Prof. Menegon to Present Paper for University of Oxford China Centre
Tomorrow, October 29th, Professor Eugenio Menegon will present a talk virtually over Microsoft Teams for the University of Oxford China Centre. Professor Menegon’s lecture, titled “The Invisible City: A Global Microhistory of Europeans and their Social Networks in Eighteenth Century Beijing,” will take place at 12:30 PM GMT, or 8:30 AM EST. To register for the event, see the event listing at the China Centre’s website.
The study of the Catholic mission in Beijing is an ideal arena to uncover the deep structures of Chinese-Western socio-cultural and economic relations in early modern times. This presentation focuses on the Qing imperial court, where missionaries worked as scientists and artisans, seen as an urban microcosm, a node in a vast planetary network, and the site of informal social networks. The missionaries nested within these networks to pursue their interests (primary for them, evangelization), and stubbornly resisted bureaucratic control and autocratic hegemony, using their professional skills and gift-giving to obtain patronage. The historical experience of these individuals behind the public façade of power humanizes and nuances the claims of grand political and economic narratives, from the ‘Great Divergence’ between China and the West, to Qing state building. Through this group, we can expand the analysis to a larger network of individuals and institutions (also using digital scholarship approaches), extending from the Qing court to the entire world.