While the study of contacts and exchanges between China and non-Asian societies over the past several hundred years is still dominated by variations on the (Western) impact/(Chinese) response model, the recent reemergence of China as a major player on the world stage has led cultural historians increasingly to turn their attention to earlier moments in which China's presence was powerfully felt well beyond its borders. Their studies have foregrounded the significance of the roles played by Chinese objects and ideas in Enlightenment thought, early modern consumer society, and literary and artistic developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The colonial American engagement with China has, until now, largely been regarded as merely imitative of British trends.
Caroline Frank, in her eminently engaging and often provocative new book, sets out to redress the consequent neglect of this topic and to challenge a number of misconceptions that have arisen from this oversimplified view....
