Book Review: Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century

Book Review: Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century

Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century contains eight essays that bear witness to the interconnectedness between the West and the East—be it tactile or intangible—during the long eighteenth century, a historical span that well precedes our digital era. Although we are enjoying ubiquitous convenience and effortless immediacy facilitated by virtual digitality, borderless hyperconnectivity at once silhouettes us as it induces trepidations toward a variety of inimical otherness—ranging from viruses of the nanoscale to nations of geographical adjacency. Now as then, Bärbel Czennia reminds us in“Introduction,”that the long eighteenth century prefigures both benign visions and sullen undertones at the dawn of an interlaced world (3): on the one hand, merchants, diplomats, and adventurers advocated an ever-growing global reach that aspired to accelerate the circulation of objects and ideas under the economic ideal of mutual dependence. On the other hand, nonetheless, voices from the domestic domain remained skeptical to the beneficial call for unanimous connectivity, promulgating, for instance, the abolitionist movement that aimed at policing the enlightened mind from moral degradation.