A discussion of ideas presupposes a clear periodization, for when political thought is narrated in isolation from the history of its age, it inevitably gives rise to numerous misunderstandings and misconceptions. For this reason, the present discussion of modern English thought will likewise begin only after first establishing a clear periodization.
In the history of European political thought, the "Age of Enlightenment" ordinarily refers to the hundred years from the Glorious Revolution in England in 1689 to the French Revolution in 1789. This Age of Enlightenment, however, in which an unprecedented and unrepeated upheaval in political thought, letters, and worldview cast off the "religious frame" of European history, was preceded by roughly a hundred years during which a blood-soaked "prehistory" unfolded, preparing the way for the age of Enlightenment. Even in this blood-drenched "hundred-year prehistory" of the seventeenth century, unprecedented political upheavals and intellectual and literary convulsions occurred, in sharp contrast to the preceding Renaissance. The tenth through fourteenth centuries constitute the proper medieval period, and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the late medieval period, constitute the age of the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, a human-centered literature and art was reborn. Yet this flowering of letters remained confined within a "Christian religious frame" that still adhered to the concept of God and the Christian faith. The seventeenth century of this "hundred-year prehistory," however, was an age in which -- although the idea of God and the Christian faith were not abandoned -- the concept of God was already being transformed along deistic lines, the existing Catholic scriptural interpretation was being militantly overturned through fierce doctrinal controversy, and Lutheran and Calvinist Protestant doctrine was being endlessly subdivided, so that serious conflict and friction with the existing ecclesiastical order, on the level of ideas, had become general.
This age used to be called simply the "Renaissance," and some still call it so today. Recently, however, certain historians specializing in cultural and intellectual history have begun to call this "hundred-year prehistory" of the seventeenth century the "Baroque Age." This is a period name. Baroque architecture is characterized by grotesqueness, imbalance, extravagance, illogicality, sophistry, and contingency, in contrast to the balance, harmony, symmetry, logic, and necessity of the Renaissance. "Baroque" originally means a "misshapen pearl," a term that is not without a certain figurative aptness to the character of the Baroque Age. For this reason, the present author likewise adopts this new periodizing concept from these cultural and intellectual historians and refers to the aforementioned "hundred-year prehistory" as the "Baroque Age."
There is room for disagreement, however, as to precisely when the Baroque Age begins. Historians who periodize European history solely by political epoch would likely wish to take 1517, the year Luther's Reformation began, as the starting point of the Baroque Age, and 1648, the year of the Peace of Westphalia -- which ended the Thirty Years' War and achieved the great compromise between Catholics and Protestants -- as its terminus. Yet the religious and political thought of the Reformation and of Protestantism itself never departed in the least from the "Christian religious frame" of the medieval and Renaissance periods; and although the wars of religion came to an end internationally in 1648, domestically they continued -- for instance in England, down to the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1689, when Protestant nobles drove out a Catholic monarch. Nor can the English Puritan Revolution of 1640-1660 be regarded as a purely political and social revolution: it strongly retained the character of a war of religion, in which the Puritan sects that professed Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine -- that is, Calvinist Protestants -- overthrew Charles I, head of the Church of England (the Anglican establishment) that had persecuted the Puritans, in effect excommunicating a "heretical monarch." Likewise the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 was itself a kind of international religious civil war, in which the Anglican Tories and the Protestant Whigs joined forces, summoned a Dutch foreign army, and drove out the Catholic monarch James II by branding him a heretical monarch. Around the same time in France, the Edict of Nantes (1598), by which Henry IV had ended the thirty years of religious civil war known as the Wars of Religion and granted the Huguenots (French Protestants) a limited freedom of worship, was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, and religious persecution of the Huguenots resumed.
Thus, if the late Renaissance was a period of pure religious war, the Baroque Age was one in which, even as a dimension of political and social revolution was added, religious war persisted, intermixed with the rest. In short, the "Baroque Age" can be said neither to have begun with Luther's Reformation (1517) nor to have ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648).
What can be said with certainty at this point, however, is that in England the wars of religion were finally brought to an end by the Glorious Revolution of 1689, after which, conversely, the persecution of Catholics and Puritans began. In France too, although the persecution of the Huguenots persisted, it began to ease with the accession of Louis XV (1710-1774). Witch trials likewise continued across Europe and New England, though they too began to grow less frequent. Voltaire, moreover, dealt a final blow to the remnants of religious persecution, religious conflict, and witch-hunting with his 1763 *Treatise on Tolerance*, which called for "universal tolerance." It is therefore reasonable, as a technical matter, to fix the year in which the end of the wars of religion began at 1688. As for the "starting point" of the Baroque Age, I consider it more appropriate to reject the view that takes Luther's Reformation (1517) as its beginning, and instead to take 1579, the year George Buchanan's *De Jure Regni apud Scotos* was published, as that starting point. For in this work Buchanan demolished the theory of the divine right of kings, common to both Catholics and Protestants, newly propounded the theory of the popular grant of royal authority, and established a theory of the right to depose tyrants all but purified of Christian doctrine, thereby finally superseding the doctrine, shared by both confessions, of excommunicating heretical monarchs; and the theories of popular sovereignty and the right to depose tyrants subsequently advanced by Suarez, Milton, Grotius, and Locke all covertly inherited Buchanan's ideas, "plagiarizing" and variously transforming them. Was not Suarez the foremost advocate of the doctrine that a Catholic people might depose a heretical (Protestant) monarch, and that a Catholic state might wage religious war to overthrow such a monarch -- while Milton, Grotius, and Locke were the foremost advocates, respectively, of the Puritan Revolution, which executed the head of the Church of England for persecuting the Puritans, and of the Glorious Revolution, which expelled a Catholic monarch even as he extended religious toleration?
On this reckoning, the "Baroque Age," measured by the standard of English intellectual history, spans roughly a hundred years from 1579 to 1688, while the "Age of Enlightenment" spans exactly a hundred years from 1689 to 1789. The Baroque Age and the Age of Enlightenment thus together encompass a long span of some two hundred years, and the cultural and intellectual upheavals and political collisions that recurred and intensified in England and Europe over these two hundred years all arose because the existing "Christian religious frame" was distorted or shattered under the impact of Confucian philosophy and Chinese culture, giving rise to new political philosophies and literary trends. Over these two hundred-odd years, cultural and artistic currents in Europe and England underwent great change, and Enlightenment philosophy arose as modern philosophy and rapidly expanded its influence. This book, accordingly, analyzes the cultural figures, artists, and Enlightenment philosophers of Baroque- and Enlightenment-era England -- from Buchanan through Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Webb, Richard Cumberland, William Temple, Isaac Vossius, Nathanael Vincent, John Locke, Shaftesbury, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Matthew Tindal, David Hume, and Adam Smith, fifteen English thinkers in all -- from the standpoint of the impact and influence of Confucian philosophy upon them. These fifteen thinkers not only led seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought but were, whether Whig or Tory, "venerators of Confucius," "admirers of Confucius," or "plagiarists of Confucius" who directly or indirectly shaped the real politics of Baroque- and Enlightenment-era England.
Even in the Baroque Age, hundreds of reports on China and collections of letters, written by missionaries, merchants, sea captains, physicians, navigators, soldiers, travelers, and adventurers, were published in Europe, and hundreds of books on Asia likewise appeared. Of these books, about twenty-five dealt with South Asia, about fifteen with mainland Southeast Asia, and about twenty with the islands of Southeast Asia. The remaining sixty or so were devoted intensively to East Asia and the Far Eastern empires alone. Hence, in the Baroque Age, "there could hardly have been any European intellectuals wholly untouched by these books, and it would indeed be truly remarkable if their influence were not visible in the material culture, arts, philosophy, and science of contemporary Europe."¹ In seventeenth-century England too, the influence of Chinese culture had become pervasive, and Confucian philosophy was steadily spreading.
England entered the Eastern trade later than Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and by the seventeenth century had published scarcely any translations of the Confucian classics or books relating to China. Yet from the mid-sixteenth century onward, the English diligently imported and read -- or translated into English and published for popular circulation -- the China reports, Far Eastern travelogues, translations of the Confucian classics, and studies of China and Confucius that had been published in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France. From the mid-sixteenth century, once the eastward sea route around the Cape of Good Hope had been opened, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian conquistadors, adventurers, plunderers, and missionaries diligently carried Far Eastern Confucian civilization and Confucian philosophy back to Europe. From that time until the end of the sixteenth century, the books and reports on China published in Iberia and Italy included the report of an anonymous Portuguese (1555), the letters of Fernao Mendes Pinto (1556) and his *Peregrinacao* (1614), Galeote Pereira's report on China (1564), Gaspar da Cruz's *Tratado das coisas da China* (1569-1570), Martin de Rada's official report on China (1575), Bernardino de Escalante's *Discurso de la navegacion* (1577), Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza's *Historia... del gran Reino de la China* (1585), and Alessandro Valignano and Duarte de Sande's *De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium ad Romanam Curiam* (1590).² Then, in the early seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas's *Purchas, His Pilgrimage* (1613) and Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault's *De Propagatione Christiana apud Sinas* (1615) were published.³ And throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, a steady stream of accounts of China (中國記) by Semedo, Martini, Kircher, Navarrete, Nieuhof, Magalhaes, and others poured forth.
The book that first introduced Confucius to Europe was Fathers Valignano and Sande's *De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium ad Romanam Curiam*. Their account of Confucius and Confucian philosophy was based on the report of Matteo Ricci, who in 1579, following Father Michele Ruggieri, became the first to gain formal entry into China through Guangzhou prefecture and succeeded in obtaining permission to reside at Zhaoqing and Shaoguan. Valignano and Sande introduced Confucian philosophy as a philosophy of "the light of nature." This "light of nature," which later became the "light" of "Enlightenment," came to displace the "light of revelation," the "light of faith," and the "light of grace" -- lights that, in claiming to illuminate the world, had in fact darkened it. The works of Purchas, Matteo Ricci, Semedo, Martini, La Mothe Le Vayer, and others reaffirmed as a "philosophy of the light of nature" the very philosophy of Confucius that Valignano and Sande had earlier introduced under that description. If one probes deeply into the "light" of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one finds that Western missionaries took the character 明 (ming, "brightness"/"illumination") -- as in 明明德 ("to illumine bright virtue"), 天之明命 ("Heaven's bright mandate"), and 皆自明也 ("all of these clarify themselves") in the *Great Learning*, or as in 自誠明 ("from sincerity comes enlightenment"), 自明誠 ("from enlightenment comes sincerity"), 誠則明矣 明則誠矣 ("sincerity brings enlightenment, and enlightenment brings sincerity"), and 著則明 明則動 ("manifestation brings clarity, and clarity brings movement") in the *Doctrine of the Mean* -- or, more simply, the 明 of the Great Ming Empire (大明帝國) -- and understood this 明 as "lumiere" or "light," importing this "light" as the "light" of Enlightenment; while in Germany, it can be seen that the 淸 of the Great Qing Empire (大淸帝國) was understood as *Klarheit* (clarity/brightness, as in *Aufklarung*), and deployed as a weapon of the Enlightenment's hygienic and racial "purity" and its religious and ideological "purification and clarification."
The Iberians and Italians, together with the Englishman Purchas, who introduced China through their various reports and treatises, and the subsequent stream of accounts of China, were the first to convey -- together with this philosophy of "the light of nature" or "the light of reason" -- the astonishing fact that the Ming empire of China was a free and equal state, a prosperous market economy and welfare state, and at the same time a state of religious freedom and tolerance, to a Europe fractured and divided by the ramifying conflicts of religion. Thus, amid this baptism of new information and knowledge about China and Confucius, the Enlightenment thought of Europe began to stir; and in England, thanks to the pioneering work of Buchanan, Bacon, Milton, Webb, and Temple, Enlightenment thought took root even earlier than on the Continent.
George Buchanan, who traveled diligently between France, Spain, and elsewhere and was the first in England to encounter Chinese political culture, expounded in his *De Jure Regni apud Scotos*, published in 1579, a populist theory of popular sovereignty that denied the divine right of kings and asserted the theory of the popular grant of royal authority and the right to depose tyrants. Buchanan's Confucian, populist theory of the popular grant of royal authority became the intellectual driving force of the Puritan Revolution. Francis Bacon followed by establishing modern empiricism and a vision of an ideal state founded on science and technology, drawing on Chinese antiquarianism (尙古主義) and empiricism (1627). And John Milton, inheriting Buchanan's theory of liberty, equality, and the right to depose tyrants, served as the official ideologue of the Puritan Revolution and as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to Cromwell's English Republic, publishing *Areopagitica* (1644), *The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates* (1649), and *Eikonoklastes* (1649), in which he expounded the freedom of the press, argued for popular sovereignty and the right to depose tyrants, and on this basis argued for the justice of the execution of Charles I.
From the mid-seventeenth century, ever more accurate and detailed reports on China poured forth, and some eighty years after Confucius was first introduced, the Confucian classics themselves were translated. Alvaro Semedo's (1585?-1658) *Imperio de la China* (Spanish ed. 1642, Italian ed. 1643, French ed. 1645, English ed. 1655), Martino Martini's (Chinese name: 衛匡國, 1614-1661) *Sinicae Historiae* (1659), Athanasius Kircher's (1602-1680) *China Illustrata* (1667), Johan Nieuhof's *An Embassy to... Peking* (1665), Domingo Fernandez Navarrete's *Tratados... de la Monarchia de China* (1676), Gabriel de Magalhaes's *Nouvelle Relation de la Chine* (1688), Louis Le Comte's *Nouveaux Memoires sur l'etat present de la Chine* (1696), and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde's *Description... de la Chine* (1735) were all published in this period.⁴ And between 1662 and 1687, Prospero Intorcetta, Inacio da Costa, Christian Herdtrich, Francois de Rougemont, and Philippe Couplet, among others, produced complete Latin translations of the *Analects*, the *Great Learning*, and the *Doctrine of the Mean* from among the Confucian classics, published in Paris. In 1711, Francois Noel published in Prague a complete Latin translation combining these three works with the *Mencius*, the *Classic of Filial Piety*, and the *Xiaoxue* -- six texts in all -- as *Sinensis Imperii Libri Classici Sex*.⁵
As countless books on China and Confucius poured forth in this way, the Chinese-admiration and Confucius-veneration of Europeans and Englishmen alike surged toward its climax. Amid this current, Chinese culture and Confucian philos- -ophy reached their height. During this period, English Enlightenment thinkers, passing through the political upheavals of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution after the Puritan Revolution, produced a vast outpouring of books. These included John Webb, Richard Cumberland, William Temple, Nathanael Vincent, Isaac Vossius, John Locke, Shaftesbury, Trenchard, Gordon, Tindal, Hume, and Adam Smith. Through these "great masters of philosophy," before and after the Glorious Revolution, English Enlightenment philosophy came to surpass the Enlightenment of the Continent.
Meanwhile, in the eighteenth century, England, having rapidly expanded its trade with the Far East, emerged as the largest importer of Chinese goods and became the country that imported the greatest quantity of Chinese and Far Eastern material culture. Along with this, the vogue for Chinese-style art and craft culture known as "chinoiserie" flourished in England to a degree that surpassed even France. English "chinoiserie" did not refer to Chinese culture, art, and craft themselves, but to a European-style, Chinese-flavored culture, art, and craft that "imitated" them. To put it simply, "English chinoiserie" was an "English-language remake" of Chinese culture, art, and craft.
England, moreover, together with the expansion of its Eastern trade, became the most advanced country in Europe in the study of Chinese culture and economy and Confucian philosophy, and in the importation of China's advanced political institutions, political thought, and ethics and morality. The creation of the theory of the "Chinese-English garden" (中英 garden) and the construction of landscape gardens, and the mass production of high-quality English imitations of Chinese lacquerware, porcelain, and wallpaper, are good examples of England's flourishing chinoiserie and its thriving import-substitution industries. And the fact that the hereditary, blood-based gentleman was transformed into a "moral" gentleman in imitation of China's 紳士 (the "gentry-scholar," or mandarin) is a good example of the advancement of English ethics and morality. As knowledge of Confucian philosophy and the Chinese gentry-scholar spread, the English gentleman was no longer "English gentry" simply by being born a "gentleman," but became an "English gentleman" precisely because he imitated the "Chinese gentleman" -- one who possessed moral virtue and learning, was certified by state examination, and demonstrated moral dignity and competence through the performance of public office. Thus the English gentleman, modeled on the "Chinese gentleman," was "reborn" now not as a gentleman in the "hereditary, blood-based" sense but as an "English gentleman" in the "moral" sense.
Under the influence of Confucianism and Confucian civilization, English thought, culture, and material life underwent a great transformation, and there emerged, in great numbers, masters of the Enlightenment -- Bacon, Milton, Vincent, Locke, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Trenchard, Gordon, Hume, Smith, and others -- who openly praised and venerated Confucius and who shook the whole of Europe. As Confucian philosophy spread and Enlightenment thought became general, Cambridge Platonism was naturally pushed to the margins of English intellectual life. Bacon, who established modern empiricism on the basis of China's empirical science and technology, and the English empiricist philosophers who continued this tradition, were able to absorb empiricist Confucian philosophy and Chinese learning into their own "free-thinking" with relative ease -- without the "rationalist distortion" so often committed by Continental philosophers -- and thereby rapidly rose to prominence as the "central nation of the Enlightenment movement" and an "advanced political nation."
Thus, in the two respects of Enlightenment philosophy and chinoiserie, eighteenth-century England came to lead the Continent. The spread of the Chinese-English garden on the Continent; Voltaire's *Lettres philosophiques*, which praised France's cultural and scholarly achievements as mere "trinkets" beside England's "masterpieces"; Voltaire's own philosophical "conversion" from rationalism to empiricism, from intellectualism to a philosophy of virtue; Quesnay's and Mirabeau's (Victor de Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau, 1715-1789) reception of Locke's empirical philosophy;⁶ and the great vogue in Paris for translations of Locke and Hume -- all of these fully attest to the cultural and philosophical hegemony of England in the Age of Enlightenment.
English culture and philosophy, undergoing great transformation from the early seventeenth century onward under the growing scale of imports from the Far East, and under the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and economic impact exerted by Confucian philosophy and Chinese political culture, began to sweep across Europe. Amid the spread of Far Eastern culture and England's own cultural transformation, English intellectual and cultural life was swept up, almost without exception, into a mood of Confucianism and pro-China sentiment. Naturally, this "sweeping tide" provoked "defense of orthodoxy" from England's clergy and Christian Eurocentrists. England's "defenders of orthodoxy" consisted of clergymen and theologians such as Baxter, Wotton, and Berkeley, along with Admiral George Anson and the novelist and essayist and former slave trader Daniel Defoe. Below, their arguments will be analyzed in detail, and their errors, ignorance, and false accusations exposed. Naturally, the venerators and admirers of Confucius and China were not themselves free of ignorance and error regarding Confucius and China, and these shortcomings, too, will be brought fully to light.
England's cultural transformation encompassed the decline of classicism; the rise and dominance of chinoiserie and rococo art; the spread of Chinese-style garden theory and "Chinese-English garden"-type landscape gardens; the fusion and popularity of chinoiserie-rococo architecture with Gothic architecture; and the emergence of Romanticism from Chinese aesthetic sensibility and its sense of the venerable and enduring. The unexpected fact that English Romanticism arose from the influence of Confucius's empiricist philosophy -- which prizes the historical experience of the venerable past -- and of Chinese culture and art, is a page of history that will lead Far Eastern Asians and people the world over to a fresh recognition, from yet another angle, of the superiority of Confucian civilization, a superiority already amply demonstrated from many directions.
English political institutions gradually modernized through the introduction of a cabinet system modeled on China, a Chinese-style bureaucracy, written examinations, and civil-service examinations for the appointment of officials; through the socioeconomic weakening and political displacement of the hereditary aristocracy; and through the establishment of the nation-state (the commoners' state). And as deism gained ascendancy and de-Christianization and secularization advanced under the influence of Confucian philosophy, English social ethics likewise became de-religionized and secularized, transformed into a natural morality grounded in human nature.
Philosophically, under the influence of Confucian philosophy, modern ideas of liberty, equality, and revolution were first created in Europe in England, by Buchanan, Milton, and Locke; and following them, in the discourse of moralists such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith, moral philosophy was reformed into a Confucian theory of natural moral sentiment, casting off the entire framework and content of "revealed morality" and becoming wholly de-Christianized, de-magicalized, and secularized. Likewise, the traditional European political schema of "small state = democracy, large state = monarchy" was demolished by Hume, who, taking as his model the vast, continental state of China -- which, by virtue of its "territorial vastness," had long enjoyed both "liberty and moderation" in its politics simultaneously -- prepared the intellectual ground for the independence of the vast North American colonies. Thus the United States, which adopted a democratic republic after independence, became a "vast" democratic nation whose territory and national power exceeded those of all Europe combined, and time and again became the "last bastion" defending modern democracy whenever democracy in Europe faced crisis. Without this "vast American democracy," the democracy we enjoy today could not have been preserved against militarism, fascism, Nazism, communism, and the many other anti-democratic ideologies and forces. Adam Smith, meanwhile, completed the modern theory of the free market on the foundation of Confucius's market philosophy and China's market economy, together with Quesnay's physiocratic free-market theory, which had itself developed under Chinese influence; and the anti-Corn Law campaigners and the British Parliament completed the system of the free market by abolishing the Corn Laws.
Under the influence of chinoiserie and of Confucian philosophy and Chinese political culture, England, by developing Enlightenment philosophy and political thought, along with new political and economic institutions, to the highest degree, was the first in Europe to inaugurate "high modernity." In what follows, these points will be demonstrated in precise detail, centered on literary critics, artists, and Enlightenment philosophers. Among the English moralists who were active under the influence of Confucian philosophy, the first to be named must be John Milton and Nathanael Vincent. Milton, as the official ideologue of Cromwell's "free commonwealth," indigenized and popularized the Confucian freedom of speech and publication and religious tolerance, Chinese-style schooling and education theory, the theory of humanity's natural liberty and equality, and the right to depose tyrants, and popularized the theory of natural moral sentiment. And Vincent, chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles II, published in 1685, by royal command, the court sermon collection *The Right Notion of Honour*, in which he produced the first English translation of part of the *Great Learning*, rendering Confucius's phrase 天下無生而貴者也 ("under Heaven, none is born noble") as "None are born great but those of Royal Family," thereby opening the "English path" that led to Locke's theory of natural, innate equality. John Locke, inheriting from Milton and Vincent, completed the theory of natural liberty and equality and the European theory of the right of revolution (the right of resistance).
English deism, together with the Baconian-Newtonian scientific revolution, gained a fresh impetus for its development, and put forward China as its model. Walter W. Davis speaks to this intellectual and historical connection as follows: "There can be no doubt that Deism, in the interrelated spheres of religion and ethics, was nurtured by the Newtonian revolution, which stimulated the search for natural laws applicable to every field of human endeavor. But recall that China provided the only living prototype of Deist ethics known to eighteenth-century thinkers -- so that utopian speculation alone would no longer suffice -- and the affinity between the Sinophiles and the leading Deists will appear too great to be easily dismissed."⁷ For nearly all Deists were themselves Sinophiles.
Shaftesbury, who was close to and learned from the Sinophile Pierre Bayle, received from Mencian philosophy the theory of the moral sense of right and wrong and the theory of moral sentiment, thereby founding a moral philosophy grounded in human nature and raising deism to a new level; Hutcheson developed this further. Hume and Adam Smith enriched the moral-sentiment theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in its essentials and elaborated it from many angles. The current of moral philosophy running from Shaftesbury through Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith -- all of them Sinophile, Confucian moralists -- constituted a great advance toward a thoroughly secular "modern ethics." Along this path, Deists such as Trenchard and Gordon venerated Confucius as a figure greater than Jesus, and radical Whigs advocated the wholesale "Sinicization and Confucianization" of England and Europe.
Hume and Adam Smith adopted China's free-market institutions and developed Quesnay's free-market physiocracy to complete the modern theory of the free market. Hume's theory of free commerce and industry is secretly connected to Confucius's thesis of 無爲而治 ("governing through non-action"), while Smith's "invisible hand" is "invisibly" yet closely linked to the concepts of 天地之道 ("the way of Heaven and Earth") and 無爲而成 ("accomplishment through non-action") of Confucius and Mencius, as conceptualized in Quesnay's "natural order" (*ordre naturel*), and to Sima Qian's concept of 自然之驗 ("the proof of the natural"). The westward transmission (西遷) [of Confucian civilization] to the West was thereby completed. In England, free trade was permitted a full seventy years after Smith's theory of the free market was completed. Nevertheless, Smith's free-market theory must be counted among the representative modern theories that led England into modernity. In what follows, this will be examined in painstaking detail and rigorously demonstrated on the basis of extensive historical sources and materials.
¹ Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. III (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 1890.
² For a detailed analysis of these reports and works on China, see Tai-Youn Hwang, The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment (Paju: Cheonggye, 2019), pp. 602-714.
³ For a detailed analysis of the China reports of Purchas and Matteo Ricci, see Tai-Youn Hwang, The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment, pp. 957-975.
⁴ For a detailed analysis of the contents of these works, see Tai-Youn Hwang, The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment, pp. 975-1041.
⁵ On the history of translation of the Confucian classics, see Tai-Youn Hwang, The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment, pp. 1041-1093.
⁶ Adolf Reichwein, China und Europa im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Oesterheld & Co. Verlag, 1922), p. 111. English translation: Reichwein, China and Europe - Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (London·New York: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., LTD and Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), p. 102; Lewis A. Maverick, China - A Model for Europe, Vol. II (San Antonio in Texas: Paul Anderson Company, 1946), p. 119.
⁷ Walter W. Davis, "China, the Confucian Ideal, and the European Age of Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1983), p. 546.