The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China, Japan and the Spice Islands dazzled the English imagination. Questioning conventional Eurocentric histories, in this 2006 book Markley examines how Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift deal with the complexities of a world in which England was marginalised and which was dominated economically by the Eastern empires.