Christy Wang

Appeals to God’s providence among Christians can be deeply manipulative for the sake of profit. While an acute awareness of divine involvement in everyday life may discourage unrestrained profit-seeking, the same sensitivity can also nurture patterns of exploitation of providential language for self-gain. My current project, ‘Godly Interest’, calls for proper attention to this ‘providential pragmatism’ among the seventeenth-century English diaspora, especially amongst the educated elite. By highlighting this ‘providential pragmatism’ as the intellectual context for an intensified pursuit of material and economic betterment in England, 'Godly Interest’ will dispute the exceptionalist portrayal of economic progress in the English empire as wholly novel and virtuous. This research project is funded with 3 million yen of Grant-in-Aid (KAKENHI) by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and conducted at the University of Tokyo under the supervision of Dr Koji Yamamoto.