Chen Hongshou (1598-1652), Elegant Gathering. Handscroll, ink on paper, 29.8 X 98.9 cm.

146

5.8 Mm Qiji (1580-afterl661), publisher, "Oriole Writes a Letter to Scholar Zhang," Illustration to Act 18 from a set of twenty Illustrations ofXixiangJi (Romance of the Western Chamber), 1640. Multicolor woodblock prints on paper, 25.5 X 32.2 cm. 5.9

5'10

Mm Qiji (1580-afterl661), publisher, "Scholar Zhang Meets Oriole in the Night," Illustration to Act 11 from a set of twenty Illustrations ofXixiangJi (Romance of the Western Chamber), 1640. Multicolor woodblock prints on paper, 25.5 X 32.2 cm ?°"guQlChang (1555-1636)-

Iff7!' h:^8mS ScroU' 111-3 X 36.8 cm.

149

50

Wanluan Thatched Hall,

mk and U8ht col°rs

on paper, 152

FIGURES

3.1

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, King of France. Full-length portrait in royal costume. 1701. Oil on canvas. 277 X 194 cm.

IX

220

3.2 Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651. Detail showing the allegorized polity

as the body of the monarch. 3.3 Drawing of a detail of Greeting the Emperor at Wangxian Village. Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk. Shanghai Museum of Art. Anonymous, Southern Song dynasty (1125—1278). 3.4

Buffalo and Herder Boy in Landscape. Anonymous, Southern Song dynasty, 12th-13th century.

3.5 Qu Ding (active ca. 1023-ca. 1056), Summer Mountains. Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), 11th century. Handscroll; ink and light color on silk, 17 3/8 X 46 in. (44.1 X 116.8 cm). Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family, Gift of The Dillon Fund, 1973 (1973.120.1).

222

224 228

234

INTRODUCTION David Porter

M

odernity, if the term retains any cogency at all, would appear to be in crisis. Economic meltdowns in Europe and the United States have revealed the profound vulnerabilities of an increasingly hypercapitalist world order. Environmental disasters in Japan and the Gulf of Mexico and disruptive climate shifts across the globe underscore the cataclysmic dangers attending a complacent overreliance on inexpensive nonrenew­ able energy. Protests engulfing Chinese factories, European streets, and city squares across the Middle East convey the frustration and despair of those multitudes across the globe the triumphant march of progress has blithely left behind. The global reach of such crises, of their structural origins, and of the media technologies that lend them their air of irresistible immediacy con­ tribute to the appearance of an accelerating historical convergence. As a globalized world becomes smaller and more tightly interconnected, the trajectories traced by its component societies come to seem increasingly, almost fatalistically predetermined. The teleology of modernity, for better or for worse, binds the errant strands of local and regional histories ever more tightly into a recognizable arc, consigning the inexhaustible diversity of the past to a musty irrelevance. If the pathway for traditional or devel­ oping" societies points inescapably toward a singular vision of the modern, there is, it might seem, little need for a backward glance. Increasingly, such a homogenizing conception of modernity has been challenged by those who recognize a degree of legitimate vari­ ability, not only among the historical trajectories of human com­ munities, but also among their value hierarchies and aspirations. We seem increasingly willing to acknowledge, for example, that societies can be successful by economic and other measures of well-being in the absence of a secular, liberal democratic political structure. And

2

DAVID PORTER

yet, even a capacious vision of multiple modernities runs the risk of a myopic presentism if it focuses narrowly on the terminal endpoints of historical processes. To attend only to the demonstrable diversity of modernities in the absence of the backward glance is to leave unques­ tioned the larger macroparadigm of historical convergence, not to mention the privileged status of "Western" modernity as the standard benchmark against which all others must appear as lesser alternatives. What is called for, and what an increasingly prominent strand of com­ parative historical scholarship has sought to provide in recent years, is a perspective that complicates this picture of modernization-asconvergence by asserting the commensurability of seemingly diverse contexts in the recent premodern past.1 The convergence paradigm presents a funnel-shaped model of global modernization, where the present and future are characterized by increas­ ing interconnectedness and homogenization, in contrast with a past marked by radical differences of various insurmountable kinds between Western (often presented as, in one deep-structural respect or another, proto-modern) and non-Western ("traditional") societies. The notion of multiple modernities laudably widens the tip of the funnel by insisting on the plurality of viable configurations of an "advanced" present-day society, but this notion in itself does nothing to counter the still widely held assumption of fundamental incommensurability in the histories of the West and its others. Among the challenges posed by the present moment of global crisis is that of recognizing that a multiplicity of pasts are embedded in our current condition, and that some of the most salient resources in coming to terms with its conundrums might well be found beyond the putatively decisive boundaries of the European cultural tradition, narrowly conceived. To assert the commensurability of historical contexts is not to claim that they are the same, but rather, literally, that they can be measured (and imagined and interpreted) together, and that there is no gaping chasm of y PreTenK ,hem fr°m be"'® P^ucfvdy compared. Nu» ed 1 naralTT 'i" ''""*"turn' »* "gional histories, bo. also wi.h. nl" , rnd hi"orical ™ot»ge points. Most readers h'Ve been ™"re of'he dangers of Eorocen.Hstn. me :° I™ '° &mili" hy «P»"i"8 ou. geonae.hodolog.cal E„,„„„rma,,v„y and ask-

world rnighUooZke

^ ""

d,afE?eZp?fohr"agcr,COme °h

"is.ory of the early naodc.n tU™inB

"shies in .his way is

and STot -,h:s,,e °f e SU88eSK

inscription over the emperor's head i ™°,h" di"™ "nolosy. one thm Conner

whX mhes h,sT°e TT BleSSed °"d » •>* corrupt, rmpe

of the other would be dangerous. Indeed, t

A WAR OF WORLDS

31

Figure 1.4 Abu'l Hassan, Emperor Jahangir Triumphing over Poverty, circa 1620-1625. Watercolor, 23.81 X 15.24 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

attend to the apparent medievalisms of Europe's early modernity is to open new avenues for comparison based not on preestablished markers of what constitutes modernity, but rather on the symbols, ideas, and knowl edges that were circulating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such symbol, I have tried to suggest, is the idea and image of "the world" itself. The Unfinished Project: Reimagining Early Modernities The breakdown of this cosmographic mode as a model for knowledge of the world, in Europe at least, by the end of the sixteenth century, and its almost inevitable fragmentation into more specific scientific disciplines

32

AYESHA RAMACHANDRAN

such as geography, natural history, astronomy, and navigation, suggests how and why the post-Enlightenment association of science and moder­ nity strategically obscured its early modern origins.54 While the cosmographic method emblematized the intellectual changes associated with what has been called the great "epistemological shift" of early moder­ nity, it remained steeped in religion, speculation, and poetic synthesis. Its desire to embrace the whole and offer a coherent and comforting vision of certain knowledge and stable world order would always be in tension with the singular techniques of empirical observation, mathematic mea­ surement and ethnographic reportage so dear to an idealized scientific modernity. Thus, from the perspective of a post-Enlightenment narra­ tive, the cosmographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were doomed to be discarded as premodern or medieval remnants in the new, modern discipline of cartography—a fate that plagues scholarship on t ese texts today. It is hardly surprising then that even in non-European contexts, cosmographic literature and imagery has been relegated to the realm of the premodern, either to be idealized with nostalgia as part of a less corrupt time of transcendental belief and spiritual power, or dis­ missed as evidence of a primitive and insufficiently developed culture.55 ere are important lessons in this rapid historiographic overview for the future of comparative early modern studies. First, and most obvi­ ously it indicates the extent to which Weberian narratives of moderity have become endemic, so much so that historiographic paradigms can masquerade as evidence of significant cultural difference. As sevtions beh 01^ KtS ^ « conference observed, the teleological assumpattemnts T' m°dernity" "self often complicate even the best PreSSUrC °f retrosPe«-e identification, that is, to Jem, T™ °f"ady from « some definite y m'8h' be mpomnrt T" S«o„d. and more o Tc o t c e m i l " 8 ? e x " n t ' ° Which ™ >»v, to interrogate m°d»»«y idenS^Hf •,""'"""1 a, we venture fnto searching^ sustained3co m°dern',y" '» "on-European contexts. Perhaps

w h a t c o n s t i t u t e s aspects of European earlv moHfs aspects which mav illi of enligh,„me™?

^

s eo f and understand * ^aVe '3een hitherto obscured, Pm 'n one case, its claim to mastery is contained by i e toic exhortation against worldly glory; in the other, imperial majesty sustains and is sustained by spiritual enlightenment. Both articulate the need tor and the potentials of a totalizing vision. Notes 1.

in. £a ^°m PreCk Verb ddein ("t0 See")' W'J" T' Mitchell, Iconoloi *ge' eXt' IdeoloSY, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

' the^ll P°btICal C°nteXt f°r this P«wing was the dispute betwe the Mugha! and Safavtd courts over possession of the frontier reg. Kandahar that was eventually captured by Safavid forces in 161 Ra~ " °V S Pamting arE numerous: see especially, Sumal C~\ J\ °f thC G1°be iH Mu«hal Visual P«ctic< .... " les ln Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007): 751-71 (Wa^hinrtorDC^F11' J"*"™' Im"ge: Paintingsfor the Mughal Co and Imperial 'J, Fre" fallerV of Art, 1981); Ebba Koch, Mughal , Pr Ss 20

.S

%'yr

e"

(NeW York:

°xford Unlets (N- yo,

ess ritsn™;wf:K'mperia'Mughai

***

m t h ° M ° 8 h "»"«-

in Mughal Paintine " amtmg' m

Skelton, "Imperial Symboli: Context of Visual Arts in the Isla,

Robert C°Ment

>

A WAR OF WORLDS

35

World, ed. Priscilla Soucek (University Park, TX: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1988), 177—191; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Indian Conquest of Catholic Art: The Mughals, the Jesuits, and Imperial Mural Painting," Art Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 24-30; Milo Cleveland Beach, "The Gulshan Album and Its European Sources," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston LXIII, no. 332: 76—77; and Ebba Koch, "The Influence of the Jesuit Missions on the Symbolic Representations of the Mughal Emperors," in Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1-11; and Ashok Kumar Srivastava, Mughal painting: An Interplay of Indigenous and Foreign Traditions (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2000). 4. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Par-dela l'incommensurabilite: pour une histoire connectee des empires aux temps modernes," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 54, no. 4bis (2007): 34—53. 5. Jeremiah Losty, "Abu'l Hasan," in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. Pal Pratapaditya (Bombay: Marg Publications, 1991), 81. 6. It is worth noting that this painting appears to be part of a series produced at the Jahangiri court. Similar paintings, which depict globes or maps, include "Jahangir on a Globe" (now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), "Jahangir with an Orb in His Hand" and "Jahangir Standing on a Globe" (both in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin), "Jahangir Using a Globe as a Footstool" (in the Freer Gallery of Art).These and other globe paintings" have been recendy discussed in Jeremiah Losty, "Abu'l Hasan," in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. Pal Pratapaditya (Bombay. Marg Publications 1991). Other discussions of Mughal painting that focus on the image of'the globe include Beach, The Imperial Image; Richard Ettinghausen, "The Emperor's Choice," in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor ofErwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss, vol. 2 (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 98-120; Linda York Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library (London: Scorpio Cavendish, 1995); Amina Okada, Indian Miniatures of the Mughal Court, trans. Deke Dusinberre (NewYork: H. N.Abrams, 1992);Skelton,"Imperial Symbolism";Srivastava, Mughal Painting-, and Som Prakash Verma, Painting the Mughal Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Ramawsamy rightly points

out that most of these studies discuss the globe in terms of European influ­ ence on the Mughal atelier, and dismiss it as a "European" object, rather than discussing its particular characteristics within the Mughal context (759) 7. See Ramaswamy, "Conceit" andJosephE. Schwartzberg, "Geographical Mapping," in Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 2 The History of Cartography (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press 1987), 38 Volumes in The History of Cartography series will hereafter be cited as followed by volume and page numbers.

^

AYESHA R A M A C H A N D R A N

8. See Schwartzberg, "Geographical Mapping," who argues that "there can be no question that the general shapes . . . indicated on the globe . . . derive from European maps," noting for instance that the north­ ern shore of the Arabian Sea bears a striking resemblance to Hondius's Magni Mongolis Imperium of 1625 (409). 9. Schwartzberg, "Geographical Mapping," 409. 10. For authoritative overviews, see Joseph E. Schwartzberg, "Introduction to South Asian Cartography," in HC 2: 295-331; and Irfan Habib, "Cartography in Mughal India," Indian Archive 28 (1979); 88-105. 11. The most famous account of the Mughal desire for maps is Sir Thomas Roes narrative of his embassy to Jahangir's court from 1615-1619 (see The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615-19, ed. William Foster (New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1990), 380; for other occasions when maps were gifted to the Emperor, see 44-45, 84). Roe's account is corroborated by his chaplain, Edward Terry (notes to 382 83). For a discussion of European accounts of Indian mapping, see Schwartzberg, "Introduction to South Asian Cartography," 324-27 and Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture, (A.D. 1498-1707) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 36-37, 148; Habrb, "Cartography," 94; and Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King oj the World:The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London:Thames & Hudson, 1997), 139. mber Gascoigne suggests as much in his classic account (A Brief tstory of the Great Moguls (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), p. 162) and Ramaswamy concurs ("Conceit," p. 758-9).

lo. Ramaswamy, "Conceit," 772—9 14. Ramaswamy "Conceit of the Globe m Mughal Vrsual Practice." 776, •

e notec* though that the pictorial assertion ofjahangir's . S °U mpenal power rs very legible across cultures: as Ramaswamy her-

Tdvi

C °mmientators before

terrrtorv persia Pfrcia

her, notes, "the Mughal emperor

CkimS' alBelt

11 i°n

e

cessfully, over his rrval Safavrd's sprawls across across a good part of

on wbicb be sta awuus nds

Ask ' ' ' the Safav,d's vast empire : reduced to ^ Such pictorial"110 h 1^ term°rles around the Mediterranean" (755). EUr°pean Renarssance painting as well se " famill3r (Ithaca, NY: c°nnection between European and Mughal Muo-hal l -' ' connection

ence of Euronea

^

P°Wer has been

15. This trope "1 ""T®" also Bamber

eX'ensively ln Koch>

is derived from

th^flT6

r

"7 )f°S"ls'

(Antwerp, 1569-72))- whTb

.«~po L

o

n

»

attributed to the influ-

3": Iee Mte 3 above"

n

7^ o

Mughal Art, 116-29; see

As Koch

notes, this imagery

P°lyglot Bible

t

e

• *

, h

«

of course, that we should simnlv ipnnrP it, ,• 6 C°mp 1Clty of the cartographic project in the imperial agendas ofF of analysis to account f^T 29. Surprisingly^ the'h . M

Slmply tHat WC broaden the field P°tentiaI marke" of

modernity.

see especially, DenisG^^r^malT'Yu1116 C°Sm°8raPhy is small: 1450-1650," in HC 3- 55-qq. c f of Renalssance Cosmography, Lestnngant. "The Crisis of Cosmography at the End of thj R™ naissance, The Decline of the French Reno' in Humanism in Crisis: University „( »,ch"t ~'j '

XV-XVII Century," Memorie deUa t r C°SmoSraPhy « Italy from Soaeta Astronomica Italiana 65 (1994):

A WAR OF WORLDS

39

443-68; and Matthew McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Miinster (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007). 30. See John W. Hessler, The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio (London: Giles, 2008). 31. David Woodward, "Cartography in the Renaissance: Continuity and Change," in HC 3: 3-24, and "Medieval Mappaemundi," in HC 1: 286-370. 32. The scholarship is succinctly summarized in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, "Introduction to Islamic Maps," in HC 2: 3—11. 33. For useful overviews, see Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Cosmographical Diagrams," in HC 2: 71-89; Joseph E. Schwartzberg, "Cosmographical Mapping," in HC 2:332-387.1 refer to"Islamic science" in this generalized way for the sake of brevity, though it should be noted that the indigenous traditions stretching from North Africa to India were quite distinct. 34. See S. R. Sarma, "From Al-Kura to Bhagola: On the Dissemination of the Celestial Globe in India," Studies in the History of Medicine and of Science XIII, no. 1, New Series (1994): 69-85; S. R. Sarma, S. M. R. Ansari, and A. G. Kulkarni, "Two Mughal Celestial Globes, Indian Journal of History of Science 28, no. 1 (1993): 55-65; and Emilie SavageSmith, "Celestial Mapping," in HC 2: 12-70. 35. Brotton, Trading Territories, 87-118; Savage-Smith, "Celestial Mapping," 27-28. 36. See J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, The History of Cartography Volume 2

(Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987). The small, but growing body of scholarship on cartographic traditions and knowledge practices in non-European contexts suggests that the diffusiomst model for the historiography of science is deeply flawed: see Raj, Relocating Modern Science, 1-20. 37. Raj, Relocating Modern Science, 5. 38. Karamustafa, "Cosmographical Diagrams," 71-73. 39. For a recent overview of the historiography see Pauline Moffitt Watts, "The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping," in HC 3: 382-400. See also Zur Shalev, "Sacred Geography, Antiquarlanism and Visual Erudition: Benito Arias Montano and the Maps in the Antwerp Polyglot Bible," Imago Mundi 55, no. 1 (2003): 56-80- the essays in Les meditations cosmographiques a la Renaissance, edited by Frank Lestringant, Cahiers V. L. Saulmer 26 (Paris: PUPS 2009); and David Woodward, Catherine Delano-Smith, and Cordell D.^ K. Yee, "Maps and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, in Plantejaments i objectus d'una histdria universal de la cartografia/ Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography, (Barcelona: Institut

Cartografic de Catalunya, 2001), 179—200. ... 40. Roger Bacon, "Opens Majoris Pars Quarta: Mathematicae In Divims Utihtas," trans. Herbert M. Howe, 1996, http://www.geography.

AYESHA RAMACHANDRAN

wisc.edu/histcart/bacon.html. The passage is discussed at length in David Woodward, Herbert M. Howe, and Jeremiah Hackett, "Roger Bacon on Geography and Cartography," in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 199-222. 41. Lestringant, Mapping; Watts, "The European Religious Worldviewand Its Influence on Mapping" 397-98; and Denis E. Cosgrove, Geographical Imagination and the Authority of Images (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 17-18. 42. See for instance Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500-1600 (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Kenneth Nebenzahl, Maps of the Holy Land (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). Significantly, most mapmakers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu­ ries appear to have had Reformist leanings: it is a surprising and striking act t at the use of maps and their production seems more firmly assoate with Protestant regions than with Catholic ones. Delano Smith an ngrams study of maps in Bibles decisively shows that this practice was a Reformist one, as maps began to appear in Bibles in the 1520s, coinciding with Luther's break from the Catholic Church. It is now • i

C ' e great cycle of maps in the Vatican Galleria may in fact rh^°St •" e""ne resPonse to the widespread Protestant use of maps n the service of religious contemplation.

43. Woodward, Cartography in the Renaissance: Continuity and Change," • See aho figure 6.2 in Robert Karrow, "Intellectual Foundations UniverS"™,1; 241ReV°'U,i0n'"

P"D

74 (1988): 1-39.

68

WALTER COHEN

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bV Chikamatsu

University Press, 1961.

Holt, Rinehart and WiMtoTl976'°f "*

PK-M°dem Era' New York:

Kelly, John. The Great Mortality An , ,• De"th' Devastating Plague of All Time NewvT °f ^ ^ Kennedy, H. N. "The 'Abbas d C 1"T Harper Collins, 2005. Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashti ^ ^ Historical Introduction." In Abbasid Knauer, Elfriede IT "The O ^ ^ of Western Prototypes on the^ M°ther of tbe West: A Study of the Influence Exchange, ed. Mair, pp. 62-1 lS^"08"*^ °fthe

Taoist

Deity." In Contact and

"igh

M'Me ^ d'

69

EURASIAN LITERATURE

Kulke, Hermann, and Dietmar Rothermund. A History of India. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Kuzmina, E. E. The Prehistory of the Silk Road. Ed. Vtctor H. Mair. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Lancel, Serge. 1992. Carthage: A History. Trans. Antonia Nevill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. , . Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Lehmann, W. P. "Comment on 'the Typology of Indo -European' by Edwin G. Putteybhnk." Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 119-21. Levy, Reuben. An Introduction to Persian Literature. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1969. . Lindsay, Jack. The Troubadours and Their World of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. London: Frederick Muller, 1976. Littleton, C. Scott, and Linda A. Malcor. From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and the Holy Grail. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Loewe, Michael, andEdwardL. Shaughnessy, eds. The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. Cambridge,

am n ge

University Press, 1999. . , Luk, Bernard Hung-Kay, and Barry D. Steben, eds. Eastern Asia: Literature and Humanities. Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992. Mack, Maynard, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Exp. e .

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Beginnings to 1650. New York: Norton, 1995. _ , fJ Mair,Victor H. Afterword and Appendix to Tao Te Ching:The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, by LaoTzu.Trans.Victor H. Mair. NewYork.Bantam. • , ed. The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia^

vols. Washington, DC: The Institute for the Study of Man in collaboration with The University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications,^^ . ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. , ed. Hawai'I Press, 2006. . , r. . Headnote to "Heavenly Questions," by Ch u Yuan [i.e., —

Q

Vll,nl

Tn

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London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.

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WALTER COHEN

Mallory, J. P., and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. McDonald, William C. '"Too Softly a Gift of Treasure': A Rereading of the Old High German Hildebrandslied." Euphorion 78 (1984): 1-16. McNeill, William. 1976. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Anchor, 1998. Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Miller, Barbara Stoler, ed. Theater of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 Miner, Earl, ed. The High Middle Ages, trans. Aileen Gatten and Mark Harbison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Minervini, Laura. La poesia ispano-araba e la tradizione lirica romanza: una questione aperta." In Lo spazio letterario del medioevo. Part 3, Le culture circonstanti, ed. Mario Capaldo et al. Vol. 2, La cultura arabo-islamica. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2003. Nagaraj, D. R. "Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture." In Literary Cultures in History, ed. Pollock, pp. 326-27. A' Hispano-Arabic Poetry and lroubadours. Baltimore: n.p., 1946.

Papillon, Serge.

Its Relations with the Old Provencal

Influences tokhanennes sur la mythologie chinoise." Sino-

Platomc Papers 136 (May 2004)

Paterson, Linda M. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100c• Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. englase, Charles. Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influences in the Homer,c Hymns and Hesiod. London: Routledge, 1994. aR™!dre,|

Tav

y"Sa ,

^,1Wength Hsiao-shuo and the Western Novel: A Generic n

l"1"nd the West:

Comparative Literary Studies, ed. William

and Hci,-hs'"* y"»-

Pollock, Sheldon. Introduction pp 1-36

in

T •*

»"«

^

Literary Cultures in History, ed. Pollock,

Uni^^ty'^CaliforniaVres^'52003.^eCO"S'r"':('t'"i^r0m ^ ^ History, ed'pollock'pp7 39-130 ^ ^

"th

°Ut"

C""mS

HlSt°ry: A

of Recent 2'

Pulleyblank, Lwin G ' The Chm T'S*' ^ the American Oriental Society 99 (Wq)^"^18"5 " Phonograms "Journal of Early China 16 (1991): 39-80

^

ApPlication to the

• "The Historical and Prehistoric:, 1 n w Ancestry of the Chinese Language ed Willi of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 8.

, •

Calendar."

. Chmese" In T],\ 8' PP' U5~94'Joum"'

71

EURASIAN LITERATURE

. "Old Chinese Phonology: A Review Article." Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21 (1993): 337—80.

. "Reply to Baxter's Reply." Journal of Chinese Linguistics 22 (1994): 161-69. . "Reply to the Comments of Professors Lehmann and Schmidt." Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 135—41.

. "The Typology of Indo-European." Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 63-118. Reichl, Karl. Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure. New York: Garland, 1992. Renfrew, Colin. "The Tarim Basin, Tocharian, and

Indo-European

Origins: A

View from the West." In The Bronze Age, ed. Mair, 1 pp. 202-12. Roberts, J. A. G. A Concise History of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. .. Sass, Benjamin. The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium: The West Semitic Alphabet ca. 1150-850 BCE; The Antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian Alphabets. Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute

of Archaeology, 2005. c Schmidt, Karl Horst. "Comments on Edwin G. Pulleyblank: The Typology o Indo-European." Journal of Indo-European Studies 21 (1993): 123-33. ^ Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig, and Victor H. Mair. "Buddhist Literature.

n

Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Mair, p. 160. Sedlar, Jean W. India and the Greek World: A Study in the Transmission of Culture.

Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. r .. r . . Shalian, Artin K. Introduction to "David of Sassoun": The Armenian Folk Epic in Four Original Cycles. Trans. Artin K. Shalian. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1964. , . Sherratt, Andrew. "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of C me Relations with the West." In Contact and Exchange, ed. Mair PPShirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology,

'

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Sorenson, John L„ and Carl L. Johannesen. "Biological Evidence for PreColumbian Transoceanic Voyages." In Contact and Exc ange, Sparks,^Kenton L. Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Guide to the Background Literature. Peabody, MA: Hendnckson, 2005 ... Buitenen, j. A. B. "The Cl.sstal D,omo.~ In Tl,e U,e„m„ of Ini.e, ed.

Edward C. Dimock, Jr., et al., pp. 81-114 West, M. L. Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. Ox or .

,

r]

—!' The Eos, F„, of Helicon: We,, A,,.„o He— >» the Tltank °f be thinkino• ^ -his chapter suggests that we should also Oriya Boitas, Arab* dho °Ut fEgyptlan Khufu ships, Japanese Atakebune, mese junks, and Pacific Islander proas as potential alte'rn r'

»» th,s

we are all Europeanists.

we

-^

subjects; in terms of methodology,

Notes Co., ignnT' 2^

A De-feme

°f

N°"sense

(New York: Dodd, Me

For their enthusiasm and wi< P „ Boko, Michael Farrelly Fu Tie RUggJtl0nS> 1 am grateful t0 Marnott. Andrew Re Sebastian Prange, Jennifer Sh' Ut£ ' ny Tang, Palgrave's ai mous referee and to t-h

and earnest, sympathetic

SCh°larS who

BelfUtrpSed'

£ave criticisms, ber

of this deli at the Queen's University °" asc P°stcolonial Research Forurr University of British n l British Columbia Department of History colloq, Versions

91

ASIA-CENTERED APPROACHES

and the Comparative Early Modernities conference at the University of Michigan. 3. These details have become traditional in the Western understanding, and appear already in L. A. Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, with Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism, and Mythology, and in Its Relation to Indian Buddhism

(New York: Dover, 1972 [1895]), 80. 4. Alfred Tarski demonstrated this around 1930. See Alfred Tarski and Steven Givant, "Tarski's System of Geometry," The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 5 (1999): 175-214. 5. Joseph Fletcher, "Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the

Early Modern Period, 1500-1800," Ni&uca Bicig / Pi Wen Shu Hit / Journal of Turkish Studies / Turkluk Bilgisi Araytirmalari 9 (1985): 37-57. For

an overview of the early-modern world, see my "Early Modern World," in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, ed. Jerry Bentley, David Christian, et alia (Berkshire Publishing Group: Great Barrington MA, 2005): 1213-18, and Luke Clossey and Brandon Marriott, Exp oring Periodization in the Classroom," History Compass 6 (2008): 1368-81. 6. Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 9 7. Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The

Tragic

Journey of a Colonial

Native Convert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2007),

. 8. Geoffrey Koziol, a medievalist who interprets rituals, has stipulated tha "members of a culture are often less knowledgeable about the meanings of their rites and symbols than the scholars who visit them. Geoffrey Koziol Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France

(Itfaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 289, 308. am also struck by the intensity of Egll Hegerberg's denial of an interviewer s interpretationof astatementhemade,aninterpretationso conservative to be littlemore tha restatement. IfsuchagapcouldseparateHegerbergandacontemporaryjo nalist, how much greater must be the gapbetween ^ turies-dead subject. See "Hurra Torpedo, at 2.54, at n p

com

/watch?v=WSP2ikbMwsI . . ,n /onnsv n 9. See my review of Betrayal in the International History Review 30 (2008). 09Q , 10. Constance Fntey points on. that this issue arises in both BraeI Gregorj•, S.t,„la, a, Slake and D.pesh Ch.krabartys

he, revrew of the forme, in 77,,>.rn«I ./M«,»n 11. In his Tan, China: The Ri« „/ Donald Lopez, Steven C. Rockefeller and their colk-agues, concentrate^, more on the ways the comparison can teach us to read eac tra 1 sensitively and accurately.42 Both have lessons for us. As we con compare, we need to be longitudinal thinkers like the istorian , textual, pluralistic thinkers like the literary comparativists.

Notes 1. Hanan 1990. 2. Richardson 1970, III.330 (Letter LXI). 3. Ibid., III. 118 (Letter XVIII). 4. Anthony Fletcher 1995, p. 101; Moulton 2000, pp.

_

122

katherine carlitz 5. Richardson 1970, III. 115 (Letter XVIII). De Bary and Bloom 1999, p. 331. Carlitz 1994, pp. 104-24. Sommer 2000, pp. 260-304. Hunt 1993, p. 10. 10. Moulton 2000, p. 12 6. 7. 8. 9.

11. Hegel and Carlitz 2007. 12. St. Clair and Maasen 2000,1.x 13. Wrigley 1985 14. St. Clair and Maasen 2000 I.xv. 15. ibid., 1.6 16. ibid., 1.133 17

Maf U15e9d8t0OR°berl

18 «H

•

r °nglnal

m HenrY

' byS ?

by FdlX Kl"gSt°n' for

TholM

E- Huntington L.brary.

N°' 10 in Tke Fir$t B°0k

by Thomas Cranmer (London) 1547 19. Nicholl 1984, p. 1. 20. See Thirsk 1978.

"JHomilies, publish*

21. Woodbridge 2003, p. 16.

22. Hutson 1989, p. 173 23' MoSrnd(Soa7?2rs^him°ndi' 7 7 24. Moulton 2000, p. l6.

SCe BayCr 2°09' PP' 200_202 g0t C° England

25. Moulton 2000, p.184. 26. Handlin 1983. 28. CarlitTl9976

Gr°a"ing Words'

Section 1.

29. Guifan, I.lb. 30. Huitu lienu zhuan. 31. Blanchard 2007. cated to Mingtrotklo?11"7 °f Orientations (APril 2009), dedi11115 fr Foundation, with essavs bv^ °m ^ Shibui Collection/Muban CahUI, „d othe„ Th^IS'")" V°° d" B°r8' SS"" James Cahill, Chinese Erotic Pni 7 33. Van Gulik 2003, vol 1 DD iaq" cf 34- For the twelfth-century version,

Chen 1976. 35. Wang 2000, p.82. 36. ->'• 38. 39.

ee

great ^ " treated Printing, forthcoming.

n

on£JleyU(zn

detal1

Xixiangji, translated in

Included in Van Gulik 2003. Joseph Fletcher 1995 n 9 Xie 2007, p. 280. 'P ibid., p. 282.

40. Guanyin had entered Chin, c

Avalokiteshvara, but in a 1 2001, she became female

r°m

as

^e male bodhisattva

in tB § Pr°C.eSS recounted ln the popular mind.

in Chun-fang Yu

PORNOGRAPHY, CHASTITY, "EARLY MODERNITY"

123

41. Derrett 2006. This article also resumes Derrett's earlier work on Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian parallels. 42. Lopez and Rockefeller, 1987.

Works Cited layer, Andrea, ed., Art and hove in Renaissance Italy. Exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yale University Press, 2009. 3ai mei tuji (Collected Images of One Hundred Beauties), comp. Yan Xiyuan, fl. 1787-1804. llanchard, Lara C. W. "A Scholar in the Company of Female Entertainers: Changing Notions of Integrity in Song to Ming Dynasty Painting, Nan Nil. Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, 9.2 (2007). 189—246 Carlitz, Katherine. "Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult ofWidowFidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan ."Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (August 1997): 612-40. . "Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women s Virtue in Late Imperia China." In Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women,Culture, and the State, pp. 101-24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Ih'en Li-li, trans. Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance: A Chinese Chantejable. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. )e Bary, Theodore and Irene Bloom, eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vo . From Earliest Times to 1600. New York: Columbia University Pres , 'errett, J. Duncan M. "Versatility, Angels and Space: The Meaning o u and Non-Buddhist Parallels." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series ,

, is

'etcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500 Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. . , 'etcher, Joseph F. "Integrative History: Parallels and Intercomnections n the Early Modern Period, 1500-1800." In Beatrice Forbes Manz e•

'

Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia. Aldershot, Great Britain , VT : Variorum, 1995. /1611-1680?). v 'anan, Patrick, trans. The Carnal Prayer Mat (Roupu tuan), by 1 u New York : Ballantine Books, 1990. 'andlin, Joanna F. Action in Late Ming Thought : The K'un and Other Scholar-Officials. Berkeley: University o

. .•

nf Lit

1983

'egel, Robert and Katherine Carlitz. Writing and Law in Laite^Penal

Chtm'

Seattle: University of Washington Pres^sla" d„ but illustration hem zhuan (Illustrated Biographies of Notable edition with identistyle places it 1610-1620. Published by Zhencheng tang. 1??9 cal illustrations and near-identical text was published by Zh:ibuzu^thai in A facsimile of the 1779 edition was reprinted in Taiwan by Zhengzhong J in 1971, and is widely available in United States libraries.

124

KATHERINE CARLITZ

Hunt, Lynn Avery, ed. The Invention J

k> 1 vrnvxrapny . KJoscemty and the Urim. Of Modernity, 1500-1800. New York : Zone Books ; Cambridge, MA Distributed by MIT Press, 1993.

Hutson Lorna. Thomas Nashe in Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. opez Donald S. and Rockefeller, Steven C„ eds., The Christ and the Bodlmtm. Albany: State University of: New York Press, 1987. Lu, Kun, 1536-1618. Shen yin yu (Groaning Words). Shanghai : Da da tu shu gong ying she: Guang yi shu ju, Min guo 24 [1935] Huizhou1editi1on(I11UStrated

Regulations

for

the

Women's Quarters). 1617

M7ondn Ian FretrlC,k- ^ Po^Sraphy : Erotic Writing in Early Modern En knl M S Nicb n ^ ,£W °Xf°rd UmVersl'y Pr^a 2000:

Routledge^and Kegan

^ ^

1902 NewS%"ketdidlm"tory °fClanssaSommer, Matthew Harvev Sex T CA: Stanford Unieetaity P„„, 200" S'

fsmlum'Tl r? ,™S"d

M

^

8 vols-

'CU"'S

Mlas"n.

tds, Comfnrt Ulenlm/at

Oxford: cUnS

Van Gulik, Robert Hans (1910—19A71 c ,• ^

ZZ1)

{Z

Brdf

Writing Practice " MitlOo a"",": Woodbridge,

""

'

' ^

an Essay on Chinese Sex T ife f U44. d'vola.

AMS Press, 1970. Reprint of

•

A O

Col°"r

FlCtion

Wtig*'"' r„eLl°":.: p"8'"e

and

« C 20t-A D

Prints of the Ming Period: With

Romanticizing Late Ming

tr" •'

"" N""Em"

the Continent in ^the Ea^v Mod))'11 a'^ ')?.r'eu,tural Change: England and m 15.4 (Spring 1985): 683-728 " ' Journal of Interdisciplinary History Regl°f)-

dated 1617. X'M"',SeSZfi»,td°cf

44.3 (2007): 279—97

1

Published by the Zhu

Preface by Wanyuzi" (pseudonym),

°'h **«*• M™°' « Once: I. A. MM, Parative Method, ' Comparative Literature Studies

Yii, Chun-fang. Kuan-yin : The Chi York : Columbia Universitv P "sn

T

Zhang Longxi. Unexpected Affinities: Re ^ of Toronto Press, 2007 " >n^

mnsformat'0n

across

of Avalokitesvara. New

Cultures. Toronto: University

CHAPTER 5

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT: ACCOMMODATIN G INCOMPATIBILITIES IN EARLY VISUAL MODERNITY Richard Vinograd

"'he notion of an early modern era seems vexed in more waysit - one.1 First, early modern suggests something developmenta y ^logically related to a fully unfolded modernity. In historica terms, > offers a consistent narrative for the European case o t e si ough twentieth centuries, where an early modern era o s eptic , lerimentalism, commercial networks, and internationa enterp -ras of enlightenment, political and industrial revolutions new ur a dia and transportation technologies, emergence o t e ^ niail_ l artistic modernisms. In other parts of the world sue as ma y early modern episodes in the sixteenth and seventeen followed by different historical, social, political and technological ectories that emerge into recognizable versl°ns °s [J 'lrbehted and shadow ofEuropean colonial incursions, an P both ivative. In this historiographs configuration, the^ modern seems b ^ ocentric and Euronormative, and ascriptions of ear y er centers become tainted by implications of world-his and discursive Euro-dominance. further, prevailing notions of an early mo ability of earlier versions °^the m° hina .chronological) early modernity in Song

the a notion the tenth to

126

RICHARD VINOGRAD

thirteenth centuries, even as a hypothesis, some of these hi stenographic and discursive worries are calmed. Arguing for a Song modernity might seem only a diversion (or an evasion) of the tough terminological and categorical questions onto another plane. But if we grant that a plausible case can be and has been made for a Song Chinese era of technologi­ cal innovation and dominance, urbanization, widening interregional and interstate commercial networks, maritime expansion, social and political power sharing beyond the aristocracy, printing, realism (and supra- or ex ra rea istic va ues) in pictorial arts—all conventionally hallmarks of

7

altered

"^

in E"">pe-the

historiographs landscapes

teemhScChiClrCTStanCeS' ^ m°dern eras ln slxteenth- a"d *venMomovam 1 "rT6' Chma and PerhaPs also in Mughal India and Pen°d JaPan beCOme e1ually b*l«ed, but equally inde^S c of"odes of modernity-leaving aside the ermml? t0 SUCh 3" epiSode » China. "Late earW modern on the parodic. Ifth^05' 6^7 m°dern" seenl both clumsy and to verge parts ofEuron A ^ ™ r g'C m C£dbn§ wdat happens in this period in name' WhatCVer that sh°uld be, it should derive primarily from zons rather t h m f ji mterconnections and common hori-

a

early modernity, whkhmnTtotf f° Pref°rmulated lists of symptoms of PreflgUratlons of the Western modern, As it happens ixteenth seventcenth-century Europe and China did participate in I ^eisrci: sxccew° H r™iiL

porcelains, fabrics, and spices- the Te and visual arts instruments- 1 A ^

"'• ^

tnanSular trades 111

enterpnse and lts text

by the Dutch and British East Indrir"6810"31

translation

netWOrks manaSed

ComPanies among others.3 I mean to imply everything that follow f a era modernrty, howete^TJT/" °f the —

episodic, contingent, and local

4

U

1

^

PlUfa1' discontinuous'

model, it might be more useful to thiT f" 3 develoPmental histoncal of modernity as a condition or state, which can crystallize inro °u andpotent the right circumstances, bmwhT 77 configurations under mto another state, in the fashi 7 might dlss°lve or resolve back mical solution. In what follows I continue to use "early modern^0! * tbe at 'east partially anachronistic "Europe" and "Chin ") °n^ relaClvel shorthand for this period offocmi y established terminology and ries, but we should probablv thinP "c ie.Slxteenth and seventeenth centuThat is to say, it points to a ^ ° ' 1S 3S 3 Conditional Early Modern. tha" t0 3 period' and als0 makes the application of the^rm?" ° China of this period conditional

127

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

on some corollary understanding of the Song as an antecedent Primary Modern. Viewed in this way, there is no assumption of the paradigmatic status or normativity of European forms of modernity. At the same time, such an understanding does not preclude the possibility of the impact of European forms, institutions, and enterprises on China at one time or another, especially in situations of diverse intercultural contact as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Representation and its Discontents Since any discussion of modernity is involved with terms and condi tions, I should begin with a bit of methodological boilerplate. My discus sion will be focused on Chinese and European pictures—paintings and prints—of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, within a comparative horizon. This does not imply an exclusion, on principle, of other me la and other regions from consideration in this context. The materia lty of pictures and of other kinds of objects ceramics, carpets, furniture, mirrors—figure importantly in this account. The geographical ocus part a convenience, based on limits of space and competence. Using pictures as a point of entry into the subject is meant to emp the importance of the visual in these cultures, and also, in the erne g of modernity. How pictures look, their conditions of representatio , how they are looked at are of equal concern their form an m modes of operation, and conditions of viewing all seen as int p dent. The form of pictures can shape ways of looking in more or e direct ways—the entailed position(s) of the viewer, the visua , or critical skills she is expected to bring to the encounter w practices and expectations can impact production. Rat e more way construction of a viewing subject, we can observe some ^ like the coproduction of communities of vision. Locating the social, economic, political, and institutional does not r q ^ ther move outside the circuit of picture, viewer, and yew*n®'mar_ aspects are everywhere entailed, in patronage an su jec rpreDtion kets, materiality, and production; audiences and '°of'occasl0nal, collecting, and criticism; the social and cultura ^ controlled, or conventionally forbidden looking. on witj1 one Finally, I would argue that these pictures ear' ^ proc'edures are another and across cultures, in part because P already harbored in some of them. Comp"J!°" ^ Potential pitfalls. Comparing European and pie, shouldn't imply the need for a mapping o one

COurse, p°ctures,

its own for examother> and

128

RICHARD VINOGRAD

certainly not that the features of European early modem pictures are nor­ mative for China or for the rest of the world. Early modern images and objects in different parts of the world might have conditional, structural, and receptive commonalities without looking very much alike, repre­ senting the same things, or deploying the same media and techniques. Comparison is a device aimed at uncovering similarities and discrepan­ cies, commonalities, connections, and avoidances alike on the level of orm, reception, and subject formation, but it is also a tool to sharpen and eground the terms of critical analysis, and to throw the conditions of comparison itself into critical relief. u u,6 C>an^ brief accounts of four European oil paintings: Holbei n s A m b a s s a d o r s o f 1 5 3 5 (flg. 5.1), Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus d e l a z 9 u e z ' L a s M e n i n a s of 1656 (fig. 5.3), and Vermeer's r - II? 1Sj- ' Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window of 1657-1659 (fig. 5.4) These are amous paintings by famous artists, and some of them have the critical status of metapictures, inW.j. T. Mitchell's formulation, in their internal

George, de Selve7^^a^l^^'(UIL~1S43)-JeaH

de Di"'"'ilU

Bought, 1890 (NG1314) © National r ,. ! °n °ak' 207 X 209 5 ational Gallery, London / Art Resource,

129

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

Figure 5.2

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610). T h e S u p p e r 1601. Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 x 196.2 cm. resen e by the Hon. George Vernon, 1839 (NG172). National Gallery London, Great Britain. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, N . atEmmaus,

Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

uration of conditions of pictorial representation.

In t at se

,

' exceptional in the general run of painting or picture ma g, :ak of visual culture at large, in this c e n t u r y - and-a-quarter per 35 to 1660. They are not unrepresentative of these artists o wever, and some features of their

subjects,

^ ^

representational

iress to the viewer were widely dispersed in the contemP°1~ iture iking culture of Europe. Not least of these features was the ^ ne that surrounds them, and related phenomena t at emerg

,

Qf

claims to

>und this time: the artist's biography as a literary opment ing social and cultural status on the part of artists a n d the development art markets that rewarded distinction in style an

tec'

All four are figure paintings in oils, various y

^ ^

linked

traitS)

leSs by

'heal illustration, and a domestic genreengagement with 'dium, genre, subject matter or style t an y ^ Qrial representathematization of fundamental techno ogi n. The A m b a s s a d o r s , which portrays Jean e

teviUe

i

ch ambassador to the court

m

(1504-1555), Georges de

130

X 318

RICHARD VINOGRAD

™- ""•«» 1«' P-ado, M,i™, s'p.'n

design The lute am demonstration print of persnectival

°°

geometric shapes in the floor mo

^ VS* fo"Sh"re' A

Albrecht

Durers well-knc

incorporates up-to-date technolomeTofiZfT^,^ Pal"' ln^uiry and exploration ir multiple renderings of telescone, ' globes („„e teeJLl '"—.s, ,„odel>. Those motifs evoke a horizon of i ^ figured also in the Anatolian ra ^ °ratlon and diplomatic status of the portrakTubjectsJ' ^

ltS

PersPecClval sYstel encoun

mtercultural Wdl

"

f°relgn

Figure 5.4 Jan Vermeer (van Delft) ^ an Open Window. Ca. 1659. Oil on canvas, 83 X 04.3 cm , Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden,

er

Credit: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut / Art Resource, NY.

Despite

i t s i m p r e s s i v e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n a l a r s e n a l , t h e r e a r e a s.

d u a l i t i e s a n d i n c o m p a t i b i l i t i e s figured

in

and

through

some hinted at, and others m a n i f e s t e d , w i t h s u r p r i s i n g the painting is shadowed b y

the anamorphically ren

human skull in the center foreground, which reposition herself radically

to an

le8lb1^

the elements o f t h e p i c t u r e p a r t i c i p a t e i n perspective, projection, and foreshortening,

^ ^

ere

kull " g

u

ore

g,

^r^e^wer^

acute ang e a

Painting in order to perceive t h e image

the pam

12

Thus, all

mathematical

^ ^ dialectical

132

RICHARD VINOGRAD

competition between terrestrial and celestial, secular and sacred, the opulent things of this world and the image of the skull as a reminder of human mortality and vanitas.'3 Other symbolic references to discord and strife are strewn amid the objects on view, but most striking is the incompatibility of viewpoints, and worldviews, implied by the anamorphic skull.14 Seeing the skull image demands a physical relocation, almost a dispossession of the viewer from a standpoint that offers a comprehensive and legible view of the scene, into an alternative posi­ tion that resolves dramatically into a vision of mortality, and occludes a clear view of worldly things. Is this sort of accommodation of incompatibilities, as a kind of dia­ lectical architecture that holds in suspension the legible spaces and forms of the painting, symptomatic of an early modern condition? Viewing the issue in this way doesn't require that modernity be located in a pro­ found rupture or a refashioning of the prevailing representational order, and equally might decouple notions of visual modernity from exclu­ sively European forms, as will be discussed below. The idea of things e d ambiguously in suspension, resolving into alternative configurations epending upon the viewer s interested participation, seems at any rate to operate broadly across European and Chinese pictorial horizons in s era. Needless to say, there is much more than even a ramified notion visible in play in a picture like the Ambassadors. Beyond what is represented—with references to material, social, intellectual, religious, economic and political life , how it is represented, and what kind of i

, y

an. Pract4ces °f looking are implied, constructed, or demanded e painting, it directly references or embodies patronage arrange-

UfC eatinn' ^ concerm™111^

institutions> ematlCS' 3nd

foreshorteningbfsTd

interregional trade, astronomy, navianatomy among other extra-pictorial

on hnrWa"' °f

3 forcefully

1601

comPressed

35 3 CenCral Pictorial deV1C£' but equally prominent is the te" with gradients of 1' l, j chmque of chiaroscuro modeling of forms (fig. 5.2). Thus tfi18 ' 3n . S adow> contrasted to almost theatrical effect

European pictorial

P°werfully

era and earlier. The d

deploys the two predominant

mqUeS of rePresentation

of Christ and Luke, a^wetusTr

from this "early modern"

helghtened b> che

expansive gesture;

veyed by Cleophas,'who is caught^™ °fthC Sh°Ck of recognition con; imbalance, just rising from his1dJ" 3 pI;eCanOUS moment ofsuspensefui as he becomes aware of the mirarnl^ OT ^ hlmSdf 3gamSt ous nature of the resurrected Christ t appearance Those rent- l

central contradictions

of

,he

resurrection mysKiy

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

133

reenacted in the very terms of representation: Christ as man revealed as deity, the dead revealed as resurrected, are paralleled in the ways that the figures of Luke and Christ pass from bright illumination into the obscu­ rity of deep shadow; how Luke seems to reach out into the viewer s space from within the picture; and how the basket of fruit balances precariously on the edge of the table, seemingly ready to tip into the real space of the viewer, but held in suspension by the invisible barrier of the picture plane. Christ's divinity is hidden in plain sight until the moment of rev­ elation or recognition, in a way just as startling as the revelation of the death's head from within the hidden plane site in Holbein's Ambassadors (fig. 5.1). In the biblical narrative of the Supper at Emmaus as Christ gives the disciples bread, their eyes are opened and they know him an at that moment he disappears, in a kind of deep structural embodiment of the same theme of revelation and invisibility.15 This is the moment of perilous equilibrium depicted by Caravaggio, plain in the quoti ian materiality of the table and its victuals, balanced on the edge of reve atio and disappearance, material and visionary, like the fruit basket tottering on the edge of the table. , Velazquez's abundantly discussed Las Meninas includes a n elaborate perspectival framework and subtly modulated tonal effects o lg t shadow among its many representational complexities (fig- 5^r u to these the image of a mirror, in which the reflected figures King Philip IV and his queen, Mariana, are captured. There is t absence near the center of this representation, but a dynamic the sense that that the insubstantial reflection signals the ot erw ible presence, outside the pictured space, of the royal coup e, , theless activate the gazes of most of those within the viewer s a sight. Yet another prominent absence is the invisible picture sur ace painting that Velazquez shows himself at work on; seen from behind with its easel, stretcher bars, and blank canvas back—unless it is p ^ surface, as a portrait of the royal couple, which is s own re e mirror.16 While the viewer is not mobilized and reP°sltlo"e , drcuit way as with Holbein's Ambassadors (fig- 5.1), or imp icate ^ of outreaching and receding gestures as in Supper at m jate(j he is elevated to the position of royalty, or even per ap a(. into the royal eye, whose visual field is what is on disp ay. ^ ^ own least, occupied that position as the painting's ongina vie ' amid claims to social elevation are embodied in his promme ^ the courtiers and aristocrats, marked with the honors W environment of king.17 Thus, despite the courtly protoco s at wor .$ in its own production, and on display within the picture,

134

RICHARD VINOGRAD

way implicated in a dynamic social world of negotiable and changeable status. There are several picture planes within the painting: those of the paintings shown hanging on the rear and sidewalls, the invisible pic­ ture plane of Velazquez' unseen canvas, hidden in plain sight, and the picture plane of the has Meninas canvas. The latter is activated, not just in the usual way it might be by any viewer, but specifically by the focal presence of the royal couple assumed to be standing beyond it, yet simultaneously within or behind it in their mirrored image. The mir­ ror surface is another pictured plane in the painting, framed like those paintings surrounding it but more luminous, and visually thus seeming to project forward away from the rear wall on which it hangs, an evo­ cation of the projection of the royal couple's physical position outside and in front of the painting. The mirror is not an especially sophisti­ cated visual instrument, and not unprecedented as a represented object, including^its harbored reflections, in Velazquez's and earlier European ^ Pos^on^n8 in Las Meninas amid other framed images— the larger surrounding paintings on the rear wall, the framed figure of e queen s chamberlain poised on the steps just beyond the rear door— seems owever designed deliberately to render its object or reality status am iguous. It might plausibly be read as a painting, and though shown engt , the royal figures within the frame have a liminal quality, overing in brightness and bracketed by the figures within the darker adjacent paintings, the court official in the doorway, and even by the m

A

-

1^Ures

*n t^ie f°regr°und. The room in which Las Meninas

IS staged, in the Alcazar Palace in Madrid, and formerly the palace gal-

ery room, is an almost fully rendered architectural box

or

enclosure,

onen dnS 2? mu ^ ^ reCedmS waI1, a rear wall with an hus' the room constitutes in some sense a camera obscura °rW^y" « (lea™!^ "a

lf n0t darkened rooni—and preCUrsor in the

the mirror-captured genealogy of the photographic camera ™-

Zn7tZ:,nZ'::"" T,^

penod S opened onto a n plainer box-like room, further er's left 2 5 r" eXten°r ^ ^ lead-Paned window at the viewseen also for example^n^11 " & COmmon device in Vermeer's painting, 1666.22 The curtain with its ^ °f fr°m su Letter is a relatively ungainlv rfo , PP°rting rod in Girl Reading a Y ng and certainly plainer than the richly

135

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

polychrome tapestry that lifts diagonally to reveal the allegorical tableau in the Art of Painting', here, a similar carpet is bunched up on the table behind the curtain. In Girl Reading a Letter, the drab curtain cloth hangs limply, and the horizontal rod above cuts starkly across the picture surface, just below the top of the canvas. The rod and curtain reiterate the pic­ ture plane, but they might also have served some other purpose to merit depiction in such an unprepossessing manner. Among other possibilities, the curtain reinforces an ambiguous trompe 1 oeil effect, since it could be read as a physical curtain of the sort used to protect paintings in Dutch interiors.23 The room as a whole is relatively stark, offering only a chair, a trailing red window curtain, the bunched up carpet and a Chinese style blue-and-white bowl laden with fruit to decorate its blank-walled spaces. Radiographic studies have revealed that Vermeer removed, m the final version, a painting of Cupid hanging on the rear wall (the same painting that is depicted in his A Lady Standing at the Virginals), so the sparseness was deliberate. The Cupid painting (which was later removed) and the bowl of ripe and opened fruit leave little doubt that the woman is rea ing a love letter, but the presumably surreptitious and illicit vignett thoroughly understated, emphasizing deep absorption rather t a

y

overt reaction or expression.24 What remains is a functional, or e instrumental room, illuminated at one end, able to be darkene

y

curtain, in the manner of a camera obscura space. Vermeer, a ong w some of his Low Countries contemporaries, is thought to have use

cam

era obscura-like optical devices in the production of his pictures, optical precision and representation of unfocused circles o residual by-products of his use of the apparatus.

ig

There is no e

in Girl Reading, but the square-paned window evokes

ot

the kind of perspectival foreshortening-generating devices 1

.

r

Durer's woodcut, and the glass lens, since the image-carrying c the glass is conveyed by a reflected image of the reading gir s

on the comer surface of,he window. The Du.ch ment of fine lenses in telescopes, microscopes, an tnVermeer's era is well documented.26 The most fundamental techniques and

of deV1CeS_^

li^ir

the European sixteenth and seventeenth

jn these pamt,ngs

chiaroscuro, mirrors, lenses, and camera obscu troped into figures of self-contradiction, deliberate am ig tual confusion. Whether we want to call such and

of the limits of representational legibility

perspective, ornercep> ^

of early modern

a

visual culture is arguable, but we can say t a Uy linked to the increasingly instrumentalized an

^

are plausi_

mechanical visual

136

RICHARD VINOGRAD

representation of later and modern t cuiope, ana also aeeply engaged with tensions between artifice and reality, revelation and hiding, authen­ ticity and falsity that are very widespread in the literary, visual, and phil­ osophical cultures of then-contemporary Europe and China.27 •

T1r

*?' °f course' much more going on in and around these paintg t an t e trajectory of conflicted representational technologies I have been outlining. Some of those other concerns will emerge in the discus, °„ tnese pictures below; for the moment, I want to focus on those that offer a bridge to the wider world, China included. The interstatism, g consciousness, and participation in an emerging world system that are often seen as the foundational aspects of the early modern—and which lreC.'rOUtC to meaningful cross-cultural comparison—are con• picuous m The Ambassadors, with its diplomatic protagonists, globe, and

tionTT with im '

Ration instruments suggesting horizons of explora(fiS- 5-l)-28 Vermeer's paintings are laden

r,eg 1°"a 1 COntact 1 i

to AnamT8 SuvvelatT mmaus) India C

fadC and matCrial Culture> from maPs and Slobes ?c° pr°minently displayed in The Ambassadors ,ni an ur hats, to the local chamber of the Dutch East

dePlcted in his View Of Delft.29 Girl Reading a Letter (fis Yd white porcel 7* * Wanh Period (1573-1620) Chinese blue-andbetween Chr dT ' ^ °f ^ trade in such wares 7u v * 3nd Eur°pe' often managed by the VOC.3« SUbjeCt °f Velaz1uez' Portrait- was thehead^famuhLlmEurop6 lnterhemisPheric col°" nial network whose New World" ^ «« and internati^dT^ "mineS/Unded -ooomic expanof New World fah • j Europe to East Asia. The intrusion re»u "esl" b„ h ,h" ^ °' New World 115 SCCne /,J unconscious of its view" !! ''u * Memnas and the historical ,heS"^« cussion.32 Rep™!™"" t scholwrly dis-

not unambiguous signals of °re'Sn obJects and materials are of course jul.cral conract. The, might, in various comets 'C'Sm -Uy appropriate stm^i symbolic tokens of the artisiA d They may have had the material as examples of a patron's tastes im worldwide accessibility of exor'

biblical narratives, or serve as f'kiU' ?' °f virtues and viceS' "1St s studl° ProPs as much r ° possessions- The increasing

Part in shaping early modern subject hW8°°dS Sh°Uld ^ played * entltles as culturally contingent, but equally important were the e state enterprises such as ioinc ™erSlng institutional forms of non1602) and British (founded leOoTfiastTY*1?" (theDutch (founded India Companies) and religious

137

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

associations such as the Society of Jesus (founded 1534). Despite their very different orientations, respectively toward profit and proselytizing, these held in common a spirit of enterprise, mobility, and discipline based on commonalities of purpose rather than of birth or political allegiance.33 Such organizations also had important consequences for psychological and subject formations, including the program of Spiritual Exercises outlined by St. Ignatius of Loyola from 1522—1524 that used introspective and meditative techniques to encourage an identification of the contemporary subject with the experiences of Christ, or, to put it another way, sought to realize biblical experiences in contemporary life.34 Although Caravaggio's engagement with the Jesuit enterprise was episodic and uneasy, his work shared biblical subject matter with Jesuit imagery, as well as an interest in vividly realized corporeal experiences of religious events manifested in the more psychologically based visuality of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.

Contacts Jesuit imagery along with painted porcelain wares offered the most direc conduits between Europe and China for pictorial production m the six­ teenth and seventeenth century era, and Jesuit projects in China are m specifically documented. The Society of Jesus was a global enterprise o religious propagation, with some commonalities with other ear y organizations such as the East India Companies: it was also ®scr "company" of Jesus, followed some of the same mterhemisphenc route and outposts, and was dedicated to a shared mission and a co p cipline.35 The Jesuits developed a visual culture of menta l £or contemplation, architectural propaganda, and pictoria mstru ^ variously internal, Counter-Reformation, and propagation PUT'" Jesuit imagery had a substantial presence and impact m ' _ within environments of misunderstanding, resistance, rejecti > s«ion,

and adaptation. The most widespread vehicle or tonal culture in China was the print-illustrated boo ,

^

imported

• uteenth

"''•ally produced. Over the course of .he centuries a large corpus of European religious, tec -{wj-ated trea­ ties were translated and published in China, including^ ^ ^ hses on mathematics, astronomy, and pictorial persp of vivid meditative and pictorial reahzations

j-qblical events

visuality may

have been aimed primarily at communities o China, but it penetrated into much broader literati circles and imperial court.38

in

138

RICHARD VINOGRAD

°i me main venicies tor Jesuit propagation in Asia was Jerome Nadal s (1507—1580) Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, a collection of engrav­ ings of biblical subjects, accompanied by explanatory legend texts, which was designed specifically as a Jesuit religious instructional tool. First pub­ lished in Antwerp in 1593, the compendium was requested for the Jesuit missions in China in 1598. Typically, a major episode is accompanied by miniature narrative cells, which are chosen according to a religious narrative logic as related prefigurations or consequences of the main epi­ sode. Such images are complex instructional machines, dense hybrids of image and text, which juxtapose multiple temporalities, spatial arenas, and scales of representation within a single, framed picture. They require understanding both of their content and their underlying conventions to be legible. Some of that information is supplied by the alphabetic keys within the pictures and the matched texts in the cartouches, in the man­ ner of map legends, which identify the various vignettes and episodes; accompanying textual annotations and mediations further amplify the images. A guide to the visual conventions underlying the images might ave been supplied by a sermonizer or a missionary interlocutor, but the contemporary introduction to Nadal's compilation suggests that even learned viewers required some guidance to the complex program.40 uch Jesuit religious prints belonged to a visual genre related to illusrated mechanical treatises, that shared with the early modern European paintings discussed above an accommodation of complex temporal WI1C

cuiJIT

lnc°mPatl'3llities'

even though aimed at an effort of cross-

hntmisrirran^atl0n often in imaeerv int

^ persuasive instruction.41 That translation, both lctona P > was supplied by Chinese artists and publishers, Wlth

^

Jesuit

collaborators, who incorporated such

For example, the Jesuit Giulio Aleni (1582°i649t 1 'ww-, ^ formats'42 d " reduCCd Set of Nadal's designs in China in 1637 suW> ? Plf woodcut medium and Chinese language texts, for Nadal's 1 " ^

clld ftfaV:r to"!mgelL T

'Zd

L"in

a,ddr°

to thoroughgoing! "V

°r,8inl1- Th« of adaption °f Chinos* sides ,„d explanatory tear y altered

S lg

into local idioms rhj J f

ences. Some of Aleni's Chir^ of their European mor^l ^ •

"""I""1""'"

d accessible to Chinese audiVerSlons amplify the perspectival devices amillar an

of light and cast shadows, tmnchcIt involved in negotiating t

from their European models,

"'"P'V'"

d™'mshmg chiaroscuro on

effects

of the complex accommodations

such Mrs11°zt" rss cul,°res" eafly Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-16101 for imr-1 • • y for inclusion the ,„k-c,ke design catalogue Ctajil.

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

139

moyuan—in effect a kind of visual anthology of late Ming pictorial motifs and culture—around 1604—1606 were accompanied by Chinese charac­ ter and romanized transliteration texts of homilies composed by Ricci, more or less closely related to the images.44 They include scenes related to the story of The Supper at Emmaus, although the supper episode illus­ trated by Caravaggio is consigned to a small vignette somewhat hidden in a distant plane.45 These are certainly collaborative or hybrid efforts between Ricci, the catalogue publisher Cheng Dayue (1541—after 1610), and local woodcut artists, but they function as Chinese images in terms of their production and audience, and through their textual and imagistic environments. The placement of the Christian images among Buddhist and Daoist iconographies in the catalogue meant that they took on some of their significance through adjacencies with Chinese images. Thus "Believing, You Can Walk on the Sea" becomes less exotic through its placement nearby to an image of another foreign-looking religious figure (but one with a deeper history of absorption into local cultural environ ments), performing a similar miraculous act, "Bodhidharma Crossing the Yangtze River on a Reed."46 The placement strategy would have served the purposes of both the missionary and the publisher, making the Christian images more accessible to local viewers, while retaining an a^ra of strangeness and novelty agreeable to contemporary Chinese tastes Some other adaptations of the Christian prints are much more y transposed into a Chinese vernacular of architecture, furnishings, an social decorum, as in the Annunciation scene from a Rosary text pu in China.48 Still other images embody a full absorption of European

designs into Chinese subjects, genres, and media, as in Wu Bin s with Dragon Amid the Clouds painting of 1601. This composition as identified as an adaptation of Nadal's Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane Print, with a dragon in the position of the Angel descending on clouds and a red-robed Buddhist luohan in the position of Christ. larosc contrast is reduced in Wu's rendering, but the instability o ti e s &ce planes is enhanced. Wu Bin's painting dispenses with t e a p cally labeled narrative cells in the engraving, but the p acemen °f the luohans against arched rock formations conveys som ^ same spatial effect as the engraving. Wu Bin was Caravaggio s Porary, but the argument for a Chinese early visual moderni Y depend primarily on close chronological coincidence, or on ^ °f formal qualities or specific compositions seen in European ^ Particular, Chinese representations consistently dunims e' . chiaroscuro contrasts of European models. Perspectiva or appear effects had a deeper history in Chinese pictorial culture, an

140

RICHARD VINOGRAD

tTr

F silk

f

"

r, 62 4 v'lT',

China

DraZ w b

C

?

Ca" 1573-^20). Gavampati, from The Tu^O" Surangama Sutra. Album leaf, ink and colors on

Cm"

Nati°nal Pa^ce

^ I! 1 " f ° r ; g r O U n d 8 u a r d » n figure

shoftenriTh

s

Museum, Taiwan, Republic of

upper rieht and

his h"d

t

AU

"

S

in Wu Bins

Luohans un

^ tilted back and for,

^- - « - * ™

P a l n t l n g ' r u n n i n g from lower left

141

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

More than the ambiguities or internal contradictions of space and pic­ ture plane that are so salient in early modern European paintings, Wu Bin follows other kinds of representational ambiguation and contradic­ tion strategies. Texture, rather than chiaroscuro, plays a leading role, in describing complexly structured surfaces that fail to resolve into stable configurations or substances. Elsewhere in Wu Bin s oeuvre, his image of Gavampati from the Twenty-Five Great Deities of the Surangama Sutra conflates evocations of root, grotto, cloud, and fungus in an image of ceaseless transformation, a kind of Mobius strip of interlaced hollow and solid, in which the figure of the deity, who represents the unreliabil­ ity of sensory perception through taste, embodies that same instability (fig. 5.5). Here, and more clearly elsewhere in Wu s oeuvre, ambiguities of miniature/microcosmic and full-scale or monumental forms are in play, engendering an unstable field demanding constant perceptual and conceptual shifts.50 On a conceptual level, the idea of the fundamental unreliability an illusoriness of sense perception that pervades the Surangama Sutra para lels the fundamental contradictions of worldly representational coherence in Holbein's Ambassadors (fig. 5.1j.51 The conceptions are visualized m analogous ways as well, combining an emphatic materiality ac leve through dense textural stippling in Wu Bin s picture, and care u su description and spatial perspective in Holbein s with a rupture coherence of those primary devices of representational legibility, no of Wu Bin's Surangama Sutra figures is the arhat Upanisad, who in the sutra text on the impermanence of form, and is shown con plating a miniature skeletal figure reminiscent of Holbein s s u seated on a rocky plinth that renders ambiguous solid and ho ow, mo 'ain and rock, and up-down directionality all at once. Commonalities

While contact with European pictures figures inata paintings, the multiple commonalities between moving) ^tter at an Open Window (fig. 5.4) of 1657-1659 and. ff hading Scholar Zhang's Love Letter (fig. 5.6), one page ro q (he color woodblock printed illustrations of the Xixtang J ( ^ Western Chamber) drama produced by the Hangzhou pu contact.53 1640, were not based on any historically salient connec joyer> within hboth images a woman reads a letter, presuma y rom ^

J

a domestic space, unaware of being observed. n 'ngmaid is hiding from her mistress, but in plain sig

,

viewer, as she

142

RICHARD VINOGRAD

igure 5.6 Mm Qiji (1580-after 1661), publisher, "Oriole Reads Scholar hang's Love Letter," Illustration to Act 10 from a set of twenty Illustrations ofXixiangJi (Romance of the Western Chamber), 1640. Multicolor v ° ^,C Pr*nts Kunst, Cologne.

on

PaPer' 25.5 X 32.2 cm. Museum fur Ostasiatische

PaintCd sCandln8

h o^-^h 1"° C' the

en

"llstress- Tbe Whlle

screen trying to look over the should viewer is similarly positioned as hidden fro belnS offered a view of her mirrored ima

absoriedg J" letter SCro11 before her. Vermeer's letter reader ,s smula, viewer w"th tT miSS1Ve' and Slmilarly offered up to the gaze of an unse CUrtMn PUlled aSlde f°r the P-P°- of revelation, ZhTm en8a§e multlPle picture planes. In Vermeer's painti: these included ness because it h PaintmS ro7- the reflect ^

Whidl 1S Pulkd lnto the

^Wlnd ^

°W

aW3'

c-tam and curta and the °P- Wind°

glass window lens int olhe .LrkeneT10 ^ ^ C° ^' ened room when closed. Min Qiji's ima

143

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

offers the print surface, activated perceptually by its gauffered surface and conceptually by its role as a transition between the viewer s space and the private space of the heroine and her maid; the screen surface, which bears a recessional landscape painting and conveys a resultant tension between flat surface and illusionistic depth, and the image-bearing mirror surface plane (fig. 5.6). The materiality of objects in the Chinese print is empha­ sized functionally rather than illusionistically as in the Vermeer. The vis­ ible facticity of the letter scroll is crucial to the narrative and to the social world of the drama, and the screen functions as furniture organizing interior space into zones of privacy and accessibility. The social realm is more fully evoked in the Min Qiji print than in Vermeer's painting: the social spaces of mistress and maid; the sequestered and gendered space of women's privacy; and the implied arena of masculine action that is figured on the screen in the image of a fisherman boating by a woode bank, perhaps a stand-in for the heroine Oriole (Yingying s) absent cor respondent and lover. What do such commonalities without clear connection, appeari g less than two decades apart, indicate? It would be fair to ask w et this comparison is simply an exercise of hunting for superficia imag matches, with no deep parallelism of cultural process at work. We shou first recognize that transmission of image types could follow mu tip e channels of contact and mediation, often not readily documenta e. scenic structure of a woman reading in a domestic interior, or ex p , appeared in Nadal's Annunciation engraving and in its C mese a p tions referenced above, while scenes from the Romance of the Western Chamber were painted on blue-and-white porcelains of the km acces sible to Vermeer and his contemporaries, and depicted m Gir ec,i im£ a letter (fig. 5.4) and others of Vermeer's paintings. It may have e case that more intercultural visual and material exchange was l in the production of such pictures than the differences m me iu , ject, and presentation might initially suggest. Even so, it m;sed ficult to account for the specific parallel inflections of privacy and complex vectors of looking in such images ex Qf of meaningful convergences in the social, visual, an cu u an the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and the s°^ region of China. We could point to emerging cult and within that women's poetic and epistolary c » atively elite groups with the means and education to tural production and consumption.55 In both observe the emergence of notions of gendere p hority in both the architectural and psychologi

domesticity,

^^ iP;sure Culcan

^yacy, and inte' & fascination

144

RICHARD VINOGRAD

with image-bearing and image-baring surfaces, practices of secrecy and arenas of the illicit as common features of these cultures, whether we characterize them as early modern or otherwise.56 We should observe that gendered practices of the clandestine, including illicit behavior hid­ den behind curtains or screens, private moments of women before their mirrors offered to inspection, and scenes of letter reading interrupted by intrusive observers are part of the literary and pictorial culture of China^and Japan as far back as the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth cen­ turies. The source drama text of the Romance of the Western Chamber dates to around 1300.58 So it was not that the social or cultural facts of such themes were entirely new in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ina at least although I think we could fairly say that the prominence o nonaristocratic women s cultural performances in domestic spaces is greatly amplified in both Europe and China in this time—but rather t at their visualization in forms that highlight the artifices of representan t e visual and social intricacy of multilayered viewing is mostly unprecedented. The viewing subject is constructed as not just a voyeur, fn, i,^?1 I S°Phlsticated one> who takes pleasure both in revelations Ut a*SO *n , , 1 Process of disentangling interrupted, concealed ambiguous, or self-contradictory images. cont T "Ught bt, thC fidd °f reference for this common concern with both S 10^' amblguation> and incompatibility in representation? On the dev T' thOUg\m°re Saliently o" the European, we could point to 1SUal tedlnol°g- »nd devices as promoting an warene^rT sentation - A " ^ ^ Wdl aS rheto"cal and literary) repreincludinv art nimCreaiing mstrumentalization of culture played a part, that offered alternative views'cif fi^evvorld T ^gutesTr 177

and telesc°PeS

""folded in treatises, conno.sseur-

a part in the defamihariTa^tnd1^6"?1^^1 ^ in awarenesses that m i o E t E denaturalizing of cultural practices, of cultural superiority or xenophobi^ wkhin dominant dimat" discursive concern with authe t' • C rejectlon- In China, a widespread falsity' slncentV and phomness, artifice and reality, among lat^Mi!/ SUCh 35 Ta"S XlanZU (155°" 1616) and Li Zhi (1527-i?021b H & comP^ex coordinates, extending from moral philosophy to a r t in an environmJnt c°nnoisseurship- Such ^^ number of highly educatedbuT ^ - .he crr.es, m^dm^ny'"

P°pulatlon

Sr°wth. an increasing ™»a,i„„ candrdai.s writers, class emulation and social

HIDING IN PLANE SIGHT

145

fluidity, that destabilized categories of understanding in ways analogous to the shifting of visual orders and readings in pictures of the time. In European philosophy of the same era, Cartesian methodological skep­ ticism about the reliability of perceptions might be linked to cultural manifestations of awareness of artifice and doubt of the sort manifested in Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" and Calderon s life is a dream discourses.64 It remains difficult to distinguish foundational and caus­ ative circumstances from by-products and effects in such situations of coproduction and conditionality. Visual culture experiments might shape models and metaphors for philosophical discourse as much as the other way around, and class identity might depend as much on cultural know edge and performance as on birth or wealth. On both European and Chinese sides, we might find such phenomena examples of markedly visual cultures in the plainspoken, nontec mca sense: cultures that were saturated with images, and that enjoye t eir intricacies, difficulties, and paradoxes.65 The visual needn t be imite the pictorial, and indeed the materiality of media is closely con lg with the pictorial in many instances. The engagement wit t e had important social and economic dimensions, including p involving collecting, connoisseurship, domestic environments, J3 lie spectacles, as well as image and object markets and mass tr visual and representational technologies, relatively nove in s in their pervasiveness, played a part in both Europe an i P tive, chiaroscuro, mirrors and lenses, and print repro uction involving wide dissemination of images. These are p ausi y , em complexes of the visual, in that they may be connecte o era image industries, media overlays, and visual sophistications ^ need not entail conventionally modern social locations ^ wi n tocratic and courtly environments of Holbein s an e azque ^^ and the religious arenas of Caravaggio's and Wu Bin s struc_ we can discern some fault lines in those socia an extent actitures that are not simply illustrated, but perhaps to so ^ tensions vated by pictorial culture: the pressures of status ^j^res (figs. 5.1 between secular and religious motives within cour reiieious arena and 5.3); popular energies and secular tastes animating (%• 5.2, 5.5, and 5.7).

Convergence and Contingency rr k o) and Chen Hongshou s ?>U U- „™ges of r,8u,eS

146

RICHARD VINOGRAD

Figure 5.7 Chen Hongshou (1598-1652), Elegant Gathering. Handscroll,ink on paper, 29.8 X 98.9 cm. Shanghai Museum.

g

ered around a table. In Caravaggio's painting the reality status c

6 ln a and °fsusPension between astonishment and recogni , ton, hiding and revelation. The contrast m Supper at Emmaus betweei he plam illusiomstic materiality of figures and objects and the air c

force Of T T the reallty of Christ's nature only adds to th e C COUnt relatively mild contrast in ink tonalitie of Litem ^ !l r' aS ^ more subdued but parallel effect, conveyini an initial^ ^ to contraveSSt'mPtlTin f evenness °f representational status that is liabl pamtings emphasize the gazes of the portraye( figures bntV'"' at Emmaus a1T!^°rl'raSC1rl^ effect. The disciples and the server in Suppe comprehension and relponle^Chr'Td th°Ugh ^ different degreCS ° his eves are doc A • • Christ does not return their gazes, or ours

richly before him is if he"

iTb f'°m 'he PerceP,il>le worl ™ ® same year, is the subject of Dong Qichang s Wanluan Thatc e FcaDe ing of 1597 (fig. 5.10), was one such hometown associate, also a an s p painter and art writer.78 Both Dong and Chen wrote co op ons Bin's album of Twenty-Five Great Deities of the Surangama Sutra ig.^ ^ coking another kind of late Ming community of interest, co"aPr lay Buddhist devotees who associated with Buddhist a ots a ^ while following a secular life.79 The Grape Society gath®rl°®L. P hyChen Hongshou (fig. 5.7) was of that sort; a society o prob««, and intellectuals gathered to hear a Buddhist sum readme p % »the couttyard of B.tjings Huguo Temple.The woodblock

'rations of Romance of the Western Chamber (fig- 5. , • > Gf drama Presumably aimed at a market of viewers that inc u e eXChanges of enthusiasts who consolidated their group identity through ex lett«s

and publications. Oichang's art writAtnong such societies and circles of interest, ong Qf valorized adds references to schools in the form of gene societies or comistorical artists that serve in his discourse as imaginary ^ thejr styles, Jalky gr0Ups. Dong speaks of ancient painters as i.n ^ ^ ,f (hey but the

artists' personhoods are embodied in his pain

®lghtbe encountered and communed with throug 0r

viewing them. Something similar seems at wor

^

Qf

painting

Hongshou s

154

RICHARD VINOGRAD

imagined or reconstructed gathering of the recently deceased, commun­ ing through the agency of an icon or visionary apparition (fig. 5.7). Such constructions of historical genealogies and lineages seem both acknowl­ edgements of and attempted compensations for the deep fractionalization of late Ming cultural life. Thus the many forms of pictorial ambiguity we encounter in late Ming era pictures were not just formal or isolated art world experiments. They had social locations that were both contem­ porary and historical, real and imaginary, in divided configurations that might account for something of their persistent instabilities. ^ong Qichang s Wanluan Thatched Hall historical time itself is infolded into a condition-al state, configured as a cultural space ofimagne

societies. In this and the other sixteenth and seventeenth-century mese and European paintings we have been reviewing, the very

g or conditions of pictorial representation are ambiguated, held m suspension or contradicted. There is certainly a taste for visual comP

ty at wor

P

in both arenas, an interest in artifice and the pleasures of

x. ere is much more than mannered performance and pictorial n p ay in these images , however, even if an eighteenth-century

for car L ,^am^er nicto

C/ngt

the statu

dismiss European paintings as marked by "tricks

C Cye'.

both ends of the early modern configuration,

ePres PP 152-55 for Qing dynasty (post-1644) interruption of earlier Patte™> of consumption and the appearance of culturally base

econo

ferences. For contingencies and discontinuities in t e in , » « „ *.A The Oino Formation In modern," see the essays in Lynn A. Struve, ed. World-historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Cente , 5. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3. W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory : Essays OnVer Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago ress,

visual

7. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise : the Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,rf198^on; k Susan Foister, et al. Holbein's Ambassadors ( Publications , 1997), pp. 11-19. 7'John David North, The Ambassadors Secret. ft_. Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London L Foister,

p. 30-43; North, pp. 81-123, u y

Lippincott, "The Scientific Instruments in

Natlonal

^

Gallery

[he World 0f the

yyg^21. and

Kristen

Ambassadors:

y Institutes v.

A 62

Re-examination," Journal of the Warburg an (1999): 93-125. , '• See North, pp. 113-14, 152-54, where the carpet as Armenian Christian in origin and significan L Foister et al., pp. 44—57.

ians are

identified

156

RICHARD VINOGRAD 13. North, pp. 125-40 14. For split views and worldviews, see North, pp. 133-36. For images of division and discord, see Foister, et al., pp. 40-3. 15. See Lorenzo Pericolo, "Visualizing Appearance and Disappearance: On Caravaggio's London Supper at Emmaus," The Art Bulletin v. 89 no. 3 (September 2007): 519-39. 16. For the ambiguities of the mirror image, see Suzanne L. StrattonPruitt, Velazquez's Las Meninas An Interpretive Primer," in Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt, ed., Velazquez's Las Meninas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 137-40.

17. However, the Order of Santiago, which he is shown wearing, was awarded three years after the painting's completion, and was probably a later addition. For the painting as a claim to the elevated status of the painter and his art, see Jonathan Brown, Images and Ideas in Seventeenthcentury Spanish Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1978), pp. 87-110.

'

18. cf. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, owned by Philip IV. ccording to the research of Steven Orso, the mirror was the sole fictive or invented object in the room; see Steven N. Orso, Philip IV and the ecoration of the Alcazar of Madrid (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 170. 20. Ibid., pp. 165-82. 21. Cf. John F Moffitt, "Velazquez in the Alcazar Palace in 1656: The 1983^281

MlSe~en-scene ofLas Meninas,"

22'

Lw ^e1997), iooring Limited, pp. '99; 141 23. Ibid., pp. 33-6, 97-103.

(L°ndon'

24' M:T^

Weste™»n.

Tr8"3 ,and Mariet

2003)! pp 25 rchlTe^Th^T 26. £d p^'^d

U

AH

^ ^

tury Europe

Glles de la

Mare PublisherS

Vermeer y el interior holandk

(Madnd : Museo Nacional dd Prad°'

°fDescribinS• Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Centurf °f ChlC3g° P-SS' 1983)' PP- 27-33'

VeKlty

(Stanford C A si- ^e°^rc^>bl'a •

28

Art History 6 (September

tbe

Chinese Cipher In Early Modem Europe 200.) for , discussion of*

tmacy in sixteenth and seventeenth cen-

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein Academic Press, 1974)

TU

N* J

I

Modern World-system (New York:

29. See Timothy Brook, Vermeer'S • TU C The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. 1st T T Juan Carreno de Miranda, in Edward J. 1650-1700: Record of the Art Museum, Princeton Univer

England:

Painting vol.

,

in Spain, no. 2 f]^azo>s

41,

(.982,. pp. 27-8 fOT « canvases to represent legibly, in order to dignity and elevated status of the painter s pro essl0".sible canVas is the 73. Other proposed possibilities are that Velazquez ^ ^ ^ prjncess; see Las Meninas composition as we see it, or a po Stratton-Pruitt, pp. 137-38. 74. Cf. Ilona Bell, "Mirror Tropes and Renaissan Shami, ed., Renaissance Tropologies: The Cu turn

England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University the technologies and tropologies of Re

orm

change and self-reflexive instability. See also Verse, pp. 22-165 for metaphors based on the nology of frames, mirrors, and the perspec

m^

ress,^

Poetry, " in Jeanne rParly Modern ^ 229-53, for ag flgures

of

Kalas, Frame, Glass, ^rumentation and tech ms ^ the mirror as

160

RICHARD VINOGRAD

a ngure ot fantasy and contradiction; cf. Stratton-Pruitt, fictive

character of Velazquez' mirror and royal portrait.

75. Romance of the Western Chamber asserts the value of love over matrimony or parental authority, a hierarchy of values asserted even more emphati­ cally in Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion of 1589; see Lu, Persons, Roles, ml Minds, pp. 63-141. Las Meninas asserts the elevated status of the artist within the world of the court, and gives focal position to a court funconary such as Nieto, who stands at the point of convergence of the linear perspective system of the painting. 76

Wai-lcam 2 vols. Citv. m . . Ho, The Century J of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. ^1. ,-u» VU15>. (Kansas v MO.' n~Atkins Museum of Art, 1992). Vol. 2, pp. 387-457. 77 7,^ • see Cahill, The Distant Mountains, pp. 7-30, 87-128. C U U CCIL fh- ' -"A o/-izo. CJ-.-JU i • .. 78. C ee Shih Shou-chien, "Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's "Wan-luan Thatched Hall" P?

V

nn°7tl0n His Painting Style," in Ho, Wai-ching, ed.. TUng ch'ang iInternational — o ch''~ * en t t t c t t i m i V Y i Q i oVrr Symposium. Kansas Citv: r Ine Neknn-Aflzi«r A/T . The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, pp. 13-1 79 Ti™ .u t> , nu, 1992, ivvz, pp. ij-i to to 13-28. 13-28. • mothy Brook, Praying for Power ; Buddhism and the Formation of Gent

SS

chlj- s 'TT C a m b n d 8 e ' xvin.. M A : council C — i l on h f, " ° " ^ (v^ •

Ynriiry

Chinese Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University r * . The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late . "'A 1644. New York: Weatherhill, 1982. Chen, Hui-Hung. "Chinese Perception ofEuropean

^ Jesuit ( ase in \ oH

Pe"P"

the Seventeenth Century." The Seventeenth Century Clunas, Craig. Empire of Great Brightness: Visua an . China, 1368-1644. Honolulu: University of Hawai i

/s"l»

(•„/,„,rmtCll„i

. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China. University Press, 1997. , . Superfluous Things: Material Culture and - on.

SM„,
nd pLlCaTs POSf.il,t,CS CeS eyoiK colonies. The ^? ^ ^ Europe and its former white setter 103 ^C'ca' Pr°blem exists with the ways we have usu ally conceived onceived eatly m„dt.rn„K, „ ^ A J«says focused

CHINA'S LATE EMPIRE

213

largely on the concept of the "public sphere" and entitled Early Modernity was published by Daedalus in 1998. In the volume s introduction

N.

Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter wisely warn against using Eu™P yardsticks to measure other parts of the world at the same time^ they remind readers to guard against what they labe mverte or' which involves Asians making claims about their uniqueness ( « and Schluchter 1998: 16). Yet, when they tell us about how^the wor d has changed politically since early modern times, they write on the very next page: With the transition from empires to states and nations, the. ^ changes greatly. A -eapparatus emerge,.*-

nw r It ^of

leadership response to the tion separated from the means of administration tmdbctind m J laws; a participation of the public at large m t e p cially through universal

suffra8^nd

izations such

accretion for every indith" " *

the range of variations among early modern " h dlfferences mg the mounting of efforts to assess the »S"^"eimUes. in early modernities for explaining variation ^ ctices suggest What do these examples of late imperiall^otac^^^ about an early modern era in China. If ern to those found in Europe, then China doesnt

d cl„didate ^^^

for having an early modern era comider that the decision to posed in the chapter s title. I , > cur0pe leads us to ignore limit early modern practices to t ose o matter to its present, we sahentfeaturesofChinese history that may well ma ^ imperial may want to give a different answer. I suggest

214

R. BIN WONG

China did have an early modern era. Moreover, because of both simi­ larities and differences between its early modern era and Europe's, their respective modern eras continue to show similarities and differences. While scholars can associate modern political differences according to the uneven diffusion of European political institutions, we haven't really explained how and why such diffusion varies. It is the promise of early modernities to help us understand subsequent modernities that can lead us to care about producing a better understanding of them. While the modern era has been a more global period of history when the political, economic, and cultural connections among distant parts of the world have become more important than they could be in early modern times, the persistence of multiple modernities owes much to the historical antecedents we can discover by comparing early modernities. The particular issue of social spending in China and Europe exemplifies the dangers of expecting social, political or economic prac­ tices to be formulated in ways first found in Europe. A contrast of exit and voice helps us think through the conundrum posed by these prac­ tices. We could ask more generally whether the voice used in Europe or the exit used in China proved more common in other parts of the world. Clearly white settler colonies followed a set of European political 1 eo ogies and institutions so we can anticipate finding voice taking a ger role than exit but for places less directly affected ideologically and tutionally by Europe are there as likely parallels to Chinese exit as to European voice? Europeans and their descendants in other parts of the world have us one institutional nexus that grows out of an earlier arc of polit.i j

P aCtl,CfS tbat bas *ts particular early modern past not shared with j p °r re8t°ns of that era. As the subsequent evolution of American opean public spending in the past 30 years has created increas-

sompnCertainty ab°ut bow best to manage government finances, perhaps its inst-if ytU™ to Chinas efforts to build its taxation base and develop problem °!qa mecbanisms °f social spending to broaden the range of abletoT T P°uSSlblHtles -e consider for the future. We may be better at 1 e modern world without assuming that American and Euronean r howTe e! ,aCtlCe?UPPly Slobal if we can recognize more fully both matter^ m°fern era lncludes similar and different practices that •ngly c„mmo° cLlTe^ef R the SC°Pe °''i"""' r"P appears to develop hand in hand with admi jzation. Political concepts attendant upon these S' 1 e a ^ modern political concepts, require of taxpayer suhip ^ j?ractdces' a higher level of abstraction than is necessary 1 thus C S ° 3 dynastic realm. As Danielle Allen has observed, th a Ijeed P°r visualizing itself, the sovereign, and the p c .

C 1^°, Crn

'

n

1 e

advan^n"1 "r 1 ^ W& sllould find advanced political centralization. LeuiatZTf"'8

visualizations only at mom'

Painting, or the Jiangshan landscape, could invite misgu.ded conclusions. None

the Shanghai

ontlspiece

such

VISUALIZING THE STATE

237

above represents in any way the national essence of any people, but all three represent early attempts to envision "the people at a moment when political centralization made such imaginings urgent. The People, then, as a modern political concept, does not appear to have been the expression of a unique, Western Volksgeist, but rather a concept that emerged from structural necessity.The chief significance of the comparison lies in this, the realization that the way in which political abstractions are imagined is not arbitrary, nor is it the product of either national character or merely local custom. Visualizations of the polity offer significant insights into the ways in which ordinary taxpayers could be imagined in relation to the sovereign and the state.Visualizations such as those seen in Hobbes' frontispiece, or m certain Song paintings, require the manipulation of abstract legal concepts that would eventually obviate the need for symbols of pomp and enchant­ ment. This much the three works of art have in common. The disparities between the three visualizations appear due to different approaches to fiscal administration. In post-Tang China, taxpayer revenues went to the state, not to the monarch. As with Hobbes, the people made up the body of the state, but due to fiscal separation the former were not sub­ sumed under the monarch. Of course, the end consequences of t is po icy were far from trivial. It was only because of the court/state distinction that nonnoble taxpayers could participate in the polity in so many ways. It was also this distinction that made possible the separation of political author­ ity from inherited status in a manner that would inspire any number Enlightenment radicals. However, that is a topic for another time.

Notes , „„ „„«« ,h,„ks.. funds supporting research for this essay. Cmb,idBe

University Press, 1996), 245 46.

3. Benedict Bndet.on, ^On—

Hyperion Press, 1954), 170 71. 5. See Stephen Toulmin and June Goodtieid,

„fiPrtinns on the Origin and

^ *06),f3.

Discovery of Time (New

York: Harper and Row, 1966). 'DODular sovereignty' was 6. Jonathan Israel observes that t e c°"c modern mind to adjust an extraordinarily difficult notion for the early m

MARTIN POWERS

to and accept." See Israel, Enlightenment Contested : Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670—1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 326—43. 7. Cited and discussed in Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education ( C h i c a g o : University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80. 8. Allen argues that any definition of the people can b e stabilized only in figurative language, or in images. Ibid., 80-84. 9. See John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, and flip Court Cinurt of nf Bavaria, ed. Christian F. F. O t t o and and Architecture Architecture at at the

a

Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4 -9.

^

10. On material scales of value see Martin J. Powers, l' ^l,»

Sec r ll„b,,h Ur„.l.. "

VISUALIZING THE STATE

239

Illustrations to Tao Yuanming's 'Returning Home'," Artibus Asiae, Vol. 59, No. 3/4 (2000): 225-63, esp. 233-34. 24. Susan Siegfried, "Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France," The Art Bulletin Vol. 75, No. 2 (Jun., 1993): 235—58, especially 235—36. 25. For a highly readable account see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 47-52. 26. Ibid., 115-17.

27. Powers, Pattern and Person, 270—76. 28. Liu Zongyuan, Fengjian lun iJsSvfe (On feudalism). In Tangsong ba dajia wenxuan shizhu (Selected works of the eight, great masters of Tang and Song), edited by Chen Xiacun and Xian Fengwu BSJIlfn 2 vols. (Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu Press, 1992), I: 245-49. The term "feudalism" is much disputed. See Elizabeth A. R. Brown, "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe," The American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 4 (Oct-» 1974): 1063-88); Derk Bodde, "Political and Social Background, in Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol I the Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B. C.-A. D. 220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 20-30. Of course Liu Zongyuan could

not

have been

aware of these disputes.

....

29. Liu Zongyuan, "Fengjian lun" (Essay on Feudalism), in Tangsong badajia wenxuan (Selected works of the eight great masters of Tang and Song) (Taiyuan: Xinhua Publishing, 1986), 248-49. 30. Translation based on Chen jo-shui, Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in T'ang China, 773-819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 153; Liu Zongyuan, "Song Xue Cunyi zhi ren xu, in u Ch'ing-fei, ed„ Liu Zongyuan, (Taipei: Diqm chubanshe 1992), 347. 31. Giovanni Tarantino, '"Is Not the Liberty of the Mind Preferable to the Liber y of the Body?' Thomas Gordon and his 'Republican Catechism, or Le simbole d un Laique," a paper delivered at the Institute Study (Spring 2009), 36. The parallel is closer than one might think. Already in classical times Shenzi had observed: "When one sets up an emperor, it is for the benefit of the world, it is notthat• to fbenefitl the emperor." Pattern and Person, 149 5 . to benet j P y and Anti-Walpole Journalism, ers see also 1. ran, iQ1Qv. 141-49 The Review of English Studies, Vol. 25, No. ( Pr-> j 32. On Han Yu's critique of religion see

37, no. 1 (1977): 100.

MARTIN POWERS

34. Brian McKnight, "Fiscal Privileges and the Social Order in Sung China," in John Winthrop Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 95-99. 35. This institution has been the subject of much study and debate, with scholars alternately striving not to overinterpret or underinterpret its significance. Peter Bol, in reviewing these debates, established two points that are pertinent in this context. First he notes that, no mat­ ter how one assesses the level of social mobility in early Song China, the fact remains that an aristocracy did not reestablish itself: "success­ ful bureaucratic families of the eleventh century generally did not see themselves as an aristocracy of great clans descended from the [Tang]." Secondly, Bol amasses a large body of evidence to demonstrate that culture primarily belles lettres, historical essays and poetry—became an important arena of political and social debate by the eleventh century. See Peter K. Bol, "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in Vang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 59-66; 73-74. 36. John Chaffee s exhaustive study of the examinations details various occupational and other prohibitions in the early years of experimenta­ tion, but notes that most of those groups were eventually permitted to take the examinations. John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 55-65. 37. Song shi (History of the Song dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), especially 3603-23. See also E. A. Kracke, Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1953), 67-68; Bol, Culture, 68-70. Some sense of the nature of unending debate over civil service examinations can be gleaned from Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content, negotiating standards for the civil service examinations in imperial ina (1127 — 1279) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press East sian Series, 2007). Surprisingly, issues of egalitarian access, so prominent in the primary sources, scarcely enter into De Weerdt's narrative. Powers, Pattern and Person, 99-100.

^rac"kc Jr-' Early Visions of Justice for the Humble in East and West," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 96, No. 4 (OctDec., 1976): 496. 4°. See Yu Yunguo

Songdai taijian zhidu yanjiu *«&*«««*

e censorate in Song times) (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2001), 1-9. 41. Translation, Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life ofSu Shi (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute: Distributed by the Harvard e

a.,

S"j Ptess,

pU> ,. p'.

1994) 36—37; Su Dongpo Quanii (the

Wan§ Wen'gao

collected

works of

and Tang Junzhi, 3 vols., (Zhuhai: Zhuhai

Publishing House, 1996), 548-49.

241

VISUALIZING THE STATE

42. Kracke. "Early Visions," 497. 43. The fan painting Seattle Museum of Art illustrated shows a young herd boy with his ox, a common theme, but in this case both the boy and the ox are in pitiful condition, nothing but skin and bones. Such a paint­ ing corresponds to the many Song poems exposing malnutrition in the countryside. The poet Lu You (1125—1210) once bragged that the peo­ ple of his district so liked his governance that some had had his portrait painted on fans to show their approval in public. See Bo Liu, "Political Expression in Song Dynasty Fan Painting," Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2009, 4-6; 136-49. 44. Songshi, 4168. 45. Hugh Scogin, "Poor Relief in Northern Song China," Oriens Extremus 25 (1978): 32 ff. 46. Meng Yuanlao (£1. 1110-60), Dongjing menghua lu (the eastern capital: a dream of splendors past), annot., Deng Zhicheng (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1982), 165. 47. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 80-82. 48. Zhang Ruyu, Qunshu kaosuo xuji (further research from the shantang studio) (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1969, 1508), 29.1086. 49. Ibid., 29.1087. 50. Ibid., 45.1181. 51. Johannes Nieuhoff, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces . . . (London: Printed by the Author at his house in WhiteFriers, 1673), 143. 52. Scott, "Acts of Time and Power," 22-25. 53. The term literally means "mountains and rivers," but to translate it so awkwardly is to needlessly exoticize the term. One might also translate daxiao as "big and small" but in fact it simply means size. 54. See Editorial Committee of the Palace Museum, Zhongguo hdai huihua (Chinese painting through the ages) (Beijing: Renmm meishu chuba she 19811, II: 94-132. , , 55. Xin Qiji Jiaxuan ci b i a n n i a n jianzhu (Xin Qiji s lyrics| arra^e c rono logically and annotated), ed„ Deng Guangmmg (Shanghai. Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998), 172. Body'" in Landscape, 56. Martin J. Powers, "When is a Landscape like a Body F Culture and Power, ed„ Yeh Wen-hsin (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1998),18—19. n A A —A S 57. Powers, "The Jiangshan Genre of Landscape, • 58. Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian (A comprehen xinwen chubanzhongxin, 1996), volume 218. 59'

Ibid'

Jn. u

A

Guoj.

pi!;. Vinoerad, Chinese Art & Culture ® Inc-> 2001),

60. S e e R o b e r t L. Thorp and Richard m (New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., and 238-40.

^

y

242

MARTIN POWERS

"Works Cited Allen, Danielle S. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 2006. Bodde, Derk. Political and Social Background." In The Cambridge History of China, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank. Vol. 1, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B. C.—A. D. 220, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe, pp. 20-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Bol, Peter K. "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Brotherton, Elizabeth. "Li Gonglin's Illustrations to Tao Yuanming's 'Returning Home."' Artibus Asiae 59, no. 3/4 (2000): 225-63. Brown, Elizabeth A. R. The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe." The American Historical Review 79 (October 1974): 1063-88. Chaffee, John. The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Chen, Jo-shui. Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in Tang China, 773-819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. De Weerdt, Hilde. Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil ervice Examinations in Imperial China (1127-1279). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press East Asian Series, 2007. torial Committee of the Palace Museum. Zhongguo lidai huihua [Chinese painting through the ages], Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1981.2:94-132. lsensta L S-N. The Political Systems of Empires. New York: Free Press, 1969. '

inese Fables and Anti-Walpole Journalism." The Review of English

Studies 25 (April 1949): 141-42.

r-

, ^ac^' ^

Past

lhe

West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

s 11 ' TT ®*sPuters °.f the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989. Hartman, Charles. Han Yu and the Tang Search for Unity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. HUUniLynn

^

Culturc>

and

Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1984.

ofMan^SW-Tv'^T1 ContcsU'd: Phil°s«phy, Modernity, a n d the Emancipation

lohnsnn n„ 'j ..T/\ T'ane and F

1 q

Uxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006.

Years of 3 Grcat

Klingensmith 71 "mf " H"rvard U"lUY at the Co !°f r UnTvcStv frlmEd"

ClamThe Li Family of Chao Chun in Late if Asiatic Studies 37, no. 1 (1977): 100. Ceremony, Social Life, a n d Architecture

SP>cndor:

ChnStla" R

university of Chicago Press, 1993.

°«°

3"d

Mark Ashton. Chicago:

•K-racke, Tr. E A c Su"s Chi"a• Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 1 3 r""" 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

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. "Early Visions of Justice for the Humble in East and West." Journal of the American Oriental Society 96 (Oct.-Dec., 1976): 496.

Liu, Bo. "Political Expression in Song Dynasty Fan Painting." PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009. Liu, Zongyuan,. "Fengjian lun" [Essay on feudalism]. In Tangsong badajia wenxuan [Selected works of the eight great masters of Tang and Song], pp. 248-49. Taiyuan: Xinhua Publishing, 1986. . Fengjian lun [On feudalism]. In Tangsong ba dajia wenxuan shizhu [Selected works of the eight, great masters of Tang and Song], ed. Chen Xiacun and Xian Fengwu, 1:245-49. Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu Press, 1992. . "Song Xue Cunyi zhi ren xu." In Liu Zongyuan, ed. Lii Ch'ing-fei, p. 347. Taipei: Diqiu chubanshe, 1992. McKnight, Brian. "Fiscal Privileges and the Social Order in Sung China." In Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China, ed. John Winthrop Haeger, pp. 95—99. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975. Meng, Yuanlao. Dongjing menghua lu [The eastern capital: a dream of splendors past]. Annot. Zhicheng Deng. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1982. Nieuhoff, Johannes. An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces . . . London: Printed by the Author at his house in White-Friers, 1673. Powers, Martin J. Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Series, 2006. . "When is a Landscape like a Body?" In Landscape, Culture, and Power, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh, pp. 18-19. Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1998. Scogin, Hugh. "Poor Relief in Northern Song China." Onens Extremus 25 (1978): 32ff. Scott, Hamish. "'Acts of Time and Power': The Consolidation of Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, c. 1580-1720." German Historical Institute London Bulletin 30 (November 2008). Siegfried, Susan. "Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in

Postrevolutionary France." The Art Bulletin 75 (June 1993): 235 58. Sima, Guang. Zizhi tongjian [A comprehensive history]. Vol. 218. Hainan: Guoji xinwen chubanzhongxin, 1996. Song shi [History of the Song Dynasty], Beijing: " Su, Shi,. Su Dongpo Quanji [The collected works of Su Shi], Ed. Wang W

. g

and Tangjunzhi. 3 vols. Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 1996. Word Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi. Trans. Ronald Egan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1994. Distributed by the Harvard University Press. Taran.rno, Giovanni, "I, No, ,he Liberty of.be

, Mrnd

Preferable

., f^

T

of .he Body?' Thorn.. Gordon and hi, 'Republican™ ^ d'un Lai'que." Paper delivered a, the Ina.i.oB for Advanoed S.udy, Ponce,on, Thorp', RoberU^and Richard Ellis Vinograd. Chinese Arl& Culture. New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

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Tilly, Charles. "Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys, or Social Movements." Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (Winter 1983): 461-78. Toulmin, Stephen, andjune Goodfleld. The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Xin, Qiji,. Jiaxuan ci biannian jianzhu [Xin Qiji's lyrics arranged chronologically and annotated], Ed. Guangming Deng. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998. Yu, Yunguo. Songdai taijian zhidu yanjiu [The censorate in Song times]. Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2001. Zhang, Ruyu. Qunshu kaosuo xuji [Further research from the Shantang Studio]. Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1969, 1508. 29.1086. Zhang, Yanyuan. Lidai minghua ji [Great paintings throughout the ages]. Some Tang and Pre-T'ang Texts on Chinese Painting. Trans. William Reynolds Beal Acker. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1954.

CHAPTER 9

AREAS, NETWORKS, AND THE SEARCH FOR "EARLY MODERN" EAST ASIA Kenneth Pomeranz

A

t least in theory, one can separate the question of whether there is a history of what we often call the early modern period (ca. 1400/501800/50) from the question of whether "early modern" is the best label for that period—though the two issues have often been conflated. As many scholars have noted, the term "early modern" comes with a lot of teleological baggage that it may be best to avoid. This seems particu­ larly advisable if one takes seriously the various arguments proffered m recent years about the important historical discontinuities associated with industrialization.1 But skepticism about the "early modern" label does not necessarily rule out any effort to construct a world (or at least transre gional) history for this period that is something more than just t e sum o various regional histories. . . ,.c As it turns out, though, separating these two questions is rnore difficult than one might initially suspect. For a transregional ^story to be worth creating it needs to have some implications forpatterns of longterm change, since a history with more phenomenological goals n o ^ words, one more focused on recapturing experiences o peop g these times) would have no obvious need to emphasize a radically different from the ones that most people expenen .ar basis.2 Moreover, since we cannot help and noting that, at least in material terms, P

246

KENNETH POMERANZ

dramatic sets of changes in the last several millennia—it is not imme­ diately apparent how we would frame a world history for this period that was not organized with one eye on the subsequent emergence of a "modern" world. There is at least one narrow sense in which one can argue that this period has a world history while others did not: after 1492, AfroEurasia and the Americas were in regular contact, which they had not been before. And focusing on that fact seems less narrow if we locate it not just within a context of European exploration and expansion, but a wider series of outward initiatives. With regard to seafaring and trade, we have Zheng He's fifteenth-century voyages and the sixteenth and seventeenth-century expansion of Chinese private seafaring, Arab and Gujarati expeditions to Southeast Asia and East Africa, and so on. With regard to religious missionizing, we have a seventeenth-century boom in Tibetan Buddhist missionizing in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Western China; a boom in Chan Buddhist missionary work in Southeast Asia, Islamic missionizing in South and Southeast Asia (as far as the Philippines), and in various parts of Africa; numerous projects of landed expansion and ethnographic mapping in Southwest China, Siberia, the Caucasus, southern Vietnam, and many other places; and so on. (Only the conquest, massive depopulation, and resettlement of vast transoceanic areas is an exclusively European project in this period.) All of these things make it at least superficially plausible to see the emergence of globe-gir­ ling networks as a logical outcome of something broadly characteristic o this period, rather than just of something incubating in one particular place during this period. Furthermore, if, as I have argued elsewhere,3 the growth and thicken­ ing of these transregional networks gives the various cases in this period of what Jack Goldstone has called "efflorescences"4—Golden Age Holland, seventeenth-century Japan, high Qing China, and other cases oforgamtiona and technical innovation yielding both population growth and improving living standards over a period of at least a couple of gener­ ic A " di®"erent historical significance than the earlier and less net,. 6 j orescences of Rome, the southern Song, and so on. If true, is would make the teleology implicit in calling this an "early modern f l• ti

CSS t.rouhhng,

11S

ah

as it would suggest that something characteristic

across manY

different places was vital in allowing one par(that of eighteenth-century Britain) to lead to a radlcally different material possibilities. (I will briefly touch

e71°r eSCence" j

on n Die h? °

1 6 eVldence used in that chapter later on.) Indeed, many peove suggested that while Europe's outward thrust in these centuries

AREAS, NETWORKS, AND SEARCH FOR "EARLY MODERN"

247

was particularly sustained and energetic, this is at least partly explained by its position within a broader world. As a relative backwater at the start of this period (and one torn by particularly intense and expensive political/ military conflict), its states had much more proportionately to gain by increasing their shares of long-distance trade and other remote resources than polities in East or probably South Asia. By taking this route, we may seem to have solved our problems rather quickly—including that of teleology. After all, arguing that the signifi­ cance of A was that it was bound to lead to B is not necessarily wrong, if the momentum toward some particular end really was sufficiently strong and broadly based that some important outcome was extremely likely. From that perspective, we might worry less about trying to dispense with teleological "grand narratives," and more about framing better ones, ones that would locate the roots of the various modernities now visible around the globe in a combination of transregional networks and broadly paralle processes unfolding in several different locations, but also in some o t e regional particularities that inflected those processes during the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It needs to be emphasized here that once one gets away from see­ ing modernity as a single generic condition still less one arr by only one route-diverse regional particularities can be seen as each facilitating the emergence of distinct modern societies, rat er t "traditions" that either hamper this transition or are irrelevant to it Increasingly scholars are seeing modernity in East and Southeast Ana as rooted in indigenous patterns of development, rat er t thing largely learned from the West. Insofar as we focus on ™*s,J:he work of Hamashita Takeshi and others is particular y impor , mg: (1) how patterns of mtra-Asian trade (themselvesi bui around^the Sinocentric "tribute system" in Hamashita's view*) and helped pave the way for East Asia's relatively successful economydeve opment of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Southeast Asian international relations began to ev , ^ in the eighteenth century, in ways that pre^U^sc^3m older stories as tern of state-to-state relations: something cnent a lot of time a European import. (Speaking as somebody who^sp^t^t, ^ thinking about recent claims that there is a ni how many of "modern economic development, am rep them is anticipated these arguments, and how much oft e evi enc 1970s 7) if we take in Hamashita's work, going all the way ac fk Sglden and ^her hisseriously the arguments of Giovanni trig , from Hamashita, and torically minded sociologist, (who borrow heavrly from Hamash

248

KENNETH POMERANZ

from the so-called California School) that developments in this period explain both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political-economic predominance of the West and the relative success of East Asia in return­ ing to a central place in the global economy of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, utilizing a distinctive form of capitalism in which transnational Chinese networks play a central role,8 then we can make a strong argument for thinking of not only the Atlantic history of this period, but its Eurasian, or even global history, as both unified and "early modern, at least in political-economic terms.9 Meanwhile, younger scholars such as Wu Jiang and Charles Wheeler are giving us a renewed sense of the continuing dynamism of what Wu calls missionary Buddhism" in the seventeenth century and beyond. They further demonstrate that this missionary activity was connected with commerce, state-formation, and conflicts over imitation and indigenization of imported "high culture" very much like the ones we asso­ ciate with the activities of, say, Jesuits outside Europe.10 In each of these cases, the organizational structures that sustained these dynamics maybe less well understood than in European cases (which were organized by more centralized institutions), and the geographic scope less vast; none­ theless, the importance seems plausibly comparable. However, upon closer examination, this network-based formula­ tion still has many problems. First of all, the growth of these transborder networks was much less linear in early modern East/Southeast Asia than in the Atlantic world (where the location of the key nodes shifts over time, but the size and density of the overall network keeps growing ir y steadlly)' Even if we don t accept the more extreme accounts of the Japanese sakoku policy, there are clearly ways in which Japan circa 1750 was ess plugged into the outside world than Japan circa 1550. In the case ma, we know that the Ming government tried to ban private for^ Certaln P°ints, as did the Qing rulers during the 1661-1683 ^ l°ok to intellectual connections, the lively Confucian/Jesuit a ogues o circa 1600 are muted a century later, and almost dead a few eca es a ter that. While some quintessentially early modern imports— rom Copernican astronomy to tobacco-became firmly indigemzed, ne chains of human contacts that had brought them to China were ° constant, much less constantly growing, significance. Moreover, '1

, °r a, 6W or nnlv °?

excepti°nally

mcuded

well-connected monks, the Chinese who

almost nobody who was part of the intellectual

t^US Producec' n° texts for domestic consumption that r m t,1^' 1 reCC1Ved W1Sdom ln China the way that reports from well ed , ell-educated Jesuits, colonial officials from elite backgrounds, or (later)

AREAS, NETWORKS, AND SEARCH FOR "EARLY MODERN"

249

ship's doctors with strong scientific credentials could shake Europe's—a process that Jack Goldstone emphasizes in his chapter. (Though Ayesha Ramachandran rightly cautions us against overestimating how rapidly and thoroughly European thought became "modern" in response to these stimuli, there is clearly something to the link Goldstone and others have drawn between increasingly far-flung sources of knowledge and epistemological change.) Richard Vinograd's chapter does show us instabilities in late Ming art—especially in the work by Dong Qichang—that have many affinities with those he finds in Holbein, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Velazquez, and that could reflect foreign as well as domestic influences. Here too, though, it is not obvious what happens once we move forward from the time frame that he discusses: Would we find high Qing art that is to Dong as, say, Hogarth is to Vermeer?11 Even if we think about long-distance networks within China (which, as many of us have noted, are in purely geographic terms more "long-dis­ tance" than many "international" connections in the West), the situation is murky. Economically, regional networks became much stronger over the course of the eighteenth century, while some of the most important networks of long-distance trade—such as the Lower Yangzi s exports of cloth and other light manufactures in return for raw cotton, rice, timber, and so on—peaked around mid-century and then shrank circa 1750-1850, so that the empire may have had more of a "national market" in 1750 than a century later.12 For maritime Southeast Asia, there is now a good deal of skepticism about Anthony Reid's claim that the growth of armed European power in the seventeenth century broke apart earlier networks spanning the Malay world and trapped each new colony in a bilateral relationship with its metropole.13 Indeed, Reid himself later edited a volume doc­ umenting lively cross-border exchanges in the eighteenth century, and a later essay by Li Tana argues that even the new European pres­ ence in late eighteenth century Saigon and early nineteenth-century Singapore was dependent on a complex web of multilateral mtraAsian trade in which growing demand in China for Southeast sian nee was particularly crucial.14 The development of Singapore was m some ways emblematic of these connections: it depended on peranakan (locally born descendants of Chinese men and Malay women with

creolized culture) elite*, who moved from Melak, as .ha. port dohned and became Singapore-based mediators between the B „ t . c o l o m . l state and newer groups of Chinese from other trades to buy rice they sold in migration.13

more

250

KENNETH POMERANZ

Yet even these examples give us nothing like the unambiguous evi­ dence that exists suggesting that trans-Atlantic webs were growing more efficient: steadily increasing volumes of trade, declining freight and insurance rates for the crossing, and so on. True, the economist's favorite measurement price convergence between ports on opposite sides of the ocean remains quite weak in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world as well, partly because the same states that were providing greater secu­ rity for these voyages were also sharply increasing tariffs of various sorts. For our purposes, however, this is not a problem, since these increased taxes were not sufficient to stop the rising volume of trade; they simply changed the distribution of profits from it. The fact remains that the evidence that transoceanic connections were exerting ever-increasing influence on the societies they touched is stronger for the Atlantic than for any large part of the Pacific or Indian Ocean littoral before 1850 or perhaps even 1900. Indeed, the difference between heavy state involvement in promot­ ing, contesting, and exploiting Europe's extra-continental trade routes and the much more limited state involvement in maritime East and South Asia points to a second important reason not to rely too heavily on long­ distance networks in defining an "early modern" era including Asia. In s arp contrast to the Atlantic world, it is hard to find strong synergies etween these long-distance networks and domestic economic growth and state-making in the largest East Asian states. The Zheng mercantile empire of the seventeenth century resembled European trading compa­ nies in many ways, as various scholars have pointed out; but it flourished precise y in the interregnum between the Ming and the Qing dynas, n ,

n was quite exceptional in the way that it linked armed trade quasi )state power.16 Likewise, new work suggesting that the early

, J1 state was ^ar more dependent on and oriented to trade than we a rea lze —-and thus a major beneficiary of the flood of Latin American "t0 , . *na l*es a highly successful East Asian state-making projtaP into burgeoning global trade;17 but this focus on . a 1 to ouragmg an exploiting long-distance commerce to finance warfare

f

p, •

mUC.

netwnT56

w'ea'ser

once the Qing had taken Beijing and gained access

utaXeS" JaPan's most extensive involvement in overseas thg cons°hdation of Tokugawa power and stabilhv T°EU CamC aiar a f t p We n°w recognize that the door to the outside world remained 311

not m i ' JaPancse involvement in overseas networks was certainly not particularly robust at the height of Edo prosperity." S/ner£les ln mainland Southeast Asia (especially on the fronti ° the frontiers, as Charles Wheeler has shown);1'1 and it may be as Sanjay

AREAS, NETWORKS, AND SEARCH FOR "EARLY MODERN"

251

Subrahmanyam has suggested, that there was some ongoing convergence in methods of rule and of finance between the smaller trade-oriented polities and the larger agrarian-based states of South and Southeast Asia beginning in the fifteenth century.20 But at least in sparsely populated Southeast Asia, where warfare was often more about capturing people than land—and so was not characterized by the enormously expensive self-catalyzing cycle of more powerful gunpowder weapons yielding more expensive fortifications requiring more powerful artillery in the same way that characterized the "military revolution 21 elsewhere even frequent warfare did not create the same intense pressures toward mer­ cantilist state policies that one finds further west. More importantly, China, Japan, and Korea are exceptions too big to ignore to any pattern of strong state/merchant alliances to increase foreign trade; and attempts to tie developments in these societies during their most flourishing decades closely to regional or even global networks seem to me shaky. Kawakatsu has tried to do so for Japan by focusing on various efforts at import substitution and imitation of Chinese manu­ factures during the sakoku period, so that the idea of the rest of East Asia remains important,22 but this does not seem compelling; it requires a very strong commitment to the teleology of an East Asian regional economy to argue that the main significance of a period in which trade and other exchanges were deliberately kept quite limited was that it paved the way for a future in which those exchanges intensified. Korea did have a sig­ nificant trade with China in this period, but little trade with anyone else; and the commerce with China was not a crucial source of revenue. Here too the absence of chronic military emergencies (after Hideyoshi s fai e invasion) provided a context where there were few incentives to reorga­ nize the state's relationship to external trade. In the post-1644 Qing case, while the porcelain, silk, and tea for silver trades were all quite significant at certain moments and m certain regions, the overall impact was rather limited. « trade was vastly larger, and certainly more important or Yangzi, the country's most "advanced" area. State revenues from for eign trade though they climbed near the end of our period, remained a very small share of overall revenues;22 and while -chants m general did make major contributions to defraying the costs of sporadic m ht emergencies (especially .he Wirhe itary-fiscalist pressures were not sufficie y ,trr»nff state desire to new patterns of state-merchan, a to encourage foreign trade. (The ve constant military threat and had lost much of its land base,

252

KENNETH POMERANZ

in these directions, but that orientation did not outlast their demise in 1279.) It is true that the Qing rulers spent over half their revenues on the military during most of the long period in which they were con­ quering portions of Central Asia;24 but even that figure is well below the 70—90 percent of revenues or more that many European regimes of this era spent on war plus debt service.25 Moreover, the Qing, being on the offensive almost throughout, had the choice of when to fight, and never found it necessary to create a public debt to do so. In 1766, at the end of this long period, their revenues were about twice what they had been (in silver) in 1652; certainly a significant increase, but slower than population growth over the same period, and much smaller than the increases in state extraction in various European states over the same period.26 Technology transfer through trade was also limited: Chinese craftsmen did imitate things like the gears and jackwork in Western cuckoo clocks, but there was little that affected the economy more broadly. (The Qing military did copy some Western weaponry, but did not turn to it nearly as much as some South Asian states did.27) It is also worth noting that Sino-Western trade in general was powered to a great extent by goods in which one side or the other had an exclu­ sive advantage. Europe simply did not have tea; China had very little silver. Since these trade goods did not compete directly with domestic production, they were much less likely to start a cascade of changes in omestic resource allocation than goods that did compete closely with local products. All of this suggests that rather than relying heavily on the growth of ong-distance networks to give the period a unifying character, we might need to return to a greater focus on tracing the trajectories of largely separate states/societies. If we take that route far enough, any unified 1 1

t0r^j °

t'le Per20