Empire in Asia: a New Global History

Empire in Asia: A New Global History

Volume One From Chinggisid to Qing

Edited by Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments x Linguistic Conventions xi Notes on Contributors xii

Series Introduction: Reordering an Imperial Modern Asia 1 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell Concepts and Historiography 2 D e ﬁ nitions 4 Revisiting Empire in Asia 6

Introduction: Making Imperial Asia 9 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

1 Inner Asia, 1100s– 1405: The Making of Chinggisid Eurasia 15 Florence Hodous The Nomadic Empires of Inner Asia 15 Formation of the Mongol Empire 16 Building the Empire 19 Imperial Identity 23 A Mandate to Rule the World 26 Legacies of the Mongol Empire 29 Mongol Decline and Successor States 33

2 The Great Ming and East Asia: The World Order of a Han- Centric Chinese Empire, 1368– 1644 43 Jinping Wang Political Legitimacy 44 Imperial Governance 48 Monarchy and Bureaucracy 48 Community 52 Frontier Management 55 Foreign Relations with Other East Asian States 63 Conclusion 69 Contents

3 East Asia under the Expanding Qing 77 Frederik Vermote Introduction 77 Jurchen Origins 79 Formation of the Manchus 80 Imperial Consolidation and Expansion 84 Institutions of Empire 85 The Banner System 85 Manchu Language 87 Government Ministries 90 Control of Frontiers and Subjects 92 The Qing in Decline 97 Qing Legacies 98

4 Southwest Asia, 1300– 1800: Ottomans, Safavids, and the Turco- Persianate Imperial Tradition 107 Jack Fairey Introduction 107 History of the Imperial Idea: Persia 107 History of the Imperial Idea: Greco- Roman World 108 History of the Imperial Idea: Caliphate 110 The T ü rkmen Dynasties 111 Ottomans: From Beylik to Sultanate 113 Ottomans: Imperialism as Crisis Management 115 Safavids: From Suﬁ Ṭ arī qah to Millenarian Empire 116 Imperial Self- Understanding 120 Imperial Visions of World Order 125 Borderlands 127 Institutions 129 Ottoman and Safavid Legacies 131

5 South Asia, 1400– 1800: The Mughal Empire and the Turco- Persianate Imperial Tradition in the Indian Subcontinent 141 Murari Kumar Jha Introduction 141 Mughal Conquests and Imperial Expansion 142 Structure and Institutions of the Mughal Empire 145 Process of Decline 148 The South Asian Context of Mughal Notions of Kingship and Sovereignty 150 Mughal Imperial Ideas and the Articulation of Legitimacy 152 Mughal Interactions with Other Empires 157 Legacy of the Mughal Empire 161

vi Contents

6 Northern Eurasia, 1300– 1800: Russian Imperial Practice from Tsardom to Empire 171 Paul W. Werth Introduction 171 Russia, Asia, Europe 172 The Rise and Growth of Muscovy: A Brief Sketch 174 Legitimation and Imaginings 176 Motivations 180 Institutions and Practices 183 Conclusion 190

7 In Search of “Empire” in Mainland Southeast Asia 195 Bruce M. Lockhart Introduction 195 Historiographical Overview 195 Toward a Synthesis 199 Kingship and Ideology 206 Comparative Observations 208

8 In Search of “Empire” in the Insular Malay World 215 Sher Banu Khan Srivijaya, 700– 1400: Seventh- Century “Harbor City” or “Imperial Construct”? 217 Melaka, 1400– 1600: Islamic City- State or a Global Malay/ Islamic Center? 220 State-Formation and the Creation of “Absolutist States” in Insular Southeast Asia, ca. 1500– 1700: Toward “Genuine Empire Formation”? 222 The Beginnings of “Empire- Building” in Insular Southeast Asia? The Case of Aceh 223 The Beginnings of “Empire- Building” in Insular Southeast Asia? The Case of Johor 228 Mainland/ Island Southeast Asia Dichotomy: A Case Study of Success and Failure in the Empire Project? 231

9 Iberian Maritime Asia, 1497– 1700s: The Portuguese and Spanish Empires in Asia 239 Anthony Rendell Disney Introduction 239 The Hybrid Character of the Iberian Empires: Seaborne, Maritime, and Territorial 240 Transportation Networks 240

vii Contents

Networks of Trade 241 Catholic Mission Networks 244 Formal Imperium and Territorial Empire 246 The Iberian Empires and the Great Powers of Asia 249 The Spanish Territorial Empire in the Philippines 251 Informal Conquests and Freelance Conquistadore s 252 Imperial Lines of Defense 253 Social Interaction and Cultural Exchange 253 The Iberians and the Other European Empires in Asia 257 Twilight of Empire 259 Conclusion 260

10 Chartered Companies and Empire 269 Peter Borschberg Introduction 269 Research 272 What Is a Chartered Company? 273 Era of the East India Companies 275 Why Companies? 277 Were the East India Companies Successful? 278 Importance of the Charter Territory 280 Were All Chartered Companies Instruments of Empire? 281 From Companies to Company States 283 Legacies of the Chartered Companies 287

Index 295

viii Series Introduction: Reordering an Imperial Modern Asia Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

In the Asia of the twenty-fi rst century, Japan is the only state still headed by a fi gure referred to in English as an “emperor” (tenn ō ). The title is understood by all, however, to be an anachronism, given that Japan no longer professes itself an empire.1 Everywhere else in the world, explicitly imperial titles and forms of governance have more or less disappeared. “Empire” itself has become a dirty word, applied to existing states primarily in order to condemn and revile them. And yet, this is a very recent state of affairs. Historically, more Asians have lived under imperial rule than under any other form of political organization and for longer periods of time. There is not a single Asian region, state, or people whose history has not been shaped in decisive ways by these experiences. It is precisely the diversity of imperial forms of governance present in Asia—and the corresponding wealth of political terms in different Asian languages— that has tended to obscure the full extent of the impact of empire, as a political form, on the region. Beyond the impact of empires on individual states and peoples, it has played a critical role in framing the larger history— spatial, cultural, economic, and especially political— of the region. Empires thus have not only helped to defi ne modern Asia but also to mediate and connect its inhabitants to the wider world, long before the era of instantaneous mass electronic communications. Does the foregoing mean there is something inherently “Asian” about empires in Asia? The question is, of course, fl awed from the outset inasmuch as it presupposes a monolithic “Asia” that has never existed. The inherent fallacy of the question, however, has not prevented a long line of European political theorists from answering it in the affi rmative. Beginning in Classical Greece, writers such as Herodotus, Aeschylus, and Aristotle considered empire to be a characteristically “Asiatic” form of rule— a generalization made slightly more pardonable by the stark contrast that existed then between the turbulent and fragmented world of the Greek city- states and the absolutist and universal monarchs of Achaemenid Persia and Pharaonic Egypt.2 The notion that a fundamental distinction existed between the freedom-loving peoples of Europe and the slavish masses of Asia became a recurring motif across centuries of European thought, showing up in the “seigneurial monarchy” of Bodin, the “oriental despotism” of Enlightenment thinkers such as Boulanger, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Condorcet, the “theocratic despotism” of Hegel, the “Asiatic mode of production” of Marx, and the “patrimonialism” and “sultanism” of Weber.3

1 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

Such assumptions about “Asiatic despotism” used to be seen as self- evident given not only that Asia was home to many of the largest and most populous empires from the Mongols to Qing China, but also that, in purely numerical terms, the majority of imperial states have been based in the central and eastern regions of the Eurasian supercontinent. The relatively brief epoch of Western global supremacy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the effect of turning this paradigm on its head so completely that empire and imperialism are now conceived of and studied as largely European— or, at least, trans- Atlantic— phenomena. Modern theorizing about the nature and practice of empire has thus, until quite recently, been done primarily on the basis of evidence derived from the modern British, Spanish, and French empires, with supporting evidence drawn from their Russian, Dutch, German, and Habsburg contemporaries. Asia was thus demoted, somewhat ironically, from the Urheimat of empire to one of its principal victims. This series will revisit the relationships between empire and Asia by asking questions about the historical experiences of empire in Asia. Those questions emanate from, and revolve around, three principal queries. First, how did empire, as a form of political organization, shape the spatial, cultural, economic, and especially political ordering of Asia and Asians? Second, what concepts, practices, and understandings of empire defi ned these Asian experiences? Finally, how did both these things connect Asia and Asians to wider worlds— and to what ends? In order to answer these questions about the experience, impact, and importance of empire in Asia, however, we need to vault beyond old false binaries of “East and West” or “Europe and Asia.” The fi rst volume of this series will examine how empire fi rst shaped a larger Eurasia—a supercontinent intimately connected, across time, by geography and the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas—while the second volume will show how empire helped forge what we will call a “Global Asia” (a concept we will unpack in the introduction to that second volume).

Concepts and Historiography

We propose to conduct this examination by providing a general and comparative history of empire as a form of governance in Asia, across the span of time during which modern Eurasia, then Global Asia, evolved as geopolitical realities. The value of such a project stands on the premise that empire played a decisive role in shaping the histories of modern Asia: if so, then a clearer understanding of the histories of empire in Asia must surely strengthen our general understanding of modern Asia. This is not to suggest that the histories of individual empires in Asia have been neglected; far from it. But a proper understanding of large-scale structures and processes—such as empires were— requires that similarly large- scale comparisons be made across political boundaries and, on this score, much remains to be done. Historians working on speciﬁ - cally Asian-based empires, for example, in China or India, have tended for much of the

2 Series Introduction past century to focus on these polities for their own sake, rather than in order to address larger discussions about empire or imperial governance. This tendency to compartmen- talize has been even more in evidence outside Asian studies since, in English at least, the scholarship devoted to empire has focused disproportionately on the experiences of empire in Europe, or of empires built by Europeans.4 The winds of change are, however, clearly at work in recent scholarship. The developing trend among historians working on Asian empires is to produce studies that take a more comparative approach. This can include comparing themes of empire, regions, aspects, and experiences, as well as seeing the histories of empire as encounters, connections, fl ows, and movements, and engaging all these things across time and space. Karen Barkey, Ariel Salzmann, Rifa’at Abou-El- Haj, and Suraiya Faroqhi, for example, have all reinterpreted the Ottoman experiences of empire in wider and more comparative contexts. Barkey’s comparative analyses focused on the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Roman experiences of themes such as centralization, state control, and social movements. Salzmann and Abou-El- Haj have compared processes of state formation in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Suraiya Faroqhi’s comprehensive studies of Ottoman politics, everyday life, and numerous other themes are best refl ected in her book The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It, a wider analysis that encompasses Ottoman grand strategies, foreign policies, and empire-building as integrated within the wider European, Middle Eastern, and Southwest Asian worlds the Ottomans linked together.5 Such vantage points make eminent sense for the study of a region that even today stands as the point of contact, on multiple levels, between “Europe” and “Asia.” In South Asia, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, among others, have produced work that reexamines the Mughal Empire within multiple contexts and through an array of comparisons: as part of larger Islamic and imperial worlds, through interplay with Turco- Persian political and cultural dynamics, through connections with Inner or Central Asia, as a regional hegemon in a subcontinental system of states and powers, and not least in interaction with European agents and powers. 6 Victor Liebermann ambitiously sought to connect Southeast Asia with much wider connected experiences of empire in Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800– 1830. 7 Nicola di Cosmo, Thomas Barfi eld, and Christopher Beckwith all studied imperial experiences in Central Asia, or Central Eurasia, or Inner Asia, within such larger contexts as discourse with the Sinic world, engagement with the Turco- Persian regions, contact with an expanding Russia, and intercourse with the Indian subcontinent.8 Peter Perdue changed our understanding of Qing China, both its nature and its place in wider Asian and global orders, through such work as China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire. 9 The last-mentioned study points us toward something important. All this work stands on the shoulders of much that went before. Some canonical works still resonate. In The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, published in 1974, Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s thesis of the “gunpowder empires” shaped two generations of work on the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman experiences, and made direct contributions

3 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell to the emerging ﬁ eld of “World History” that Hodgson, together with William McNeill, did much to develop.10 That same year Immanuel Wallerstein published The Modern World System, which fostered the growth of the controversial “world systems theory,” later expanded by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank.11 The more recent waves of scholarship, identiﬁ ed above, have built on these foundations by more focused and pen- etrating comparative studies of just what constituted the experiences of empire across Asia and through time, and to what ends. One of the principal objectives of this two- volume series is to bring such comparative work together, digest it as part of a wider reconsideration of the histories of “Empire in Asia,” and make it accessible to historians working on empire, in general, as well as in Asia, in particular, and to a wider interested readership.

D e ﬁ nitions

The fi rst step in any comparative history of empires is of course to defi ne what we mean; historically, what was an empire? This is no easy task, as the term has generally been applied in haphazard and imprecise fashion. Indeed, there is a surprising lack of consensus among political scientists and historians as to the defi ning characteristics that would distinguish an empire from a kingdom, city- state, federation or any other form of governance. We also cannot rely on empires to make our task easier by “self-identifying” themselves as such. The wide array of terms that Asian states have used, across time and space, to refer to themselves raises diffi cult questions of commensurability: are tianxia in Chinese, p ā dshā h ī in Persian, and samr ā jya in Sanskrit, for example, all interchange- able words for “empire,” or did they describe fundamentally different kinds of entities? Then there is the question of whether it is appropriate or meaningful to apply a political term grounded in Roman and medieval European history to non- European polities. At least one leading scholar of Imperial China, Mark Elliott, has gone so far as to say that China itself only really became an empire once Europeans started to refer to it as such.12 These objections and diffi culties will be treated at greater length in the chapters that follow, but we will lay them aside for the moment to offer the working defi nition of “empire” we will use in these volumes. We will defi ne an “empire” as any state that formally adopted some combination of an associated set of ideas and practices that manifested themselves in three ways: ideological, structural, and institutional. In ideological terms, empires considered territorial expansion and/or incorporation of territories and peoples to be a good in and of itself, whether on civilizational, religious, legal, practical, or political grounds. Imperial states did not see their domain, in other words, as limited to a particular people, region, or religion. They did not always make an explicit claim to universal rule, but their political principles anticipated and implied it. Such uni- versalism was less common in the historical experience of empires in Europe and became less prominent in Asia during the modern period. But in earlier periods of

4 Series Introduction

Asian history, as well as the global historical experience of empires, it was strongly characteristic.13 An ideological corollary of imperial expansionism was a strongly hierarchical vision of the political order of the world, with one particular empire (or sometimes a group of mutually cognizant empires) at its pinnacle. As these hierarchical structures were seen as universally valid across time as well as space, empires commonly presented themselves as the literal or ﬁ gurative heirs of other great, world-conquering empires. Structural features of empire included two key facets: composite polities and unequal incorporation. Empires were typically made up of multiple distinct peoples and territories that retained their separate identities and, often, distinct institutions. Such peoples and territories were incorporated into the imperial state on different and often distinctly unequal terms, and administered as such, with very different privileges and responsibilities vis-à - vis the imperial center. And the key institutional feature was related: the frequency of indirect rather than direct rule, mediated through layers or delegations or accommodations, over most subject populations and territories. Empires were typically expansive and expan- sionist, composite, differentiated, and plural. Why should these kinds of polities have become so common across Asia, especially during its early modern and modern history? In part, this was the result of both active and passive diffusion of imperial ideas and concepts across the wider supercontinent of Eurasia. It was in the very nature of empires to cast long shadows, both over the lands they ruled and the neighbors they impinged upon. Successful empires, in particular, produced many imitators and heirs, who sought to draw not only on the prestige of the former but also on their practical experience. As Burbank and Cooper, Nexon, and others have pointed out, the diverse and composite nature of imperial polities required an unusually high degree of adaptability and resourcefulness, as the symbols, constitu- tional arrangements, and institutions that ensured the cooperation of one group might have the opposite effect on another. Empires therefore had to develop ample tool kits or repertoires of rule and to become masters of the art of multivocal or polyvalent signaling, that is, appealing simultaneously to the loyalty of many disparate subject groups. 14 In practice, empires tended to develop in clusters or lineages that, while by no means identical, drew upon a common stock of time-tested imperial institutions or practices. Examples of such “imperial lineages” would be the Sinic empires of East Asia or the Turko- Persianate empires of Southwestern and South Asia, marked respectively by such common features as the adoption of Confucianism, literary Chinese, and the imperial civil examination system, and of Islam, literary Persian, and the employment of slaves (kul/ ghulā m ) as elite soldiers and bureaucrats. The widespread diffusion of imperial ideas and practices was thus as much a product of necessity as imitation. Simply put, empire, as a form of governance in Asia, worked — on multiple levels. Charles Tilly captured the point in a seminal work that applies very well to the Asian experience, when he argued that empire “has proven to be a recur- rent, ﬂ exible form of large- scale rule for two closely related reasons: because it holds together disparate small-scale units without requiring much centrally-controlled internal

5 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell transformation, and because it pumps resources to rulers without costly monitoring and repression.”15 Empire, in other words, allowed one to govern far-fl ung and stubbornly different places and peoples effectively yet— relatively speaking—inexpensively. Having defi ned “empire,” we must now turn to the issue of how to defi ne “Asia.” Historically, what was Asia? Geographically, this is not painfully diffi cult, even if exact “borders” with Europe and Africa are more or less moot. The working premise can be that Asia encompassed the continental landmass between the Pontic Steppe, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Sinai Desert in the West; Japan, the Philippines, and the Pacifi c Ocean in the East; the Arctic Sea in the North; and the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago in the South. But the more important question is historical: why, for this series, is Asia a meaningful unit and focus of study? The answer returns us to our fi rst page: strictly speaking, it is not. There was nothing specifi cally or uniquely “Asian” about the features we have identifi ed as constituting the historical experiences of “Empire in Asia.” Notions of stagnant Oriental despotism and Asiatic modes of production simply do not stand up to close scrutiny of the evidence. Instead, it makes most sense to study Asia within the context and frame of a larger Eurasia. Regarding the experience of empire in history, there was an East, there was a West— but only in reference to each other, subject to multiple variations across time and space, and neither was ever completely different from, or utterly alien to, the other. And they certainly did meet, and together they became something else again. Even Rudyard Kipling, despite his infamous assertion that “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat,” had to admit, “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”16 Asia is thus important for our study not so much because we endorse it as a category in its own right, but in order to promote a greater understanding of the unities of Eurasian history by looking at its more ignored, eastern components. In this sense, we propose to study the “Asian history of empire,” in order to transcend it.

Revisiting Empire in Asia

The structure of this series, its division into two volumes, is dictated by this larger argument we wish to make about the historical experiences of “Empire in Asia.” Contacts on multiple levels, of varying degrees of intimacy, between Asia and the rest of the world stretch back long enough to be lost in the proverbial mists of time. The wider interconnectedness we now call “globalization” is also a very old process, substan- tially accomplished long before the onset of the personal computer and mobile phone. It will be argued herein that the history of empire, both in Asia and everywhere else, was deeply intertwined with the history of globalization, in at least three ways. First, empires were fundamental drivers of the process of globalization because they consol- idated large areas, and because they opportunistically pressed outward to incorporate

6 Series Introduction new regions and resources. Second, practices of imperial governance provided much of the new structures and norms that regulated the resulting encounters from this consolidation and expansion; as empires moved toward each other, they increasingly sought to reconcile, one way or another, their mutually overlapping claims and interests. The modern concept of an “international order” should more accurately be seen as an order built primarily by empires, not by nation- states. Finally, imperial governance was itself reshaped by globalization; empires became more and more alike through processes of inﬂ uence, imitation, and assimilation. The history of empire is a central component of global history.

Notes

1 Although they are not usually referred to in English as “emperors,” the kings of Thailand and Cambodia also currently sport titles (respectively, sayamminthrathirat — “emperor of Siam,” and preah sri loka dhammika raja— “virtuous king universally propagating the Dharma”) that could legitimately be understood as imperial. 2 Ann Ward , Herodotus and the Philosophy of Empire ( Waco, TX : Baylor University Press , 2008 ) ; Ryan Balot , Greek Political Thought ( Maldon, MA, Oxford, and Victoria, Australia : Blackwell , 2006 ), chap. 5. 3 Jean Bodin , Les six livres de la R é publique ( Paris : 1576 ) ; Nicolas- Antoine Boulanger , Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental ( London : 1762 ) ; Jean- Antoine- Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet , Tableau historique des progr è s de l’esprit humain: Projets, Esquisse, Fragments et Notes (1772– 1794) , ed. Jean- Pierre Schandeler et al. (Paris: Éditions de l’Institut national d’études démographiques, 2004) ; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Introduction, Reason in History , trans. John Sibree ( London : H.G. Bohn, 1861 ); Voltaire , Essai sur les mœ urs et l’esprit des nations , ed. Ren é Pomeau ( Paris : Garnier, 1963 ) ; Lawrence Krader , The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx ( Assen : Van Gorcum , 1975 ) ; Max Weber , Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich ( Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London : University of California Press , 1978 ) . 4 Historians of Imperial Russia deserve to be seen as an exception to this observation but that exception only underlines the case being made here, as it has been driven by the sense that intermingling between European and Asian themes in the Russian experience was too intimate to be separated. The chapters in Volumes One and Two of this series by Paul Werth address this theme directly. 5 Karen Barkey , Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective ( Cambridge : University Press , 2008 ) ; Ariel Salzmann , Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State ( Leiden : Brill , 2004 ) ; Suraiya Faroqhi , The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It ( London : I.B. Tauris , 2004 ) ; Rifa’at Abou- El- Haj , Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries ( Albany, NY : SUNY Press , 1991 ) . 6 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam , Indo- Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400– 1800 ( Cambridge : University Press , 2007 ); The Mughal State: 1526– 1750 (Oxford: University Press, 2011); and Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For some other examples of comparative treatment of empire in South Asia, see: A. Azfar Moin , The Millenial

7 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam ( New York : Columbia University Press , 2012 ) ; Ali Anooshahr , The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods ( London and New York : Routledge , 2009 ) ; Lisa Balabanlilar , Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia ( London and New York : I.B. Tauris , 2012 ); and Christopher Bayly , Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 ( London and New York : Longman , 1989 ), chaps 1– 2. 7 Victor Liebermann , Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800– 1830, 2 vols ( Cambridge : University Press , 2003 , 2009 ) . 8 Nicola di Cosmo , Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History ( Cambridge : University Press , 2004 ); and The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, coedited with Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden ( Cambridge : University Press , 2009 ) ; Thomas J. Barﬁ eld , The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 ( Cambridge, MA : Blackwell , 1989 ) ; Christopher I. Beckwith , Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present ( Princeton : University Press , 2009 ) . 9 Peter Perdue , China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia ( Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press , 2005 ); and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire, coedited with Huri İ slamoğlu ( London : Routledge , 2009 ) . 10 Marshall G. S. Hodgson , The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1974 ) ; William McNeill , A World History, 4th edition ( Oxford : University Press , 1999 ) . 11 Immanuel Wallerstein , The Modern World System , 4 vols (New York, San Diego, Berkeley: Academic Press and University of California Press, 1974– 2011) ; Andre Gunder Frank , ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1998 ) . 12 Mark Elliott , The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China ( Stanford : University Press , 2001 ); New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, coedited with James Millward , Ruth Dunnell , and Philippe Foret ( London : Routledge Curzon , 2004 ); and “Was Traditional China an Empire?” Public Lecture, Nanyang Technological University, September 5, 2013; see also the chapter in Volume 1 of this series by Wang Jinping. 13 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper , Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference ( Princeton : University Press , 2010 ) . 14 On “imperial repertoires,” see ibid., pp. 3– 4, 16– 17. On imperial “polyvalent signaling,” see Daniel Nexon , The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conﬂ ict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change ( Princeton : University Press , 2009 ), pp. 99 – 100 . 15 Charles Tilly , “ How Empires End ,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation- Building , ed. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen ( Boulder, CO : Westview Press , 1997 ), p. 4. 16 Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 1889. The romantic but complex themes of empire Kipling addressed, and the context in which he crafted this work, are analyzed in the chapter by Brian P. Farrell in Volume 2 of this series.

8 Introduction: Making Imperial Asia Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell

Our venture divides this reexamination of the history of empire in Asia into two important phases, treated in two separate volumes. Volume One, “Making Imperial Asia,” examines the long period of imperial consolidation, fragmentation, and regional re-formation that began with the rise of the Mongol Empire and spanned the next seven centuries to the arrival of “European Industrial Imperialism” in the nineteenth century— a development we deal with in Volume Two. As the focus of this volume is the rise across Eurasia of large, coherent imperial polities, the time period covered by each chapter varies slightly from region to region depending on the pace of developments locally. There are, in other words, simply no convenient beginning and end dates that would apply universally across Asia. It should also be made clear that although the period covered in Volume One is roughly coextensive with the period of world history known generally as the “Early Modern,” this concurrence is only signifi cant to the extent that the “Early Modern” is understood fi rst and foremost as a period of proto- globalization, characterized by increasing economic, political, and cultural exchanges between the different regions of the world.1 Our purpose, in other words, is not that Volume One serve as a potted history of premodern Asia, but rather that it provide a synoptic view of the forms of empire that were present in Asia during an era of marked imperial expansion, and of increasing interimperial contact and exchange. Given this focus, it is natural that Volume One should begin with the rise of the Mongols. The celebrated Chinggis Khan, who ruled from 1206 to 1227, produced an empire that barely lasted a century— but its reverberations would continue much longer. The reach of Mongol imperial ambitions stretched from the Pacifi c Ocean to Central Europe, accepting no boundaries and recognizing no equals, creating, physically and politically, the closest thing Eurasia ever experienced to a single “world order.” Every region of the supercontinent found itself under Mongol sway to some degree with the exceptions of Japan, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe. Even in these “protected zones,” as Victor Liebermann calls them, the Mongol threat shook established orders.2 This new world order had a single source, however: the Mongols. Therefore, by defi nition, the “Pax Mongolica” fell short of being a true “international” order inasmuch as the Mongols denied the legitimacy of other empires or states. Mongol ideas, practices, and concepts of empire did establish new baselines, however, from which much subse- quently fl owed, just as Mongol military success forged connections in trade, commerce, and the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas that knit Eurasian regions together more tightly than ever before. Our fi rst chapter, on “The Making of Chinggisid Eurasia,”

9 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell therefore examines the Mongol experience and legacies. It also explains why the breakup of the vast Mongol imperial order was just as consequential as its creation and expansion. From unifi cation under a single dynasty, Asia was fragmented into an array of contending successor realms and states; but at the same time each of these successor states remained intensely aware of their Chinggisid predecessor and sought to recreate many aspects of it in miniature in their more reduced domains. The chapter’s conclusion, that the Chinggisid Era laid the foundations for what became a modern “Imperial Asia,” is fundamental to the rest of this volume. The fragmentation of the Mongol khanates triggered several volatile centuries in Asia characterized by three broad trends. The fi rst of these is that local “lineages of empire” took advantage of Mongol weakness to reassert themselves in the form of a host of smaller states with competing imperial ambitions. The second trend saw the winnowing of these contending states over the next two centuries as a handful of states consoli- dated their control over large regions of Asia and, in the process, came to embody new interpretations of their particular lineages of empire. The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries thus became, in many ways, a new imperial “Golden Age” in Asia, when the fi ve empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Romanovs, and Ming (then Qing) came to project their power and infl uence over most of the continent. In order to make this process clearer, the chapters of Volume One divide into four broad geographical regions. The Sinic Sphere in East Asia was so extensive and signifi cant that two chapters are required to address the two dynasties that ruled China after the Yuan: one on the “Great Ming” and the second on the “Expanding Qing.” The Turco- Persianate empires, similarly, require two chapters: one on the Ottomans and Safavids in Southwest Asia, and a second focusing primarily on the Mughal Empire in South Asia. The Orthodox Slavic imperial traditions of Northwest Asia are examined in a chapter focusing on the Russian Empire under the Rurikid and Romanov dynasties. Southeast Asia is treated in two chapters, since the greater degree of political fragmentation there constituted something of an exception to the larger patterns of consolidation: one chapter examines Peninsular or Mainland Southeast Asia, and the second reviews the imperial history of Insular or Island Southeast Asia. The third and fi nal trend in post-Mongol imperial Asia was the arrival of European explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries especially in South and Southeast Asia, many of whom pursued their own imperial projects in Asian space. As European imperialisms also differed from each other in important ways, we have treated them in two chapters: the fi rst dedicated to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and the second to the chartered company states such as those of the British and Dutch East India companies. These new imperial blocks represented not one, but several competing, region- alized world orders. This is not, of course, to say that the different empires in Asia existed in splendid isolation from each other; they clearly did not. There were, however, major differences in ideology, structure, and function that made relations between states belonging to different “imperial lineages” particularly diffi cult and discomfi ting. Diplomacy between the rulers of Vietnam and China or of the Ottoman and Safavid

10 Introduction empires, for example, was often tense, but at least communications were facilitated by shared literary languages, religions, political rituals, and understandings of how politics worked. A host of obstacles, however, and not merely geographical distance, impeded relations across imperial lineages between, say, the Ottomans and Ming China. An important part of the story told in Volume One is how these different imperial lineages came into increasing contact with one another and how they dealt with the differences between them. Five especially prominent features characterized the web of interconnections between the empires of Eurasia and thus reappear in each of the chapters to a greater or lesser extent. The fi rst was the prevalence across Eurasian societies of monarchy and hierarchy—indeed, the very concept of “empire” would have been meaningless without a widespread conviction across multiple regions that human societies were ordered hierarchically both internally and relative to one another. The image of the emperor as a “king of kings,” for example, recurred in virtually all the imperial polities considered here. More egalitarian societies such as the tribal peoples of the Southeast Asian highlands, Borneo, or southwestern China, however, were generally inhospitable terrain for imperial projects. A second common feature of interimperial relations, which has already been mentioned previously, was the shared experience across much of Eurasia of Chinggisid rule and therefore a lingering model of how imperial unifi cation of the entire known world could take place— whether that model was held up for imitation or avoidance. The third, rather obvious, factor encouraging relations across states was the search for prosperity and power through commerce. Again and again, the desire for trade drew empires into sustained contact across enormous distances and gave them an incentive to overcome differences in language, culture, ideology, and political claims. This was not always the case, however, and empires such as those of the Ming and Qing were quite capable of ignoring the siren song of foreign commerce when it suited them. The fourth factor was the important role of religions as ideological and cultural unifi ers. Islam, for example, was particularly important for encouraging exchanges across a wide range of states from North Africa to Southeast Asia and for giving their rulers a common store of political words, ideals, and practices. Missionaries, proselytes, and religious minorities played a particularly critical role as bridges between different imperial lineages and cultural worlds. The foreign relations of the Ming and Qing, for example, would have been much more diffi cult without the presence at court of Portuguese Jesuits and Muslim generals. The fi fth and fi nal feature was the role of the sea in linking multiple regions of Eurasia and allowing the circulation of new imperial ideas and practices. Indeed, it is not coin- cidental that the period covered in Volume One is also that of the “Age of Explorations” and the rise of long- distance sea travel. The sheer size of the great Eurasian continental landmass and the diffi culties imposed by climate and terrain impeded in time, manner, and extent the pace and depth of connections between its different regions. For millennia armies, settlers, and trade caravans had moved across the continent at

11 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell the same pace, and with similar degrees of vulnerability to climate, season, and terrain. Such conditions had militarily favored the great mounted cavalry armies of the Steppe Empires, preeminently the Mongols. Only Romanov Russia and Qing China eventually developed any signifi cant capability to reorder the vast interior spaces of Central Asia on any large and lasting scale, and both could only march inexorably but slowly. Movement by sea, however, was potentially another story. It is true that for a long time movement by sea resisted transformation by human invention. Wooden ships propelled by the winds fi lling their sails were larger and more effi cient in 1400 than they were in 400, but they could not move much faster, nor could they surmount restrictions imposed by the seasons and their patterns of winds. What their owners could do, however, was discover how to navigate the “great waters” of the world over very long distances, for very long times, out of sight of the land. Several different Eurasian empires showed an interest in precisely such maritime exploration during the 1400s–1500s. Ming China under the Yongle Emperor, for example, commissioned Admiral Zheng He to undertake a series of “treasure voyages” with a massive fl eet from the South China Sea to the east coast of Africa between 1405 and 1433. After a spectacular beginning, however, the Ming state abruptly lost interest in such voyages and returned to a deliberate policy of avoiding maritime entanglements. The Ottomans, similarly, engaged in ambitious voyages of exploration during the 1500s that took their fl eets from the Atlantic to the Straits of Malacca. The dynasty even seems to have contemplated the creation of a seaborne “soft world empire” that would have stretched from Gibraltar to Sumatra, before offi cial interest in these schemes waned over the course of the 1600s.3 By default, the great globe- girdling voyages of recon- naissance that did so much to drive globalization and world history would come instead from Western Europe. It bears emphasizing, however, that if such voyages of exploration were launched mostly from European ports, they were aimed primarily at reaching Asian shores as European states sought to overcome the distances that divided them from the storied wealth of the Indies and China. Two very different types of European projection of power into Asian space thus evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the slow but methodical expansion of Russia by land and by river across Siberia and the more dramatic, seaborne empire- building of the maritime powers of Western Europe at scattered points throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeastern Asia. Europeans thus must form an inevitable part of the larger story of “Empire in Asia,” even before the formation of large European-ruled empires in the region. The role of Europeans in the imperial history of Asia during this period was, however, much more modest and circumscribed than the usual stereotypes of Western imperialism would lead us to expect. Expansion into Asia connected Europeans to a larger and more dynamic world, not the other way around. European traders and explorers thus relied on already existing local networks and on Chinggisid, Ottoman, and Timurid empire- building for the physical connections that enabled sustained intercourse. Upon arrival, Europeans had for a long time to tread softly in Asian spaces that were governed by polities often stronger and wealthier than those they came from. Until the late 1700s, Westerners

12 Introduction were in no position to reorder the politics of the regions they operated in, but rather had to learn to adapt to local expectations. When Westerners transgressed the bounds set by their hosts or lost favor with a local ruler, they suffered wholesale expulsion as happened repeatedly to all European representatives operating in the East, such as the Portuguese in Japan (1639), the British in Java (1682), the French in Siam (1688), and in many other cases. As the chapter on the Iberian empires demonstrates, one of the great accomplishments of the Portuguese and Spanish was that they managed to overcome these limitations to build modest, but far-fl ung empires in Asia that would have a lasting impact on the region and the world. In particular, the Iberians forged what was perhaps the fi rst truly sustained global economy, which connected the export of silver mined in the New World of the Americas with Asian trade and commerce as they expanded in East, Southeast, and South Asia. In the process, the Iberians created a network of sea routes, ports, forts, and commercial links that other European powers like Britain, Holland, and France would later appropriate by force and use to build up a far more substantial presence in the region. The successes of the Iberian powers also introduced a novel concept to Asian states: that the sea itself could be both a means and an object of empire-building. The fi nal chapter of Volume One points us toward a more general shift of approach in the second volume of this series, by following the rise of a peculiar new method for informal empire-building: the chartered company. This chapter underlines the important point that although the various East India companies were conceived and headquartered in Europe, they were fundamentally joint ventures that fused European ambitions and innovations with Asian networks, business practices, resources, and political interests. The resulting chartered companies did not always evolve into overtly imperial structures, but the largest and most important—those belonging to the British, Dutch, and French companies—certainly did so and would ultimately pave the way for European imperial projects of truly grand dimensions in Asia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Notes

1 On the Early Modern period as “proto- globalization,” see: Anthony G. Hopkins, “Introduction: Globalization— An Agenda for Historians,” and Chris A. Bayly , “ ‘ Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750–1850 ,” both in Globalization in World History , ed. A. G. Hopkins ( London : Pimlico , 2002 ), pp. 5 – 6, 47 – 73 . 2 Victor Liebermann , Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 ( Cambridge : University Press , 2003 , 2009 ), vol. 2 , pp. 85 – 6 , 92 – 122 . 3 See Giancarlo Casale , The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press , 2010 ), pp. 149 – 51 .

Empire in Asia: A New Global History

Volume Two The Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Donna Brunero and Brian P. Farrell

Contents

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Linguistic Conventions x Notes on Contributors xii

Series Introduction: Reordering an Imperial Modern Asia 1 Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell Concepts and Historiography 2 D e ﬁ nitions 4 Revisiting Empire in Asia 6

Introduction: Globalizing Empire in Asia 9 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero Entanglements and Empire 9 Framing Time, Place, and Themes 14

1 In the Center of It All: Thoughts from the Edge of Empire 31 Thomas David DuBois Introduction 31 D e ﬁ ning Empire 33 Empires and States 36 Material Foundations 38 Empire and Culture 43 Conclusion 47

2 Legal Fiction: Extraterritoriality as an Instrument of British Power in China in the “Long Nineteenth Century” 53 Robert Bickers Designing and Implementing Extraterritoriality 56 Establishing a British Supreme Court 59 Practice in Amoy (Xiamen) 62 Disciplining British Subjects 66 Deploying the Regime More Widely 69 Conclusion 72 Contents

3 East Asian Empire and Technology: Imperial Japan and Mobilizing Infrastructure, 1868– 1931 81 John P. DiMoia Science and Imperialism: Approaching the “Problem” of East Asia and the Early Modern 82 Meiji Japan as a “Progressive” Model 84 Meiji Japan: Infrastructure and Intimations of Empire, 1853–95 85 Rail and Colonial Expansion: Contested Spaces and Nascent Empire 88 Taisho Japan and Styles of Colonial Rule: Apparent Contradictions 94 The Embrace of the Rational: Toward an Imperial Modernity 99

4 Suzerainty versus Sovereignty: Establishing French Empire in Indochina 107 Bruce M. Lockhart Sovereignty versus Suzerainty 108 Cambodia, 1856– 67 109 Vietnam, 1874– 85 116 Laos, 1865– 93 122 Conclusion 126

5 Staking Out an Imperial States System: The Imperial Frontier in Asia in the “Long Nineteenth Century” 137 Brian P. Farrell The Imperial Frontier 139 The Nineteenth- Century Frontier 143 The Imperial Frontier and the Asian States System 147 Conclusion 174

6 Human Mobility in Russia’s Asian Empire 187 Paul W. Werth Russian Asia and Asian Russia 189 Movement: Variations on a Theme 192 Embracing Mobility 200 The Discontents of Movement 204 Conclusion 207

7 Faith in Empire: Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance in the “Long Nineteenth Century” 215 Jack Fairey Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance, ca. 1800 217 Relationship between Religion and State 219 “Defensive Modernization,” Reforms, and the Threat of the West 222 The Impact of the Tanzimat on State Ideology 225

vi Contents

Narrowing of the Religious Sphere 228 Soft Power and the Domestication of Religious Authorities 232 Conclusion 235

8 Maritime Goes Global: The British Maritime Empire in Asia 249 Donna Brunero Maritime Empires in Asia Pre- 1800 252 The British as a Maritime Power in Asia 254 A Thalassocracy: Victorian Imaginings? 258 The Great Modern Asian Port 261 Challenges to British Maritime Empire 266 The Empire from the Deck of a Ship 268 Conclusion 273

9 Empire in the Long Run: Asia in the Nineteenth Century 281 Odd Arne Westad

Index 287

vii Introduction: Globalizing Empire in Asia Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

Entanglements and Empire

The story is familiar but it remains pertinent. In September 1793, George, fi rst Earl Macartney, British Envoy to the Celestial Kingdom, met the Qianlong Emperor in a massive imperial tent, a yellow yurt, erected near the hunting grounds at Chengde. Macartney went to China to persuade the Qing to do four things: allow the British to establish a permanent offi cial embassy; relax restrictions on commercial trade operations by British merchants, confi ned, with all other Western commercial agents, to an enclave in Guangzhou; allow British trade through other ports in China; and lease or cede a small island off the Chinese mainland to the British, to be developed as a commercial base. Macartney was an interesting choice. He served as the last English East India Company (EIC). President of the Presidency of Madras, from 1781 to 1785, and then, briefl y in 1785, as the fi rst Governor of the new British Province of Madras. In that capacity Macartney developed a keen interest in what had become the most dynamic venture being pursued by EIC agents: to expand trade in and with Qing China, where fortunes seemed sure to be made. But frustrations came fi rst. From 1757 the Qing confi ned foreign trade and merchants to that small enclave in Guangzhou, operating through the Canton System and relying on local partnerships. These partnerships were anything but equal; factors were constantly at the mercy of local trading representatives. They were required to work through a guild of thirteen local trading companies known as the Cohong, vested by the Yongzheng Emperor with legal control over commerce through Guangzhou. The ensuing trade balance between British and Chinese interests ran heavily into surplus for the Chinese, driven by vor- acious British appetites for silks, porcelain, and above all tea— which all had to be expensively paid for in silver, the only commodity the Qing government would accept in trade.1 EIC agents sought ways to break free of these restrictions and reduce this trade imbalance. The EIC was driven by the very real concern that they were accountable to their Board of Directors and shareholders, as well as commercial ambitions. Their commodity of choice turned out to be opium, for which Chinese appetites proved very strong. But Macartney was ambivalent about this, suggesting that relying on one prob- lematic commodity was bad policy. He argued that introducing a wider range of new products to the Chinese market would be more likely, over time, to forge a sustainable expanding fl ow of trade with the Qing domains. And he joined a growing chorus, led by EIC agents and China- based merchants, calling for state support to galvanize efforts

9 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero to “open up” China to wider trade. The government of William Pitt the Younger heeded these calls, but decided to split the difference: the British government prepared a formal state mission to the Qianlong Emperor and his court, yet compelled the EIC to foot the bill on the grounds that it stood most directly to gain. Given that the British state had at great expense rescued the EIC fi nancially twice in the previous generation, culminating in the controversial 1784 India Act, this was hardly surprising. It also rather nicely refl ected the entangling of fl ag and commerce that already so marked British activity in Asia. The fi rst mission was aborted when the chosen ambassador died before the expedition could reach China. But that entangling then became closer still when Henry Dundas, the senior EIC offi cial who organized the ill- fated fi rst embassy, became Pitt’s Home Secretary, and Macartney advised him to try again. Dundas not only took the advice but he appointed Macartney to lead the mission. This meant being represented by the man who wrote in 1773, celebrating a wave of British territorial expansion after victory in the Seven Years War, that the British now boasted “this vast empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained.”2 Macartney led the most ambitious effort the British Empire had yet launched to insert itself into the political economy of the region Britons then referred to as “Tartary,” and later came to call the “Far East.” His delegation was more than 100 strong, including artists, scholars, scientists, gardeners, doctors, interpreters, and a military escort. And in addition to the four objectives noted above, the British government directed Macartney to carry out two other very interesting assignments: to open political and trade relations with “other nations of the East,” especially Japan; and to gather intelligence about China, including assessments of government and administration, military power, science and technology, foreign policy, society, and the condition of the people. Dundas, Pitt, and Macartney all hoped that establishing direct government-to- government relations with the Qing court would be the breakthrough, enabling British trade to break free from the straitjacket imposed by the Canton System. To that end, the idea was to impress the Qing with British wealth, power, science, and technology, for which purpose the Macartney Mission brought along a great deal of bric- a- brac, including weapons, textiles, and timepieces, to help woo the Middle Kingdom. It seemed at the time, and to many ever since, that the Macartney Mission failed because the Qianlong Emperor dismissed both the requests for a permanent embassy, with expanded access and trade, and the products his guests displayed to impress him. The Qing court was arguably at its wealthiest under Qianlong. But this is where the story gets interesting and why, for the study of empire in Asia in the nineteenth century, it remains so signifi cant. Popular myths such as the story that the mission was rejected because Macartney refused to practice the full ceremonial kow tow gesture of submis- sion to the Emperor have long been debunked. Yet there was a defi nite cultural failure to communicate. The argument that the failure stemmed from arrogant Chinese insistence that the Middle Kingdom had no peer, and only related to the rest of the world by dictating to it from a position of superiority, is not much more accurate than the kow tow myth—but this point is subtle, nor is it diffi cult to understand why many Britons

10 Introduction long felt this was what happened.3 The central piece of evidence is a famous letter the Qianlong Emperor sent to King George III to explain why he rejected the British requests in what he apparently regarded as a gesture to indicate no offense was taken or meant, and there was no reason why anything should change. The translated wording of that letter expressed, poignantly, vast differences in worldviews, perceptions of status, and understandings of how to manage relations between states. The Qing letter refl ected very deeply established understandings of the world and how to behave in it, a world revolving around the Middle Kingdom. What the British considered gifts, the Chinese referred to in terms translated as “tribute,” a system they used as a way to order their relations with other, less important powers. Qianlong tried to assure George III that the “respectful humility” of his ambassador was “highly praiseworthy,” then paid what he thought was the compliment of explaining point by point, in detail, why he could not accept the British requests. This explanation revolved around two themes: existing trade arrangements were fair and satisfactory, and the fundamental differences between Chinese civilization and its cultural, political, and social norms, and those of the Europeans, were so profound that direct political relations, and expanded trade access, simply could not be made compatible with the existing civilizational order of Qing China. And that civilizational order was perfect as it was; nor did it make any sense to expect the Europeans to try to adopt it for themselves. This was simply not the way of the world. The Emperor noted that “I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Permission to trade through Guangzhou was already a “signal mark of favour” which allowed the British to “participate in our benefi cence,” no small concession given that “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolifi c abundance and lacks no product within its own borders.” Qianlong pointed to his generosity in nevertheless treating the Macartney Mission with “extreme favour” and noted that he gave the British King a “mandate” to operate within the established Sinic world order. It therefore seemed routine to close the letter by expressing, in customary language, the Imperial expect- ation that this newest recruit to the “tributary system” by which Qing China ordered its world, and structured behavior, would behave accordingly. That included clear warning to respect the Empire’s decisions or face consequences: “Do not say that you were not warned in due time! Tremblingly obey and show no negligence! A special mandate!” The most familiar interpretation of this event is that this rebuttal was a fundamental mistake— at worst, extreme arrogance— by the Qing, who supposedly squandered an opportunity to establish amicable working relations with the British Empire before the Industrial Revolution decisively altered both the correlation of forces between Qing China and the European Great Powers and British attitudes toward behavior in, and relations with, their “Far East.”4 Despite the fact that the Industrial Revolution did indeed transform the correlation of forces, and this did infl uence attitudes, this analysis nevertheless cannot withstand close scrutiny. It is unhistorical. There was no opportunity to squander, because the differences between these two great empires in worldviews, and therefore in root understandings of how to order the world,

11 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero were fundamental. The European practice of respecting notional equality of status between states, especially Great Powers, and communicating accordingly, dated back, in practice and in concept, to the Westphalian agreements of 1648. The Chinese understanding of the Empire as the Middle Kingdom, ordering a world that revolved around it regardless of current physical realities of power, and behaved accordingly, could not be reconciled with any notions of basing “foreign relations” on equality of status. This supposedly helps explain what has often been identifi ed as the defi ning fact of the nineteenth- century Asian experience: the decline of the Qing Empire and its world order, overwhelmed by the tsunami of European- driven “High Imperialism,” fueled and sustained by the Industrial Revolution. Delayed for a generation by revolution and total war in Europe, an even stronger British Empire then resumed interest in “opening up” China and its trade, resorting to force to do so. Through two Opium Wars, during 1839–42 and 1856–60, punctuated by the imposition of “unequal treaties”—featuring settlement and trade concessions, extraterritorial privileges, and the enforced establishment of permanent embassies to the Imperial Court in Beijing—the Great Powers, led by the British Empire, overwhelmed the Sinic World. The “answer” to the supposed arrogance, and apparent strategic blindness, of the Qianlong Emperor’s letter to George III came through the Treaty of Nanjing, the cession of Hong Kong, the destruction and wholescale looting of the Summer Palace, and fi nally, in 1900, the suppression of the so-called Boxer Rebellion. Imperial China became an arena of geopolitical expansion and competition between the rest of the Great Powers. And as fared the Qing, so fared the rest of Asia. Such grand narratives laid it all out: stagnant, despotic, “backward,” and “Oriental” Asian- based empires were superseded, or colonized, or dominated and marginalized, by “modern” industrial (and thus “progressive” and dynamic) European-based empires, who, during the “long nineteenth century,” built a truly global “world order,” and hardwired Asia and its peoples into that order. There is much that still needs to be corrected or even set aside from these grand narratives. But one central theme stands intact as the basis for such correction: empire remained the principal instrument of what did indeed amount to an unprecedentedly extensive, and intensive, reordering of Asia and its peoples— within, fi nally, a truly global context. Empire and its concepts, practices, and norms was the principal vehicle for what we outlined in our fi rst volume: the forging of a supercontinental Eurasian Imperial Order, built by imperial states and societies whose characteristics, connections, and convergences ordered relations and intercourse within, and between, its polities. This centrality of empire within the historical processes did not change in what became a “long nineteenth century.” Nor did several of empire’s most fundamental characteristics: layered and delegated sovereignty and administration, expressed through networks and partnerships at various levels; hierarchy and differentiation of treatment; the importance of establishing legitimacy and asserting status. But some very important things did change: the physical correlation of forces between different imperial states and societies, which thus altered material, technological, economic, and military

12 Introduction capabilities accordingly; and the impact this had on perceptions of status, power, and sophistication, which therefore affected notions of what was legitimate, and on what basis order should be constructed. Economic determinism plus technological development do not and cannot explain these changes, nor are they suffi cient to periodize a “long nineteenth century.” But they are central and necessary to both. This was not, appearances to the contrary, a century defi ned by nationalism and the nation- state. It was the century transformed by the Industrial Revolution, which enabled the construction of a truly integrated and permanently entangled global order of political economy: an order built by empires. The Imperial Order constructed in post- Chinggisid Eurasia gave way to a Global Order that rewrote the political, territorial, and interstate map of Asia and, through empire, globalized that space and its peoples. The task of this second volume is to explain how and why this happened. Popular narratives interpreting such events as the Macartney Mission and the Qianlong Letter that told us more about their authors than about the events in question produced, over time, the backlash that forged the most obvious obstacle confronting this volume: what is by now the lazy concept, even accusation, of “Eurocentrism.” Taken too far, as too often happens, this means being condemned for suggesting that “Europeans” had anything to do with “Asian” history, and in the process producing at best lopsided or at worst congratulatory histories. In more restrained form, this is the accusation of denying historical agency to “Asians”; those addicted to jargon have used the term “epistemic violence.”5 Seen through the lens of empire, as we explained in Volume One, this did not make sense in the thirteenth century, let alone the nineteenth. Looking deeper into the evidence, beyond visceral inclinations to shout “orientalism,” the practices and concepts of Empire in Asia indicate something very profound: from the dying years of the eighteenth century, ambitions for fundamental change and appetites for transforming expansion— territorial, political, technological, economic and commercial, conceptual—emanated very heavily from the Western portion of the Eurasian supercontinent, rippling through its larger Imperial Order. This was however far more complicated than simple binary stories of aggressor-victim, active-passive, evolving-stagnant, or rising-declining. The multiple and dynamic connections between the general and the local, the networks that combined both in chains of intercourse, the arrays of partnerships and alliances, all very much remained defi ning features of Empire in Asia and reordering Asia. But the three vectors of systemic geopolitical change we identifi ed in Volume One as emerging later in the eighteenth century— (1) the reordering and consolidation of vast continental spaces in Central Eurasia by expanding great imperial powers, increasingly bumping up against each other; (2) the ebbing of westward expansion by Asian-based powers and the rising of eastward expansion by European-based empires; and (3) the forging of a truly global order of political economy, heavily driven by maritime projects of empire, dominated by European-based powers—became, from the end years of that century, dominant profound forces reordering geopolitical Asia. While this remained a story that defi ed Eurocentrism binaries, this qualitatively different “Industrial Revolution

13 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero imperialism” altered the nature of networks and partnerships when it altered, bringing a new level of intensity, the correlation of forces.6 European- driven projects of Empire continued very emphatically to build on, or work from, what was already in place. But they did so with ever greater ambitions and a growing sense of difference. Attitudes changed. Seminal events punctuated and revealed this process. The Macartney Mission stands out more in retrospect as a moment of imperial collision, but only because it was eclipsed at the time by prolonged total war in Europe. That war generated the next such event: the French expedition to Egypt in 1798, featuring a much stronger and more aggressive military project but also incorpor- ating wider intellectual, political, and even civilizational ambitions into the expedition. The ripple effect through the Ottoman Empire and Southwest Asia became a strong vector of imperial reordering. The British assertiveness that provoked the Opium War in 1839 brought this wider vector into East Asia and the Sinic sphere. That was followed by American coercion of Tokugawa Japan in 1853, reinforced soon after by British gun- boat diplomacy. Russian expansion into Central Asia, as well as British paramountcy in South Asia, was more incremental but also more methodical. But they also featured their violent ﬂ ash points of change: the British military conquest and annexation of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in the 1840s, the Russian conquest and annexation of the khanates of Central Asia in the 1860s. Nor did Mainland Southeast Asia avoid such changes, reﬂ ected by French penetration into Indochina and up the Mekong in the 1860s and the British imposition of paramountcy in the Malay peninsula in the 1870s, having already established the same by force in Burma. Asian- based powers did not simply stand by and observe this process. The Qing continued to exert themselves politically and militarily in their northwest, into Central Asia, and strove to suppress rebellion and “modernize.” Japan’s dramatic response to forcible reconnection with geopolitics is a fundamental part of the story of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century.” But most of the deep structural reordering, driven by striking attitudinal changes, very much emanated from forces projecting into Asia. Three things made this “long nineteenth century” a distinct period: the extent of the geopolitical reordering within Asia, the attitudes that drove it, and its globalization.

Framing Time, Place, and Themes

This second volume sees the story of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century” as something best revisited within a broad framework sketched out by three recent studies of great importance, all rising well above older narratives of binaries and rufﬂ ed feathers. In 2000, Kenneth Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy . Four years later, Christopher Bayly published The Birth of the Modern World 1780– 1914 . And in 2014 J ü rgen Osterhammel’s 2009 study was published in English as The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century .7 This new scholarship helps us not only move beyond

14 Introduction misperceptions, prejudices, and binaries, it also allows us to reconsider how to reconcile older but still valuable analyses of world systems—Wallerstein, McNeill, Hodgson— with newer approaches to globalizing the histories of Empire in Asia: during the period when one was clearly the agent that embedded the other within the truly global geopolitical order so starkly challenged by the outbreak of Great War in 1914.8 Pomeranz’s argument can be laid out by unpacking his title. There was a “great divergence” between the characteristics and capabilities of some parts of the world compared to others. That did help forge a “modern world economy.” But this cannot be understood by comparing “China” as a whole to “Europe” as a whole, because closer examination of economic, structural, and political evidence indicates something fundamental: the real differences were between core regions and peripheral regions in both these larger areas. For a long time core regions had more in common with each other than with peripheral regions in their own part of the world. But, much later than was often supposed, well into the nineteenth century, core regions within Europe began to diverge markedly, in economic, structural, technological, and political characteristics, from core regions in China and elsewhere in Asia. The big question was not why there wasn’t any Industrial Revolution in China. It was why one occurred in core regions of Europe, and how it came to produce such a “great divergence” that the outcome was the European-driven globalization of Asia and world political economy. The answer lay not in anything intrinsic to Europe, nor in any facet of its structure— neither ideology, nor culture, nor organization, nor competitive international relations—but rather in contingency and commodity. Stumbling on the New World, European core areas were eventually able to generate so much surplus wealth and power that they made the “leap off the land.” By drawing on an entirely new source for fuel supplies, labor expansion, and agricultural expansion, they were able to build viable long distance trading networks that added value as well as bulk, leverage their access to silver to gain dominance in pan- Asian trade and commerce, and bolster their economic endeavors by ever more formidable military coercion. We do not in fact accept Pomeranz’s core arguments for contingency and commodity, and for comparing by region rather than larger polity. He himself is inconsistent in the latter, for example, in explaining European maritime penetration into Southeast Asia by comparing Qing failure to do the same; and the former ignores the ability to exploit windfalls that was provided by ideas and organization, and driven by competition and rivalry. But his analysis does make two powerful points: that the fundamental divergence in the correlation of forces did unfold in a way that divided European-based entities from Asian-based entities, but only well into the nineteenth century, driven by industrialization in the former; and that this did enable a globalization of political economy in Asia. Bayly took the analysis to a higher level in a magisterial study that reworked our understanding of modernity, globalization, and the nineteenth century. Bayly argued that our “long nineteenth century” was deﬁ ned, and periodized, by unfolding historical processes that transformed human politics, economies, and societies by a series of transformations which began circa 1780, at the start of “the revolutionary age.” These

15 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero resulted from active, creative, and dynamic interactions between regions, peoples, polities, practices, and ideas. Revolutions, political and industrial, accelerated these transformations; ideas crossed oceans and borders. The pace, extent and intensity of these changes, above all their entanglement, amounted to global transformation. This was far more complex than simple outward projection of forces, practices, and ideas from the Euro- Atlantic regions to the rest of the world. The dynamic was much more interactive; rapidly developing connections created hybrid polities, mixed ideologies, and complex forms of global economic exchange.9 These very same connections often heightened the sense of difference and antagonism between people in different societies. Aptly, Bayly cites Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation , to observe that the global and the local fed off each other.10 Crucially, this did refl ect, geopolitically, a “European moment.” Bayly argues that the root of this ultimate interconnectedness, and its consequences, was the evolution of Western European and North American economic dominance. The world of 1780, multipolar and dominated by agrarian empires, featured assertively independent Qing and Ottoman regional orders, and effectively autonomous Central Asian, African, and Pacifi c polities. This gave way, by 1914, to a connected global order, in which these orders had either fragmented, or incorporated, or were unraveling. Local, national, and regional history became global history, and the societies, economies, and polities of the world became more similar and more connected. Asian agency was central, multiple, and crucial, but continued to unfold within this larger Eurasian Imperial Order— one now globalized by power, practices, and ambitions that emanated heavily from European- based empires. The “modern” world emerged from this new global order. Bayly argues that an important part of being modern was thinking you were. Modernity was a process driven by emulating and adapting. Globally, this could be seen in wide ranging examples, from European statesmen who wrote and spoke about modernity to Asian populaces who adopted its accoutrements, such as the watch, bowler hat, and umbrella.11 Modernity not only shaped society and the individual but also had a powerful infl uence on ideas relating to technology, statecraft, religion, and objects, all of which helped make sense of what it meant to be part of a modern, global world system. Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century focused more on explaining what defi ned the nineteenth century than on modernity per se: “this book is the portrait of an epoch.” But his explanations for what constituted modernity, and for the historical experience and agency of empire, are central to a study that for once deserves the title “defi nitive.”12 Osterhammel nods toward the Pomeranz school of analysis, noting that “the problem of the ‘great divergence’ between rich and poor regions has thus been shifted forward to the nineteenth century.” But he insists this is not his “central issue.” Osterhammel notes, “I see the nineteenth century even more sharply than he [Bayly] does as the ‘European century,’ ” but also stresses the need to respect the evidence and take a different approach to “world history.”13 His nineteenth century was “anchored in history,” in a wider, not date-framed, history of both time and space. Closer examination of “subareas” of human experience,

16 Introduction thematic as well as regional, reveals a truly grand narrative which— even though shaped by generalities—can for that very reason capture the nature of “an epoch.” Osterhammel presented his study as a “kindred spirit,” pushing his work beyond Bayly’s scope.14 Both adopted a broad survey approach and resisted the temptation to break their study down to regions, civilizations, or continents, but Osterhammel applied his own distinct lens and methodology. He did not see the framing of the nineteenth century as chronologic- ally clear- cut as Bayly did, and he was more interested in the United States of America; for those reasons, his discussion ranged from before 1780 until, on some points, our own times.15 Both Osterhammel and Bayly regard colonialism and imperialism as an integral part of their larger narrative. Neither separates it from their main study of the century, both deliberately “keep it in view throughout.” Osterhammel argues that his thesis can be explained, from the global vantage point, by measuring, case by case, theme by theme, aspect by aspect, event by event, within “particular areas of historical reality,” the “gap between “Europe” (whatever that may have been at the time) and other parts of the world. Osterhammel describes the long nineteenth century as European- driven because “other continents took Europe as their yardstick.” 16 This European agency was projected via power (often violent), through infl uential channels of capitalist expansion (trade networks as an example) and by the force of example. His thesis is a dynamic bal- ancing act: while insisting that in world history the notion of “Europe’s special path” does not withstand serious analysis, nevertheless “the history of the nineteenth century was made in and by Europe, to an extent that cannot be said of either the eighteenth or twentieth century, not to speak of earlier periods.”17 Our volume concludes that closer study— theme by theme, aspect by aspect, of the continuing experience of Empire in Asia, during this broader period bounded, roughly, by the geopolitical ascendancy of European- based powers— supports this thesis, and its rationale. The dialogue between these framing studies helps explain our conclusion. Bayly argued there was a “great acceleration” and intensifi cation of the profound forces building the modern world, from the 1890s into the Great War— a world that simultaneously became more similar from region to region, but also more differentiated within regions. Osterhammel argues that his picture is more nuanced, his time frame more protracted. For him, the “innovations with a worldwide impact” which came “thick and fast” began in the 1860s, extended into the 1880s, and converged. This shaped a process of change over time that made the outbreak of the Great War, from a global point of view, something more than a “sudden, unexpected falling of the curtain.”18 The vantage point of Empire in Asia, as affected by the three vectors of change we identifi ed above, bears him out. The striking changes in the broader correlation of forces certainly justify Osterhammel’s contention that “never had changes originating in Europe achieved such impact on the rest of the world.” Osterhammel’s three levers of European agency—power, infl uence, and force of example— all resonate through our story. Yet so do fundamental aspects of continuity and overlap. European-based imperial projects

17 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero of expansion did become transformative— but never unfettered, unilateral, or all- conquering. “Asian” states, societies, communities, and individuals found themselves increasingly navigating and negotiating within a geopolitical frame being reordered by powers emanating from Europe. Bayly rightly notes that the global expansion of European power and its seeming pervasiveness proved transitory. But those powers, and their European agents, almost always strove to build on, and work within, legacies and legitimacies inherited on the spot; were compelled to work with, and often depend on, demographic, economic, political, and physical partnerships with Asian populations and polities they sought to reorder; and became heavily, sometimes powerfully, infl uenced by the constraints and burdens, as well as benefi ts and advantages, of wielding suddenly greater leverage in reordering a mega- region which also made its own demands upon them. This was in fact not even a story of uncovering case by case, or aspect by aspect, explanations for gaps in agency and power: it was a story of entanglement. An Imperial Order, in which regions and polities defi ned themselves in relationship to each other, became, through the noise and fury of the “long nineteenth century,” a Global Order that brought European and Asian- based powers, through this entangling instrument of empire, into an interwoven geopolitical and economic states system. To put it crudely, European industry, technology, money, ideas, and ambitions entangled fundamentally with Asian legacies, practices, structures and institutions, norms and expectations, societies, and physical environments. The shared and overlapping stories of the post-Chinggisid Imperial Order became the blended stories of an integrated Global Order. This volume engages that story by proceeding thematically, rather than, as in Volume One, regionally. There are two principal reasons for this. First, the characteristics that made this a qualitatively distinct period in the wider history of Empire in Asia were so systemic, entangled, and interwoven that these profound changes over time can only really be brought out by analyzing them thematically, not by proceeding region by region. Second, our approach is to identify a series of developments that illustrate, when aggregated, why this was both continuing story and distinct change. The themes themselves, with some selective focus, are used to illustrate the wider experience of a particular dimension across Empire in Asia. The themes include: extraterritoriality and the use of legal codes to reorder and regulate relationships on the spot within projects of empire, or in spaces of competition between empires; technology and infrastructure as the organizing principles and physical eco-skeleton of projects of empire and wider reordering; concepts of political sovereignty and their practical impact on geopolitical control of territories and peoples; the defi ning of imperial frontiers as a cornerstone of the process of reordering a “modern” states system; the mass movements and migrations of peoples, for a variety of reasons, as a driving force in reordering economies, states, and the states system; the changing relationship between religion and the politics of empire and state- building, or state- rebuilding; and the projection of maritime empire, commercial and political, across the oceans, high seas, and port cities of Asia, as the most dramatic expression of globalizing an Imperial Asia. A fi nal chapter considers

18 Introduction our aggregated arguments for the importance of Empire in Asia in globalizing Asia in a “long nineteenth century.” Our project divided this reexamination of the history of empire in Asia into two important phases. This division was determined by what we saw as the changing nature, character, and consequences of the driving forces that reordered Asia, through empire. Those driving forces, indeed the historical nature of empire itself, are considered in an opening survey chapter that links some central themes explored by both volumes in this series: Thomas DuBois’s study of “the overlap of plural empires as a way of life.” DuBois identifi es in Hulunbuir, the steppe grassland border province that now connects China, Mongolia, and Russia, a site through which to search, through the combination of “historical accident, cultural preference, and ecological constraint,” for what might be seen as “one or more uniquely Asian experiences of empire.” Geography, human movement and activity, and the fl ow and transmission of goods, ideas, and ambitions, made Hulunbuir a space in which multiple experiences of empire could coexist, and this should compel us to reconsider any static concepts of core and periphery. Material, cultural, and political expressions of empire produced for Hulunbuir a history in which “old networks did not vanish entirely, but rather continued to exist and evolve as new empires added new layers of connections symbols and loyalties.” Ranging from the Mongol through the Japanese projects of empire, the Hulunbuir legacies suggest that for Asia, on numerous levels, the experience of empire was always dynamic and plural. The theme of extraterritoriality and the application of legal codes remain the most emotive dimension of this story, time, and place. To cite just one potent symbol of perceived “Western” arrogance and Chinese “humiliation,” the myth of signs saying “No Dogs or Chinese” in the public parks of the Shanghai International Settlement refuses to die.19 Robert Bickers’s chapter examines extraterritoriality, primarily as developed by the British in expanding their presence and activity in Qing and Revolutionary China. Right away this theme raises deeper issues: the fundamental importance of external penetration and reordering in the Sinic sphere, and the wider Asian repercussions of this most dramatic change in the correlation of forces, between Imperial China and the rest of the Great Powers. The intelligence assessments Macartney brought home from his Mission might have been overshadowed for later generations more interested in the Qianlong Letter, but at the time they turned out to be part precursor and part prompt to attitude changes toward Imperial China that powerfully infl uenced the “long nineteenth century.” Macartney’s entourage produced much of lasting and wide interest, including detailed accounts, with engravings, of journeys that included crossing the Ming Great Wall, and an infl uential multivolume offi cial report. But Macartney’s own journal observations seem most directly to have planted seeds of future ambitions:

The Empire of China is an old, crazy, fi rst-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant offi cers have contrived to keep afl oat for these hundred

19 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

and ﬁ fty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufﬁ cient man happens to have the command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and then will be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.20

This portrait of an imperial state “in decline,” a theme atavistically familiar to clas- sically educated Britons weaned on Gibbons’s classic study The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, coincided with an ever-growing sense that commerce in China promised fabulous wealth.21 The Qing state and its administration might have become disorganized, sclerotic, and apparently isolationist, but Chinese economy and society remained dynamic, and hungry for engagement. Bickers’s chapter examines that most nuanced of issues: just how imperial powers, particularly the British, managed, on the spot, from the 1840s on, to insert their own commercial, economic, and administrative interests, and agents, within a Chinese political economy they sought to reorder, to “open to the world.” There is a limit to revisionism. British and International Settlements and Concessions were established on Chinese soil and British gunboats patrolled up China’s great rivers, but there were no Chinese concessions in Cornwall, nor any Chinese warships patrolling the English Channel. But Bickers presents a relationship much more complicated than the simple dispossessing of Chinese authority on their own soil in pursuit of some grander imperial agenda. Extraterritoriality refl ected how complicated and unstable the whole project to “modernize” China by external intervention really was. Its most important rationale was to serve as a means to control and discipline the behavior of British and British- controlled individuals and interests in China, not to exclude Chinese from enclaves carved out of their own hide. What mattered most about extraterritoriality was how it operated in practice, and the most important feature in that regard was that the system rested on the contingent needs of British individuals and interests on the spot in China, not on any imperial grand strategy. The system and its practice in fact refl ected the nature of the British Empire itself, at least in this part of the world: an unstable array of networks and partnerships, very heavily localized and contingent in how they pursued their own interests, working through layers of administration and application. The most fascin- ating practical result of establishing the whole system was to reshape in practice the def- inition, in China, of just who was British—entangled identities—and just what interests were British- protected. Bickers notes that this often stretched any such defi nition well beyond familiar notions of identity, ethnicity, and patrimony. Tracing the growth of the practice, Bickers points out that it became widespread throughout the whole Sinic sphere, including Qing attempts to impose it in their own interest in Korea and Japan. He points out that there were important differences in design and practice, between, for example, British and Japanese systems. He accepts that the operation of the system

20 Introduction bounded in time the reordering of a China unable to set terms for external engagement in its own territory, with all that entailed. But he insists that these systems were embedded inside, working within, the Chinese-dominated networks of commerce and trade that were essential to the prosperity of the foreign interests operating from settlements and concessions. And he concludes that the salient feature of the most important system, the British, was how improvised, local, and contingent it always was. Bluntly, “the seem- ingly hard principles underlying it could be superseded when it was deemed necessary.” The ramifi cations of the “globalization” of Imperial China by the combination of external and local forces cannot be underestimated. This was a cornerstone development of the “long nineteenth century.” It formed a wave that propelled another: the Japanese national decision to embark on two projects— modernization and overseas territorial empire. This is often told as a unique story, standing in striking contrast to the apparent decline of all other signifi cant Asian-based imperial projects, from the Ottoman, through the Mughal, to the Qing. It is also frequently explained as a project that changed fundamentally in the twentieth century, becoming, after the Great War, a military march toward conquest and exclusive regional hegemony.22 John DiMoia challenges this latter interpretation in a chapter which argues that from a vantage point no less signifi cant than geopolitics and foreign policy the Japanese project of overseas empire shows striking continuity, from the middle years of the Meiji period in the 1880s, in its focus on aggressive territorial expansion and establishing exclusive spheres of infl uence. That vantage point is the combination of technology and infrastructure, combining methods of organization with the structures built to develop a Japanese-dominated political economy in mainland Northeast Asia. DiMoia argues that Japanese infrastructure development was the real driver of wider Japanese imperialism and thus a window into its very nature. Agreeing that external penetration into the Qing polity did trigger fundamental regional changes, DiMoia explains how Japanese efforts to build economic, technological, and administrative infrastructure reveal the underlying continuity of a drive to security and prosperity through expansion. Operating within the competitive and volatile period of “high imperialism,” railway building in particular, especially the development of the South Manchuria Railway system, not only points to the central importance of infrastructure in Japanese policy, it also reveals the wider ambitions of that policy. Far from being a reaction to circumstances during and after the Great War, this was an agenda that unfolded very consistently and with increasing momentum. Bringing a closer critical examination of more recent historiography to bear on the problem, DiMoia concludes that “the elements for an imperial approach were in place very early,” and rather than being an atavistic or moral reaction to post– Great War geopolitical challenges, “Japan’s modern empire appears almost relentlessly bureaucratic and deeply rational in its pursuits.” Japanese imperialism was indeed a central development in forging a Global Asia. It remains the most striking evidence that this vast historical process was much more complicated than “the rise of the West”; but it was driven more by the Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s effort to wedge itself into that world, than by reactive militarism. DiMoia persuasively

21 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero summarizes the nature, impact, and breadth of this deeper continuity of empire-building through infrastructure: “Through materiality, with rail and industry representing key examples, Japan extended and carried out its aims abroad, and supplemented these spatial interventions with an increasingly interventionist military/ policing presence, one where the public health apparatus responsible for quarantine was located inside the colonial police.” This categorically demonstrated that an Asian-based imperial power could effectively insert itself into the new Global Asia being reordered by empire. Seismic upheaval in the Sinic sphere also signifi cantly infl uenced the experience of the region we now call Southeast Asia, a term not used during the “long nineteenth century.” This also often unfolded through the entangling of Chinese, local, and European interests and ambitions, infl uenced here by the absence of any dominant regional power. Island Southeast Asia, more accessible to European maritime power, was already heavily enmeshed in a European- dominated imperial states system, politically territori- ally carved up by British, French, Dutch, and Spanish (and later American) projects. Mainland Southeast Asia now found itself literally stuck between its relationships with the Sinic Order of geopolitics and a massive increase in European- driven ambition and penetration into the region— partly as a component of reordering China, partly for its own sake. Bruce Lockhart studies this experience in a chapter that analyzes what was ultimately much more than a simple failure to communicate: a long and erratic clash between French concepts of sovereignty and local and regional understandings of suzerainty, as both defi ned, demarcated, and legitimized the exercise of political authority over territories and peoples. Lockhart argues that existing regional ideas of suzerainty relied on ambiguity and overlap, and were palpably layered, in order to manage the exercising of authority over land and people in a region whose physical environment often set limits to such authority, and which had long experience in negotiating a balance between practical autonomy and a relationship with Imperial China. He notes that the French understood the nature of these ideas and deliberately set out to supersede them with something very different. But this was a messy process indeed, especially because so much was literally, sometimes willfully, lost in translation. A term such as “independence” proved especially prob- lematic. French empire-builders, particularly agents on the spot, saw it as representing a fundamental change by defi ning exclusive political authority; Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Chinese agents tended to regard it as a rhetorical assertion that did not affect overlapping and ambiguous relationships of patron and vassal with which they were so familiar. This difference in perception, partly contrived, eventually provoked military confl ict between the French and the Qing over whether or not French exclusive geopolitical authority would prevail in what the French now termed “Indochina.” Lockhart argues that French agents came to understand these differences in concept and leveraged them, “in effect, forcing a replacement of traditional multiple suzerainty (in the case of Cambodia and Laos) by a single suzerain, themselves.” French power, concepts, and agency did not dispel or erase deeper cultural and intellectual continu- ities between the region and the Sinic sphere. But French insistence on a very different

22 Introduction

“monopolistic suzerainty” and their ability to impose it did reorder the region geopolitically, by evolving “into direct sovereignty with the creation of French Indochina as a full-fl edged colony with clearly defi ned borders.” Imperial convergence was sharpest along the frontier and borders lie at the heart of the next chapter by Brian P. Farrell, which examines the nature and impact of imperial frontiers in the “long nineteenth century.” Farrell notes that a border formed only one component of a frontier; that frontiers were one of the oldest and most signifi cant components of empire and geopolitical systems, in Asia as well as everywhere else; and that hitherto the imperial frontier was, more often than not, characterized by a fundamental theme: ambiguity. Ambiguous liminal zones in which people living in and moving through areas that lay at the margins between imperial states, with political, military, and economic relationships to one or more of these states that could be overlapping, or ambivalent, or even co- opted, provided empires with an instrument that helped them manage, fl exibly, such challenges as military security, economic intercourse, the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas, and the projection of status and authority. It is no exaggeration to say that “pre-modern” empires were heavily defi ned by their frontiers, usually plural in nature as well as on the ground. From the middle of the “long nineteenth century,” European- based empires made a determined effort to transform the geopolitical order of Central Asia in particular. This was part of what became a global drive toward constructing a “modern” states system, in which articulated standards of governance and administration, as well as norms and codes for acceptable economic, military, and political behavior, were defi ned as the basis for literally redrawing the political map. This was expressed as establishing an order composed of “civilized states.” That meant marking out clearly defi ned and accepted territorial boundaries to enable authorities that demonstrated they could meet the required standards and effectively control these borders to secure the territory and peoples within them. It can even be said, in modest simplifi cation, that the global pursuit became to replace a world defi ned by frontiers with one regulated by borders.23 This understandably generated the trauma of change. Ambiguity suited empire, aligned as it was to diversity, differentiation, and layers. Stark clarity in defi nition fi t less well with such a geopolitical model, and the rough edges of the fi t emerged very clearly in the Asian nineteenth- century experience. The crucial relationship was the link between the frontier and the state. European-based empires adopted, over time, two concepts for their wider drive to reorder the states system: to distinguish between empty space and ordered space, which in their view meant the difference between territory not controlled by any authority that could meet the required standards and territory controlled by one that could; to identify, demarcate, and rec- ognize scientifi cally surveyed geographical border lines, as instruments by which to manage both “international relations” and relations with peoples living inside these frontier areas. This was a major problem, because such peoples could and did complicate both internal security and “international relations,” which, through the medium of the frontier, were entangled too tightly to separate. The two greatest

23 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero projects of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century” generated a bitter and volatile rivalry, from the late 1820s, over how to manage the relationship between their great Asian projects: the consolidation of British paramountcy in India and the territorial expansion of Tsarist Russia. Defi ning the imperial frontier became the very essence of that rivalry, the principal instrument by which both empires sought to reorder Asia, build this new “modern” states system, establish “ordered space,” and contain the expansion of the other. The focal points of this so-called Great Game were, not coincidentally, the heartlands of the old Timurid Empire, from whence his descendants moved into India to establish the Mughal Empire: what the British called their Northwest Frontier, straddling India and the state of Afghanistan, vio- lently overlapping into the khanates of Central Asia and impinging on the Qing’s own Northwest Frontier. Farrell makes fi ve arguments. First, the British consciously worked from within legacies and strategies inherited from the regional powers they supplanted, and relied fundamentally on local agents and relationships, at all levels, for all their endeavors. Second, British policy was distorted by long- running bitter internal arguments— which ran in a rolling discussion, that lasted for decades, from higher direction in London, down through central administration in India, and out to include political and military men on the spot along the Northwest Frontier. The argument was over how to manage the volatile relationship with Russia in Asia, which itself became defi ned by linkage between specifi c problems in the region and much wider strategic rivalries. This was in fact one of the most powerful manifestations of “globalizing Asia”: the forging of strategic connections between Great Power politics in Europe and this dynamic, and protracted, “Cold War” in Asia. Third, the problem of what they saw as “empty space” dominated both British and Russian thinking about this rivalry and how to manage the problem of frontiers, and both identifi ed the status of Afghanistan as the pivotal issue. Fourth, the British tried to resolve their problem by defi ning what they called a “scientifi c frontier” for Northwest India; the very concept refl ected the spirit of the times and the dynamics of their wider empire project. Finally, the general problem was never resolved. It was only surpassed by geopolitical developments elsewhere, to which this rivalry was connected. The result was the persistence of one of the last “imperial frontiers” left on the planet— an “empty space” surviving within, and despite, an aggressive, wide, and deep reordering of the Asian states system by these fractious empires. In this respect, the “long nineteenth century” lingers still. This wider and deeper reordering is pursued in the next chapter by Paul Werth, who analyzes the multiple movements of masses of people, throughout the “long nineteenth century,” across what became the vast spaces reorganized by Russian imperial expansion. Werth makes some cardinal points: the Russian project of empire was, overall, going into the twentieth century, a striking success by any metric one cares to use; Russia by itself reconstructed a Eurasian order that bonded the whole of North Asia into a polity stretching from the Pacifi c Ocean into central Poland; and during the “long nineteenth century” Russia became “an Asian power in terms of its geographical composition and

24 Introduction the geopolitical preoccupations of its elites.” The effects fl owed both ways: “just as Asia became increasingly important to Russia and its leaders, so too Russia became central to Asia’s future as the nineteenth century progressed.” Russian expansion was fundamental to the dynamic already identifi ed over frontiers: the merging of European Great Power rivalries and their states system with their larger projection of imperial power, and states system reordering, across Asia. Werth argues that movements of peoples were central to all these developments. Linkage, the connecting of strategic pressures and challenges in one region to those in another, became a defi ning feature of Russian imperialism. A frequent primary motive to threaten the British along their Northwest Frontier was to compel the British to back down, or reduce the pressure, in other regions, such as the Balkans and the Ottoman sphere. Moving peoples, either by design or in enabling more spontaneous fl ows, became a preoccupation of the expansion of Russia into Asia. Peopling vast spaces, to anchor them politically, physically, and economically to the wider Russian polity, relied on these great movements. People moved east, and southeast, as refugees, pilgrims, settlers, convicts, traders, merchants, soldiers, engineers, and administrators. By far the biggest such driver was unleashed by the emancipation of the serfs, which refl ected a major change in the hitherto guarded Russian state attitude toward spontaneous mass movements into Asia. This enabled, by the 1880s, a demographic movement of settlers to people the vast spaces of Siberia and what became the Russian Far East. The older dynamic of defi ning frontiers with Imperial China culminated in massive territorial expansion that brought Russian Empire to the Pacifi c Ocean, made it a major player in the external imperial penetration in Qing China, and brought it into confrontation with Japanese imperialism in Manchuria and Korea. Werth notes poignantly that “in virtually all cases, this movement entangled Russia and Russians more deeply in the affairs of their neighbors, while also implicating non-Russian subjects in the fate of the tsarist empire.” Nowhere was that more stark than in Central Asia, the old Timurid heartland, whose political autonomy eventually disappeared under Russian territorial expansion that created imperial frontiers with Qing China and the buffer state of Afghanistan. These fl ows, powerful as they were, also remained far from one-sided. Strong emphasis from the 1890s on trying to use demographic movements to Russianize and therefore “civilize” newly absorbed Asian territories often found more complicated realities on the ground: “conditions often compelled [Slavic migrants] sooner to adapt to habits of their new neighbors than to compel the opposite.” But the fl ows remained powerful. As with frontiers, fl ows of people could be a source of instability or represent new opportunities for the state. The massive expansion of the railway and communications network across this Russian Empire literally connected the political economies of East Asia to those of Europe, along an unbroken and patrolled economic land artery, for the fi rst time since the Mongol postal route. Russian orchestrated, enabled, driven, or tolerated movements of peoples literally made North Asia as a geopolitical fact, reordered Central Asia, and constituted one of the strongest drivers in building a Global Asia. Werth concludes that this theme makes clear “it was in the nineteenth century that [Russia and the other great

25 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

Asian- based empires, Ottoman, Persian, Chinese] became fundamentally entangled, and human mobility proved to be a critical ingredient in this convergence.” Convergence also featured in the theme engaged by Jack Fairey in Chapter 7: the relationships between religion and experiences of imperial governance and administration. Fairey poses a clear question to focus his chapter: “how did imperial practices and attitudes toward religion change?” How, in other words, did “political actors across Asia in the nineteenth century use ‘religion’ to assist in constructing and administering imperial states?” Fairey addresses these questions by examining four things: offi - cial state ideology; day-today practices of imperial governance; managing relations between subject religious communities; and relations between states. He focuses on the Ottoman Empire, as the most signifi cant non- European based power that continued to frame policies and decisions involving religion in an era where, across Asia, such things increasingly emanated from European power. The Ottomans thus represent not only an important case study but also a crucial outlier, for the larger theme of how religion infl uenced, and was infl uenced by, geopolitical globalizing in Asia. Fairey explains the role and impact religion played in the Ottoman polity, which was central to both its internal dynamics and its relations with the rest of the world. He argues that the French invasion of Egypt triggered seismic geopolitical waves that over time persuaded Ottoman administrators, who remained confi dent in their own traditions of governance, that “those traditions had become corrupted or fallen into abeyance, and that . . . deeper reform and renewal were required.” This involved experimenting with new administrative ideas, forms, and practices. That led, along a path of so- called defensive modernization, toward truly signifi cant change: the attempt to inculcate “a new, trans- confessional sense of ‘Ottoman- ness’ that placed patriotism to a common ‘fatherland’ or ‘father-state’ over loyalty to any particular religion.” This unsettled the very core of the Ottoman polity, within which religion had always been understood as the primary individual and communal source of identity, and the conduit through which both related to the state and the empire. Religions were communities, with layered and delegated political roles. Displacing this by forging a new imperial identity, outfl anking religion, summed up in an 1876 constitution that declared “all subjects of the Empire are without distinction called Ottomans, no matter what religion they pro- fess,” was fundamental change. The need to pursue such change seemed driven home by the dramatic change in the correlation of forces, which placed the Ottoman state on a geopolitical front line bordering the Great Powers and the Concert of Europe. They increasingly came to see the Ottomans as the “Sick Man of Europe,” identifi ed as the “Eastern Question” the issue of what consequences would ensue from a collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and increasingly took up communal issues within that empire as international concerns that required their involvement. This was role reversal from the long years of Ottoman penetration into Central Europe, and it helped motivate the so- called Tanzimat Reforms that aimed to strengthen the Ottoman state by centralizing it. That gravely disrupted long established layers and hierarchies of administration, and

26 Introduction differentiation— especially communal bodies defi ned by religion— through which this polyglot empire was defi ned and governed. Fairey agrees with Bayly that a central feature of the “long nineteenth century” was the progressive imposition by Western states of “a new pattern of internationalism on the old world order.”24 This undermined the ambiguity, in international relations as well as internal administration, that was so foundational to the practice of Empire in Asia, nowhere more so than in the Ottoman sphere. Religion as a political factor, and its agents, became something to be controlled by imperial states, not accepted as part of their necessary ambiguity. The Ottomans also embarked on a cultural and political cam- paign to promote Islam, as a way to enhance their own geopolitical infl uence and in response to European pressure on Ottoman arrangements. That only underlined the new concept of harnessing religion as an instrument to be employed by a stronger imperial state. Instead of governing through power-sharing arrangements resting on differentiation and ambiguity, the Ottomans, and other imperial states, tried increasingly to co- opt religious leaders as subordinate agents working directly for a more centralized imperial state. Despite some wide variations in how different imperial states tackled the relationship between religion and the state, a strong trend of convergence, one refl ected by the Ottoman experience, became clear: “it was imperative to increase government capacity— to do more as a state and to extract more from one’s subjects than ever before.” This forged an “imperial religion,” featuring drives to strengthen centralized states, “nationalize” such forces as religion that had long been sources of pluralism, and redefi ne the place of religion and its elites in political life. For Asia in general the consequences of this substantial shift were palpable. For the Ottomans, they were exist- ential: “the religious policies of the nineteenth century failed dismally to bring about more effective direct rule and arguably brought the empire to an end that was sooner, messier, and bloodier than might otherwise have been the case.” Through such vectors, the Ottomans actually exercised great agency, to their detriment, in answering their own “Eastern Question.” The fi nal thematic chapter, written by Donna Brunero, tackles the most visibly dramatic aspect of globalizing Asia through empire: the construction of a global maritime empire, weaving the sea lanes and maritime infrastructure of Asia into what became a truly global network of networks, chain of chains. Brunero focuses on the British as the imperial power that drove this maritime globalization, a persuasive feature of the era that overlapped with the “Pax Britannica.” She pursues three themes: what constituted the elements of British maritime power and empire in Asia and how they made that empire a thalassocracy, which she defi nes as “rule by those who control the sea”; how did Britons understand and promote this thalassocracy they built in Asia; and how we can understand imperial fl ows and experiences by exploring from the vantage point of one of their fundamental components: the deck of a working ship. The British inherited the elements of a maritime empire from earlier activity led by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch.

27 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

But from 1815 British maritime power was so formidable that it gave them unprecedented agency to redevelop the imperial use of the great waters. In Asia, however, that project revolved around a fundamental reality: maritime power must amount by its very nature to the exploitation of land- based networks and nodal points of trade, commerce, and security—and in Asia, those land-based networks and nodal points relied, fundamentally, on truly massive local engagement and involvement. What the British did over time was to build a series of maritime networks, linking colonial port cities, that created a global economic network of networks. This series of networks very much built on long established local trade and commerce relationships; it deeply entwined the fl ag and trade as British naval power became the great enabler of port and maritime investment and development; and it absolutely relied on Asian populations, on land and at sea, for labor, fi nance, and markets. It marks yet another example of entanglement in the process of creating a global Asia. Nothing did more to globalize Asia through the agency of empire-building; but no such project was more deeply characterized by an array of partnerships between Asian and European, in all ways, and at all levels, than this one. The list of great commercial cities of contemporary Asia coincides almost exactly, and not coincidentally, with the list of great colonial port cities developed through this project of a “British world order.” Arne Westad’s summary chapter ponders the collective effort by this volume to argue three main conclusions. First, there was a “long nineteenth century,” bounded not by dates but by vectors of change, during which empire, not nation-state or substate actors, remained the principal instrument of reordering in Asia. Second, that reordering was unprecedented in breadth and depth, culminating in the geopolitical reconstruction of an Asia now hard wired into a global states system of political economy. Finally, such reordering unfolded during the period when the Industrial Revolution and other profound forces altered the correlation of forces so massively that a “great divergence,” from the mid-nineteenth century, vested global ascendancy and initiative into European Great Powers, who used it to dramatically reorder geopolitical Asia—but did so through concepts, practices, policies, and endeavors that were fundamentally blended with local reality, legacy, partnership, and agency, at all levels. The older Eurasian Imperial Order simply globalized. The editors conclude this introduction by noting their debt to one other infl uential analysis. David Abernethy argued that it is possible to study both the interactions of Asians with Europeans and the interactions of Asia with Europe. But these historical agents were so deeply intertwined, for so long, that this must be done with eyes wide open. The experience of Empire in Asia, in what was indeed a distinct “long nineteenth century,” bears out both the argument and the caution. Abernethy argues that only Western Europe— to which we might add the United States and perhaps Imperial Japan—produced an outward projection of sheer power that, over time, established their regional states system as a truly global system. Agreed. But as he notes himself this was due to very specifi c and contingent historical circumstances, as well as profound forces.25 Europe might have exported itself to remake its world— but Asia and Asians were so infl uential in determining how

28 Introduction those processes unfolded on the supercontinent that this can only be seen as a wider, blended, outcome of empire.

NOTES

1 Odd Arne Westad , Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 ( New York : Basic Books, 2012 ), pp. 35 – 49 , provides an excellent short overview to these themes. The Canton System and the Cohong are examined in context by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik , The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present ( New York : M.E. Sharpe , 2013 ) ; and in detail by John D. Wong , Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016 ) . See also Frank Dikötter, Lars Lamaan, Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) . 2 The genesis and organization of the Macartney Mission is examined in James Hevia , Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 ( Durham : Duke University Press , 1995 ) , Part 3; and Alain Peyrefi tte , The Immobile Empire ( New York : Vintage Books , 2013 [ 1992 ]) . Macartney’s statement is recorded in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2006 ), p. 55 . 3 Critical evaluations of the Mission include Hevia , Peyrefi tte , and Robert Bickers (eds), Ritual & Diplomacy: The Macartney Mission to China 1792–1794 ( London : The Wellsweep Press , 1993 ) ; Frances Wood , “Britain’s First View of China: The Macartney Embassy 1792– 1794,” RSA Journal 142 , no. 5447 ( 1994 ) ; and Ruth W. Dunnell et al. (eds), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde ( New York : Routledge , 2004 ) . An infl uential contemporary account is Aeneas Anderson (ed.), An Accurate Account of Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China ( New York : Forgotten Books , 2016 [ 1797 ]) . 4 The Qianlong letter can be examined at http:// www.fas.nus.edu.sg/ hist/ eia/ documents_ archive/ qianlong.php . The established interpretation may be engaged in John King Fairbank, “On the Qing Tribute System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (June 1941); and, as editor, The Chinese World Order: Traditional Chinese Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Fresh reinterpretations include Tom Cunliffe’s evaluation of Henrietta Harrison’s forthcoming work, “Emperor Qianlong’s Letter Strategic, Not Arrogant,” at http:// www.china.org.cn/ china/ 2015- 01/ 30/ content_ 34686142.htm; and Tim Chamberlain’s blog essay, “The First British Embassy to China 1793– 1794,” at http:// eccentricparabola.blogspot.sg/ 2014/05/ the-fi rst- british- embassy- to- china- 1793.html . 5 A n i n fl uential work in this vein is Gayatri Spivak’s chapter “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader , ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman ( New York : Columbia University Press , 1988 ) . 6 David Abernethy , The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415– 1980 ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 2000 ) ; Charles Tilly , Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990– 1992 ( Cambridge, MA : Blackwell , 1990 ) ; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper , Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2010 ) . 7 Kenneth Pomeranz , The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2000 ) ; C. A. Bayly , The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 ( London : Wiley Blackwell , 2004 ) ; J ü rgen Osterhammel , The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2014 ) .

29 Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

8 Immanuel Wallerstein , The Modern World System, 4 vols (New York, San Diego, Berkeley : Academic Press and University of California Press , 1974– 2011 ) ; Marshall G. S. Hodgson , The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1974 ) ; William McNeill , A World History , 4th edn ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1999 ) . 9 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780– 1914 , pp. 1– 2. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 11 and 330– 40, for religion, modernity, and imperial power. 12 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World , pp. xv– xxi, lays out what is discussed here in summary form. 13 Osterhammel himself noted the marked difference between his own background as a China scholar and Bayly’s expertise as a South Asianist, suggesting that this scholarly training was at least partly responsible for the signiﬁ cant point that the two historians have differing points of emphasis on understanding the modern world (ibid., xvii). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., pp. 362– 8, for a comparison of the frontier in the American and Russian contexts, issues taken up by Chapters 5 and 6 in this volume. 16 Ibid., xx. 17 Ibid., xx– xxi. 18 Ibid., xviii. 19 Robert Bickers , The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832–1914 ( London : Penguin , 2012 ) ; James Hevia , English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China ( Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press , 2003 ) . 20 Helen Henrietta Macartney Robbins , Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney with Extracts from His Letters, and the Narrative of His Experiences in China, as Told by Himself, 1737– 1806, from Hitherto Unpublished Correspondence and Documents ( London: John Murray , 1908 ), p. 386 . 21 A sense that ran through the twentieth century— for example, Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers , ﬁ rst published in 1937, was reissued as recently as 2008. 22 Robert A. Carter , The Kyoto School: An Introduction ( Albany : SUNY Press , 2013 ) ; James Heisig , Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School ( Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press , 2001 ) . 23 An interesting take on this theme is Valeska Huber , Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalization in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 ) . 24 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780– 1914 , pp. 234, 237. 25 Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance .