Professor Ada Ferrer’s talk at the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History has unfortunately been cancelled.

Over the course of the Enlightenment, Europe claimed a monopoly on progress for itself alone. In the eighteenth century, other places had appeared as familiar and comparable. By the early nineteenth century, they were cast as inscrutable and incommensurable. What caused this fundamental transformation in Europe’s understanding of itself? In this talk, I aim to explain the transition from early-modern cosmopolitanism to late-modern orientalism by revealing the hitherto unknown deployment of Chinese science in Enlightenment debates. To do so, I…