On Thursday 29 October 2020, 12:30 pm GMT, the China Centre at Oxford hosts an online presentation “The Invisible City: A Global Microhistory of Europeans and their Social Networks in Eighteenth Century Beijing.” The guest speaker is Eugenio Menegon, an associate professor at Boston University and an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Menegon will examine the lives of the missionaries who worked as scientists and artisans at the Qing imperial court, an ideal setting to explore the\u00a0deep structures of Chinese-Western socio-cultural and economic relations in early modern times. In pursuing their interests and stubbornly resisting bureaucratic control and autocratic hegemony, the Catholic missionaries operated within\u00a0a vast planetary network and a series informal social networks. Menegon argues that these individuals’ experiences behind the public fa\u00e7ade of power help to humanize and nuance “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.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n