Mobilizing Chinese Information and Media in Early Modern France: How the History of Information Can Inform Global Conceptual and Intellectual Histories of Governance and Infrastructure

Title

Mobilizing Chinese Information and Media in Early Modern France: How the History of Information Can Inform Global Conceptual and Intellectual Histories of Governance and Infrastructure

Abstract

Using examples from her two latest research projects on the global history of medieval Sinitic political advice literature and the social history of Chinese material infrastructures, Professor Hilde De Weerdt discussed how key concepts of modernity such as citizenship and infrastructure have since early modern times been shaped by European encounters and engagement with Chinese and East Asian practices of information gathering and knowledge organization across different media. The talk focused on French questionnaires and reports about Chinese governance and infrastructures and proposed that these forms of investigation and reporting should be seen as products of both the French and the East Asian “commerce of information.”

This lecture was the second in a series planned for the 2024-25 academic year as part of the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities. Organized by graduate students in the UW-Madison departments of History and Asian Languages & Cultures with support from the Center for East Asian Studies, the workshop series was titled “The Lure of Information: Reexamining Information/Information Studies in the Sinographic World”. It was held in-person with the option to join on Zoom.