Prof. Menegon Co-edits Journal Issue on Maritime China and Publishes Article on Sino-Western Relations

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Professor Eugenio Menegon, Associate Professor of History

The Journal Cross Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (online and print journal based at UC Berkeley) published an open access issue in December 2017, co-edited by Professor Eugenio Menegon with Professors Philip Thai (Northeastern University) and Xing Hang (Brandeis University), entitled “Binding Maritime China: Control, Evasion, and Interloping.”  Based on a conference with the same title organized at Boston University in May 2015, with support from the BU Center for the Study of Asia, the Dean’s Office at BU’s College of Arts and Sciences, Northeastern University Humanities Center, Brandeis East Asian Program and Office of the Dean,  and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the issue features five articles on early modern and modern Maritime China.

Street scene with São Domingos (Saint Dominic), the convent of the Portuguese Dominicans in Macao, seat of the Propaganda Fide procurators between 1732 and 1776. Watercolor by George Chinnery, c. 1840– 1845. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.
Street scene with São Domingos (Saint Dominic), the convent of the Portuguese Dominicans in Macao, seat of the Propaganda Fide procurators between 1732 and 1776. Watercolor by George Chinnery, c. 1840– 1845. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.

Among them is Menegon’s “Interlopers at the Fringes of Empire: The Procurators of the Propaganda Fide Papal Congregation in Canton and Macao, 1700-1823.”The article examines the office of the procurator (financial agent) of the papal Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide), a unique case study of noncommercial interloping in the long eighteenth century in the Pearl River Delta, which reveals the complexity and fluidity of life at the intersection of Asian and European maritime environments in the special human ecosystem between Canton and Macao. Using sources preserved in Rome, the article offers new insights into the global mechanisms of trade, communication, and religious exchange embodied by the procurators-interlopers and their networks, with significant implications for the history of the Sino-Western trade system, Qing policies toward the West and Christianity, and the history of Asian Catholic missions.