An investigation of the idea of the powerful Asian empires in the works of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift.

Introduction: British literature of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties; 1. The Far East, the East India Company, and the English imagination; 2. China and the limits of Eurocentric history: Milton, the Jesuits, and the Jews of Kaifeng; 3. 'Prudently present your regular tribute': civility, ceremony, and European rivalry in Qing China; 4. Heroic merchants: trade, nationalism, and abjection in Dryden's Amboyna; 5. 'I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it': Crusoe's Farther Adventures in the far east; 6. 'So inexhaustible a treasure of gold': Defoe, credit, and the romance of the South Seas; 7. Gulliver, the Japanese, and the fantasy of European abjection; Epilogue; Bibliography.