Connecting Eurasia: Jesuit Experimentation with Overland Mobility Between China and Europe, 1656–1664

Abstract:During the mid-seventeenth century, the Society of Jesus engaged in a thorough investigation of overland routes between China and Europe. This article addresses the Jesuit “overland project” as a case study of early-modern global communication that unravels new aspects of the entangled histories of Asia and Europe during the period. The article analyses the Jesuits’ motivations, strategies, and visions regarding their overland experiment through the prism of network construction and situates this grand undertaking in the context of the global geopolitical changes around the missionaries, as a part of the Jesuits’ efforts to emancipate their long-distance communication systems from external providers of transportation, and as the manifestation of the Society’s universal vision regarding its spiritual enterprise. Seen in this new light, this understudied episode opens a window to the making of transcontinental networks and long-distance mobility at the dawn of globalization and presents Eurasia as meaningfully connected through these processes.