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The moral and material excesses of Eastern empires were of particular interest to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English reflections on the changing nature of global commerce and its increasing impact on everyday metropolitan life and the wealth of the nation. Early modern orientalism, especially as expressed in performance and spectacle in the theater, exhibited China by staging histories of heroism, violence, and conquest, creating out-of-body adventures that extended the limits of the human and depicted the novelty of Eastern wealth, customs, and religions. Audiences learned that the grandeur of ancient civilizations like Egypt and Persia represented an accumulation of wealth that doomed them to fall under the weight of their own luxury. Unlike the cautionary example of Rome’s demise , these Asiatic empires formed part of an “Oriental” lineage that continued into the eighteenth-century present and was imagined to stretch from Egypt to China, linking along a moral axis “all the peoples of Asia, all the way to China— Mahometans, pagans or idolaters.”1 The cultural work of imagining China’s place within this heathen geography was one key feature of early modern orientalism; another was making a virtue of consuming Eastern spectacle through turning its idolatrous excesses into lessons of moral self-improvement. If we recall the fictional dialogue between Socrates and Confucius that opened this book, China’s marvelous feats of technology were deemed a dubious “spectacle”; they appear to be original inventions but are revealed to be mere imitations of Egyptian civilization . While China’s economic strength could not be denied, the legitimacy of its antiquity, and hence its moral character, could be undermined as fake. Ironically, the comparison calls into question the cultural authority of both Egypt and China, one for being an original but defunct civilization, the other for being derivative, thus registering the Western ambivalence toward Eastern models of empire, old and new. Eighteenth-century meanings of China circulated in relae p i l o g u e Orientalism, Globalization, and the New Business of Spectacle Orientalism, Globalization, and Spectacle 185 tion to other sites of the Orient and to the routes of East-West trade. As we have seen, they also foregrounded a logic of temporal dislocation: the more modern the British Empire, the greater the fascination with ancient China, and with the conquest of China in particular. The ideological utility of Eastern antiquity for Western empire-building has long persisted, and present-day reiterations of early modern orientalism— specifically, two from the closing decades of the twentieth century—illustrate the ongoing commercialization of Eastern antiquity in the context of neoliberal economic projects. By way of conclusion, I turn now to the revivification of the Egypt-to-China trajectory in recent performances of Asia. The profits made from promoting the cultural authenticity of the East in these cases rearticulate the relationship of virtue and commerce as one of the ideological and material effects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization. We can see the relevance of oriental exemplarity today, by looking at an eighteenth-century paradigm of cultural tourism that provides a framework for understanding the moral significance of spectacle: the treatment of the East in Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) offers valuable insight into the workings both of early modern orientalism and two contemporary performances of opera—Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, the former being staged in China, the latter in Egypt. In that these multinational productions involve state-sponsored tourism, they are also selforientalizing fictions. Moreover, they draw upon the acts of spectatorship and contemplation of ancient monuments theorized in eighteenth-century literature to make consuming Eastern antiquity once again a virtue of modern life. As in the earlier historical context of chinoiserie, China’s current strength in the world economy makes it a particularly powerful screen onto which to enact fantasies of cultural authenticity that are not only virtuous, but hugely profitable. The eighteenth -century framework reminds us of the exigencies of deriving moral as well as aesthetic value from the consumption of foreign luxury. Before moving to the contemporary context, I begin with one of the foremost Oriental tales of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, in which cultural tourism becomes an exercise in training English audiences to be critical spectators and, in effect, ethical consumers. The comparison of Egyptian and Chinese monuments is particularly instructive to the main characters of the novel, an Abyssinian prince and his royal entourage, who journey through...

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