Riches, Power, Trade, and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1720

This essay explores the complex responses of European writers to the Far East between 1600 and 1720. Examining diplomatic correspondence, travel narratives, and seventeenth-century cosmographies, it investigates the ways in which figures such as Elizabeth I, the author Peter Heylyn, and representatives of the English East India Company came to terms with the economic, political, and cultural power of China and Japan. In seeking to open trade with the Far East, the English and the Dutch confronted the limits of a Eurocentric worldview, even as they tried to emphasize the racial, cultural, and economic similarities between Protestant merchants and the upper-class dignitaries to whom they paid tribute in the Far East. (pp. 494-516).