At the roots of the "great divergence": Europe and China in an 18th century debate

China and Chinese civilization represented a hotly-debated topic in eighteenth-century European culture, as they summarized one of the most obvious forms of cultural diversity with which the West had ever come into contact. Chinese institutions, society and cultural tradition at the end of the 17th and at during the 18th century became either the objects of a strong, even mythicizing attitude of admiration and eulogy, mostly inspired by the will to use it as a mirror for criticizing several aspects of European societies, established religions and cultural traditions; or the target of severe, sometimes violent criticism, aversion and even loathing. The latter attitude became dominant in the last quarter of the 18th century and at the beginning of ther 19th century. This essay explores how the first, positive and 'sinophilic' attitude was gradually substituted by the second, or 'sinophobic' attitude, tries to contextualize his phenomenon by referring it to the changing pattern of Sino-European relations and, most of all, by showing the Eurocentric turn of the late-eighteenth-century thought on non-European civilizations. More specifically, the essay shows how in the final decades of the 18th century it emerged a strong awareness of basic differences or 'divergence' between China society and economy and the European ones, conducive to new appraisal of China as an immobile, or 'stationary', not just stable, nation. The conclusion of the essay is that the idea of the 'great divergence', coined by Samuel Huntington and Eric Jones and influentially articulated with reference to China and Europe by the economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz in his seminal 2000 book, was in fact a guiding concept, with not only an economic, but a more general significance, shaping European's perceptions and representation of China at the end of the Enlightenment era, thus preparing the ground for the age of free trade imperialism and the Opium Wars.