A Global Enlightenment is the latest in a series of publications that considers the Enlightenment in a global perspective. In a departure from approaches that locate and redefine Enlightenments in other world regions, Statman argues that "at the very root of its European origins, the Enlightenment as traditionally understood was global already" (3). He proposes that Chinese thought was a central part of the Enlightenment and explores a well-known historical episode of the scientific encounter between the Jesuits and Chinese knowledge. Statman contributes towards this body of scholarship by focusing on the period immediately after the Rites controversy. The book reconstructs episodes of cross-cultural scientific exchange through a nuanced reading of the letters between the French Jesuits in Beijing and their correspondents in France. Due to their marginalized status, Statman calls these actors 'orphans of the Enlightenment'. The correspondence is extensive, much of which remains unpublished in Parisian archives. Yin-yang and qi are singled out as fundamental Chinese concepts that made their way into early modern European scientific accounts of gravity, electricity, chemistry, and animal magnetism.

The first two chapters introduce several historical figures from Jean Baptiste du Halde to Henri Bertin and show how the French Jesuits seized victory from the jaws of defeat. Even as the Rites controversy stymied the expansion of the Catholic mission in China, the Jesuits continued to research Chinese texts and knowledge, most notably contributing to the voluminous and authoritative publication Mémoires concernant les Chinois. When the Church announced the global suppression of the Society of Jesus in the 1770s, several ex-Jesuits, amongst them Joseph-Marie Amiot, remained in Beijing, serving as go-betweens in the Sino-European intellectual exchange.

Chapter 3 presents the eighteenth-century search for ancient wisdom in China, which stemmed from the European belief that a body of perfect knowledge existed, communicated by God to antediluvian people and preserved by Noah and his descendants. European historians of antiquity and Amiot studied Chinese texts and artefacts to advance their understanding about the ancient origins of arts and sciences. The parallel development of the evidential studies movement in late imperial China saw Chinese intellectuals advocating an empirical approach towards history and broadly concurring that the origins of natural science was in ancient China. Amiot attempted to streamline European and Chinese scholarship to create an account of ancient wisdom which leaned heavily on Chinese evidence. Chapter 4 shows how this search for ancient wisdom overlapped with the early beginnings of modern European science. Amiot and the comte de Mellet connected over parallels between the new European theory of animal magnetism and the Chinese theory of kung-fu. Both theories claimed the discovery of ancient esoteric medicine and supported the idea of a "universal agent", a subtle fluid flowing through nature, or through the human body according to mechanistic laws, which needed to be in equilibrium to cure ailments. The connection was fruitful, with Amiot researching Chinese sources and Mellet conceptualizing a Chinese theory of animal magnetism. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century, an agreement about what science was emerged. Occult science and non-Western science became excluded by authorities at the Académie des sciences.

The final chapter discusses the birth of modern Sinology. A departure from early modern Chinese studies, this new positivist branch of study isolated China as a subject of inquiry rather than as an intellectual equal through which knowledge could be shared. From this stage onwards, China could not provide progressive knowledge, and instead offered "ancient Eastern wisdom". Statman argues that although early Orientalists intended to valorize Asia through ascribing ancient knowledge to them, the realities of the nineteenth-century European colonial enterprise meant that China was perceived to be backwards and in need of Western science for social and political reform.

I would like to point out two issues. Firstly, the concept of the "global Enlightenment" could have been further addressed. In the introduction, Statman briefly outlines broad paradigms towards a global history of ideas - that of comparison and diffusion. He critiques these paradigms as presuming a normative "western" Enlightenment and adopts instead the approach of "connection" or "entanglement". However, there is no sustained analysis of what exactly is "global" about the specific exchange narrated in the book beyond the European engagement with Chinese science, which largely took place in Paris and Beijing. It seems then that "Sino-European" would have been a more useful and precise term.

This history would also have benefitted from more attention towards Chinese voices, either by fleshing out further historical Chinese figures involved in this exchange, or by referring to more Chinese-language archival documents. One of the most fascinating figures in the book is Prince Hongwu, a grandson of the Kangxi Emperor and a local contact of the French missionaries. His story is briefly reconstructed based on archival documents in chapter 2, and more biographies of Chinese figures would have made the case for cross-cultural exchange stronger. Another challenge of this episode of intellectual exchange is that the sources skew European. To what extent can China be considered an actor in this exchange, if the texts upon which this exchange is based passed through the hands of the Jesuit mission, translators, editors, and publishers? The question of textual authority is briefly mentioned in chapter 3, but not discussed at length. A comparative reading between the original Chinese texts and the translations of the ex-Jesuits could offer a productive interrogation into the workings of early modern cross-cultural scientific exchange and the role of text and translation.

The book closes on a strong note, linking the historical Enlightenment with present-day attitudes towards progress. Statman draws from his experience as a university educator to highlight how ideas of "progress" - one of the cornerstones of Enlightenment thought - have been met with skepticism in Western universities and civil society, against a backdrop of social inequality, environmental crises and political polarization. He juxtaposes this with the buoyant sentiment in the People's Republic of China. Spurred by decades of economic advancement, a growing sense of self-possession on the world stage, and a newly found confidence in traditional Chinese science and philosophy, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has firmly embraced the "Enlightenment values" of science, progress, and development, which it no longer perceives to be Western.

Emily Teo