The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere: The Early Modern East Asian Information Order

Abstract

This chapter traces the contours of the Sinosphere as an information order. East Asian history has recently begun to offer up examples of early modern networks which both transcended cultural spheres in their own early modern times, and laid the ground for East Asian societies’ engagement with and later reworking of the modern global order. The main model in East Asia has been the intellectual networks facilitated by the Classical Chinese language and Confucian intellectual culture referred to by Joshua Fogel as the ‘Sinosphere’. In this chapter I will argue that just as Islam provided an important scheme of scientific and ethical conceptual orthodoxy for the establishment of an early modern (and pre-Western dominance) cosmopolis in Southwest Asia, so too Confucianism played a similar role in the Far East, with Chinese acting as a transnational lingua franca much like Persian, Arabic, and other languages across the Near East and South Asia.