The Tartar Moment: Martino Martini and the Globalization of Chinese Cosmopolitics

SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF DISCOVERIES

VIRTUAL LECTURE SERIES

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh,

Cambridge University, Magdalene College

Our latest Virtual Lecture reveals how the Manchu conquest of China transformed the sciences, politics, and their relationship to each other, in the early modern period. The “Tartar war” between the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), peasant rebels, and the Manchus—a Tungusic population from northeast Asia—was experienced by several Jesuit missionaries in China. During the unstable interregnum, Jesuits sought patronage from disparate factions, offering their astronomical expertise to help various contenders secure the “Mandate of Heaven” to rule legitimately over China.

Based on their experiences in China, Jesuits came to view Chinese “cosmopolitics”—that is, the entanglement of humanity and the cosmos—as a resource to solve urgent problems of social order in a crisis-stricken Europe. Between 1653 and 1658, the missionary Martino Martini (1614-1661) was tasked with promoting the China mission in Europe, where he represented the new, Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644-1912).

In Europe, Martini published accounts of the Ming-Qing War                           

(1654),China’s geography (1655), and its history(1658) with commercial printers, reaching a wide, interconfessional readership. He courted patronage from powerful Habsburg rulers and defended the Jesuits’ involvement in Chinese sciences and politics before the papacy.  Martini’s successful manipulation of different political, religious, commercial, and scholarly networks across a turbulent Eurasia enabled his accounts of Chinese sciences to reach an extraordinarily wide audience. In turn, during the long eighteenth century, many prominent European writers drew on Martini’s accounts of Chinese “cosmopolitics” to propose solutions to contemporary natural, social, and political crises.

Our Speaker

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is the Lumley Research Fellow in History at Magdalene College and a Leverhulme Trust Fellow in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.  His PhD, “Globalising China,” completed in 2023 in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, examined how the Manchu conquest of China transformed politics and the sciences across early modern Eurasia. Gianamar’s work has been published and is forthcoming in journals including Isis, History Workshop Journal, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Journal for the History of Knowledge.  His current project explores how disparate peoples drew on intellectual resources from China and the East Indies to make sense of unfamiliar nature and cultures at the Dutch Cape Colony. Gianamar has been a Freer Prize Fellow of the Royal Institution and a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Descartes Centre in Utrecht.  Gianamar was shortlisted in both 2023 and 2024 as a BBC New Generation Thinker.