The Far East in Early Modern Globalization: China and the Mongols in Donne and Milton

Using both modern and early modern globalization theory, I explore an increasingly troubled awareness of Far Eastern culture as it is revealed in English Renaissance literature. The “China” of each generation tended to serve for western Europe a distinct set of discursive functions and rhetorical purposes. I study how China served as a cultural stimulus that compelled early modern Europeans to rethink their economic, theological, and political assumptions. I argue that in representing the images of China and the Far East transmitted by travelers and Jesuit missionaries in their works, images that caused considerable controversies in the early modern intellectual sphere, both Donne and Milton demonstrate an increasingly global consciousness, or what I call “global cosmopolitanism,” that responds with unexpected generosity to cultural and religious differences. Donne and Milton’s global cosmopolitanism is chiefly manifested in their attempts to grapple with the implications —economic, political, and theological—of China’s reemergence in the world stage. Specifically, I study how Donne’s image of the “Anyan” strait in his “Hymne to God, my God” captures his awareness of the geographical discovery and cartographical mapping of the Pacific region and how he responds theologically to this global consciousness. I also explore how Donne’s depiction of Spanish “pistolets” in his elegy “The Bracelet” signals a perception of the early modern global commerce of gold and silver dominated by Ming China. Donne and Milton’s cosmopolitan reaction to Chinese culture registers in their willingness to engage the challenge posed by eastern antiquity to the authority of biblical chronology. Far Eastern imperialism as is represented by the Mongol Empire, I claim, constitutes a major inspiration behind Milton’s representation of empire in Paradise Lost. Unpacking richly layered allusions in Donne and Milton’s works at once reveals the commercial, cultural, and political messages they encode and illustrates the interpretive strategies used by Renaissance imaginative writers to decipher the Far East. Donne and Milton’s responses are exemplary because the issues their works raised reflect the larger concern in the early modern encounter with a highly civilized “other” that boasted an antique history, an advanced ethical system, and a powerful monarchial empire.

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