SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis provides the first full-length academic study of Thomas Manning (1772-1840), one of Britain’s first scholars of Chinese, using recently rediscovered archival materials to shed new light on his career and underlying motives and objectives. The reasons Manning gave for studying Chinese were comparatively disinterested – not concerned with trade, Empire, or spreading Christianity – and he resists easy categorization. His approach betokens Romantic sensibility and Enlightenment rationalism. He was a patriot and a pluralist; a sceptic with mystical inclinations. Now, the interactions between Manning’s scholarly enterprise, personal beliefs, and the literary, political, and religious culture of late-Georgian England, can be much better understood. This project builds upon recent work addressing Manning’s friendship with the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834) and his place within Anglo-Chinese relations and Regency Sinology during the important interlude between the Macartney Embassy (1792-3) and the First Opium War (1839-42). Manning’s connections to prominent literary and political figures mean the new findings should hold much of interest for scholars working on Romantic sociability and Sino-British history. But they also pertain to late-Georgian English intellectual culture more broadly. New evidence regarding Manning’s aims and ideas affords an original perspective on British engagement with China in the early nineteenth century. This speaks to the history of “Oriental studies”, and to theories promising to explain the nineteenth-century encounter between Britain and China or, indeed, between “West” and “East” in general. But it also has implications for the wider public understanding of how and why British people have studied other cultures. This case study is primarily a work of history, but it takes as much interest in the history of ideas as in historical events. Insofar as the approach draws on history, literary studies, religious studies, and philosophy, it is broadly interdisciplinary; but this is a response to the problem being investigated, not an end-in-itself.