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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China, Japan and the Spice Islands dazzled the English imagination as insatiable markets for European goods, and as vast, inexhaustible storehouses of spices and luxury wares. Robert Markley explores the significance of attitudes to the wealth and power of East Asia in rethinking conceptions of national and personal identity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literature. Alongside works by canonical English authors, this study examines the writings of Jesuit missionaries, Dutch merchants, and English and continental geographers, who directly contended with the challenges that China and Japan posed to visions of western cultural and technological superiority. Questioning conventional Eurocentric histories, in this 2006 book Markley examines the ways in which the writings of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift deal with the complexities of a world in which England was marginalised and which, until 1800, was dominated - economically at least - by the empires of the Far East.

A 2006 investigation of the idea of the powerful Asian empires in the works of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift.

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Introduction: British literature of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties; 1. The Far East, the East India Company, and the English imagination; 2. China and the limits of Eurocentric history: Milton, the Jesuits, and the Jews of Kaifeng; 3. 'Prudently present your regular tribute': civility, ceremony, and European rivalry in Qing China; 4. Heroic merchants: trade, nationalism, and abjection in Dryden's Amboyna; 5. 'I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it': Crusoe's Farther Adventures in the far east; 6. 'So inexhaustible a treasure of gold': Defoe, credit, and the romance of the South Seas; 7. Gulliver, the Japanese, and the fantasy of European abjection; Epilogue; Bibliography.

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