in the late fifteenth century, "European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the 'Enlightenment'" (29)
contestable, though note that "Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft")