This panel aims to consider the contributions of Asian traditions of scholarship to the formation of modern disciplines commonly seen as Western in origin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, academic disciplines now grouped as the humanities and social sciences took shape in new university departments, academic journals, and other institutions that continue to structure scholarship today. It has often seemed that these epistemic formations spread through European imperialism to be adapted and transformed in Asia, displacing existing knowledge traditions. Yet as new histories have begun to suggest, our modern disciplines were not the singular invention of Europe, but co-produced globally.
How, then, were Asian knowledge traditions deployed in the global construction of fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and comparative law? In the eighteenth century, Jesuit engagement with Indian pandits created foundational axioms of anthropology. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Qing linguistic scholarship was deployed in phonetic descriptions of Chinese for Western students, as disagreements over Daoism cemented the separation of philosophy from orientalism. By the era of high imperialism, Japanese legal experts mobilized their traditional philology to contribute to the idea of diffusionism itself. Through the circulation of books, artefacts, and practices as well as encounters and exchanges with Asian scholars, new modes of knowledge production emerged in the West from diverse beginnings. Modern disciplines in the humanities and social sciences should be seen as truly global, not just in their geographical reach, but also in their intellectual origins.
