In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China, Japan and the Spice Islands dazzled the English imagination. Robert Markley explores the significance of attitudes to the wealth and power of East Asia in rethinking conceptions of national and personal identity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literature. Questioning conventional Eurocentric histories, Markley examines the ways in which Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift deal with the complexities of a world in which England was marginalized and which, until 1800, was dominated - economically at least - by the empires of the Far East.

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.