Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces.

In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu‘s life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu‘s multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

"Sachsenmaier’s pioneering study of one Chinese Christian’s impact upon the global religious tableau of intercultural misunderstanding, conversation, and amalgamation is especially welcome because he has brought a largely forgotten and overlooked voice into the larger dialogue of scholarly interest in Sino-Christian exchange. . . . This is a valuable book for better understanding the value of ‘marginal’ voices during a time in global history when the world’s margins were being slowly erased." - Journal of Chinese Religions

"The Columbia Series in International and Global History, to this reviewer’s mind at least, is one of the most original history publishing series going and Sachsenmaier’s short yet ambitious volume is a worthy addition. . . . Global Entanglements is an interesting and pleasurable read, dealing with highly complicated historical themes and doing so admirably." - The Seventeenth Century

"Besides offering a timely and rich re-contextualization of the scholarship on the intersection of late Ming China and the Jesuit missions to the Far East, Sachsenmaier’s book is, quite simply, a joy to read." - Ming Studies

"The Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled is an exquisite and erudite work, all while being accessible and skillfully written and narrated: a must-have on syllabi of courses of Sino-Western relations, Chinese history, and history of global Christianity." - Journal of Jesuit Studies

"Global Entanglements is a thoughtful book based on twenty years of meditation. It is a distinguished contribution to scholarship that leads us to think in new ways about an isolated Christian literatus in seventeenth century China who although he never traveled, was transformed by his relationship with the rest of the world." - Monumenta Serica

"Sachsenmaier’s historiography is outstanding and will be meaningful to scholars and students in many academic fields, such as world Christianity, relations between China and the West, and religious studies." - Reading Religion

"An innovative book . . . Sachsenmaier achieves his goal of writing a book that weaves together ‘microscopic and macroscopic’ perspectives on this important encounter in early modern world history." - East Asian Journal of Popular Culture