17th-Century Chinese Christianity and the Global History of Empires

This paper investigates the history of seventeenth-century Chinese Christianity not chiefly as an episode of intellectual history, or the history of religious ideas. It puts much more emphasis on the imperial power constellations and institutions (local and global) that shaped the intellectual flows and religious exchanges that defined central aspects of Chinese Christianity during that epoch. Focusing on Ming society and politics on one hand and the Catholic Church as a global organization closely entangled with rivaling European empires on the other hand, it argues that the main contours of 17^th-century Chinese Catholicism emerged along the thin lines of possible compromises between both large imperial systems. It adds more substance to the idea that unresolved conflicts and unmovable contradictions between two (very different) imperial formations shaped this history of inter-cultural syntheses at least as much as intellectual efforts and scholarly dialogues did. The paper discusses several sample cases for such unresolved conflicts. One of them is the (widely under-studied) history of ethnic identities and policies in 17^th-century Chinese Christianity. While ethnic stereotypes played significant roles in Late Ming and early Qing society, the Catholic Church long continued to bar Chinese individuals from becoming priests – despite its own universal claims.