Serge Gruzinski. The Eagle and the Dragon

Serge Gruzinski’s The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century is the closing volume for a trilogy that includes What Time Is It There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times (2010) and Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (2004). Throughout his work, the author argues for a rethinking of the Renaissance, which he seeks to investigate in a wider global context. His thus emerging “Global History of the Renaissance” (240) transcends narrow national and imperial histories in favor of broader comparative issues “to mitigate our ineradicable Eurocentrism and make new questions emerge” (59). On a broader level, the present book can be reviewed in a factual and a methodological way. The factual level engages two seemingly unrelated events. The first occurrence is Hernán Cortés’s well-publicized encounter and ultimate conquest of the Aztec Empire. The second, lesser-known incident is Tomé Pires’s mission to China and his ultimate failure to take over this vast empire. By juxtaposing the successful and failed Iberian missions, Gruzinski illustrates how each episode was informed by different cultural dynamics and was spearheaded by the two Iberian nations that were frequently at loggerheads with each other.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · China · CONQUEST · Context (archaeology) · Early Modern Europe · Empire · Eurocentrism · Globalization · Political science · Sociology · Trilogy · World history · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies