The Seventeenth-Century European Advance into Asia—A Review Article

Extract

In his perceptive essays entitledOn History, Fernand Braudel declared that “there is no problem which does not become increasingly complex when actively investigated, growing in scope and depth, endlessly opening up new vistas of work to be done” (University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 15). These observations are reflected in this masterful study of Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley as they depict the intricacies of Asian civilization from India to Japan during the seventeenth century. This is a significant contribution to the overall multivolume project that seeks to delineate Europe's formation of the images of Asia from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries by examining the literature published at that time. That the more than two thousand pages under review are not the completion, but the next to last step of a work still in progress and so “growing in scope and depth,” assuredly increases the reader's appreciation for this vast enterprise.