Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 - (Critical Issues in World and International History) 5th Edition by D E Mungello (Paperback)

About the Book

This thoroughly updated edition provides an essential source of understanding the dynamics of East and West during the periods after the Age of Discovery. This text addresses the issue of two cultures in contact at a crucial period in history allowing students access to proble...

Book Synopsis

This thoroughly updated edition provides an essential source of understanding the dynamics of East and West during the periods after the Age of Discovery. This text addresses the issue of two cultures in contact at a crucial period in history allowing students access to problems of contact on the soil of China and reactions and solutions by both parties.

Review Quotes

Mungello's book ably explores the seismic shifts of the sixteenth and seventeenth century from the perspective of religion and culture in China and Europe. My students are drawn in by the way Jesuit missionaries shape and adapt Christianity to Chinese culture. The greatest strength of the book is Mungello's ability to dispassionately see cultural engagements and cultural clashes from the perspective of both sides, and in the process question Euro-centrism in favor of a more multipolar worldview. I would recommend instructors of world history consider this text, as Mungello highlights in dense but clear language and specific detail how China and the west first sized each other up on the world stage, and how individuals within both cultures were able to step outside their own ethnocentrism to appreciate, and even defend, the practices of a foreign culture.

I've been using Mungello's Great Encounter of China and the West in my global History survey course for many years. I can't think of another text that so clearly encompasses so many of the processes of globalization in the early modern world. Better still, it flips the traditional narrative away from a Eurocentric world view and never fails to generate substantive discussions. I always tell colleagues that if they are looking for one supplemental text to use in their World Civ classes, this is the one to pick - students will read it, will recognize transnational phenomenon, will use it as a springboard for class discussions, and will find their interest in world history reinvigorated.

About the Author

For the past half-century D. E. Mungello has been a leading scholar in Sino-Western history. From 1979 to 2016 he founded and edited a journal dedicated to the post-Mao Zedong era revival of contacts between Chinese and foreign historians. His books include Leibniz and Confucianism, Curious Land, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800, The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785, Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide since 1650, Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz, The Catholic Invasion of China, This Suffering is my Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China and Interracial Lovers in Revolutionary China. He is the Professor of History Emeritus at Baylor University.