"Sweetness and Courtesie": Benevolence, Civility, and China in the Making of European Modernity

This essay examines late seventeenth-century European missionary and Jesuit accounts of China for the ways in which they draw attention to China's social and cultural superiority in the early modern world. By idealizing Chinese modes of maintaining social order, the authors of these accounts align generosity, civility, self-possession, and a benevolent monarchy with national wealth and moral authority. Elevating China as the exemplar of uncorrupted Christian virtue, these texts insist upon China as the standard against which all other claims to morality must be measured. Although these texts were intended to justify European efforts to educate and enlighten a "heathen" race, they instead implicitly and explicitly mark the limits of European morality.