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For a long time, the idea of China as a culture and society which was voluntarily secluding itself from the rest of the world was dominant. But, in reality, China has always been part of the world, just as the world has always sought to penetrate China. The relationship between China and the world was, in the past, sometimes smooth, and at other times it was difficult, but nevertheless the bond remained alive.This collection presents an analysis of China from a global perspective within a broad temporal and spatial spectrum. It reveals the early relations established between the Roman Empire and China, the dynamics developed with the countries of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and Japan, and the gradual path of Europeans and Americans towards China. The book reviews the development of diplomatic relations, the signing of agreements and alliances, and the rise and resolution of conflicts. It also analyses the forging of economic relations, the establishment of commercial exchanges and the creation of companies, professional bodies and institutions of collaboration. Guido Abbattista's contributions explores the changing representations of China in the Western world from the Enlightenment to the First Opium War, and shows how the Enlightenment idea of modernity as depending on the development of a commercial civilization inspired aggressive and interventionist policies at the beginning of the 19th century, thus revealing the persistence of peculiar Enlightenment ideas in Western early 19th century mercantile imperialism

International expositions as representative cultural phenomena which contributed to shape world history in the modern and contemporary age are currently approached from combined spatial points of view (in a geographical, material, and cultural sense). It is argued in this article that they may be better studied, and understood in the classroom, by also taking into account their temporal and historical dimensions. The symbolic and discursive structure and modules of exhibition-style events such as the "Great Expositions" during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the living human expositions, have in fact been organized along temporal and historical coordinates as well as spatial ones. The two sections of this articleexplain the functioning of expos as "time-machines."As the first part of this essay will argue, nineteenth and early-twentieth century expos and fairs visually represented the human ways of living, activities, products and achievements diversities in the historical past and future, hence presenting them in a temporal dimension. Elements of this temporal representation included the effort to reproduce ancient Greek or Roman temples and monuments, Oriental palaces, decorative details and typical settings such as harems and cafés, and, most of all, medieval streets, quarters, castles and whole villages, example not just of the pursuit of the picturesque, but of the intention to make possible the visual experience of temporality and a material, emotional and empathetic understanding of history.Also the living ethno-expositions, through the physical presence of alien humans, put on stage historical temporality, offering to the gaze of Western observers the conflation of present savage societies and primitive or ancient societies, seen as the progenitors of contemporary societies. As the second part of this essay will further suggest, the exposition can be deciphered, in this respect, as a time machine as well as a teaching devicewith significant parallels with the development of modern museums in the hierarchical organization of displays according to evolutionary paradigms, and their educational function.With 1889's Eiffel Tower, Alva Edison's pavilion of electric light, and the Hall of Machines, the technological sublime and the thematization of the future became central features of expositions: the time machine began to be set on a date yet to come, offering the visitor "an early encounter with tomorrow." Expos, through their richness as material objects and communicative circuits – exploiting specific treatments of space, visual representations and stagings, and the cinematic dimension of theatrical performances and the movement of viewers – increasingly worked as science-fictional devices,embodyinga sense of wonder and producingin spectators' mechanisms of cognitive estrangement which prepared the ground for the emergence of science fiction as a codified and recognizable genre.

This article is part of a themed issue of "Ricerche storiche" with the title "Esposizioni Universali in Europa. Attori, pubblici, memorie tra metropoli e colonie, 1851-1939 (a cura di Giovanni Luigi Fontana -Anna Pellegrino)". It aims at discussing some current historiographical paradigm concerning living ethno-exhibitions, by showing how deeper and more ancient motivations were at their basis. In particular, the article criticizes the notion of "human zoos" as suggesting an interpretation which risks missing some fundamental aspects of the ethno-exhibitions. Such aspects - variety, multiple meanings, agency and negotiation - are introduced and explained. In particular, this essay dwells on the concepts of ‘human zoos’ and ‘living human exhibitions’, in order to show that the first was a particular case of a larger family of cultural practices in early modern and modern Europe, where the appropriation of human ‘others’ was inspired by the will to exercise the ‘power of the gaze’. Human aliens were repeatedly and often voluntary victims of abduction from their countries of origin and public exhibition in several different venues in European cities according to widely diffused practices of ‘public othering of the human body’, which was made available to the observation of the Western gaze. The great nineteenth-twentieth century world expositions offered one of the most influential contexts for such ethno-shows, innovating the pre-existing performances in several ways, in particular by taking over the ‘human zoos’ format. It would be partial however to interpret the latter only in terms of the obvious aspects of ‘animalisation’ of human ‘others’ and racism. Public exhibitions of living humans ‘other’ were in fact complex performances involving ideas of civilizing and Christianizing tasks and occasioned unexpected reactions on both sides of the exhibitions, so that to reduce the latter to a mere expression of power and racist domination means to miss important aspects of the complex relationship between exposer and exposed.

The present contribution concerns the European representation of the colonized world within universal exhibitions, with particular reference to the exposition of living exotic and savage humans coming mainly form Africa. Such performances were contrived for offering the public a vivid image of the contrast between civilization and savagery. Although well rooted in a very old European tradition of freak spectacularization, capture, imports and expositions of human beings came to assume a commercial entrepreneurial form during the 19th and early 20th century. Recent historical and anthropological studies have called these exhibits “human zoos”. However, this notion seems too limited for essentially two reasons: it applies only to a particular late 19th-early 20th century variety of living human exhibitions, which in fact comprehend a larger assortment of shows and displays of human beings; and it insists excessively on the monodimensional and unidirectional relationship between the displayer and the displayed, whereas human exhibitions were more complex “cultural artefacts” whose actors included visitors and spectators and whose unstable meaning was the result of the interplay between different agencies, being thus much the result of representations and interpretations on the making. Four main points are then to be stressed: 1st) the exposed subjects’ agency, which can be analyzed by studying the details of the European tours and the complex reaction patterns that can be ascertained during the exhibitions, 2nd ) the connection between living ethno-exhibitions and national colonial policies; 3rd) the transformation of the 19th century form of human exhibition into more articulated, less exotic, ideologically more complex representation of human diversities within an imperial discourse during the first half of the 20th century; 4th) the continuity in contemporary world of living human exhibitions begs the problem of the building of individual and collective personalities and their meanings through exposition and self-exposition, “watching” and “being watched” and the search for the conditions and boundaries of visibility as a drive for the definition of cultural identities.

This essay, which is part of the section "Europe and the World" in "EGO-European History Online" (http://www.ieg-ego.eu/), proposes an overall reconstruction of the expanding process of Europe overseas in the early modern age and of the multiple forms of ‘encounter’ with ‘other’ peoples and cultures successively made by the European navigators, explorers, conquerors, colonizers, merchants and missionaries over nearly four centuries in America, East Asia, the Pacific and Africa. Such encounters have always had a double aspect. On the one hand they had practical consequences, as they involved the necessity to work out forms of direct and immediate approach with such peoples ‘on the spot’. In other words, they led, though conquest, colonization or commerce, to the establishment of modes of domination or coexistence and implied several aspects of transcultural relationships. On the other hand, the encounters with ‘otherness’ in the early modern age stimulated in Europe a complex intellectual and cognitive process directed at interpreting the origins and nature of such human and cultural (linguistic, religious and social) diversities. This enriched considerably the European views of world history and of the anthropological and sociological varieties of mankind, spurring in particular a wholly new kind of reflection on ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’, and leading to the authentic discovery not only of new geographic realities, but also of cultures, religions and languages totally unknown before. If it is possible to keep logically distinct these two aspects, in fact they remained closely connected, as the pressure of political and economic interests and of religious, cultural and racial prejudices always influenced the European perceptions of the ‘other’ and gave them an increasingly hierarchical turn, reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by scientific paradigms. At the same time, observation of alien societies, cultures and religious opened new perspectives on extremely differentiated forms of human life, producing doubts and a critical attitude towards European Christian civilization. Recommended citation form: Abbattista, Guido : European Encounters in the Age of Expansion, in: Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), hg. vom Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz Jan 24, 2011. URL: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/abbattistag-2011-en URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-20101025326 [TT.MM.JJJJ].

Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by centuries of material and cognitive contact with domestic and exotic forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity in both a spatial and temporal dimension. The need to confront and deal with ‘diversity’ stemmed in part from the process of European expansion in the world. But it also reflects the core problem of politics: how to harmonize different interests, groups, religious faiths, customs, languages and ethnic identities, blending them into some form of viable and durable co-existence. We can identify two extremes in the approach to cultural diversity: suppression through assimilation or its perpetuation through radical ‘othering’. In between there has been a wide variety of policies and intellectual or ideological constructs of a ‘transcultural’ kind, with the transfer, adaptation and dialogue of political, religious and economic patterns of relationships. This international collection of essays reviews many such cultural experiences, taking a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization to the process by which the European states themselves took shape. It is the outcome of the European research project “EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)” conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program 2006-2008)

Recent studies on human live ethno-exhibitions have concentrated on their nineteenth-twentieth centuries forms, considering them as a typical expression of Western capitalist, imperialist and racialist culture and using for them the definition of ‘human zoos’. This essay aims to put in a longer historical perspective the phenomena of live human ethno-exhibitions, suggesting, first, to connect them to the practice of abducting exotic humans at the epoch of the discovery of the New World, and, second, to underline their relationship with the ancient “Roman triumphal culture” and its public exhibition of stranger, exotic captives as preys and trophies on the same plane as booty of other kinds. At the same time, a continuity can be envisaged between early modern practices of ethno-exhibitions of exotic living humans and present-day episodes registered by news reporting which testify how the use of reifying human beings and making of them ‘trophies’ of ideological discourses of different sort – humanitarian, conservationist, ecological – has survived in many unexpected contexts even in the twenty first century and not only in the Western World.

The article propounds a reflection on the new historiographical genre of "transnational history", with particular reference to some recent publications. It tries set its boundaries between history and social and political sciences and to underline its added value with respect to cultural or previous, more traditional forms of historical writing.

Il saggio contiene una analisi originale su fonti primarie a stampa e manoscritte relativa alla figura e al contributo di A-H. Anquetil-Duperron, autore dell'opera manoscritta inedita di cui il volume presenta la prima edizione critica a stampa, con commenti e aparati critici

From the mid-1770s onwards there was a clear shift in perspective in the way European commentators looked at China, a subject that, especially in an era defined by Paul Hazard as the crisis of European consciousness, had long appealed to Western culture as both a cognitive and more generally an intellectual challenge. The contrast between sinophilic and sinophobic attitudes, which often characterized the evolution, even temporal, of the eighteenth-century perception of Chinese reality, cannot alone explain the shifts in interest and changes of opinion that occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. What this contribution aims to highlight is how, in some key observers of and commentators on China between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century – from Adam Smith, Abbé Raynal and Denis Diderot, to Lord Macartney and John Barrow – one can detect perspectives and reflections that cannot be due to a simple descriptive register or to attempts at apologia or devaluation, but rather to approaches tending to include China in global comparative historical or socio-economic reasoning. And how, with that reasoning, the assumption of the superiority of the European model leads to China being seen no longer as a mere object of admiration or a source of inspiration, but as a new actor with a new role in global history. The discourse thus tends to take on, in various ways, prescriptive overtones, aimed at identifying the internal and external changes necessary for the part that, from a Western perspective, China could play in a connected world.

During nearly a century, between the 1851 London Great Exhibition and (at least) the eve of WWII a very ancient practice of putting on display human beings of exotic origins established itself in Europe and, in general, in the Western world, modifying their previous significance and scope and assuming the aspect of a highly organized commercial activity and a regular spectacular happening within the great expositions of different size and extent – national, international, colonial, imperial, universal – which became a frequently recurring international rendezvous. On such occasions, groups of human beings were systematically brought from every part of the non-European world toward the Western capitals and other cities seats of the expositions to be variously put on display as actors of what has also been termed ‘human zoo’, but we can better call an ‘exhibitionary complex’, whose script in fact was the result of different and often competing agencies engaged in defining how those ethnic types were placed in the great map of mankind, civilization and societies. What was at stake in a more or less explicit way was their possessing all the requisites of a fully developed human nature and their rightful or conditional or limited belonging to a proper human condition. The interplay between the several actors involved in the living ethno-exhibitions determined the degree of de-humanization or animalization or commodification, or else of positive appreciation, to which those peoples were exposed. This paper intends – by reference to a series of historical examples and by discussing the ‘human zoos’ paradigm – to offer a summary interpretation of a phenomenon through which the nature of the displayed individuals as human beings and as members of cultural groups was questioned and interpreted according to the different paradigms concurring to define roles and meanings of the participants to the exhibitionary devices.