China and the Spanish Enlightenment: The Celestial Empire in Spanish Periodicals, 1758–1808

In the eighteenth century, reports of China’s powerful centralized bureaucracy, densely populated agricultural districts, and prosperous markets inspired wonder in enlightened Europeans.  The central idea of Enlightenment—to reorganize society according to Reason—appeared already to have been achieved in China.  Scholars have studied China’s influence on France and England, but Spain has not received the same attention.  What influence did China have on Spain’s political, economic, and social development?  How did Spaniards’ notions of China compare with and contribute to the changing image of the Celestial Empire in Europe?  By analyzing Spanish periodicals from the eighteenth century, I will illustrate the importance of China to Spain’s reading public.  I will argue that references to China in Spanish periodicals illustrate Europe-wide enthusiasm for debates about China as well as a corresponding imperative, far stronger than any such impulse in the north, to protect critical cultural and religious traditions.

My topic has not been covered in the secondary literature.  The mere idea of a Spanish Enlightenment was established only in 1958 by Richard Herr’s survey, Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain.  Later scholarship has considerably advanced our knowledge of this revolution’s contours but has focused rather nationalistically on domestic, purely “Spanish” developments.  I will explore the extent to which so-called “Chinese” influences were founded upon genuine knowledge of China, and I will evaluate how and why China was idealized or denigrated. At a further level of analysis, I will explore the apparent gap between northern European trajectories of development and the paths often followed by non-European societies. I also expect to make a contribution to unfolding perceptions of Spanish history as best understood in comparative terms, reversing the exceptionalist dogma that formerly dominated Spanish historiography.