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SUMMARY:A Micro-Historical Approach to Global China: The Daily Life of Eur
 opeans in Beijing in the Long 18th Century - Prof. Eugenio Menegon\, Bosto
 n University
DTSTART:20150611T150000Z
DTEND:20150611T170000Z
UID:TALK58241@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ghassan Moazzin
DESCRIPTION:One of the challenges of the new global history is to bridge t
 he particularities of individual lives and trajectories with the macro-his
 torical patterns developing over space and time. The approach of Italian m
 icro-history\, particularly popular in the 1980s and 1990s\, has been to e
 xcavate the life of small communities or individuals to test the findings 
 of serial history and macro-historical approaches. Micro-history in the An
 glophone world has instead focused more on narrative itself\, and shown le
 ss interest for ampler historiographical conclusions. F. Trivellato recent
 ly suggested a need to ‘blend together social scientific analysis and na
 rration… on the global stage’ (‘Is there a future for Italian Microh
 istory in the Age of Global History?’ California Italian Studies\, 2011)
 . Sino-Western interactions offer a particularly fruitful field of investi
 gation of phenomena that are traceable in economic and statistical series\
 , thanks to the survival of detailed records of East India Companies and m
 issionary agencies regarding their activities in China. Recent scholarship
  has started to offer new conclusions\, based on such Western records\, an
 d matching recods in the Chinese historical archive. In my contribution I 
 plan to focus on the economic and socio-religious activities of the Roman 
 Catholic mission in Beijing in the long 18th century (1670s – 1820s)\, i
 n an attempt to reconstruct local and global networks supporting the missi
 on\, and their workings. By maintaining a balance between analysis and nar
 ration\, I aim to uncover unexplored facets of Chinese life in global cont
 exts from the point of view of the ‘end users’ of the global networks 
 of commerce and religion bridging Europe\, Asia\, Africa\, and South and C
 entral America\, i.e. the European missionaries and the Chinese Christians
  in the Qing capital.
LOCATION:Rooms 8&amp\;9\, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
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