The Transformation of the World a Global History of the Nineteenth Century

The Transformation of the World A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

Jürgen Osterhammel Translated by Patrick Camiller

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Unauthenticated Download Date | 3/26/16 7:45 PM First published in Germany by C. H. Beck under the title Die Verwandlung der Welt © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2009

English translation copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu

Jacket illustration: Harbor at Shanghai, China, 1875, © Getty Images. Cover design by Faceout Studio, Charles Brock.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osterhammel, Jürgen. [Verwandlung der Welt. English] The transformation of the world : a global history of the nineteenth century / Jürgen Osterhammel. pages cm. — (America in the world) “First published in Germany by C.H. Beck under the title Die Verwandlung der Welt, Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Munchen 2009.” Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-691-14745-1 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. History, Modern—19th century. I. Title. D358.O8813 2014 909.81—dc23 2013025754

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

The translation of this work was funded by GeisteswissenschaftenI nternational - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting societyV G WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association)

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Preface xi Introduction xv

Part One: Approaches

I Memory and Self-Observation: The Perpetuation of the Nineteenth Century 3 1 visibility and Audibility 5 2 Treasuries of Memory and Knowledge 7 3 observation, Description, Realism 17 4 Numbers 25 5 News 29 6 Photography 39 II Time: When Was the Nineteenth Century? 45 1 Chronology and the Coherence of the Age 45 2 Calendar and Periodization 49 3 Breaks and Transitions 52 4 The Age of Revolution, Victorianism, Fin de Siècle 58 5 Clocks and Acceleration 67 III Space: Where Was the Nineteenth Century? 77 1 space and Time 77 2 Metageography: Naming Spaces 78 3 Mental Maps: The Relativity of Spatial Perspective 86 4 spaces of Interaction: Land and Sea 94 5 ordering and Governing Space 104 6 Territoriality, Diaspora, Borders 107

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Part Two: Panoramas

IV Mobilities 117 1 Magnitudes and Tendencies 117 2 Population Disasters and the Demographic Transition 124 3 The Legacy of Early Modern Migrations: Creoles and Slaves 128 4 Penal Colony and Exile 133 5 ethnic Cleansing 139 6 internal Migration and the Changing Slave Trade 144 7 Migration and Capitalism 154 8 Global Motives 164 V Living Standards: Risk and Security in Material Life 167 1 The Standard of Living and the Quality of Life 167 2 Life Expectancy and “Homo hygienicus” 170 3 Medical Fears and Prevention 178 4 Mobile Perils, Old and New 185 5 natural Disasters 197 6 Famine 201 7 Agricultural Revolutions 211 8 Poverty and Wealth 216 9 Globalized Consumption 226 VI Cities: European Models and Worldwide Creativity 241 1 The City as Norm and Exception 241 2 Urbanization and Urban Systems 249 3 Between Deurbanization and Hypergrowth 256 4 specialized Cities, Universal Cities 264 5 The Golden Age of Port Cities 275 6 Colonial Cities, Treaty Ports, Imperial Metropolises 283 7 internal Spaces and Undergrounds 297 8 symbolism, Aesthetics, Planning 311 VII Frontiers: Subjugation of Space and Challenges to Nomadic Life 322 1 invasions and Frontier Processes 322 2 The North American West 331 3 south America and South Africa 347 4 Eurasia 356 5 settler Colonialism 368 6 The Conquest of Nature: Invasions of the Biosphere 375 VIII Imperial Systems and Nation-States: The Persistence of Empires 392 1 Great-Power Politics and Imperial Expansion 392 2 Paths to the Nation-State 403

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3 What Holds Empires Together? 419 4 empires: Typology and Comparisons 429 5 Central and Marginal Cases 434 6 Pax Britannica 450 7 Living in Empires 461 IX International Orders, Wars, Transnational Movements: Between Two World Wars 469 1 The Thorny Path to a Global System of States 469 2 spaces of Power and Hegemony 475 3 Peaceful Europe, Wartorn Asia and Africa 483 4 Diplomacy as Political Instrument and Intercultural Art 493 5 internationalisms and the Emergence of Universal Norms 505 X Revolutions: From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg 514 1 revolutions—from Below, from Above, from Unexpected Directions 514 2 The Revolutionary Atlantic 522 3 The Great Turbulence in Midcentury 543 4 eurasian Revolutions, Fin de Siècle 558 XI The State: Minimal Government, Performances, and the Iron Cage 572 1 order and Communication: The State and the Political 572 2 reinventions of Monarchy 579 3 Democracy 593 4 Bureaucracies 605 5 Mobilization and Discipline 616 6 self-Strengthening: The Politics of Peripheral Defensive 625 7 state and Nationalism 629

Part Three: Themes

XII Energy and Industry: Who Unbound Prometheus, When, and Where? 637 1 Industrialization 638 2 energy Regimes: The Century of Coal 651 3 Paths of Economic Development and Nondevelopment 658 4 Capitalism 667 XIII Labor: The Physical Basis of Culture 673 1 The Weight of Rural Labor 675 2 Factory, Construction Site, Office 685 3 Toward Emancipation: Slaves, Serfs, Peasants 697 4 The Asymmetry of Wage Labor 706

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XIV Networks: Extension, Density, Holes 710 1 Communications 712 2 Trade 724 3 Money and Finance 730 XV Hierarchies: The Vertical Dimension of Social Space 744 1 is a Global Social History Possible? 744 2 Aristocracies in (Moderate) Decline 750 3 Bourgeois and Quasi-bourgeois 761 XVI Knowledge: Growth, Concentration, Distribution 779 1 World Languages 781 2 Literacy and Schooling 788 3 The University as a Cultural Export from Europe 798 4 Mobility and Translation 808 5 Humanities and the Study of the Other 814 XVII Civilization and Exclusion 826 1 The “Civilized World” and Its “Mission” 826 2 slave Emancipation and White Supremacy 837 3 Antiforeignism and “Race War” 855 4 Anti-Semitism 865 XVIII Religion 873 1 Concepts of Religion and the Religious 873 2 Secularization 880 3 religion and Empire 887 4 reform and Renewal 894 Conclusion: TheN ineteenth Century in History 902 1 self-Diagnostics 902 2 Modernity 904 3 Again: The Beginning or End of a Century 906 4 Five Characteristics of the Century 907 Abbreviations 921 Notes 923 Bibliography 1021 Index 1119

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Knowledge Growth, Concentration, Distribution

“Knowledge” is a particularly ephemeral substance. As a social quantity, distinct from its various philosophical concepts, it is the invention of a discipline scarcely a hundred years old: the sociology of knowledge. It took what German ideal- ism had called Geist (“spirit”) and placed it at the heart of society, relating it to existential practices and social locations. “Knowledge” is somewhat narrower than the all-embracing concept of “culture.” It does not for our purposes include religion and the arts;1 it will refer here to cognitive resources for the solution of problems and the mastering of life situations in the real world. This is a prelimi- nary decision in conformity with the nineteenth century itself, when, at least in Europe and North America, a rationalist, instrumental understanding of knowledge came to the fore: knowing served a purpose. It was supposed to enlarge the mastery of nature, increase the wealth of whole societies through its technical application, liberate worldviews from “superstition,” and be generally “useful” in as many respects as possible. Nothing was a more conspicuous measure of progress—the hallmark of the age for European elites—than the expansion and improvement of knowledge. From the “Res Publica Litteraria” to the Modern System of the Sciences The formation of “modern knowledge society” has been situated in a long early modern period that lasted until approximately 1820.2 The next hundred years then witnessed its constant enlargement, institutionalization, and routini- zation, and even the beginnings of its globalization. Such a continuity should not be exaggerated, however. Only in the nineteenth century was the old concept of “science” enriched with aspects that we now firmly associate with it. The subject classification still in use today goes back no further. Modern institutional forms for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge were created at that time: the research university, the laboratory, the humanities seminar. The relations between science and its applications in technology and medicine grew closer; the scientific challenge to religious conceptions of the world became weightier. Many terms for disciplines such as “biology”—first used in 1800—or “physics”

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only now established themselves. The “scientist” (another neologism, coined in 1834) developed into a social type who, despite much overlapping, differed from the “scholar” or “intellectual” (one more nineteenth-century creation). Science as a whole was demarcated more sharply than ever from philosophy, theology, and other traditional branches of learning. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new concept of science prevalent among scientists gave up the old claim to strict universality, unconditional necessity, and absolute truth and emphasized the reflexive character of knowledge— its conditional validity, intersubjectivity, and autonomy—within the social system of science.3 The old imaginative community of scholars, theres publica litteraria that cultural historian Peter Burke, following Coleridge, described as a “clerisy,” broke open and yielded a special scientific community with narrower membership criteria.4 The scientist saw himself as a “professional,” a specialist in a clearly defined area, having little in common with literary “intellectuals,” who addressed a wider public and were politically committed. This was a big step on the way to “two cultures,” and only a small number of natural scientists, such as Alexander von Humboldt, Rudolf Virchow, or Thomas H. Huxley, sought and found a hearing for their views on nonscientific matters. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, governments began to take a greater interest in science; science policy became a new branch of systematic statecraft. Big industry (e.g., the chemicals sector), too, increasingly regarded scientific research as one of its tasks. The links between science and war or imperial expansion became closer than ever before. The Cultural Authority of Science By the eve of the First World War, the modern system of science had come of age institutionally in a number of countries. Science was a force in the work of interpreting the world and a cultural presence enjoying extraordinary prestige. Anyone who did not observe its standards of argument and justification was thrown into defensive mode, so that even Christians had to make concessions to scientific thinking. It became a compulsory part of the school syllabus, as well as a profession for large numbers of (overwhelmingly male) individuals. Whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—up to the time of Alexander von Humboldt, who spent his inheritance on his research interests—many heroes of the “scientific revolution” had lived for science on other sources of income, their successors in 1910 lived on it. The amateur was retreating on a wide front before the expert. No one could gain recognition as a scientific dilettante, as Goethe had still been able to do in the theory of colors, morphology, and anatomy. All this holds true only for parts of Europe and for the United States. A global historical approach would not radically alter the picture, however. Modern industry, based on the use of fossil energy, came into being in Europe, and so did the science that has now swept everything before it. Yet a global perspective can place these developments in a comparative context and draw attention to the

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 781 worldwide impact of the Western explosion of knowledge. A first requirement for this is to expand our concept of knowledge beyond science. Insofar as science itself is understood as a communicative enterprise and its results passed on through channels of communication to a wider public, it relies on a system of symbols that makes scientific contents intellectually transmittable in the first place. Mathematics—an important element also in economics from about 1875—and some natural languages with transcontinental reach guaranteed the mobility of scientific meaning. But, of course, languages are also the most important vehicle for many kinds of knowledge other than organized science. It is therefore impossible to speak of the history of knowledge in the nineteenth century without taking a closer look at language and languages. Their spread and use is a good indicator of the ever-changing geography of political and cultural dominance.

1 World Languages In the nineteenth century, some language areas became larger than they had been in the early modern period. By 1910 the “world languages” (a term now jus- tified for the first time) had been distributed around the globe in a pattern that is still largely with us today. Here two aspects must be distinguished from each other—although often in practice no clear dividing line can be drawn between them. It makes a difference whether a majority of the population adopts a foreign language as its chief means of everyday communication, a kind of second-order mother tongue, or whether the language remains “foreign” while being used for functional purposes such as trade, scholarship, religious worship, administration, or contact across cultures. The expansion of a language is made easier by political and military empire building, without being an inevitable outcome of it. For example, in the early modern period in Asia, Persian and Portuguese became more widely spoken without being carried into new territories by the colonial rule of Portugal or Iran. On the other hand, relatively short-lived formations such as the Mongol Empire of the Middle Ages or the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century left behind hardly any lasting linguistic traces. In Indonesia too, despite three hundred years of colonial rule, Dutch did not maintain itself alongside indigenous languages, since unlike the British in India, the Netherlanders never took pains to develop a culturally Europeanized layer of the population. Portuguese survived around the Indian Ocean into the 1830s as a lingua franca of multicultural merchant milieux. The flowering of Persian between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in western, southern, and west-central Asia was followed by the collapse of its literary ecumene in the eighteenth.5 But until the 1830s it continued to play its old role as an administrative and com- mercial language beyond the borders of Iran. Both Portuguese and Persian were then replaced by English, which in 1837 became the only recognized language

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of administration in India and, at the latest with the opening of China in 1842, the dominant non-Chinese language in the Eastern seas. By the end of the century, the Portuguese-speaking world had been whittled down to Portugal, Brazil, Goa, and a few possessions in southern Africa. Spanish was a legacy of colonial settlement in South and Central America, its geographical extent remaining more or less unchanged in the nineteenth century. Chinese spread slightly as a result of coolie emigration from China, but it never moved outside the overseas Chinese communities to become a language of education reaching into the environment around them. The fact that most of the overseas Chinese originated in Fujian or Guangdong province and used dialects barely intelligible to Mandarin speakers contributed to this isolation of the Chinese language. Winners of Linguistic Globalization The German language spread to only a very limited extent in the wake of colonization and had no real lasting effect in Africa. But its position strengthened in east-central Europe with the founding of the German Reich in 1871 and the literary and scientific esteem it enjoyed from the eighteenth century on. It continued to be the administrative language of the Habsburg Empire and, until the end of the Tsarist period, it remained with French and Latin a major language of communication among scholars in Russia; the papers of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, for example, were largely composed in German. Wherever the Reich pursued a policy of Germanization in its border areas, compulsory use of the German language became more common. Russian expanded to an even greater degree, as a direct result of Tsarist empire building and the cultural Russification associated with it after midcentury. Russian was imposed as the only official language in the Tsarist Empire, meeting resistance from Poles and subject populations in the Caucasus. Apart from being a symbol of Tsardom, it was also the main cultural cement of the empire. In contrast to the great ethnic diversity of the Habsburg armies, the Tsarist military consisted overwhelmingly of Russian-speaking soldiers.6 This was also the time when Russian developed as the language of a world-class literature. Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether the Tsarist Empire really did become an integrated linguistic community. Especially in the Baltic provinces in the Northwest and the Muslim lands in the South, the Russian language did not penetrate beyond circles of immigrants from Russia and a stratum of administrative officials. At a time when the use of French was gradually declining among scholars and educated people in Europe, the number of French speakers in the colonial empire was on the rise. Moreover, the French Canadians in Quebec (since 1763 no longer part of the French empire) were maintaining themselves as a separate linguistic group. It was the only territory ever ruled by France where the language remained in everyday use beyond elite circles in the late nineteenth century (even today it is the mother tongue for roughly 80 percent of the population). Things were different in the African and Asian colonies. Almost half

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 783 a century after the end of colonial rule, the number of Algerians who speak or understand French is estimated at up to a quarter of the population.7 In countries that used to belong to France’s West African empire, French is still the official language (alongside English in Cameroon), although it is probably used by just 8 percent of people in daily life.8 Haiti sticks to French two hundred years after its revolutionary separation from France. If a traveler in 1913 could get by with French better than with any other language except English, this was due to France’s military-colonial expansion after 1870 and the high cultural prestige it enjoyed among Middle Eastern elites in particular. From 1834, French was part of the training program for Ottoman elite officers, and in Egypt it held its ground among the upper classes even after the British occupied the country in 1882.9 At the end of the nineteenth century, a kind of francophonie reached far down into the Pacific, where political control had weakened other culturally autonomous forces and broken up their coherence. The biggest winner from nineteenth-century globalization was English. In 1800, although already respected throughout Europe as a language of business, poetry, and science, it had by no means been the undisputed number one. But by 1920 at the latest, it had become geographically the most widespread language in the world and culturally the most influential. At a rough estimate, for the period between 1750 and 1900, one-half of the “weightiest” publications on natural science and technology appeared in English.10 As early as 1851 Jacob Grimm, the leading linguist of his age, noted that no other language carried so much force.11 In North America (where, contrary to legend, German never had a chance of becoming the national language of the United States), English was as firmly rooted as in Australia, New Zealand, or Cape Province. In all these cases, it was the language of settlers and invaders little open to the influence of indigenous languages (which were never of any importance officially). In India, by contrast, English became the standard language in the higher law courts only in the 1830s, while the lower courts continued to operate in local languages, often with the help of interpreters. Here and in Ceylon, English did not spread through European settlement, or a fortiori as a result of ruthless Anglici- zation policies on the part of the colonial rulers, but because a combination of cultural prestige and mundane career advantages made it advisable to master the language.12 New educated strata first emerged in Bengal and around the colonial metropolises of Bombay and Madras, then in other parts of the Subcontinent. In the 1830s there was a heated debate between “Anglicists” and “Orientalists” about the pros and cons of an education in English versus one of the indigenous Indian languages.13 The Anglicists won out in 1835 at the level of countrywide politics, but in practice there was scope for pragmatic compromises. The British language export to India was at the same time a voluntary import by Indian citizens and intellectuals who hoped to link up with more extensive circles of communication. During the second half of the nineteenth century, English spread along with British colonial administrators and missionaries to Southeast Asia

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and Africa. In the Pacific (Philippines, Hawaii) the US influence was decisive.14 But the global fortunes of the English language in the nineteenth century were driven by Britain more than America. The triumph of English in education, business, mass media, pop music, science, and international politics got under way only after 1950, this time spurred on by the dynamism of the United States. Language Transfer as a One-Way Street Outside the colonies too, there was growing pressure and incentive to learn European foreign languages. The Chinese state, which in the Qing period was officially trilingual (Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian), had never felt it necessary to promote the study of European languages. Paradoxically, this was one of the reasons for the high linguistic competence of Jesuit missionaries during the early modern period, so high that many served as interpreters for the Qing Emperor in contacts with emissaries from Russia, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Britain. But since the ex-Jesuits who remained behind in China after the abolition of their order in Europe had no knowledge of English, the British envoys who established the first diplomatic contacts in 1793 could in some cases commu- nicate only through a prior translation into Latin for the Jesuits’ benefit. When much more serious negotiations had to be conducted, after 1840, such go- betweens were no longer available. China initially lacked any personnel trained in languages—another disadvantage in the general asymmetry between China and the West—and the emperor long adhered to the old Qing policy of making it as difficult as possible for foreigners to study Chinese. In the Ottoman Empire too, no encouragement for the study of European languages was given until well into the nineteenth century. But after 1834 (the comparable Chinese date was 1877), when the Sublime Porte began to establish permanent diplomatic representations in the main European capitals, some of the leading Tanzimat reformers got to know foreign languages and foreign countries while serving as diplomats abroad. The new power elite of the Tanzimat period was recruited less from the army and the ulama (clergy trained in law) than from the State Translation Bureau and embassy chancelleries.15 In China, meanwhile, the Qing government changed course only after the Second Opium War ended in defeat in 1860. Two years later the Tongwenguan translation school—the first Western-style educational institution of any kind—was founded in Beijing; its dual task was to train English speakers and to translate technical literature from the West (no mean feat, given that, as in Turkey a few decades earlier, much of the vocabulary first had to be created in the destination language).16 Even some of the large state arsenals and shipyards that sprang up in this period had language departments attached to them. The most important channel of linguistic transfer, however, was the mission schools and universities. At the Paris peace conference of 1919, China fielded a young guard of capable diplomats who impressed others with their proficiency in foreign languages.

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In Japan, where classical Chinese remained the most prestigious language of education down to the end of the Tokugawa period, specialist hierarchies of translators were responsible for contacts with the Dutch in Nagasaki; the world of true scholarship had little to do with them. It was through this needle’s eye of Dutch trade, alone in having official approval, that European knowledge found its way into the sealed-off archipelago. Only after 1800 did it gradually became clear to the Japanese government that Dutch was not the most important Euro- pean language, and greater efforts now went into translation from Russian and English.17 Since the seventeenth century, Japanese had also been familiar with translations of Western scientific and medical texts into classical Chinese, made by Jesuits in China with the help of indigenous scholars;18 “Holland studies” (rangaku), in which scientific material had featured prominently since the 1770s, were not the only transmission route of Western knowledge into Japan. But in the end, the more intensive introduction of that knowledge in the Meiji period was possible only because in addition to the hiring of Western experts, there was a more systematic drive to develop translation skills among the Japanese themselves. European languages were included only late and sporadically in the official educational syllabus of non-European countries, even though these often had a multilingual dimension in that scholars were required to show proficiency in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Knowledge of Europe was for a long time the reserve of indispensable, but not very highly regarded, specialists modeled on the dragomans in the Ottoman Empire—a small group of state-appointed interpreters and translators dominated by Christian Greeks until 1821.19 Conversely, it never occurred to anyone in Europe to honor a non-Western language by including it in the school curriculum. Among European linguists, Persian and San- skrit (first known in Europe in the late eighteenth century) were considered the height of perfection. But if they could ever have seriously competed with Greek and Latin (perhaps in 1810 or 1820), that brief opportunity was missed.20 The humanism of the Gymnasien, lycées, and public schools remained purely Greco- Roman; European intellectual formation centered on the West. Only in recent times has Chinese made a breakthrough into the syllabus of a growing number of high schools in Australia or a few European countries. Linguistic Hybridity: Pidgin World languages—that is, ones in which people could make themselves understood outside their land of origin—were for the most part loosely super imposed on a multiplicity of local languages and dialects. Even in postcolonial India, a maximum of 3 percent of the population could understand English (the figure in today’s Republic of India is around 30 percent).21 In many cases, simplified hybrids made communication easier. These seldom replaced the original languages, however, and demonstrated by their very existence how strongly local languages resisted the colonial ones they encountered. Not a few

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pidgin languages were older than colonialism. And when, following the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, French replaced Latin as the usual language of negotiation and treaty among the representatives of European states, diplomats in the eastern Mediterranean and Algeria were still using the old lingua franca (i.e., language of the Franks), a kind of pidgin Italian.22 In other parts of the world—for example, the Caribbean and West Africa—Creole tongues developed into independent language systems.23 Pidgin English, originally known as “Canton jargon,” took shape in a long process after the 1720s as the second language on the South Chinese coast. After the opening of China it served throughout the treaty ports as a means of communication between Chinese and European traders. It was later forgotten that it had originated in a reluctance or inability on the Western side to learn Chinese; the risibility of pidgin, with its reduced and inflected forms (“likee soupee?”), became a key element in the racist cliché of “primitive” Chinese. Conversely, a striving to overcome this humiliation was a major reason why na- tionalistic Chinese intellectuals, in particular, learned foreign languages in the early twentieth century. This went hand in hand with drastic “depidginization.” On closer examination, however, the mature China Coast English that pidgin became around the turn of the century proved to be a communicative medium well suited to the situation. Blending many other sources into the mix, from Malay to Portuguese to Persian, it offered a rich vocabulary for the realities of life on the Chinese coast.24 As in India, sophisticated communication in a European language did not mean subjugation to linguistic imperialism so much as an important step to cultural acceptance and equality. Pidgin remained a language of the business world; Western-oriented intellectuals learned proper English. Pidgin did not persist in twentieth-century China, leaving only scattered lexical remnants even in Hong Kong. Chinese as a language of education easily survived contacts with the West, while in Japan there was not even an embryonic pidgin. Classical Chinese also continued to fulfill practical objectives in the region where Chinese culture has always radiated outward. When in 1905 Phan Boi Chau, the most famous Viet- namese patriot of his time, visited the great Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao in his Tokyo exile, the two men found they had no spoken language in common. But since Phan had mastered classical Chinese writing, for centuries the medium of communication used by Vietnamese mandarins, they were able to engage in what Phan in his memoirs calls “brush conversation.”25 Knowledge travels in the baggage of languages. Not only did the expansion of major language areas in the nineteenth century strengthen local linguistic diversity and the practical necessity of multilingualism at a time when an extra language required close attention; it also opened up new spaces of horizontal communication and increased the mobility of knowledge. Colonialism and globalization created cosmopolitan language systems. In Chinese civilization, which had never lost its linguistic unity and capacity for resistance, this spelled a

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 787 less dramatic change than in regions such as South Asia, where in the preceding centuries local vernaculars had gained ground at the expense of a single overar- ching language, Sanskrit, and where new semantic ranges were now developing at the level of the elite. After its linguistic fragmentation, India was reunified communicatively through the appropriation of English.26 Limits of Linguistic Integration We should not, however, exaggerate the integrative effects outside the ranks of small elites. In Europe too, linguistic homogeneity within nation-states often emerged only in the course of the nineteenth century. The national language, rising above a multiplicity of regional idioms, did become the ideal norm for communication and the measure of correctness, but it was rather a slow process putting such an ideal into practice.27 This was true even of France, with its strong centralist traditions. In 1790 an official investigation established that a majority of people in France spoke and read a language other than French: Celtic, German, Occitan, Catalan, Italian, or Flemish. Even in 1893 every eighth schoolchild between ages seven and fourteen knew no French.28 The situation was even more discrepant in Italy, where in the 1860s less than 10 percent of the population could understand effortlessly the Tuscan Italian that had been declared the official language in the process of nation building.29 Nor were things necessarily different in the successor states of the Spanish colonial empire. The Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico did not think of creating schools for the Indian or mestizo population, so that in 1910 as many as two million Indios—14 percent of the total population—spoke no Spanish.30 As scholars all over Europe collected languages (and added neologisms) in dictionaries, described them in grammar books, and laid down rules for spelling, pronunciation, and style, whole nations were conceived and promoted as speech communities, and a cultivated language began to be considered a key achievement of every nation. Yet the language that ordinary people spoke in many regions remained stubbornly tied to the locality of their birth. If scientists and intellectuals in Asian countries—around 1862 (and even more after the turn of the century) in the Ottoman Empire, or after 1915 in China—created simpler forms of language, writing, and literature to bridge the gulf between elite and popular culture, they were doing only what had been done in European countries a few decades earlier, or was even then being done, without engaging in anything that might be described as direct imitation. In Europe too, the linguistic divide in the nineteenth century between elite and people, between written and spoken language, was more extensive than we can easily imagine today. For mature nation-states, however, this became intolerable a few decades later, and great efforts were made to impose a uniform national language or at least to pre- serve the external appearance of one. After the Second World War, European regional and national movements—from Catalonia via Wales to the Balkans— set a countertrend in motion.

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2 Literacy and Schooling One of the most important cultural processes of the nineteenth century was the spread of mass literacy. Having begun centuries earlier in many societies, and developing now at a highly uneven regional or local pace, it should not be too hastily attributed to other basic processes such as state building, the growth of confessionalism or a science society, or even industrialization.31 One can argue at length about the precise meaning of “literacy,” the spectrum of which runs from the ability to sign a marriage certificate to regular reading of religious texts to active involvement in public literary life. The crux of the matter is clear, however: literacy is a cultural technique of reading (and secondarily writing) that makes it possible to participate in communicative circles wider than those of face-to-face speech and hearing. Someone who is able to read becomes a mem- ber of a translocal public. This also opens up new opportunity for manipulating and being manipulated. By 1914 the male population of Europe had attained such a degree of literacy that soldiers on all sides could read weapon instruction manuals, absorb the propaganda that warmongers wrote for them, and keep their family posted with news from the front. The scope and scale of the Great War is hardly imaginable without comprehensive literacy. The Trends in Europe The nineteenth-century spread of mass literacy was first of all a process of European cultural history. On that continent—only in China do we find anything comparable, with no influences on each other—roots existed here and there in an older tradition of book reading that went back to the age of the Ref- ormation or the “popular enlightenment” and its emphasis on practical peda- gogy. The nineteenth century continued these trends and gave them a certain finality. It was the rise of mass education that, in conjunction with the “scientific revolution” of the early modern period, laid the key foundations of our age. Be- yond the functional aspect of increased competence, literacy gained new sym- bolic significance as the expression of progress, civilization, and national cohe- sion by creating an imagined community of people capable of communicating with one another but also of being steered toward common goals.32 By 1920 the male population of the major European countries, as well as part of the female population, was in possession of reading and writings skills. Lest we create the impression of an educated continent facing a world sunk in ignorance, some distinctions need to be drawn within Europe itself. Only Brit- ain, the Netherlands, and Germany were 100 percent literate in 1910; the rate in France was 87 percent, while in Belgium, the least literate of the “developed” European countries, it was 85 percent. Then, a long way behind, came southern Europe: 62 percent were literate in Italy, 50 percent in Spain, only 25 percent in Portugal;33 the picture was certainly no better on the eastern and southeastern periphery of Europe. Nevertheless, there were certain continent-wide tendencies:

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 789 the proportion of literate males and females was rising constantly and in no case stagnating. Some countries—Sweden, for example—was advancing rapidly from a high initial level. The period around 1860 was a watershed for the whole of Europe. Before, only Prussia had come close to the goal of completely eradicating illiteracy, but a quickening of the pace after 1860 is apparent not only from the statistical data but also from the general climate in society. By the turn of the century, widespread illiteracy was no longer taken for granted even in Russia or the Balkans; an ability to read and write was seen more or less everywhere as a normal state of affairs and a political objective worth striving for. It was achieved not only in the nobility and urban middle classes but also among artisan strata in town and country, skilled workers, and ever larger numbers of the peasantry.34 Regional differences did not completely disappear. In the 1900 census, the Vorarlberg region of Austria recorded just 1 percent illiteracy, while the figure in Habsburg Dalmatia was 73 percent.35 It would be a while longer before reading and writing skills permeated the last village in Russia or Serbia, Sicily or the Peloponnese. Full literacy did not come overnight: it was a long process that did not em- brace whole countries all at once. It began in small groups. Some family members, mostly the younger generation, learned to read, others did not. This had consequences for parental authority. Villages, neighborhoods, or parishes gradually changed their mix of cultural techniques. It would be too simple to assume that there was a wholesale transition from orality to literacy; competence in writing continued to impart cultural authority, and oral communication persisted in many of its old forms. The fact that from about 1780, urban intellectuals in Europe were transcribing fairy tales, legends, and folk songs, giving them a tone of highly artificial naturalness, was a sign that oral traditions were losing their spontaneous impact. Examples in Germany included Johann Gottfried Herder (who published several sets of folktales from 1778 on), Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1805–8), and the Brothers Grimm, whose first collection,Children’s and Household Tales (1812), would become the hardiest perennial of German literature.36 Only that which is, or is becoming, “alien” can be rediscovered. Mass literacy first developed in the cities and often percolated very slowly into village society, so that during a transitional period it actually widened the cultural gap between town and country. It also changed the parameters of Bildung. Only those who read much and without difficulty could participate in the semantic universe of high culture. But the spread of reading also increased the demand for popular material—from the farmer’s almanac to pulp fiction. Historians have closely studied these fine shades of democratization between the two poles of “high culture” and “popular culture.”37 Elites reacted to mass literacy in contradictory ways. On the one hand, the enlightenment of “simple people,” dispelling superstition with rational literature and generally standardizing cultural practices, appeared as a prime instance of “civilizing from above” that spread modernity and promoted national

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integration. On the other hand, mistrust lingered on (though everywhere in a downward curve), since the cultural emancipation of the masses—as the workers’ associations soon showed—was bound up with demands for social and political betterment. This attitude on the part of the powerful and well educated was not without a basis in reality. More democratic access to literary forms of communication did usually lead to restructuring of the hierarchies of prestige and power, opening up new possibilities for an attack on the existing order. The cultural worries of the elite also reverberated in gender politics. The idea that im- moderate reading could lead to fanciful illusions and (especially among women) to an overheated erotic imagination—a satirical theme in literature up to Gus- tave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and beyond—was a source of concern for male guardians of morality.38 Mass literacy campaigns were mostly initiated by the government of the day. Elementary schools were their chief instrument, although for a time many Euro pean governments were content to leave them in the hands of the church. The weaker a state was, the stronger the educational role of religious institutions, if only in the modest form of Sunday schools, remained. Or to put it in another way: the state, churches, and private providers competed with one another to serve a burgeoning education market. Nor was this in essence a purely European phenomenon. The English education system, for example, had many similarities to that which existed around the same time in Muslim countries: for example, the primary level was largely controlled by religious institutions, whose main aims were to teach reading and writing, to inculcate moral values, and to protect children from “bad influences” in their everyday environment. The differences were a matter of degree more than principle. In England there was less learning by rote, less recitation of sacred texts, a slightly greater practical orientation, and a moderately better provision of material aids and furnishings for schools.39 Popular education could not be simply forced down people’s throats. It could be successful only if they associated their own desires and interests with it. The difficulties that every country faced in actually enforcing compulsory education (at various moments in the nineteenth or twentieth century) point to the extraordinary importance of parental cooperation. Economic requirements had to be fulfilled if mass literacy was to be achieved. Of course, it would be wrong to underestimate the genuine thirst for education in many societies: the motivation to learn reading and writing, both for oneself and for one’s children, was not only a question of material gain and utility. Nevertheless, only above a certain income threshold were families able to release their children from production and to cover the costs of regular schooling. Mass education with fixed hours of attendance and set tasks that had to be done regardless of the rhythm of the local economy was possible only where children did not have to work to keep the home in one piece. On average, it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that European families became prepared to send their seven- to twelve- year-old children to the special world of the school, where professional teachers

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(whose professionalism was often debatable) had an authority that could hardly be challenged from outside.40 The actual figures should not be exaggerated, however. In Britain in 1895, only 82 percent of children registered to attend primary school were regularly present in the classrooms.41 In many other countries of Eu- rope, the proportion was far smaller. An Age of Reading in the United States Were there similar developments outside Europe? The school uptake in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, or the Philippines was not dramatically lower than in southern Europe or the Balkans.42 As far as literacy is concerned, comparative research is still in its infancy, and in many parts of the world, statistics are lacking for the whole of the nineteenth century. Of course, this is not the case for North America, where the early colonies already had high levels of literacy comparable with those in the most advanced European countries. In- creased immigration in the nineteenth century meant that an ability to read and write in English was often equated with “Americanization.” Many new arrivals, especially Catholics, accepted this imperative, but created educational institutions of their own where learning was closely associated with religion and ethnic identity. From the 1840s on, there was a growing sense in the United States that an “age of reading” had dawned. Rapid expansion of the press and book production contributed to this, as the Northeast in particular became the locus of a vigorous print culture. By 1860 the male literacy rate in New England was already 95 percent, and uniquely in the world, women there had reached a similar level. The fact that the national average (an especially unhelpful term in the United States) was considerably lower had to do less with a certain backwardness of the white population in the West and South than with the low literacy rate among blacks and Native Americans. Some slaves learned to read the Bible from their mistress, but nor- mally they were kept well away from such things: a literate slave could become a fomenter of rebellion and was treated with constant suspicion. As for the North- ern states, despite much discrimination, freed slaves showed a great interest in written forms of communication—as several hundred autobiographies from the two decades before the Civil War eloquently testify. The nationwide literacy rate among African Americans rose from 39 percent in 1890 to 89 percent in 1910, but then fell back to 82 percent in 1930;43 it was thus higher than in any population group of comparable size in black Africa or much of rural eastern and southern Europe. After the restoration of white hegemony in the Southern states in the 1870s, however, African Americans had to fight for an education through common efforts against a hostile white environment and an (at best) indifferent government.44 The same was true for other disadvantaged ethnic segments of US society. Some Indian peoples, though facing great resistance, used literacy as an instrument of cultural affirmation; the most notable case was the Cherokee Na- tion, which had had a written language since 1809 and was able to use this as the

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basis for a simultaneous acquisition of reading and writing skills in both Chero kee and English. Similarly, in many other parts of the world, languages first had to be given an alphabet and lexically recorded (often, though not always, by missionaries); then parts of the Bible were translated and used as exercise material, providing the basis for the enrichment of communication through writing. Asia’s Old Literate Cultures The picture was different again in civilizations that had treasured writing and learning since time immemorial: the Islamic countries, with their strong focus on the Koran and legal-theological commentaries, and the regions influenced by Chinese culture. In Egypt less than 1 percent of the population was able to read in 1800; this rose to 3–4 percent by 1880 as a result of modernization policies, and the 1897 census, the first in modern Egypt, recorded 400,000 literate people, or roughly 6 percent of the population over the age of seven (excluding nomads and foreigners).45 In 1800, even by strict European standards, Japan was already a society permeated with writing. A literary mass market had emerged as early as the seventeenth century in the cities; all samurai and the numerous village headmen had to be literate and to read Chinese characters in order to carry out their administrative tasks. On the whole, the authorities did not fear educated subjects, and some princely houses saw it as their duty to raise the moral and technical level of the population at large. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, elementary education already went beyond the circle of rural notables, and by the end of the Tokugawa period in 1867 as many as 45 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls (some estimates are even higher) had regular instruction outside the home in reading and writing.46 All this happened without the slightest European influence, missionaries having been banned from the country since the 1630s. In 1871 a national education ministry was created, and the Meiji government made it a high priority to develop every level, from the village school to the university, under close central supervision. Many schools and teachers from the Tokugawa period were incorporated into the new system, which provided for a compulsory four-year course. Pedagogues now began to study Western models and brought over some elements from it, but isolated premodern Japan had already set its sights on state-run education, and an independent direction was much more in evidence than in the army reforms introduced during the same period. By 1909, near the end of the Meiji period, the number of illiterates among twenty-year- old recruits was below 10 percent almost throughout the archipelago—a success without parallel elsewhere in Asia.47 In 1912 Japan was one of the world leaders in literacy. In China, where the standard textbook went back to 500 AD, the literacy rate seems to have stag- nated in the nineteenth century, though at a comparatively high level for a premodern society. For many centuries, China had shown great reverence for the written word and refined calligraphy that permitted the dissemination of all

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 793 manner of books, and the flourishing of a varied landscape of private education as well as community, welfare, clan, and temple schools little regulated (and by no means systematically shaped) by the government. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, most of these were one-teacher schools rooted in a local initiative; their organizers could draw on a huge pool of some five million people with a training in high culture, who, having failed at some stage in the state exam ination system, were excluded from the status group of title bearers and often worked as home tutors for upper-class families.48 For want of statistics, we have to rely on good-quality anecdotal evidence, and this does permit the conclusion that 30 to 45 percent of the male and 2 to 10 percent of the female population had at least basic reading and writing skills.49 This did not mean, of course, that they met the high standards of elite communication, but they understood a basic repertory of written characters and therefore edicts and proclamations of a hor- tatory, admonitory, or interdictory nature that the government issued to its subjects, and often also simplified versions of classical texts. The imperial state made some commitment to education and the funding of schools, but without assert- ing the kind of general authority in the matter that slowly developed in Europe during the nineteenth century. For centuries the legitimacy of the political and social order had rested on the fact that access to education, and hence to status and prosperity, was not reserved only for the offspring of upper-class families. Possibilities of upward movement therefore had to be kept open, such as those offered at least by the church in early modern Europe. Practices on the ground were quite flexible: for example, elementary education for peasant children was concentrated in months when there was no work to be done in the fields. Why Did China’s Culture of Education Fall Behind? The Chinese elementary school system, like the institutional arrangements for education in general, did not keep abreast of international competitors in the nineteenth century. The traditional system, efficient though it was in many respects, contained no potential for modernization (unlike the Tokugawa system in Japan). The imperial government itself recognized this after a long period of hesitation. In 1904 it issued a national schools ordinance and declared its inten- tion to build a countrywide, three-tier educational system modeled on those of the West and above all Japan (which in turn had used Europe as its template). One year later, the old system of status assignment and civil service recruitment through state examinations was abruptly discontinued, with little or no provision for transitional measures.50 Korea—the third Asian country after China and Vietnam with an old tradition of state exams—had executed a similar radical step in 1894, an astonishingly early date.51 The collapse of central state power in China, beginning with the 1911 revolution and unstoppable throughout the period of the Republic (until 1949), frustrated the plans that had been worked out at the turn of the century. If China’s educational system today is highly dif- ferentiated and efficiency oriented, having successfully blended assistance from

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abroad with the country’s own resources to rise up the international rankings, this is mainly a result of state policy after 1978. The gap that appeared around 1800 has now been corrected, two hundred years later. But how did that gap come about? Three reasons suggest themselves: First. The traditional education system was shaped entirely “from above” and geared to state examinations. Even if the great majority of peasant school children were not expected to undergo one day the full rigors of the examination procedures, they did have to memorize the simpler writings of the Confucian canon as soon as they had learned a basic stock of characters. This unitary conception of education left no room for the particular skills required by various lay- ers of the population. It is true that—in contrast to the modern European notion (now highly developed in China too) of school as a special space removed from ordinary life—a dense web of connections integrated schools into everyday existence. But the subject matter was frozen into a curriculum increasingly divorced from practical concerns—an obvious definite loss of creativity in comparison with earlier times, when the curriculum had repeatedly been a hotly debated bone of contention. Second. The failure of China’s educational system to keep up with its international rivals first became evident when the previously uncontested empire began to suffer military defeats after 1842. But it took decades before an analysis was made of the reasons for China’s military weakness and economic stagnation. For the scholar-officials who governed and administered the empire, nothing was more difficult than to admit that the education to which they owed their social rank and personal identity could be somehow to blame, or that adjustments were required to meet the new challenges. The superiority of Western knowledge (xixue) in some domains was soon recognized, but there was an unwillingness to grant equal value to Western culture as such. The fact that aggressors and invaders were the bearers of the new knowledge, and that Christian missionaries in the forefront often behaved without the necessary tact, contributed to the general sense of mistrust. After 1860, small circles of Chinese opened up intellectually to the West, and the state established a number of translation bureaus. But a sterile counterposition of Chinese to Western knowledge became a dogma among the majority of literati in the second half of the nineteenth century.52 When after the turn of the century the mood shifted into one of acute national crisis, Chinese tradition came to be seen as deeply problematic. Elements of Western knowledge were imported as a matter of urgency (mainly via a grudgingly admired Japan); the Japanese educational system (or anyway some of its elements) was hastily adopted in a spirit of panic. Throughout the period of the Republic (1912–49), Chinese intellectuals and educational reformers wrestled with the problem of how to assimilate and integrate knowledge from diverse sources. Some tried to salvage valuable parts of the tradition by scrutinizing and cleansing them with the methods of source criticism, while others looked for salvation either in Bolshevik-inspired anti-Western Marxism or in full-scale Westernization. Given

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 795 the weakness of the Chinese state, however, no solutions of any kind could be converted into policies applicable to all parts of the country. The basic intellectual and educational problems of the nineteenth century would have to be tackled anew in the People’s Republic after 1949. Third. The late imperial state would have had neither the administrative nor the financial resources to take charge of education. The size of the country, the traditional underdevelopment of religious/church education as a third way between the private home and state institutions, the weak presence of the bureaucracy at village level, and the deficient fiscal base of the central government together con- spired to rule out resolute policies along the lines of Meiji Japan.53 School State and State Schooling A discussion that starts with literacy as a knowledge indicator soon broadens out into a comparative account of institutional education as a whole. Here we may draw two general conclusions. On the one hand, it was only in the nineteenth century that the many forms of practical learning and moral instruction in society came to be thought of, and actually organized, as an educational system. The idea that schools should have a standard form and be connected by a common syllabus, that pupils should pass through classes grouped by age, that teachers should receive a professional training and have the appropriate qualifications, that special ministries should direct and monitor changes to the system: all this acquired practical importance in Europe and elsewhere only in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the state—in competition with private bodies, including religious communities—began to aim for a monopoly in the education of children and young people of compulsory school age. In many countries, such as the Netherlands, a deep political gulf developed over whether the state or the church should control education. A state monopoly took a long time to come into effect even in centralist France, while in some leading Western societies such as the United States or Britain it never came close to being achieved. Today it is being increasingly undermined by private schools in mainland Europe too and is certainly not a distinctive feature of “the West” as a whole. It was taken furthest in the socialist party dictatorships of the twentieth century—one among few achievements brightening up their historical record. Since the state relaxed its grip in the 1990s, even the People’s Republic of China has experienced a dramatic rise in the number of illiterates (those unable to read at least 1,500 characters).54 The state’s claim to sovereign control over the formal education of young people was a revolutionary innovation of the nineteenth century. Children from the lower and middle strata of society entered state schools for the first time, while those from rich families were more often educated together in special institutions rather than by private tutors at home. The state became a “school state,” society a “school society”—as historian Thomas Nipperdey put it with reference to the German lands.55 The trend was most evident there, but it made itself felt

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worldwide; Germany—especially Prussia—became the closely observed model to be copied elsewhere. It was Prussia’s organizational and bureaucratic measures that counted most here, rather than the idealistic ambition of its early reform period to reinvent Prussia as a Bildungsstaat. Such noble policy objectives were a thing of the past by midcentury.56 Governments around the world had various aims and priorities in their development of public education: to discipline the population, to shape “model citizens” for a “model state,”57 to improve military effectiveness, to create a homogeneous national culture, to integrate empires culturally, to promote economic development by raising the skill levels of “human capital.” To be sure, such a top-down perspective needs to be set alongside the view from below. Whatever the intentions of the state elite, people in many societies around the world saw in education the promise of upward mobility and a better life. This translated into a demand for opportunities that could be satisfied by the state, the church, or private philanthropy—or else by self-help. Colonial governments were the least ambitious and forthcoming. At the min- imalist end of the spectrum, they showed no concern at all for education and left the initiative entirely to missionaries. This was the case in the Congo Free State (after 1908, Belgian Congo), where at the onset of decolonization in 1960, after some eighty years of colonial rule, there was virtually no European-educated elite and only patches of literacy in a few local languages. The situation looked better in colonies such as Nigeria (British since 1851/62) or Senegal (French since 1817), but secondary schools were very thin on the ground. In Algeria a state education system competed with Koranic schools that the colonial authorities found very difficult to control: an educational dualism, in fact.58 The other extreme was represented by the Philippines, under US control from 1898 on, which by 1919 already boasted 50 percent literacy. The main European colonies in Asia had much lower rates: 8 percent in Indonesia, 10 percent in French Indochina, and 12 percent in British India.59 India was in some ways exceptional: the colonial regime promoted middle and higher education even in the period before the First World War, although the number of schoolchildren and students who benefited from it was fairly small in comparison with the huge population. The Hindu College in Calcutta opened its doors as early as 1817; universities followed in 1857 in Calcutta, Bom- bay, and Madras; 1882 in Lahore; and 1887 in Allahabad. They were not fully fledged teaching and research universities, however, but essentially institutes that awarded grades and diplomas to students scattered among all manner of colleges in the region; teaching took place only at Lahore University. The colleges taught little else than the “liberal arts,” since the British were interested mainly in developing a culturally Anglicized Indian stratum that could be involved in administering the country. Science and technology occupied a much humbler place. Only after Lord Curzon, then the viceroy of India, pushed through the Indian Universities Act in 1904 did some Indian universities create research departments—including in princedoms such as Baroda and Hyderabad that

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 797 were not subject to the Raj bureaucracy and sometimes had ambitious modernization plans of their own. Insofar as research in India took place under the aegis of British rule, it was strongly oriented to practical applications; theory and pure research had a harder time. Sciences such as botany (which had uses in agricul- ture) received the greatest encouragement.60 Independent Asian governments saw things differently and sought to develop the sciences on a broad base. In Japan the importance of technical skills was understood early on, while in China a few reformers fought unsuccessfully for decades against the pride in “humanist culture” of a majority of officials. Science and technology were given major importance only in a number of American missionary schools and universities founded after 1911 in Beijing and Shanghai. In the Ottoman Empire, where many architecturally imposing new schools had been built, similar trends came into conflict with one another. The question was whether higher education should serve mainly to give civil servants a training based in Islam or to cultivate practical, “productive” individuals versed in technology and economics? Until the turn of the century it was the former that pre- vailed.61 As in China (much less in Japan), foreign educational institutions in the Ottoman Empire, often run by missionaries, competed heavily with government initiatives. They offered foreign languages and in many cases had a better reputation than public schools. The presence of foreign schools and universities was less a sign of imperialist cultural aggression than an inducement for the indigenous state to widen and improve its own educational opportunities.62 It would be wrong, however, to draw conclusions regarding “the Muslim world” as a whole. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, the kind of educational reforms that had already visibly changed Egypt and the Ottoman Empire were almost completely lacking in Iran. There, in the second largest noncolonial Mus- lim country in the world, the state did not interfere with the near-total control that the ulama retained over schooling.63 Schooling the World The schooling of society was a European/North American program of the early nineteenth century that gradually became the goal of official policy worldwide. The school became a major tool for the state penetration of society and also a focus of civic commitment. The key issue was and is whether the state, local communities, or parents themselves should finance the running of schools. In the view of international organizations, school attendance and literacy rates are still today important indices of social development—hence of what, in the nineteenth century, used to be called a country’s “level of civilization.” Three aspects came together in the school: the socialization aspect, or the shaping of personality and particular human types; the political aspect, essentially con- cerning the relationship between secular government and religious educational institutions; and the instructional aspect, or the securing and dissemination of knowledge. The insight that science, as a cognitive and productive power and a

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vital social force, required well-run schools to train its future practitioners took the nineteenth century beyond the earlier threshold period of the scientific revolution. But the leading scientific countries of the age—Britain, France, Prussia/ Germany, and the United States—differed considerably in the educational strat- egies they adopted. Nowhere did so much weight and government attention center on the secondary stage of education as in Germany (especially the pioneering lands of Prussia and Bavaria). This was the birthplace of the “humanistic gymnasium” with its enormous emphasis on Greek and Latin, which in the middle of the century was joined by a different type of high school catering more to the needs of technology and business. Standardized since the 1830s, the gymnasium provided the foundation for the rise of German science in the Kaiserreich from 1871 onward. In Britain, to take an example at the opposite extreme, various private schools certainly produced excellent results, but before the 1902 Education Act there was nothing that could be described as a secondary school system.64 Only in the military field was Germany at that time as much of an inspiration to the world as it was in education. This was also true of its universities.

3 The University as a Cultural Export from Europe

The Break with the Early Modern Period The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the modern university in its three dimensions: (a) a training center that structures, preserves, and trans- mits knowledge; (b) a place for research or the generation of new knowledge; and (c) an agency of socialization, character formation, and self-discovery for young people after they complete their compulsory schooling. In most Euro- pean countries, the reorganization of university training and scientific research preceded the reshaping of high schools. Educational systems were dynamized from the top down. The university as an autonomous corporation of scholars was a time-honored institution characteristic of Latin Europe. Other civilizations such as the Chi- nese or Islamic had no less effective means of establishing and transmitting knowledge: monasteries, religious high schools, or academies (e.g., the Chi- nese shuyuan), where scholars would gather together informally. “Forums for rigorous intellectual debate” were not peculiar to Europe in premodern ages.65 In this diversity of scholarly cultures, the European university shaped in the Middle Ages stood out because it was relatively independent of external powers and constituted a space with its own laws. The Chinese state—to take an extreme counterexample—did not allow for a semiautonomous res publica of knowledge bearers. Either scholars were firmly integrated into the state appa- ratus (many as “compilers” at the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing) or they congregated in semiprivate circles that the emperor viewed with suspicion. In China there were no legally protected corporations of scholars—still less ones

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 799 comparable to the English universities, which had their own political representatives in Parliament. Such “premodern” conditions disappeared at various points in the nineteenth century—in China and Japan between 1870 and 1910, although for the time being private academies in Japan held their ground alongside the state school system, with a teaching program less strongly geared to the West. Only in the Islamic world did some of the old institutions—above all, the religious schools (madrasas) independent of the state—survive in a modified form; al-Azhar (“the Luminous”) in Cairo, a place of theological and legal learning dating back to the tenth century, is the oldest university in the world.66 The European university, by contrast, having undergone fundamental reform in the nineteenth century, spread all around the world. The modern university, as a place where secular knowledge is produced, arose after 1800 in close association with the emergence of nation-states in Europe, becoming in the last third of the century one of the basic institutions of the modern world. Its inventors and the place and time of the invention can be identified with precision: namely, a handful of aristocratic reformers (Freiherr vom Stein, Hardenberg) and idealist philosophers (Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher), in Berlin in the years after 1803 and especially 1806— when the near collapse of the Prussian state had left a power vacuum, suddenly opening up a space in which new unorthodox approaches were on offer to save the state and the nation. Although the modern university that came into being in those years, with Berlin University (founded in 1810) as its flagship, preserved many rituals and symbols from its medieval past, it was in essence a revolutionary invention in the Age of Revolutions.67 The new university brought with it a number of distinctive social types: for example, the Oxbridge “don” or the German Ordinarius, ruling in authoritarian fashion over institutes and flocks of assistants.68 New above all was the youthful “student,” who in Europe replaced an older type of the more or less ageless “scholar”; the consequences are still visible today. In some countries, the nonacademic observer becomes aware of the university’s existence only when students call attention to themselves through political activity. The chain of association “students—young people—rebellion” was forged in the early nineteenth century. In Germany it was the student fraternities (Burschenschaften), first appearing in public in 1815, which made student protest a factor in politics. In the case of France, “the birth of students as a social group” has been dated to the three decades after 1814;69 they played a significant role in all the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Later, students and graduates of modern educational institutions became active in radical, and increasingly also nationalist, politics. A Russian student movement developed in the years after the Crimean War at the five universities of the time, although in its early stages it was tightly controlled; the first disturbances associated with it broke out in 1861.70 In India, students played a leading part in the mass actions of 1905 against the partition of Bengal—key events for the founding of Indian nationalism—and in the

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Japanese colony of Korea they led the nationwide movement of March 1919 that mobilized more than two million people in anti-Japanese protests.71 In China, only two months later, student unrest linked to the Fourth of May Movement provided an anti-imperialist and cultural spark that ignited the next stage of the revolutionary process. In each of these cases, national universities had borrowed from Western models in which free space existed for the development of political consciousness. Colonial Universities Before 1800, universities of the European type had been founded elsewhere only in the New World. In Spanish America they were inserted into a system of church control over cultural life. Conditions were freer in those that sprang up in North America, already conspicuous by their number alone; the United States today has thirteen universities founded before 1800, compared with a mere two in England. In Canada there was clearly less interest. As for the non-Spanish Antilles, no effort was made to found independent universities; the sons of the Creole elite went to Europe for their higher education. In Portuguese America, there had been no high schools at all. The first university was established in Bra- zil only in 1922. The founding of a college near Boston in 1636, named three years later after an ecclesiastical patron, John Harvard, set the English colonies across the At- lantic on their way to becoming the third growth center for universities alongside Europe and Spanish America. Yale, Princeton, and Columbia Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers University already existed before the American Revolution. Each had a character and organizational forms peculiar to itself, enjoying considerable independence from the political authorities; none of them adopted the Oxbridge model unaltered, and the influence of Scottish universities and Presbyterian/nonconformist academies was hardly less important. Common to them all was a relative impoverishment: John Harvard’s generous legacy had been a great exception. The land donations that most of them received were in a part of the world where land was available in abundance and did not yet have much value. The early colleges had to raise their funds from a wide variety of sources, the main one being student fees. Teaching was on a very modest scale: probably no more than 210 professors were active in 1800 in all the North American colleges combined. Their main goal was the training of clerics, and preparation for other professions developed only slowly.72 The idea and practice of the university spread worldwide only after the middle of the nineteenth century. In the semiautonomous settler colonies within the British Empire, it became a matter of honor for the colonial authorities and municipal dignitaries to lay the foundations for a local university, even if for a long time there was no chance of departing from the great British models. Aus- tralia’s first university came into being in 1850 in Sydney; New Zealand followed in 1869. As for Europe’s “nonwhite” colonies, universities were created if they

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 801 seemed to fit the purpose of training indigenous personnel. The sons of colonial functionaries and settlers were sent to the mother country to complete their education. Not only were colonial universities starved of funds, they were unable to confer doctorates; Europeans always stood at the top of the academic hierarchy, irrespective of their individual talents. Even in Algeria, a comparatively old colony close to the metropolis, there was no full university until 1909, and the later renowned University of Hanoi, the most original French creation in the sphere of colonial education, had its launch only in 1919. Where a prestigious, high-quality university stood out amid the varied landscape of secondary and tertiary education, it was founded after the turn of the century, and in most cases after the First World War. In Egypt, a number of institutes of learning fused together in 1908 to form a (private) Egyptian University. In West Africa, the ideas that led to the founding of universities in the twentieth century were already being formulated by Africans after 1865; but it was only in the 1940s that capable universities were created in the British colonies of tropical Africa. The widest tertiary education in the colonies was offered by the American Philip- pines, where a state university along the lines of US agricultural and engineering colleges opened its doors in Manila in 1908; there were also a number of private universities, many of them run by missionaries. A German-style system of higher education did not develop in a single colony; nor was the English model of democratically constituted, self-governing colleges in the loose overall framework of a university exported to Asia and Africa. Colonial universities had an authoritarian structure, and their curriculum largely depended on the metropolis and the special objectives of the colonial authorities. Sometimes tertiary education was dispensed with altogether. Dutch universities, especially the old “Rijksuniversiteit” of Leiden, contained important centers for Asian studies; very little research was conducted in In- donesia itself (in contrast to British India or French Indochina), and before the Second World War the Dutch did not think of satisfying the educational needs of an Indonesian elite. The fleeting vision of an “imperial science” in which all the talents of the empire would participate—an idea propagated under Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty—had absolutely no counterpart in the Dutch colonies. Only in 1946, three years before independence, was a “Provisional University of Indonesia” launched with faculties of law, medicine, and philosophy—the germ of the later Universitas Indonesia.73 Scholarly Traditions and New Approaches in Noncolonial Asia In the politically independent countries of Asia and Africa too, the adoption of European university models did not begin until the turn of the century. South Africa, even as a British colony, had had a larger number of educational institutions than any other African country, but the foundations of the university system that we see today were not laid there until after 1916. In the Middle East, Lebanon was a special case: higher education developed there earlier than

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anywhere else in the region, though not on the initiative of the central Ottoman state but as missionary implants. In 1910 the Protestant American University of Beirut took shape out of a series of precursors, while the Université Saint- Joseph, run by French Jesuits, opened in the same year on the foundations of what had originally been a theological institute, later supplemented by a medical college whose degrees were recognized even by the secular state of the French Third Republic.74 The most important new creation in the Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire was the University of Istanbul (1906), successful at the fourth attempt, which was explicitly modeled on American and European universities and had a total of five faculties. In contrast to the Lebanese universities, the natural sciences occupied an important place in Istanbul right from the beginning.75 It marked a clear break with older Islamic institutions centered on law and religion; its precursors, rather, were the (often ephemeral) semiprivate circles in which individuals had grappled with Western knowledge and its relationship to the indigenous heritage. The development of higher education in China was parallel in time and similar in substance. The first universities appeared there after 1895, the Imperial University (embryo of the future Beijing University) in 1898. Traditional institutions of learning had all but disappeared by the time of the 1911 Revolution, but—again as in the Ottoman Empire—many of the values and attitudes associated with classical scholarship had survived. There was great resistance to subject specialization, for instance, and until the abolition of the state examinations system in 1905 the Confucian scholar had to demonstrate his competence in nearly every branch of knowledge. It must be said that a critical spirit was not absent from Imperial China: philological methods fostered doubts about the written tradition, and there was a right to criticize the highest dignitaries, including the emperor himself, if their policies were thought to be deviating from the principles of the classical teachings. However, the cultural authority of the top bureaucracy, which set the tasks for the state examinations until the system was wound up, was considered unassailable. The frank criticism voiced outside its ranks—for example, in local private academies—first had to gain entry to the public space of the newly emerging universities.76 Chinese universities drew on a variety of sources. The Imperial University of 1898 was founded with an eye to Tokyo University, itself shaped by French and German examples. When Japan intensified its aggressive policy against China during the First World War, parts of the new Chinese academic intel- ligentsia turned more toward European and North American models; mission universities—some considered excellent, even for the sciences, after the First World War—had the same horizons already. Only in the 1920s did the landscape become more diversified and give birth to a real academic community. The main impetus for reform came from the important scholar-administrator Cai Yuanpei, who from 1917 built Beijing University into a fully fledged research institution along German lines, while also observing the principle of the unity

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 803 of research and teaching (scarcely a feature in colonial universities). Under ex- tremely difficult external circumstances, China in the Republican period developed an academic life (including the Academia Sinica, founded in 1928) that was capable of top-class achievements. Despite ancient traditions of scholarship, it was only the early Republic that laid the foundations for China’s present-day status as a major player in the world of international science. Japan was the only country in Asia that evolved differently. Its premodern conditions were not necessarily more favorable, but the reception of European knowledge was not broken off as dramatically as it was in late-eighteenth- century China, when the flow of information via the Jesuits came to an abrupt end. In the early nineteenth century, “Holland studies” became a wider opening to European science, and from the 1840s it was possible to study Western surgery and medicine in Edo (Tokyo). After 1868, the Meiji leadership set out to make systematic use of Western knowledge: Tokyo University, founded in 1877, was completely oriented to Western sciences and refrained from giving courses in Japanese and Chinese literature. Although private initiatives should not be overlooked, the state stood more solidly than anywhere else in Asia behind the building of universities. A decree of March 1886 explicitly stated that the planned new crop of imperial universities should “teach those arts and sciences essential in the nation.”77 After the First World War, with a group of well-developed universities at its core, Japan’s diversified system of higher education was surpassed only by the United States and a few European countries. Despite the unusually strong role of the state, university professors in the late Meiji period (from roughly 1880 on) were by no means spokes in a wheel happy to take orders from above. Along with French and German forms of organization had come an ethos of the university as a free space for research and debate. The academic elite of the Meiji period linked up with two different mandarin traditions and their related role models: on the one hand, it could identify with the self-confidence and autonomous tendencies of classical Chinese scholars; on the other, it took up the authoritarian habits, but also the pride, of German academic “mandarins,” as Fritz K. Ringer memorably called them.78 However, they were paid more like Chinese than Ger- man mandarins: badly.79 Ideal and Model of the Research University The ideal of reliably funded research, free of immediate utility pressures and provided with the necessary material trappings (laboratories, libraries, external research stations, etc.), was essential to the nineteenth-century European conception of a university, though much more difficult to export or import than its general framework as an educational institution. A few premodern universities— most notably Leiden in the Netherlands—had already thought of themselves as research universities. But today’s conception of it as a “total package” first emerged during the Age of Revolution, or, to be more precise, between the 1770s and 1830s in Protestant Germany: in Göttingen, Leipzig, and eventually

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the Berlin of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher.80 By no means were all German universities research universities. However, they were examples of the few high performers that echoed around the world. The research university model had as its core a centralization of tasks that until then were scattered around in the “republic of scholars.” Even if other places of research continued to exist in Germany, and even if new ones were added toward the end of the nineteenth century (the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, etc.), a basic idea of German reformers was to move research out of the academies into the universities and to bring various “schools” under their roof as institutes and seminars. The university thus acquired much wider objectives than before. Initially existing alongside academies and learned societies (such as the Royal Society in Britain), museums, and botanical gardens, it became the dominant scientific institution and the decisive social space in which academic communities developed.81 It also offered opportunities to conduct research without an eye on how it could be turned to account. Only in this way was it possible to separate theo retical physics (a new field whose great age began at the turn of the century) from the hold of experimental physics.82 Together with classical and Romantic music (in which Austria, too, was involved, of course), the research university model became Germany’s most important cultural export since the Reforma- tion—a complex with a global, though highly varied, impact. Nor should its disadvantages be overlooked: since school qualifications such as theAbitur exam guaranteed access to higher education, a danger of overloading was built into the university system. In Imperial Germany, the fact that the educated middle classes and technical specialists were products of an educational system completely run by the state (albeit decentralized at Länder level) contributed to an illiberal fixation on state authority among large sections of the German elite. The nonvocational “liberal education” that in Britain or America is still seen as a task of the tertiary phase of the education system ended in Germany when students graduated from the gymnasium. The Germany university trained people in a particular subject and did not care for character formation. Nowhere was specialization taken so far in both research and teaching.83 Delayed Adoption of the German Model in Europe The German formulas did not at once find enthusiastic imitators elsewhere in Europe. In 1800, with individual exceptions, the advance of science was concentrated in Britain, France, and the German lands. Italy and the Netherlands had failed to keep up. Breakthroughs in linguistics and archaeology came from Scandinavia, and Russia later contributed major achievements in the natural sciences (e.g., Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, in 1869). It seemed to many observers that the relative weight of the countries in the Big Three shifted in the course of the nineteenth century. Important scientific discoveries continued to be made in France and Britain too, but to a much greater degree than

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 805 in Germany this happened outside university structures. Under Napoleon, the Grandes Écoles had developed into sophisticated, authoritarian training centers for the state bureaucracy and civil engineering, with inadequate emphasis on the “pure” natural sciences and the humanities. In England, Oxford and Cambridge—traditionally geared to training the priesthood—long steered clear of the sciences and showed no interest in building laboratories. As in China, it seemed self-evident that higher education should proceed through the study of texts, in sharp contrast to practical education in hospitals, law courts, or museums. Appropriately enough, the first science to take up residence in the universities was geology: the science of reading the stone “book of nature.” Gentlemen scholars such as Charles Darwin, the son of a wealthy doctor and speculator (and grandson of Josiah Wedgwood, one of the great pioneers of industrialization), continued to play a role in English science that was no longer possible in Germany after the death of Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. (A special case was Gregor Mendel, whose brilliant discoveries in genetics, made at the secluded Augustinian abbey in Brünn [Brno, Czech Republic], had no impact on the scientific public for more than three decades.) Scientific societies, many newly founded in the nineteenth century, retained special importance for a long time in France and Britain. As in the early modern period, London was a much more important center for the sciences than Oxford or Cambridge and the location of all the learned societies active on a national level. Modern developments in higher education emanated mainly from particular institutions within the University of London or from later foundations in cities such as Manchester (1851). There were not yet any Nobel prizes; the first were awarded in 1901. Nor did quantified rankings form part of academic life. Reputations had to be built up through individual work within webs of exchanges with other scholars, which from the beginning had an international as well as national dimension. Decades before the unification of Germany as a nation-state, its scientists formed a community which, thanks to its own performance and the diplomatic efforts of Alexander von Humboldt, was well integrated with the rest of Europe. From roughly midcentury on, academic communities in different countries kept a close watch on one another’s activities. Science became a public arena of international competition—for example, between the microbiologists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. When Wilhelm Röntgen’s recent discovery of X-rays became known in 1896, Emperor Wilhelm II sent a telegram to the later Nobel laureate, in which he thanked God for this triumph of the German fatherland.84 At the same time, the links between science, technology, industry, and national power became more apparent. In Britain, an impression spread among the public that the country had come off badly at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867. In France, the military defeat of 1871 at the hands of the new German Reich was put down to a backwardness in education and science. But demands that the state should build large “German-style” universities yielded results only after the

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political consolidation of the Third Republic in 1880, the legal foundations for a new system finally being laid in 1896. Even then, however, the research imperative had less force than in Germany.85 A modern system of higher education developed in France no earlier than in Japan, while in Britain the decentralized structures of academic life made it difficult to speak of a university system at all until far into the twentieth century. Oxford and Cambridge, which after the turn of the century modernized their teaching methods, stopped giving grades without written tests, and ended the requirement that fellows remain single. They converted themselves only after the First World War into research universities with a strong scientific component, following the lead of Imperial College in London, established in 1907 and soon acknowledged as one of the top research institutions in the world. The high costs of modern laboratory work required central financial planning beyond the bud- gets of traditional colleges and individual faculties. Specialized technical colleges have continued to play a lesser role in Britain than in Germany, France, Switzer- land (where the prototype of such an institution, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich dates back to 1858), or Japan. The PhD, initially awarded for science subjects too, was not introduced in Cambridge until 1919, by which time it had long been customary in Germany and the United States.86 It also took many years before restrictions on internal appointments of teaching staff in Oxbridge allowed fresh ideas to penetrate from outside. The Rise of Universities in the United States The German research university was thus adopted in modified form by other European nations with an important scientific life, though only after an extraordinary delay of at least half a century. Its influence was felt earlier outside Europe. However, the performance of American universities should not be exaggerated, either in colonial times or during the period up to the Civil War. One of their principal historians speaks of the years from 1780 to 1860 as a “false dawn” and dates the real hegemony of the American research university to the period after 1945.87 Only in the two decades after the Civil War did academic communities take shape in the main scientific disciplines, whereas similar trends had been op- erating in Britain, France, and Germany since the 1830s. The German model of the research university was then comprehensively studied in the United States, and in 1876 the founding of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore signaled the emergence of the full university on the other side of the Atlantic. It is true, though, that it spread only slowly elsewhere; in many cases, research was seen as a prestigious luxury, not as the very essence of a university.88 The spectacular rise of certain American universities would have taken much longer if they had not been able to profit from the economic boom of the last quarter of the century. Ever since the days of John Harvard and Elihu Yale they had been dependent on private donations and foundations, but around 1850, wealthy individuals began to show an increased willingness to support the

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 807 academic world philanthropically. After 1880, as the great American fortunes were being made, sponsors sought to perpetuate their memory in the title of universities: whereas John D. Rockefeller, for example, had contributed anon- ymously to Columbia University, many institutions now bore the names of railroad, tobacco, or steel barons. Often religious motives also lay behind this. New university buildings were built in a uniform neo-Gothic style—sometimes, as at Palo Alto at the Stanford family’s request, in accordance with Mediterra- nean taste. The old American colleges had been small and plain, and in their architecture too. Now large spaces were required to accommodate new libraries, laboratories, and sports facilities. More than in Europe, affluent civic pride found expression in splendid university buildings that were the architectural highlight even of a city as large as Chicago. German influence was evident in the ambitious orientation to research and the allocation of subjects and faculties, but state planning, direction, and funding, essential to the German model, were confined to a minority of universities in the public sector. The fast-growing top universities built up their own internal bureaucracies; professors, though held in ever-higher social esteem, were regarded as employees subject to management. University presidents saw themselves increasingly as entrepreneurs. Among administrators and those involved in teaching and learning, pride in the institution was combined with a cool, market-oriented vision of education and science. All this made late nineteenth-century American research universities an unmistak- ably original development on their side of the Atlantic.89 Japan: A Semi-Import of the German Model In comparison with the United States, Japanese universities were still weakly developed on the eve of the First World War. All sciences considered at all modern had a place in Tokyo or one of the other imperial universities, but the lavish funding received by American and some German universities was not forthcoming. The two faculties enjoying the most generous support were medicine and engineering, where Japan’s early successes had attracted attention abroad. In other spheres, the dependence on the West was still so strong that teaching did not progress beyond the repetition of textbook wisdom. Meanwhile hun- dreds and thousands of Japanese went to study in Europe and the United States, and those who returned to take up a responsible academic post imitated their Western teachers in every detail for the time being. Western advisers and lectur- ers had formerly played a major role in building certain departments, but this gradually declined in the late Meiji period. Altogether some eight thousand such experts were employed,90 giving a crucial impetus not only in natural science or medicine but also in law or history. Since it was not possible to recruit abroad systematically, and since a career in Japan, despite quite high pay, was not every- one’s dream in life, much depended on luck and chance. The example of modern historiography, introduced by the Berlin-trained Ludwig Rieß shows the limits of the transfer.91 Academics in Japan adopted the positivist source criticism

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of the German historical school (which fit in well with national traditions of textual criticism originating in China), but not its philosophical program and literary techniques. Nor could they claim to have the same public appeal that Rieß’s German masters enjoyed. Historiography remained narrowly specialist and did not dare to tackle the new national myths of the Meiji regime, such as its fictitious imperial genealogy. Unlike in the admired German example, history did not become the leading discipline in the humanities or among the educated middle-class public. Another weak point of the early Japanese university system was the extreme hierarchy that made Tokyo the unchallenged top dog. This prevented the kind of competition to be found among American universities as well as in the strongly decentralized federal German system, where the job market encompassed not only the German Reich but also Austria, Bohemia (mainly Prague), and German-speaking Switzerland. Nevertheless, by the 1920s at the latest, it was clear to the international scientific public that a start had been made in East Asia on the development of a research-oriented academic system—not only the organizational forms of the European university but also its research imperative. This was one of the differences between Japan and China on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire on the other. In the view of the Turkish historian Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the considerable efforts of the Ottoman reform elite (decades before similar initiatives in China) to translate or “buy” Western knowledge from Euro pean experts stopped at the threshold of an experimental spirit and a research culture capable of learning from results.92

4 Mobility and Translation

Patterns of Perception The science that blossomed in these new organizational forms was European in origin; only a few other elements entered into the edifice of what by 1900 was universally valid science. The study of nature in the medieval Arab world might have been superior to that in the Latin West, and the ancient Indians might have been supreme mathematicians and linguists: yet nineteenth-century European science was less in debt to non-Europeans than the early modern collectors, classifiers, and cartographers in Asia, whose work could be carried out only with the help of local experts. In the eighteenth century, Europeans had still believed they could learn from Asian textile technologies or agrarian practices such as fertilizer use or crop rotation.93 In the nineteenth century, such trust in the practical knowledge of others was on the wane. “Scientific” colonialism, much vaunted at the end of the century, often arrived at agronomic insights that had long been known to peasants living in the area, or made mistakes against which they could easily have been warned. At the height of colonial narrow-mindedness, local topographical exper- tise and the skills of indigenous craftsmen were used at best in the construction

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 809 of roads and houses, but otherwise no serious notice was taken of other people’s knowledge. It would, however, be naive to romanticize “local knowledge” in non- European cultures, and unjust to charge an expanding Europe with its wholesale suppression—a sin more grievous than that of simply ignoring it. Asian and African elites recognized the significance of the scientific and technological knowledge coming out of Europe, and increasingly the United States. They tried to acquire it, to put it to the test, to translate it into non-Western languages and conceptual frameworks, and to relate it to their own traditions and experience. The mobility of individual complexes of knowledge proved to be quite varied: some “traveled” easier and faster than others. The old idea that the worldwide “diffusion” of European sciences, by virtue of their innate superiority, was a more or less natural process is not altogether misguided, but it is simplis- tic insofar as it overlooks the particular cultural and political conditions under which contact was made and knowledge transferred.94 Nakayama Shigeru, a historian of science who has studied various patterns of transfer in East Asia, argues that since Japanese mathematics was self-enclosed and incompatible with European mathematics in its structure and notation system, it dropped out of the picture soon after the Meiji Renewal. This did not happen because it was more primitive, but because it was more practical and economical for Japanese mathematicians to adopt the new system en bloc than to tinker with the old one. In medicine, by contrast, Chinese or Japanese systems survived intact alongside others imported from the West; the two were never fused into one. The combination was (and is) effected at the level of practice rather than theory. In Japan, however, where all transfer decisions reflected the drive to shake off China’s long-term tutelage and to become the star pupils of Western modernity, indigenous medicine lost its scientific status during the Meiji period; either it was not taught at all at the new universities or it was de- moted to a popular (but widely used) art. Nakayama finds yet another pattern in astronomy. Jesuit missionaries introduced the European science into China as early as early as the seventeenth century, but their data and calculation methods could be incorporated without too many problems into Chinese calendar astronomy. The Jesuits thus helped to reinforce the traditional role of court astronomy as a support for the emperor’s legitimacy. For two and a half centuries no one ever thought of regarding Western astronomy as “modern” or superior. The main reason why its indigenous equivalent disappeared was not that it was defeated in a battle of ideas, but that it lost its function in society. When the offices of court astronomer and state custodian of the calendar were eventually abolished—not before the late nineteenth century!—the game was up; young astronomers trained in Europe and America soon built up a new discipline in the universities. Until then, however, the imported science had actually served to strengthen indigenous traditions.95 The dissemination routes of Western knowledge were tortuous and unpre- dictable. An international community of researchers, such as we take for granted

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today, came into being only in the late twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, non-European cultures had to acquire not simply existing stocks of knowledge but complete scientific worldviews. Thus, although the Jesuits acquainted Chinese scholars with Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, full translations of the Elements of Geom- etry and the Principia Mathematica were not completed until the 1860s.96 At that time, when Protestant missionaries and Chinese scholars were beginning to work closely together on translation projects, there was a preference for compact information in Western textbooks, which were themselves popular digests of previous research. By the early twentieth century, Chinese scientists were nearly always capable of understanding specialist literature in English or German. Their efforts tended to be derided in the West, both then and later, as attempts to catch up that often took them down a blind alley. But a different way of looking at things is also possible. Given the inertia of traditional scholarly cultures, it was a respectable performance to absorb Western knowledge within just a few decades in countries such as Japan, China, or the Ottoman Empire. Only in Japan did the state give systematic financial support. Where missionaries were the decisive agency of transfer, as they were in China, many initiatives remained private. The challenges were huge, starting with formidable problems of terminology. The adaption of scientific Latin had begun here and there in the early modern period, but by no means always did this result in a stable nomenclature; the terms chosen by the Jesuits were frequently criticized and corrected in nineteenth- century China. As in Japan, several translators might work alongside one another in a single discipline, so that long and ramified discussions were often necessary to reach lexical agreement. In philosophy and theology, in law and the humanities, the difficulties were especially great. Concepts such as “freedom,” “right,” or “civilization,” each with complex semantics of Western origin, could not be represented directly and unambiguously in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, or Turkish. These cultures had their own no-less-intricate worlds of meaning, so that a new Western concept had to be interpreted within the reception context, where it would nearly always pick up nuances alien to it in the original language. For example, by 1870, Japanese lexicographers and translators were conveying the English word “liberty” by means of four different terms in Chinese characters, each of which added a special sense of its own. Only gradually did one of these, jiyū (“following one’s intentions without restriction”), became accepted as the standard translation.97 “Science” was another concept over which translators wrestled. The classical vocabulary in China had more than one expression that came close, without cor- responding to it precisely: the traditional zhizhi signified “extending knowledge to the full,” while gezhi meant rather “investigating and developing knowledge.” Any Chinese scholar in the nineteenth century knew that these verbal expres- sions, both containing the character zhi (knowledge), should be seen against the background of twelfth-century neo-Confucian philosophy. From the 1860s,

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 811 gezhi gradually stabilized as the translation of “science,” but also of “natural philosophy.” But then the term kexue, imported via Japan, appeared on the scene and after 1920 or thereabouts became the standard translation that it still is today. Kexue places the emphasis less on the process of knowledge acquisition than on the categorization of knowledge, especially its curricular organization. When the leading minds of the post-1915 New Culture Movement began to feel that the narrow, static quality of this term did not reflect the novelty of the modern concept of science, they actually turned for a while to the rough phonetic imitation saiyinsi. This post-Confucian neologism, devoid of the semantic baggage of centuries past, was supposed to convey the idea of a moral awakening from the slumber of sterile tradition, a renewal of Chinese civilization and nationhood through enlightenment and critical thinking.98 Science in Exchange for Art and Irrationalism? More than ever before, the flow of knowledge around the world in the long nineteenth century was a one-way street. Western natural science devalued the stock of knowledge about nature in other regions, with the result that there was little or no interest in even Chinese or Indian medicine and pharmacology— which has since been rediscovered in the West and is becoming increasingly influential over the last half century or so. All that traveled in an east-west direction was aesthetic and religious impulses. The knowledge involved here did not have transcultural validity underpinned by verifiable research procedures and scientific criticism. Rather, it offered Asian, and later African, responses to the Western quest for spirituality and new sources of artistic inspiration. Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and inhabitants of Benin in West Africa (where a British “punitive” expedition in 1897 hauled off a fortune in ivory and bronze objects highly valued in Europe) did not propagate their culture in the West. Western artists and philosophers themselves went in quest of the unfamiliar and adjusted what they found to their requirements. Romantic poets and thinkers, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling or Friedrich Creuzer, became ex- cited about Eastern mysteries, and for a few decades the ancient Sanskrit literature, translated into European languages since the 1780s, aroused much interest among intellectuals in the West. Recent translations of the classical books of Hinduism fascinated Arthur Schopenhauer, while Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading North American philosopher of his time, delved deeply into Indian religious thought, criticized the absolute claims of Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, and advocated a spiritual rapprochement between East and West.99 In 1857, Japanese artists, most notably Takahashi Yuichi, began to practice European techniques of oil painting and triggered a new wave of interest in Western art. In the same decade, the first Japanese woodcuts reached Europe in the baggage of travelers and diplomats. Some were put on display for the first time at a public exhibition in London in 1862, but this and later collections by no means gave a representative overview of ancient and modern Japanese art.

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Nevertheless, individual prints by masters such as Hokusai or Hiroshige were a source of lasting excitement to artists and critics. The so-called Japonism that grew out of these encounters was something new: art from outside Europe was no longer used only for decoration or costumes, in the way that Chinese and Turkish material had been in various Oriental fashions of the eighteenth century, or that North Africa had featured as an exotic setting for desert or harem motifs in French painting between 1830 and 1870 (Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, Eugène Fromentin, and others). Japanese art gave answers to problems with which artists in the forefront of European modernism were then wrestling; they observed its independent achievements and realized the close affinities with their own efforts. Thus, the European enthusiasm for Japanese art and the Japanese enthusiasm for European art peaked at exactly the same time, but for different reasons. The fascination of the Western aesthetic for Japanese people began to wear off after Ernest Fennelosa—an influential figure in both East and West—alerted them to the wealth of their own artistic heritage and placed himself at the head of a movement that, with the support of official cultural policy, advocated the patriotic renewal of genuinely Japanese painting. An American Japanophile thus became the founder of Japanese neotraditionalism. Fennelosa’s writings elicited a strong response in Europe too, raising the interest in things Japanese to a new level of art criticism.100 The musical influence of East Asia was also important, though rather less epochal. The old prejudice that Chinese music was intolerable to Western ears remained alive for a long time, based only on the impressions of individual travelers and their incomplete attempts to transcribe exotic tunes into European notation. In the 1880s, the invention and rapid proliferation of the phonograph finally created the conditions for non-Western music to become better known in Europe. Giacomo Puccini and Gustav Mahler, for example, studied phono- gram recordings of East Asian music, the former turning them to account in Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (1924–25), the latter in Das Lied von der Erde (1908) and his Ninth Symphony (1909); Puccini, it has been alleged, ultimately relied on a musical clock imported from China. Composers of light music were content simply to evoke Oriental moods by means of instrumental- ization and tone color. Musical inspirations that often sounded like clichés could lead to fresh inventions in the hands of such masters as Giuseppe Verdi (Aida, 1871), Camille Saint-Saëns (Suite algérienne, 1881), or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Sheherazade, 1888). The Asian influence ran deeper where the Western tone system was allowed to be destabilized by alien elements. Claude Debussy led the way in this respect, after he had heard authentic gamelan music at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.101 After its heyday in the period between 1860 and 1920, the European fascination with Asia gradually subsided. Postwar Europe was more preoccupied with itself, while “Oriental” Asia seemed to lose its magic as urban modernization got under way, revolutions and anti-imperialist movements flared up,

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 813 and harbingers of military rule appeared here and there. The small minority of fin-de-siècle European intellectuals who looked east to Asia did so with little concern for its contemporary reality, in a spirit of Kulturkritik or with hopes of salvation. The attraction was the inexhaustible depths of various “Eastern wis- doms,” amid a crisis that seemed to many to be affecting Christianity as much as the rational worldview of natural science. In Germany the publishing house of Eugen Diederichs, a lawyer who espoused conservative lifestyle reforms, brought out the Analects of Confucius, the Book of Laozi, and other texts of the ancient Chinese canon, in a series of translations by the missionary-sinologist Richard Wilhelm that were of a high philological and literary quality. From 1875 the system of so-called theosophy, preached with bizarre appurtenances by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, had a particular impact, even in India and Ceylon. It was a syncretic version of conventional occultism combined with the most diverse Middle Eastern and Asiatic traditions, from the Kabbalah to the Hindu Vedas, with a sprinkling of Aryan racism.102 Rudolf Steiner, a master to a huge number of devoted followers in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States, came out of this mystical milieu; in 1912 he created a doctrinally more temperate Anthroposophical Society of his own. An undifferentiated “Asia,”fons et origo of salvationist doctrines, thus became the symbol of an irrationalism polemically counterposed to the Western faith in reason that seemed to reach even into the well-tempered culture of ortho- dox Protestantism. Such impulses were not expected to come from Islam. There was an aesthetic appreciation of Muslim poetry and architecture, but its main currents were quite rationalist and did not seem to offer an alternative religious worldview. A paradoxical situation therefore developed in the last third of the nineteenth century. Painfully aware of the gap that had opened up, elites in the non-Occidental world strove to appropriate advanced science and technology from the West, often regarding it as a universal achievement of the modern age that would forearm them against the supremacy of the major Western powers,103 while also—especially in India and, a few decades later, in China—sharply crit- icizing elements of irrationalism and “superstition” in their own traditions.104 At the same time, minorities of intellectuals in Europe and North America instru- mentalized “Eastern wisdom” in their struggle against the faith in reason that characterized Western scientific culture. The ironical counterpoint that Max Weber presented in his late studies of the economic ethos of world religions es- caped public notice in this regard. In his view, the tension between worldliness and otherworldliness was a source of the economic dynamism of the Occident, whereas India was too strongly, and China too weakly, oriented to spiritual hopes of salvation. Around the turn of the century, Asia thus acquired greater importance than ever in certain fields of Western thought, but it also became a projection screen for European irrationalism that seemed to leave it with no opportunities for development of its own. Revered for its “spirituality,” Asia was stuck in limbo, with

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no present and no future. Only Mohandas K. Gandhi, the later “Mahatma” who first attracted Western attention after his return, in 1915, from a long sojourn in South Africa, managed (at least in European eyes) to combine the air of an Asian prophet and holy man with a cunning politics to empower the powerless.

5 Humanities and the Study of the Other By 1900 the sciences had acquired unprecedented cultural authority in Eu- rope, the United States, and some Asian countries like Japan and India.105 At first small, then rapidly growing communities of scholars had taken shape in newly formed disciplines. The great majority of the world’s scientists were no longer educated amateurs but salaried professionals working in universities, industry, or government research institutions. The system of education in the most advanced countries now included both “pure” and “applied” science—a distinction that had only just appeared on the scene. A foundation in mathematics and (ancient) languages, universally applicable, meant that the sciences could be extended into further domains through the training of new generations. Admittedly the total volume of creativity did not keep pace with the number of scientists, since there was a disproportionate growth of mediocrity and routinism. The production of geniuses can be socially managed to only a very limited extent.106 The Human and Social Sciences Institutionalized expansion took in not only natural science and medicine, which by the early twentieth century was no longer understood as a proto- scientific craft and an art, but also the human and social sciences (Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften)—two terms that were, if not coined, then first popular- ized among the scientific public toward the end of the nineteenth century. The “humanities” was another neologism of this kind. “Social science” went back a few decades earlier, used from the beginning not as an umbrella term for older discourses such as “statistics” (= the description of states) or “political economy,” but as an indication that the rigor of modern natural science was being claimed for the study of society, with practical purposes, chiefly social reform, in view. If we leave aside early theorists with a background in philosophy, such as Au- guste Comte or Herbert Spencer, the discipline was at first closer to empirical investigation than to theory (in Lorenz von Stein or the early representatives of the German Verein für Sozialpolitik founded in 1873). Karl Marx, not just a speculating theorist but a tireless student of social reality, was one of the few who transcended this opposition in their work. No attempt was made before 1890 to define a common identity that differ- entiated the social sciences from other fields of learning; only then did pro- fessorships in “sociology” start to become common in Europe and the United States.107 For the time being, sociology and economics remained closely inter- twined, especially in the two German traditions of Marxism and the Historical

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School of Nationalökonomie (up to and including Max Weber). After 1870, economic science in most countries moved away from the older tradition of political economy—which focused on production and labor in their social interrelationship—and turned to theories of marginal utility and equilibrium primarily concerned with the market and the structure of subjective needs. This separation of economic behavior from its social preconditions was part of a general differentiation within the social sciences during the last four decades before the First World War.108 By 1930, at least outside Germany, where remnants of the Historical School stood their ground, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between economics and sociology—as well as a split between the social conformism of economic science and the sociological interest in the dark sides of capitalist development and the chances for reforming society. In Japan, the Western social sciences met with greater interest than anywhere else. But they were received selectively. Gemeinschaft was more important than Gesellschaft, the collective rated higher that the individual, for early Japanese sociologists and political scientists. Since their work involved them in the grand national project of neo-traditionalist integration through a strong state, they were wary of sub- jecting the new myths of the Meiji period—above all, the emperor cult and the fiction of Japan as “one big family”—to rigorous criticism.109 Humanities faculties began to take shape in European universities, especially in France and Germany, in the middle of the nineteenth century; the individ- ualist gentleman-scholar held sway for a little longer in the British Isles. The academization of the human “sciences” was something new. Historians, for example, had existed for more than two thousand years in Europe and China, but never before had history been taught in educational institutions as a methodical science. The first historyprofessors still worth mentioning in a history of science were to be found after 1760 in Göttingen, then the most highly regarded university in the German-speaking world, but they also taught politics or topical matters relevant to the life of the state (“statistics,” Polizeywissenschaft, etc.). At the same time, the greatest European historian of the age, Edward Gibbon, was writing his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) in the comfortable circumstances of a prosperous private scholar on the shores of Lake Geneva. In Britain the first significant historian to occupy a university chair was William Stubbs, in 1886. After Germany had once again taken the lead(Leopold Ranke’s professorship in Berlin began in 1834 and lasted until 1871), it took several decades for history faculties to become established in all European countries. This happened quite early in Russia, where Sergei Mikhailovich Solovev helped to create a school in Moscow in the 1850s. In France, it was only in 1868 that the founding of the École Pratique des Hautes Études initiated a similar process of “scientific” historical research in the Ranke tradition. Even JulesMichelet, both then and now the most famous French historian of the nineteenth century, was noted more as an orator and writer than as an educator. After Louis Napoléon removed him in 1851, for political reasons, from his positions at the National

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Archives and the Collège de France, Michelet lived off the royalties from his numerous publications. In Europe and the United States, the professionalization of historical science was a phenomenon of the period after 1860.110 It took a little longer to develop in the aesthetic disciplines. Intellectually rigorous criticism had existed in Europe since at least the middle of the eighteenth century,111 but it was only shortly before 1900 that university departments of art, music, and various national liter- atures came into being alongside (not in place of ) the freer public discourse of literati, journalists, private scholars, clerics, artists, and professional musicians. There was a less clear-cut separation between public criticism and academic science than in the case of history; the distinction between amateur and professional remained more permeable than in other fields of knowledge. Scholarship differed from aesthetic argument by virtue of its strict philological methods and its careful attention to ancient or medieval sources. As nations increasingly defined themselves in terms of a shared and distinctive cultural legacy, literary critics acquired a prominent new role as literary historians. The history of the nation’s great poets, dramatists, and prose writers joined its political history as a second prop of national identity and pride. Not infrequently, as in the German case, language and literature were a more important element in mental nation building than the memories of a rather unglamorous record of political together- ness. TheGeschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835–42), by the historian and liberal politician Georg Gottfried Gervinus, became a fundamental work of the age. Orientalism and Ethnology The study of other civilizations developed on the margins of the human sciences, never coming to play a central role in European universities.112 More important to this day has been the reaffirmation of Europe’s own roots, partly in Greco-Roman antiquity, partly in the early medieval social formations that are seen as the origins of nationhood. It is true, though, that contacts with foreign civilizations have always aroused curiosity about the Other. Accompanying the ideological glosses on European expansion and aggression, a huge literature developed in the early modern period in which Europeans—often travelers not directly associated with imperial operations—reported on their overseas experi- ences and adventures and tried to understand the customs, religions, and social institutions of the peoples they encountered. The study of language was a special concern. The interest in Arabic language and literature, particularly the Koran, had been constant since the twelfth century, while the Chinese language became known after 1600 via Jesuit missionaries. In places that had regular contact with the Ottoman Empire—Venice or Vienna, for example—experts in the field developed early on. As to the New World, missionaries began systemic study of indigenous languages soon after the Conquest. In close collaboration with In- dian savants, European scholars based in Calcutta and Paris discovered, or rather

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 817 rediscovered, the old language of high culture, Sanskrit, in the 1780s.113 Thanks to the decoding of hieroglyphs by the French linguist and traveler Jean-François Champollion in 1822, Pharaonic Egypt became legible at last. And in 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a young teacher at a secondary school in Göttingen, discovered the key to unlock the ancient Persian cuneiform script. Over several centuries, a varied literature of travelogues, country studies, botanical encyclopedias, dictionaries, grammars, and translations accumulated as a result of countless individual efforts, often outside the major centers of learning. Only the study of Arabic and Middle Eastern languages (important for biblical theology) had roots in early modern university chairs in places such as Leiden and Oxford. Nevertheless, the overall perception of the non-European world since the Middle Ages was saturated with scholarly seriousness. Even travel re- ports were not usually naive accounts of exciting adventures and strange fables, but were penned by observers who carried the most advanced knowledge in their baggage. This intellectual curiosity about the outside world was specific to Euro- peans in the early modern period. Other civilizations did not establish colonies overseas and, apart from rare diplomatic emissaries, sent no travelers to distant lands. Although a few Ottomans reported on their journeys, Muslims generally had little interest in “infidel” lands. The Japanese state forbade its subjects to leave the archipelago, on pain of severe punishment. Chinese scholars, to be sure, studied any “barbarians” who showed up at the imperial court, but only in the nineteenth century did they compose firsthand works on the non-Chinese periphery of the Qing empire. Before 1800, and even as late as 1900, the huge European literature on foreign civilizations was matched by very few texts giving an external view of Europe.114 Whereas “Oriental studies” got off the ground in Europe, it would be the late twentieth century before one could speak of the beginnings of “Occidental studies” in Asia and Africa. The character of European Orientalism changed in the early nineteenth century. As it divided more sharply than before by region (Chinese, Arabic, Per- sian, etc.), it also defined itself more narrowly as the study of ancient texts and sought the same kind of scientific detachment that its model, Greek and Latin philology, had already achieved. This entailed a lack of interest in the contemporary Orient; everything that seemed of value in Asia lay deep in the past, accessible only in a dubious inheritance of written texts and material relics over which Asian or Egyptian archaeology claimed an interpretive monopoly. An- cient Egypt was rediscovered by the scientists who accompanied Bonaparte on his Nile expedition of 1798. This initiated a continuous history of Egyptology, in which French, British, Germans, and Italians long played a greater role than Egyptians themselves. In Mesopotamia, archaeological excavations began during the second decade of the century, encouraged (as later in Anatolia and Iran) by British consular officials.115 These men were well educated and, often having little else to do, could turn their hand to Middle Eastern research, much as army officers played a major role in uncovering the Indian past.116

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In 1801 Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin and then British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, obtained permission from the Ottoman government to take large parts of the Parthenon friezes (already badly damaged by Venetians and Turks) back to London; the famous Elgin Marbles. A hundred years later, with archaeology turned increasingly professional since midcentury, public museums and private collectors in major European countries had accumulated huge quantities of Oriental “antiquities” alongside treasures from ancient Greece and Rome. Manuscripts from all cultures found their way into special sections of the great Western libraries. In regions such as East Asia, where colonial control was more elusive, the market stepped in to assist the acquisition of art objects (stone testimony being less common than in Europe, because of local traditions of tim- ber construction). But there was also theft on a massive scale, as in China during the Second Opium War (1858–60), which reached a climax with the plunder and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops, and again during the foreign occupation of the imperial capital after the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion in summer 1900. Shortly after the turn of the century, hun- dreds of thousands of documents from the fourth to the eleventh century were “acquired” for a token price and carted off from caves near Dunhuang (in today’s northwestern province of Gansu) to European libraries and museums. Archae- ology was not simply a colonial pursuit, however; it could and does also serve to build a sense of nationhood, by uncovering cultural roots long before the historical invasions recorded in written documents. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the material appropriation of Asia, North Africa, and Central America by Europeans (and North Americans) snatched numerous relics of the past from sandy or tropical oblivion, probably saved others from destruction, and laid the foundations for scientific knowledge about Egyptian tombs and Chinese ceramics, Mayan sculpture and Cambodian temples, Persian inscriptions and Babylonian reliefs. Doubts about the propriety of Western actions were seldom voiced at the time, and indigenous governments sometimes gave their approval for excavations and the shipping abroad of cultural treasures. Only since the end of the colonial era has the public become aware of the legal and ethical problems with such pillage. In 1780 only a few specialists in Europe had linguistic access to religions, philosophies, literature, or historical documents from other parts of the world, and Oriental objects were lost amid the colorful diversity of princely “wonder chambers.” By 1910, however, a highly sophisticated academic study of the Ori- ent in France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the United States was in charge of, and kept adding to, a colossal store of knowledge about foreign civilizations. Archaeology, Oriental studies, and comparative religion (a newly emerging discipline pioneered in Oxford in the 1870s by the Saxon scholar Friedrich Max Müller) contributed some of the titanic feats of the nineteenth-century human sciences. Yet, contemporary non-European societies that had no system of writing and little or no urban life could not be studied with the methods of Oriental

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 819 philology. The science of ethnology that came into being from the 1860s onward developed a professional interest in these “primitive” peoples or (in German) Naturvölker, as they were called at the time. Strongly aligned in its first few decades with evolutionist theories of a general progression of humanity, this new science looked for social conditions in other parts of the world that, for West- erners, represented an earlier stage of development they had left behind long ago. Many of the early ethnologists did not travel themselves. Some classified and interpreted the tools, weapons, clothing, and cult objects that had been collected by scientific expeditions and colonial armies; others tried to identify basic patterns hidden in popular myths. The Enlightenment ambition to develop a general “science of man,” a comprehensive “anthropology,” gave way over time to detailed research into particular ethnic groups. Bronisław Malinowski (a Pole) and Franz Boas (an American immigrant from Westphalia), working independently of each other, transformed ethnology (or anthropology, as Boas called it) from a series of speculations based on discrete anecdotal material into a science with empirical procedures centrally involving long-term participant observation. By 1920 the paradigm shift was complete, so that it was now possible and normal to describe the distinctive logic underlying a given non-Western society. This had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, despite its many links to colonialism, the discourse of ethnology was relatively nonracist. Franz Boas’s theory of “cultural relativism,” in particular, was a weighty counter to the racist zeitgeist. On the other hand, the transition from full-scale evolutionism to the new emphasis on specialized modes of in- quiry detached nonliterate societies from a comprehensive history of the human species, placing them in a space of their own outside the parameters of history and sociology. This also bred a certain isolation of ethnology/anthropology among the sciences, least marked in relation to the kind of sociology practiced by Émile Durkheim in France. Only in the 1970s—when its heroic period of description and classification of ethnic groups around the world was essentially over—did anthropology begin to have a major influence on other human and social sciences. There has been much argument as to whether Oriental studies, archaeology, and ethnology should be regarded as handmaidens of colonialism.117 It is clear enough that the simple existence of an empire offered fertile opportunities for many sciences such as botany, zoology, or tropical medicine.118 But otherwise the balance sheet has to be mixed.119 On the one hand, from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the arrogant conviction of European scientists about the all-around superiority of their own civilization is truly astounding. The as- sumption seemed, however, to be borne out by major successes in the study of other cultures—successes that were not without an eminently practical side, since anyone with good maps, linguistic competence, and knowledge of the mor- als and customs of others finds it easier to conquer, govern, and exploit them. To this extent it may be said that Oriental studies and ethnology (sometimes against

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the intentions of their representatives) produced knowledge for the sake of colonial domination. On the other hand, it is doubtful how useful this knowledge actually was, and how much it served practical purposes. Attempts to place colonial rule on a scientific foundation became a policy objective only after the First World War, and then the key experts were economists, not ethnologists. Before 1914 ethnologists—and, more important, colonial administrators for many of whom ethnology was a hobby—played a role above all where attempts were made to classify imperial subjects according to their degree of ability and cultural achievement. But there were very few ethnologists around in those days, and when their numbers increased after the First World War they often proved troublesome critics of colonial practices.120 Philological studies of ancient India or Vietnam, for their part, offered little knowledge that was directly serviceable to colonial rulers. Some have argued that precisely because of this apolitical conception of itself, Oriental studies “objectively” played into the hands of Western world domination—a charge that would be serious indeed if the supremacy of West- ern knowledge had demonstrably incapacitated Asians and Africans or reduced them to silence. However, it is not easy to find evidence that colonialism sup- pressed the knowledge of indigenous peoples about their own civilization. The academic revival of Indian traditions was in principle a joint European-Indian project, and it continued without interruption after independence came in 1947. In noncolonial countries such as Japan, China, and Turkey—to take the example of historiography—the encounter with Rankean critical methods led to a pluralist approach to the past and a more discriminating attitude toward the cultural heritage. In the nineteenth century, therefore, Western academic study of other cultures, in spite of all the annoying arrogance that came within it, was not just a destructive intrusion into vibrant non-European cultures of scholarship but also a founding impetus for the globalized human sciences of the contemporary world. Geography as an Imperial Science If any discipline was complicit in European expansion, it was geography.121 In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, it developed from the de- scriptive collection of data about countries into a complex discourse about natural and social contexts on the earth’s surface, within clearly definable spaces and landscapes. Its chief founders were far removed from European colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt, who had studied conditions in late colonial Spanish America in greater detail than anyone else, was one of its sharpest contemporary critics. Carl Ritter, the great encyclopedist at Berlin University, espoused—long before Franz Boas explicitly formulated the approach—a cultural relativism that recognized the equal value of social and cultural forms around the world. This detachment from politics was not a matter of course. House geographers already accompanied Napoleon, a zealous promoter of the subject, in his building of the

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 821 empire, and geographical elements were present in many other imperial ventures throughout the century. Official cartographers mapped newly occupied territories. Geo-experts helped to draw boundaries, gave advice on the location of naval bases, and always had things to say about mineral wealth, transportation, or agri- culture. These functions were sustained by a broad public interest in geography. School courses included classes about other continents, and imperial expansion found lively approval among lay members of geographical societies. From 1880 on, a special colonial geography emerged in the European metropolises, the conditions for truly global visions of exploration and “valorization” being particularly favorable in the British Empire. With a characteristically British interpene- tration of private and public initiative, the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 created a kind of headquarters for the organization of research trips and the collection of geographical knowledge from all around the world. Imperial uses, though not always foregrounded, were never overlooked. Of all the branches of learning, geography had the greatest affinity with the imperial expansion of the West.122 It does not follow, however, that geography as such should be blamed for collaborating with the suppression of foreign peoples. It found a place in the university at only a very late date—not before 1900 in Britain and in the last third of the century in Germany, France, and Russia. For a long time it trailed behind the more respected discipline of history, although in the nineteenth century, under the philosophical aegis of “historicism” (Historismus), historiography distanced itself from anything that looked like a natural determination of human freedom. The physical and cultural aspects of geography, still united in Humboldt, later moved apart from each other, without abandoning the common academic umbrella; it was a necessary separation, but it created an insoluble identity problem and caused geography to fall somewhere between natural science (strictly geared to physics) and the “true” human sciences. Furthermore, with the exception of specialist colonial geographers, few representatives of the discipline were directly serving the imperial project. Many saw their main task as being to describe the territory of their own nation. The close link between expansion and exploration went back a long time. Ever since the days of Columbus, overseas voyages and the urge to occupy and colonize new lands had been two sides of the same coin. Discoverers and conquerors came from the same cultural backgrounds in Europe; their education and goals in life were similar, as was their conception of the global position and mission of their own country, Christendom, or Europe as a whole. In the eighteenth century, it was taken for granted that major powers should use the resources of the state to help in unveiling the world. Britain and France sent out lavishly equipped scientific expeditions to circumnavigate the world. Tsarist Russia staked its claim to equal imperial and scientific status by following on the same path (the Kruzenstren mission of 1803–6). The first crossing of North America from east to west during the same years, initiated by President Thomas Jefferson and led by Meriwether Lewis

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and William Clark, may be seen as the US equivalent of these maritime operations. Even the details of its scientific tasks were similar to those of the great sea voyages since the time of Captain James Cook. The “discoverer” type was compromised from the beginning. Columbus and Vasco da Gama already made use of violence. But over the next four hundred years there were at least as many examples of peaceful research trips; the most important were those of Alexander von Humboldt, Heinrich Barth, and David Livingstone. The age of high imperialism did, however, witness a final blossoming of the conquistador traveler. Bismarck, King Leopold II of Belgium, and the French Republic used the services of research explorers (widely varying in scientific competence) to register ownership claims to territory in Africa or Southeast Asia. Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter by training whom Leopold chose as his man in Africa, embodied this type in the eyes of the media of several continents (three Africa expeditions between 1870 and 1889). In the subsequent generation, Sven Hedin, having started his long career in 1894 with a research trip to Central Asia, became the most famous Swede of his age, with unfettered access to mon- archs and heads of government in both West and East and adorned with countless decorations, gold medals, and honorary doctorates. Hedin’s life encapsulates the contradictions of Europe’s relationship with Asia. Convinced of the general superiority of the West over the East, Hedin was an excellent linguist and scholar and at the same time a Swedish (and, from personal choice, German) nationalist and militarist, a man of the political Right, who enjoyed taking part in geopolit- ical fantasizing about a “power vacuum” in the heart of Asia. But he was also one of the first Westerners to take contemporary Chinese science seriously and to cooperate with Chinese experts. He is held in high esteem in China today: a not atypical posthumous reputation, since quite a few European explorers, despite their activity in the service of empire, have been integrated into the collective memory of postimperial countries.123 Folklore and the Discovery of Country Life Last but not least of the “alien” groups that became the object of scientific study in the nineteenth century were those living in the same country as the learned professors. Rationalist elites during the Age of Revolution had regarded the lifestyle and thinking of the peasantry, urban lower classes, and vagabonds as an obstacle to social modernization and relics of a superstitious mind-set. Mili- tary and civilian administrators in the Napoleonic Empire had as little time for Catholic popular beliefs in Italy or Spain as supporters of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham within the East India Company had for the Hindu or Muslim traditions of India. Attitudes and procedures toward Europe’s “internal savages” did not differ essentially from the situation in the colonies. In both cases, the authorities preached and practiced “education for work.”124 The reliance on government action or naked coercion varied, but the aim was much the same: to make human capital more effective, in association with a genuine,

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 823 often Christian-inspired effort to raise the “level of civilization” among the lower orders. The Salvation Army, founded in London in 1865 and gradually spread- ing internationally, was an expression of such a charitable vision, and the overseas “mission to the pagans” was paralleled in Protestant Europe by an “internal mission” to assist the weaker members of society. Apart from such early social policies, whether philanthropic or bureaucratic in inspiration, there was sometimes a reverence for popular ways of life that bordered on glorification. Johann Gottfried Herder had been the original intellectual force behind such attitudes. Linguists, legal historians, and collectors of “popular verse” strengthened them in the early nineteenth century. Social romanticism was linked to very different points in the political spectrum. In the great French historian Jules Michelet, it signified a radical admiration for the creators of the nation and the revolution, whereas in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl—who published a four-volume social history of the German people (1851–69)—there was an underlying mistrust of the socially destructive consequences of urbanization and industry. Both men, writing at almost the same time but with quite different premises, described the life of poor and simple folk, including women, both past and present with a sympathy and accuracy rarely seen before. Riehl became a founder of what was called Volkskunde, a study of the “spirit” and customs of peoples rooted in conservative Romanticism.125 He found admirers above all in Russia, who saw his work as confirmation of their own (politically opposite) leanings. The newly emancipated peasantry and its age-old communes were glorified by upper-class urban intellectuals as the natural agents of an impending revolution. These “friends of the people,” the narodniki , opened a new chapter in the history of Russian radicalism.126 Folk elements also attracted fresh attention in the arts, as the internal exoti cism of folklore traditions within Europe ran almost exactly parallel to the exter nal exoticism of Orientalist persuasion. A search for inspiration in the anony- mous music of ordinary people and for characteristic national styles soon resulted in a versatile melodic idiom. A kind of musical exoticism developed within Europe itself. French composers conjured up Spanish color (Georges Bizet: Carmen , 1875; Edouard Lalo: Symphonie espagnole, 1874); and “typically Hungar- ian” Gypsy touches, which the cosmopolitan Franz Liszt (born in Austria’s hilly Burgenland) turned into a national trademark in 1851 with his Hungarian Rhap- sodies for piano, slipped easily into the tone language of the native Hamburger and Viennese resident Johannes Brahms. In 1904, dissatisfied with the kitsch of national Romantic clichés, the young Hungarian Béla Bartók and his compatriot Zoltán Kodály went in search of authentic music among the Hungarian rural population, as well as non-Magyar minorities in the Habsburg kingdom of Hun- gary. The new methods of ethnomusicology were then applied in the same way to musical production outside Europe. Bartók, a composer who had moved beyond Romanticism,127 proved it was possible to engage in top-class research on ethnic subjects without succumbing to the ideology of völkisch nationalism.

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In the nineteenth century, writing gave many people in the world greater scope for extensive communication, thanks to the spread of literacy and the growing availability of print media. Distribution of the ability to read and write was ex- tremely uneven, depending on levels of prosperity, political objectives, missionary goals, and the educational ambition of individuals and groups. Usually it required a local impetus, which then had to be translated into some kind of sus- tainable institutional form, with compulsory schooling as the logical terminus ad quem. The spread of world languages further widened communicative spaces, at least for those who took the opportunity to learn one or several of them. As a rule, Europe’s expanding languages did not obliterate and replace existing linguistic worlds but were superimposed on them. Access to knowledge became easier. But it had to be acquired—or rather, worked for—with considerable effort. Reading is a cultural technique that demands a lot from individuals: an illiterate person can much more easily install a radio or television set and follow the readymade programs. In this respect, twentieth-century technologies reduced the level of cultural effort, but also the threshold for at least passive participation in communication. But what kind of knowledge became more accessible? Little can be said that applies worldwide. Structured knowledge outside the realm of everyday life—what people were generally beginning to call “science”—certainly increased in the nineteenth century on an unprecedented scale; and there were more and more scientists who produced it. This happened within institutions, universities above all, which not only created a loose framework for the scholarly activity of individuals (as academies had in the early modern period) but systematically endeavored to acquire new knowledge and provided means to that end. Science expanded also because whole areas of social discourse were put on a scientific footing: the literary and textual criticism that had been blossoming in Europe became the discipline of literary studies (at the end of the century), while the collection of words and grammatical elements became a methodical, historically based search for laws and eventually, in Ferdinand de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916), a science that postulated deep structures of language. Before 1800 the human and social “sciences,” in the sense of established disciplines, had not existed in Europe. By 1910 the matrix of disciplines and the range of academic institutions that we know today had taken shape—first in several European countries, then a little later in the United States, but in a process that was increasingly interna- tionalized, not locally disparate. By 1910 a number of cross-border scientific communities had come into being, where information circulated at great speed, academics competed to take the lead, and procedures were in place for quality assessment and the allocation of prestige. These circles were entirely male dominated; non-Westerners gradually gained entry to them—first a number of Japanese scientists, joined after the First World War by colleagues from India and China. Transnational standards

Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:54 PM Knowledge 825 operated in the natural sciences. This made interwar attempts to establish a special “German,” “Japanese,” or (in the Soviet Union) “socialist” science seem re- gressive and ridiculous. It was another matter that scientists often felt an urge to ensure that their work was of benefit to the nation. However transnational the communicative infrastructures and scientific standards, scientists everywhere felt under an obligation to their national institutions (never more than during the First World War), and arts scholars—the inheritors of ancient rhetoric— operated first and foremost in the public arena of their own country. As far as science was concerned, internationalization and nationalization stood in a tense and contradictory relationship to each other.

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Civilization and Exclusion

1 The “Civilized World” and Its “Mission” For thousands of years, some human groups have considered themselves superior to their neighbors.1 City dwellers looked down on villagers, settled populations on nomads, literate on illiterate, pastoralists on hunters, rich on poor, practitioners of complex religions on “pagans” and animists. The idea of different degrees of refined living and thought is widespread across regions and epochs. In many languages it is expressed in words that roughly correspond to “civilization” in European usage—a term that has meaning only in a relationship of tension with its negative twin. Civilization prevails where “barbarism” or “savagery” lie defeated; it needs its opposite to remain knowable as such. Were barbarism to disappear altogether from the world, there would no longer be a foil for “civilized” people to measure themselves against, either taking the offensive in a spirit of self-satisfaction, or bemoaning the fate of superior humanity amid crudeness and decline. The less civilized are a necessary audience for this grand theater, for the civilized need the recognition of others, preferably in the form of admiration, reverence, and peaceful gratitude. They can live with envy and resentment if they have to; any civilization must arm itself against the hatred and aggressiveness of barbarians. The sense of worth felt by civilized people arises from an interplay between self-observation and attention to the various ways in which others react to them, with an awareness that their own attainments are constantly at risk. A bar- barian attack or a revolt by plebeian “internal barbarians” might bring ruin at any moment, but an even greater danger, and one harder to discern, is the slackening of moral endeavor, cultural ambition, and realistic tough-mindedness. In China, Europe, and elsewhere this has traditionally been denoted by “corruption” in the broad sense of the term; fortuna enters a downward spiral when the power to stick to high ideals begins to wane. Civilization, in the normative sense of socially determined refinement, is thus a universal concept not limited to the modern age. Frequently it is associated with the idea that civilized people have a task, or even a duty, to propagate their

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97. Dietrich Geyer, “Zwischen Bildungsbürgertum und Intelligenzija: Staatsdienst und akademische Professionalisierung im vorrevolutionären Russland,” in: Conze et al., Bildungs bürgertum, vol. 1, pp. 207–30, at 229. 98. Lufrano, Honorable Merchants, pp. 177ff. The term “self-cultivation,” which Lufrano uses for Chinese merchants, reminds one of a classic book on the idea of Bildung: Bruford, German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. For Japan, see Gilbert Rozman, “Social Change,” in: J. W. Hall et al., Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, pp. 499–568, at 513. The question is whether eighteenth-century merchant culture was more autonomous, or less “embedded,” in Japan than in China. 99. See, e.g., Schwarcz, Chinese Enlightenment. 100. Kreuzer, Bohème, is an important work for both social and cultural history. 101. Buettner, Empire Families; anecdotally Yalland, Boxwallahs; and, for a comparison with the completely nonaristocratic Chinese treaty ports, Bickers, Britain in China. 102. This is well researched in Butcher,British in Malaya. 103. Ruedy, Modern Algeria, pp. 99f. 104. Quataert, Ottoman Empire, p. 153. 105. Ibid., p. 146. See also chapter 5, above. 106. The most recent general account of this international financial world is Cassis,Capitals of Capital, pp. 74ff. 107. I refer to an interesting thesis in C. A. Jones, International Business. 108. Wray, Mitsubishi, p. 513. 109. Model analyses of this process are (for France) Garrioch, Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie; and (for the United States) Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class; and Bushman, Refinement. 110. See the few hints in this direction in chapter 16, below. 111. For many areas there is still no synthesis of research such as we have for Europe in Gestrich et al., Geschichte der Familie. 112. See the fine case studies in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire.

Chapter XVI: Knowledge

1. On religion, see chapter 18, below. 2. Dülmen and Rauschenbach, Macht des Wissens. 3. H. Pulte, “Wissenschaft (III),” in:Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 12, Darmstadt 2004, col. 921. 4. Burke, Social History, pp. 19f. 5. Fragner, “Persophonie,” p. 100. 6. Ostler, Empires of the Word, pp. 438f. 7. Ibid., pp. 411f. 8. Mendo Ze et al., Le Français, p. 32. 9. B. Lewis, Emergence, p. 84. 10. Crystal, English, p. 73. 11. Ibid., p. 66. 12. The degree to which the speaking of English was “ordered” from above is discussed at length in Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism. 13. Zastoupil and Moir, Great Indian Education Debate, esp. the introduction (pp. 1–72). 14. Crystal, English, pp. 24ff. gives a (rather superficial) region-by-region overview.

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15. B. Lewis, Emergence, pp. 88, 118. 16. Adamson, China’s English, pp. 25f. 17. Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, pp. 78f. 18. Elman, Modern Science, pp. 86f. 19. B. Lewis, Emergence, p. 87. 20. This moment in intellectual history was identified in Schwab,Oriental Renaissance. 21. Ostler, Empires of the Word, p. 503. 22. H. M. Scott, Birth, pp. 122f.; Haarmann, Weltgeschichte der Sprachen, p. 314. 23. See the overview in Haarmann, Weltgeschichte der Sprachen, pp. 309–34. 24. Bolton, Chinese Englishes, pp. 146–96. 25. Marr, Reflections from Captivity, pp. 30, 35. 26. Pollock, Cosmopolitan Vernacular. 27. Sassoon, Culture, pp. 21–40, on the rise of national languages in Europe. 28. Vincent, Mass Literacy, pp. 138f., 140. 29. Janich and Greule, Sprachkulturen, p. 110. 30. M. C. Meyer and Sherman, Course of Mexican History, p. 457. 31. For an introduction to the problem, see Ernst Hinrichs, “Alphabetisierung. Lesen und Schreiben,” in Dülmen and Rauschenbach, Macht des Wissens, pp. 539–61, esp. 539–42. The theoretical complexity of the theme is shown in Barton, Literacy. 32. See Graff,Legacies , p. 262—the unsurpassed standard work on the subject. 33. Tortella, Patterns of Economic Retardation, p. 11 (Tab. 6). 34. Vincent, Mass Literacy, p. 11. There are still not many national studies comparable in quality to Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read. 35. Graff,Legacies , p. 295 (Tab. 7–2). 36. With reference to Europe in general: Sassoon, Culture, pp. 93–105. 37. For Germany, cf. Engelsing, Analphabetentum. A number of works by Roger Chartier and Martyn Lyons cover the field in France. 38. M. Lyons, Readers, pp. 87–91. 39. Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, p. 36. 40. Vincent, Mass Literacy, p. 56. 41. Gillian Sutherland, “Education,” in F. M. L. Thompson,Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3, pp. 119–69, at 145. 42. See the estimates for 1882 in Easterlin, Growth Triumphant, p. 61 (Tab. 5.1.). 43. William J. Gilmore-Lehne, “Literacy,” in Cayton, Encyclopedia, vol. 3, pp. 2413–26, at 2419f., 2422. 44. Graff,Legacies , p. 365. 45. Ayalon, Political Journalism, p. 105. 46. Gilbert Rozman, “Social Change,” in J. W. Hall et al., Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, pp. 499–568, at 560f. 47. Rubinger, Popular Literacy, p. 184. 48. Pepper, Radicalism, p. 52. 49. Rawski, Education, p. 23. 50. P. Bailey, Reform the People, pp. 31–40. 51. M. E. Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, p. 11. 52. This remained the case until the end of the system; see Elman,Civil Examinations, pp. 597–600.

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53. Alexander Woodside, “The Divorce between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China,” in: Elman and Woodside, Education and Society, pp. 458– 92, at 461. 54. BBC News Service, April 2, 2007. 55. Nipperdey, Napoleon to Bismarck, p. 398. 56. Karl-Ernst Jeismann, “Schulpolitik, Schulverwaltung, Schulgesetzgebung,” in: C. Berg et al., Handbuch, vol. 3, pp. 105–22, at 119. 57. An influential Foucault-oriented analysis of Egypt along these lines is T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. But see the criticisms of such an approach in Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, pp. 57–61. 58. Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation française, pp. 257–59. 59. Wesseling, European Colonial Empires, p. 60. 60. D. Kumar, Science, pp. 151–79; Ghosh, History of Education, pp. 86, 121f.; Arnold, Science, p. 160; Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres. 61. Somel, Modernization of Public Education, pp. 173–79. Somel sums this up as the “duality of technological modernism and Islamism” (p. 3). On architecture, see also Fortna, Imperial Classroom, pp. 139–45. 62. Somel, Modernization of Public Education, p. 204. 63. Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization, pp. 170–78; Keddie, Modern Iran, p. 29; Amin et al., Modern Middle East, pp. 43f. 64. Ringer, Education and Society, p. 206. 65. Goonatilake, Toward a Global Science, p. 62, drawing on Benares as an example. Cf. Burke, A Social History, pp. 50–52. 66. For an (implicitly comparative) account of Islamic institutions of learning, see Huff, Early Modern Science, pp. 147–79. 67. Björn Wittrock, “The Modern University: The Three Transformations,” in: Rothblatt and Wittrock, European and American University, pp. 303–62, at 304f., 310ff. 68. There is a wonderful sociological character sketch in Rothblatt,Revolution of the Dons, pp. 181–208. 69. J.-C. Caron, Générations romantiques, p. 167. 70. Brim, Universitäten, p. 154. 71. Lee Ki-baik, Korea, p. 342; Lee Chong-sik, Korean Nationalism, pp. 89–126. 72. John Roberts et al., “Exporting Models,” in: Rüegg, History of the University, vol. 2, pp. 256–83. 73. Edward Shils and John Roberts, “The Diffusion of European Models outside Europe,” in Rüegg, History of the University, vol. 3, pp. 163–231. Interesting on Africa is Nwauwa, Imperialism. 74. Rüegg, History of the University, vol. 3, pp. 187ff. 75. İsanoğlu, Science, Text III, pp. 38f. 76. Hayhoe, China’s Universities, p. 13. Cf. Lu Yongling and Ruth Hayhoe, “Chinese Higher Learning: The Transition Process from Classical Knowledge Patterns to Modern Disciplines, 1860–1910,” in Charle et al., Transnational Intellectual Networks, pp. 269–306. 77. Quoted in Shils and Roberts, “The Diffusion of European Models outside Europe,” in Rüegg, History of the University, vol. 3, p. 225. 78. Ringer, German Mandarins; B. K. Marshall, “Professors and Politics: The Meiji Aca demic Elite,” in Kornicki, Meiji Japan, vol. 4, pp. 296–318.

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79. Bartholomew, Science in Japan, pp. 84f. 80. W. Clark, Academic Charisma; cf. Schalenberg, Humboldt auf Reisen? pp. 53–75. That Humboldt’s university was not a radically new departure but part of a wider European con ception of “enlightened absolutism,” is shown in R. D. Anderson, European Universities, ch. 2, see also ch. 4 (on Humboldt). 81. David Cahan, “Institutions and Communities,” in idem, From Natural Philosophy, pp. 291–328, at 313–17. 82. Jungnickel and McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery, vol. 2, pp. 166ff. 83. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Universität und Hochschule,” in C. Berg et al., Handbuch, vol. 4, pp. 313–39, at 38f. 84. R. D. Anderson, European Universities, p. 292. 85. W. Clark, Academic Charisma, p. 461. 86. Leedham-Green, Concise History, p. 195. 87. John R. Thelin, “The Research University,” in Cayton, Encyclopedia, vol. 3, pp. 2037– 45, at 2037. 88. Veysey, Emergence, p. 171. 89. Thelin,American Higher Education, pp. 114, 116, 122–31, 153f. Still useful for the period around the turn of the century is Veysey, Emergence. 90. Bartholomew, Science in Japan, pp. 64, 68ff., 123. 91. On Rieß see Mehl, History and the State, pp. 94–102. 92. İsanoğlu, Science, Text X, p. 53. 93. Goonatilake, Toward a Global Science, pp. 53–55. 94. See the fundamental considerations in Raina, Images and Contexts, pp. 176–91; and the superb collections (of reprints) Habib and Raina, Social History of Science. 95. Nakayama, Traditions, pp. 195–202. 96. Elman, On Their Own Terms, p. 298. 97. Howland, Translating the West, p. 97. 98. Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought,” in Barlow,Formations , pp. 21–81, at 22f., 30f., 33, 56. There are many excellent case studies of terminological transfer into Chinese in Lackner et al., New Terms, and Vittinghoff and Lackner,Mapping Meanings. 99. C. T. Jackson, Oriental Religions, p. 57. 100. See Sullivan, Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, pp. 120–39, 209–29; cf. K. Berger, Japonisme. 101. Fauser, Musical Encounters; Locke, Musical Exoticism. 102. There is a brief characterization of theosophy in Burrow,Crisis of Reason, pp. 226–29; see also Aravamudan, Guru English, pp. 105–41. 103. On India see Arnold, Science, p. 124; also important is Yamada Keiji, Transfer of Science. 104. Prakash, Another Reason, pp. 6, 53. 105. Especially good on India is the analysis in ibid., pp. 52ff. 106. Bowler and Morus, Making Modern Science, p. 338. 107. Theodore M. Porter, “The Social Sciences,” in Cahan,From Natural Philosophy, pp. 254–90, at 254. See also chapter 1, above. 108. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in D. Porter and Ross, Modern Social Sciences, pp. 205–37, at 208–14. 109. Barshay, Social Sciences, pp. 40–42.

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110. There are brief overviews in Iggers and Wang,Modern Historiography, pp. 117–33; and D. R. Woolf, A Global History of History, pp. 364–97; and on a grander scale, idem, Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 4. 111. René Wellek, the standard authority, traces the beginnings of literary criticism to 1750. Art criticism went back earlier in Europe, to the time of Giorgio Vasari (1511–74). 112. There is more on this in Osterhammel,Entzauberung . 113. Still unsurpassed, after numerous more recent studies, is Schwab,Oriental Renaissance. 114. A few classics are Tahtawi, An Imam; Kume Kunitake, Iwakura Embassy; Parsons, King Khama. More in Osterhammel, Ex-zentrische Geschichte. 115. Gran-Aymerich, Naissance de l’archéologie moderne, pp. 83–86. 116. Peers, Colonial Knowledge. 117. Said, Orientalism launched this debate and is still one of its most important texts. On the discussion in English and Arabic, see Varisco, Reading Orientalism; a model of a sober empirical study on orientalist scholarship is Marchand, German Orientalism. 118. See the case studies in Stuchtey, Science. 119. This ambiguity is well brought out from the French example in Singaravélou,L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient, pp. 183ff. 120. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; idem, After Tylor. 121. See also chapters 1 and 3, above. 122. Stafford,Scientist of Empire; Robert A. Stafford, “Scientific Exploration and Empire,” in Louis, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, pp. 224–319; Driver, Geography Militant. 123. Brennecke, Sven Hedin. There seems to be no adequate biography in English. 124. S. Conrad, Globalisation, ch. 2. 125. Schleier, Kulturgeschichtsschreibung, vol. 2, pp. 813–41. 126. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 633ff. 127. As a young man, however, Bartók had learned the habits of high Romantic virtuosos from his teacher István Thomán, one of Liszt’s most gifted disciples.

Chapter XVII: Civilization and Exclusion

1. On the following, see B. Barth and Osterhammel, Zivilisierungsmissionen; Mazlish, Civilization; and, with special reference to South Asia, Fischer-Tiné and Mann, Colonialism. There is a good succinct overview in an unexpected place: Costa,Civitas , vol. 3, pp. 457–99. 2. Pagden, Lords, pp. 79f. 3. Adas, Contested Hegemony. 4. Sarmiento, Civilization and Barbarism. The centrality of the barbarism/civilization opposition, with a wider reference than Argentina, is shown in Brading, First America, pp. 621–47 and Manrique, De la conquista a la globalización, pp. 147–66. 5. Nani, Ai confini della nazione, pp. 97ff.; Moe,View from Vesuvius. 6. Seidl, Bayern in Griechenland. 7. Broers, Napoleonic Empire, pp. 245f. and passim. 8. R. Owen, Lord Cromer, esp. pp. 304ff. 9. The classic text on the impact of utilitarians in India is Stokes,English Utilitarians. 10. J. Fisch, Immolating Women, pp. 376ff., 232f. In noncolonial Nepal, widow burning remained legal until 1920! 11. See the distinction between a “state model” of colonization and a missionary-borne “civilizing colonialism,” in Comaroff and Comaroff,Ethnography , pp. 198–205.

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