Looking Outward: China, Tahiti and the Enlightenment Imagination

Enlightenment thinkers often used distant societies to reflect on their own. Jesuit missionaries' reports from China portrayed a vast empire governed by scholar-officials chosen through examinations and guided by Confucian ethics. Leibniz admired Chinese philosophy, Voltaire praised China as a state without religious persecution, and François Quesnay, called the 'Confucius of Europe' by his followers, admired its emphasis on agriculture. Montesquieu, by contrast, saw China as a despotism ruled by fear.

In the Pacific, the voyages of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1766 to 1769) and James Cook (1768 to 1779) brought back accounts of Tahiti that inspired images of a natural, happy society. Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage imagined a Tahitian elder condemning European greed and moral hypocrisy.

These portraits often revealed more about European debates than about the societies described, and the idealized 'noble savage' image could be as distorting as hostile stereotypes, yet they encouraged Europeans to see their own customs as one option among many.