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Imagined Civilizations:

China, the West, and Their First Encounter

ISBN-13: 9781421406060
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Roger Hart
Price: AUD $130.00
Stock: 1 in stock
Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
Local release date: 14/10/2013
Format: Hardback (235.00mm X 156.00mm) 384 pages Weight: 680g
Categories: History of mathematics [PBX]

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Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) to translate Euclid's Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. The writings relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view.Using Chinese primary sources, Roger Hart focuses in particular on Xu, who was in a position of considerable power over Ricci. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies. Hart analyzes Chinese mathematical treatises of the period, revealing that Xu and his collaborators could not have believed their declaration of the superiority of Western mathematics. Imagined Civilizations explains how Xu's West served as a crucial resource. While the Jesuits claimed Xu as a convert, he presented the Jesuits as men from afar who had traveled from the West to China to serve the emperor.

1. Introduction
2. Science as the Measure of Civilizations
3. From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds
4. Mathematical Texts in Historical Context
5. Tracing Practices Purloined by the Three Pillars
6. Xu Guangqi, Grand Guardian
7. Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Zhu Zaiyu's New Theory of Calculation
Appendix B: Xu Guangqi's Right Triangles, Meanings
Appendix C: Xu Guangqi's Writings
Bibliography
Index

""Overall, this book is interesting for the analytical framework it suggests for approaching area-based global historical questions and it is very original in some of its historiographic claims...""

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Imagined Civilizations:

China, the West, and Their First Encounter