Even when Enlightenment thinkers did manage to explicitly state that they learned from China, Islamic, or indigenous societies, there is a tendency among later historians to argue that they didn’t actually mean it and were “confused.”
Of course, in that age it was rather difficult to credit any useful knowledge to the “savage races” without stirring up controversy.
(as it happened with Sinophile Christian Wolff)
[Reading Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything]