Abstract
The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.
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Notes
F. Braudel, A History of Civilizations. (New York: Penguin, 1995); 6–7.
Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, The Shape of the New (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Oliver Goldsmith, Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friends in the East. (Bungay: J.&R. Childs, 1820), 33.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 29
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 31–32.
Ibid., 115.
An example, which particularly emphasizes the complexity of views and how they pretty much demolish the Orientalism interpretation, is David Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
François Quesnay, Despotisme de la Chine, in Œuvres économiques completes et autres textes, Volume 2. (Paris: INED, 2005), 1032.
Translations from the French are my own
Ibid., 1056.
Scott L. Montgomery and Alok Kumar, A History of Science in World Cultures: Voices of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2015), 9.
Albert Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 38–41.
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Montgomery, S.L. Are We Civilized Yet?. Soc 54, 133–137 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0113-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0113-1