Dominic Sachsenmaier examines the global and local realities of Zhu Zongyuan (1616–60), a Chinese Christian who called himself Cosmas, and Zhu’s attempts to make sense of religious, intellectual, and social change during the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty in the coastal city of Ningbo. Through the lens of Zhu’s literary works, Sachsenmaier writes both a micro-history and a global history. To do this, he takes great care to write up a measured account of Zhu’s role and impact as a ‘bridge builder’ (p. 7) as Zhu struggled to find the ‘thin middle ground’ (p. 21) in his literary works, between his Chinese elite social background and his goal to accommodate Christianity within a Confucian worldview.

In an effort to avoid simplistic theoretical frameworks that blend both local and global history, Sachsenmaier carefully positions the relevance and impact of Zhu as an intermediary between different religions and systems of knowledge. Unlike earlier scholarship on Chinese Christian scholars, which tended to focus on upper elite members such as Xu Guangqi or Yang Tingyun, Sachsenmaier emphasizes that Zhu (or Cosmas) was a member of a more provincial scholarly elite. While he may not have achieved the same high-level positions in the Chinese bureaucracy as these earlier Chinese Christians, Zhu’s literary works do engage with works from the Confucian canon in a culturally sophisticated way that ‘few if any European fathers would have been intellectually’ capable of obtaining (p. 120). Sachsenmaier goes to great lengths to analyse Zhu’s written works from a Chinese or Confucian perspective; his textual analysis of how Zhu understood the concepts of ‘middle’ (as in middle kingdom), the difference between Chinese and barbarian, and the changing inclusivity of what it meant to be Chinese, and what this meant in terms of how Catholicism could add to a Confucian tradition, showcases great erudition and meticulous attention to detail (pp. 110–29).

In line with more recent scholarship on Jesuit matters in China, Sachsenmaier also aims to channel the voices of ‘average’ Chinese Christians and bring to light their roles in concretely accommodating two religions, while acknowledging contradictions and compromises in that syncretistic structure. Zhu’s connections were local, as he juggled being part of a social elite that was severely affected by the economic turbulence of the late Ming dynasty, his family home functioned as a hub for European missionaries and Chinese Christians (p. 56). Sachsenmaier hastens to add that these Christian communities, which were of such a size that European missionaries could not fully control or direct the on-the-ground interpretations of localized Christian thought and ritual, should also be studied as part of ‘a preexisting landscape of [Chinese] associations’ (p. 61).

Throughout the book, Sachsenmaier seeks to defy simplistic binary constructions; he does this as he avoids positioning Zhu between two monolithically defined entities, Europe and China. These were not clearly defined, and neither the Jesuits (as a Catholic order) nor the Portuguese state should be taken as equivalents for Christians everywhere or European overseas empires as a whole (p. 9). In early seventeenth-century Ming China, it was the Chinese state and Chinese scholars who set the boundaries and restrictions within which this intercultural encounter would take place. In chapter 4, Sachsenmaier’s analysis of how Ming subjects of the seventeenth century understood ‘the West’ is yet another opportunity to address the problem of oversimplifying a binary cultural exchange; Sachsenmaier reminds the reader that, since the Yuan dynasty, ‘Western learning’ had referred to Islamic thought (or Buddhist spiritual ideas), and that it would be easy to anachronistically misrepresent Jesuit exchanges and their ‘Western learning’ with later ‘undertone[s] of might, progress, and dynamism’ (p. 104). Similarly, he explicitly states that Zhu did not envision his own writings as ‘Christian’ (p. 44), and that representing the accommodation method as the result of encounters between Chinese and Europeans is an oversimplification that would ‘understate the rich diversity of both realms’ (p. 67). When it comes to the Jesuits, Sachsenmaier’s analysis contributes to that subfield in the sense that he does not restrict himself to examining Zhu’s contacts with Jesuits alone, but also considers Zhu’s awareness of strife within this order. His approach thus contrasts with most scholarship on Jesuits across the globe, as he emphasizes Zhu’s possible contacts with both Jesuits and Dominicans (pp. 42–3).

Another example of how Sachsenmaier seeks to unlock Zhu’s ability to find ‘middle ground’ is his discussion of how Zhu analysed religion and morality as both a Confucian scholar and a global Catholic. Sachsenmaier argues that Zhu’s books should be understood from both the context of the Chinese book market during the late Ming dynasty and the global spread of Catholic books. He unfolds multiple layers of Confucian and Catholic meaning of particular quotes from Zhu’s Da kewen (Responses to the quest of a guest) and his Zhengshi lüeshuo (A summary of world salvation), in an effort to illustrate how Zhu himself was one of many post-Song dynasty scholars who, in his works, pushed against a Chinese ‘cultural supremacism and in favor of … ethical universalism’ (p. 118). To do this, Sachsenmaier takes the reader from Zhu’s publications on Chinese Catholicism through works from the Confucian canon as he untangles Zhu’s argument in favour of accepting the notion that Chinese Catholicism could contribute to Confucianism regardless of Catholicism’s geographical, ethnic, and cultural place of origin. Sachsenmaier emphasizes that Zhu’s justification ‘was rooted in Confucian exegesis’ (p. 119), as he connects Han, Tang, and Song commentaries, Confucian classics from the Spring and Autumn Period (722–481 BCE), and Zhu’s Zhengshi lüeshuo. In these sections, his work carefully and expertly examines how Zhu intellectually defended the cultural opening between his Catholic faith and his Confucian worldview, using both a local and a global lens. Zhu may not have travelled globally, but his intellectual ‘conflicted worlds’ illustrate how Chinese Christians contributed to a religious accommodation that is all too often portrayed from a Eurocentric side. This is precisely what makes Global entanglements a fine contribution to the field of intellectual and global history.