Research Topic
The Reception of Chinese History in Early Modern Britain, 1600-1800: Chronology, Philosophy and the Problem of Barbarism
Supervisors: Professor Alan Strathern and Dr William Poole
My DPhil research focuses on early modern British understandings of China from the late-seventeenth to the late-eighteenth century, aiming to reassess to what extent this period saw a growing hostility towards China amongst British intellectuals (what is sometimes called a shift from 'Sinophilia' to 'Sinophobia'). By examining a wide range of areas of early modern British knowledge about China, including Chinese philosophy, ethnography and chronology, I aim to challenge the idea that the late-eighteenth century was a moment of radical discontinuity in British attitudes towards China. I am particularly interested in how a reassessment of this period's conceptions of China might change our understandings of the context for the 1793 Macartney embassy to the Qianlong emperor, as well as the importance of early British sinology for debates surrounding the Enlightenment and Orientalism in eighteenth-century Britain. More broadly, I am interested in comparative intellectual history, particularly with regards to early modern China and Europe.
I am a convener and co-founder of the Oxford Seminar in Global Intellectual History and the Oxford Seminar in the Pre-Modern History of East Asia. I also run an online network for early career scholars interested in the intellectual history of China's Qing dynasty (1636-1911). The network consists of a mailing list updating members about related events and publications, as well as hosting monthly online readings groups and seminars. You can visit our website here.
I did my BA in Ancient and Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford, followed by an MPhil in Renaissance Literature at Christ's College, Cambridge, and an EMA (English Taught Master's) in Chinese History and Culture at Fudan University, Shanghai, the latter of which was funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC).
My DPhil research is generously supported by All Souls College, where I am a Fellow by Examination. For the academic year 2025/6, I am also a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at Magdalen College.
Twitter: @RossMoncrieff
Peer-Review Publications
'Whig History and the Global Enlightenment: The Manchu Conquest of China, the "Tartar Yoke", and eighteenth-century British answers to the Needham Question', Journal of the History of Ideas [forthcoming]
'Confucian Sentimentalism in the British Enlightenment: Comparisons and Connections between Early Modern Chinese and British Moral Philosophies of Emotion', Philosophy East and West 77 (2027) [forthcoming]
'British Understandings of Manchu-Chinese Relations in Qing China and Sino-British Diplomacy, c. 1792-1842', English Historical Review (2026) https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceag110
'When Sinologists were Geologists: Chinese Chronology in Early Modern England and the Heterodox Chinese Studies of Robert Hooke and John Beaumont', Intellectual History Review 36 (2026): 239-259 https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2026.2613200 Winner of the International Society for Intellectual History's 2025 Charles Schmitt Prize
'The Enlightenment in Global History's "Connected Turn"', Global Intellectual History (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2025.2456164 [part of a special issue on Alexander Statman's A Global Enlightenment (2023)]
'"Commendably industrious" or "very good friends" of the Devil?: How attitudes towards the Jesuits shaped understandings of China in early modern England', Journal of Early Modern History 27 (2023): 397-417, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10053
'"Fair Quiet, have I found thee here"?: The relationship between garden settings and otium-negotium in sixteenth-century philosophical dialogues', Renaissance Studies 36 (2022): 395-411, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12762
'Republican Friendship and the Fall of the Roman Republic in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Drama', Cahiers Élisabéthains 106 (2021): 39-58, https://doi.org/10.1177/01847678211029306
