Politographic Discourse and Early Modern Global Integration: The Ottoman Book of China and 16th-Century Spanish Sinology

This paper explores the significance of the thematic, discursive, and formal structural similarities between the Khataynameh (“Book of Cathay”), a Persian description of China written in 1516 for the Ottoman court, by a Central Asian merchant who had traveled overland to Beijing, and the late-sixteenth century treatises on China by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza, Martin de Rada, and other ecclesiastics, produced in the context of the Spanish Empire’s contact with China through its outpost in the Philippines. Given that any direct interaction between the Khataynameh and these Spanish works can be decisively ruled out, and given that such politographic works, or ethnographic descriptive works structured according to the categories of Aristotelian political theory that became prevalent in early modern Europe, are not attested in Ottoman, Persian, or Arabic, the Khataynameh and these Spanish works are best understood as having a rhizomatic relationship, their similarities due both to common structural factors and to discourse within the zone of contact—the social world of travelers and cultural brokers who mediated interaction between the Chinese state and the merchants and rulers who traded with China. I further argue that the propagation of this politographic discourse was a significant factor in early modern global integration, and an antecedent of what Sebastian Conrad has described as the global enlightenment of the nineteenth century. The spread of knowledge of divers political systems created conditions in which universalistic imperial claims were advanced by the Spanish-Habsburg, Ottoman, Mughal, and other empires, and contributed to utopian literature that was an important component of the European Enlightenment.