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Nomadism, barbarism and civilization. Eighteenth century interpretations of Central Asian history

Rolando Minuti University of Florence Dipartimento di Storia, Archelogia, Geografia, Arte e Spettacolo (SAGAS) XXIInd CISH Congress, in Jinan Jinan, China 23 to 29 August 2015 Thursday 27 August Morning session RT 12 Crossroad States: between East and West

As clearly said by prof. Garcia Moreno in his excellent paper, the history of Central Asia during the pre‐Islamic period was a large theatre of events, conflicts, complex cultural processes and interactions among different peoples, which had a paramount importance and still raise many problematic issues for historical inquiry. Notwithstanding the growth of archeological investigation and its new and increasing results, particularly since the beginning of the last century, this great and important section of world history remains obscure in many chapters. The origins of the Hsiung‐nu, for instance is still “a problematic issue”, as we read in Garcia Moreno’s paper; the ethnic origins of the Yue Chih, is “still a true puzzle in modern historiography”; the knowledge of the history of the Chionites or of the great Kushan Empire is still “not proportional to its real importance”, and so on. The need of throwing light on this complicated, fascinating and important section of world history was already felt by Western scholarship during the period that foreruns the beginnings of archaeological inquiry, which can be placed between the end of the XVIIIth and the early XIXth century. During the long ‘Enlightenment Age’ in Europe, the topic of Central Asian history attracted a special attention in the general framework of the development of Western historiography and the transformations of a key concept in history of European culture as that of ‘civilization’. In my comment, so, I wish to draw your attention on some aspects concerning this historiographical topic, which has been defined by a remarkable scholar of Enlightenment historiography, John Pocock, the “discovery of Central Asia” and which can maybe open the possibility of some reflections concerning contemporary approach to world history and its intellectual roots. 2

It was mainly a great ‘orientalist’ scholar of the middle of the XVIIIth century, Joseph de Guignes, an eminent member of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, who tried to fill the serious gap of Western knowledge concerning the history of Central Asia and to write a general history of its peoples and events, that is the Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres Tartares occidentaux, etc. avant et depuis Jesus‐Christ jusqu’à present, published in Paris in five large volumes between 1756 and 1758,. That history was particularly important, De Guignes wrote, because it connected the East and the West, and could explain the reason of revolutions, social and political transformations, economic changes, cultural and religious interactions, which affected the East and the West as well and which only a detailed knowledge of this part of world history made possible. We could rightly observe that the interest for the events of Central Asia was not lacking in the previous period of European culture. European scholarship, mainly during the XVIIth century and the beginning of the XVIIIth, already tried to investigate some periods of the history of peoples and empires of Central Asia, mainly using Arabic sources, and to produce historical narratives about that. Beyond the terrible image of the Gengiskhanid Mongols, which in Medieval times was connected to the eschatological issues of Christian culture – the reason why the name of the Tatar peoples becomes Tartar, which recalled the idea of Hell ‐ what grew in Western, mainly French, historiography of the XVIIth century was rather the astonishment for the greatness – ‘la grandeur’ in French writings – of great empires like those of GengisKhan and Timur. An astonishment and sometimes an admiration – in works like those of Sainctyon, Pierre Vattier, François Petis de la Croix, François Catrou – which also made possible the comparison with the image of the ‘grandeur’ of the reign of Louis XIV in France. What was new in De Guignes’s enterprise was the unification of the various moments of the history of Central Asia in ancient and modern times and the accomplishment of a great historical narrative connecting the East and the West. The great scenario of Central Asia was so the theatre of a unitary history, made possible by the reenactment of its complicate chains of events but also by the idea of the dynamics produced by the confrontation between nomadic and sedentary peoples on the East and the West side. Writing a history like that, in which Central Asia became a major and unitary historical subject, was the core of De Guignes’s enterprise, but it was a very hard task, as De Guignes clearly perceived, because the sources were not particularly rich nor, when accessible, easy to approach. The knowledge of Asiatic languages and mainly the use of Chinese documents were indispensable for 3 accomplishing it. This was the fundamental documentary basis for De Guignes, who was a distinguished sinologist of his time, and the comparison of Chinese with other literary sources – obviously Greek and Latin, but also Arabic and Persian – gave to his work a particularly high value. A value that was highly appreciated by eminent historians of his time as in particular by Edward Gibbon in his celebrated Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776‐ 89). De Guignes, as we said, was an eminent erudite and not a ‘philosophic historian’ – to use a typical XVIIIth century term – as was Voltaire, for instance, or Gibbon as well, whose major importance for Western historiography of the Enlightenment period was, as largely known, the connection between erudition and a great narrative and philosophical approach. De Guignes mind is firmly settled inside the erudite framework of his time and in a traditional theoretical framework for which the Biblical scheme of diffusion of peoples in the world remains an absolute point of reference. This scheme supported his attempts to track down the origins and movements of nations and to confirm the thesis of the unity of human family, which led him to hazard some hypothesis as that of the Chinese nation as the outcome of an original Egyptian colony. Inside the complicate erudite approach of his attempt to reconstruct the Central Asian history, elements which are typical of the philosophic Enlightenment approach appear anyway in a significant way; for instance, his attention for the structures of material life and the different manners of the nomad and breeder nations and the sedentary and agricultural ones. These elements, which emerge in De Guignes work inside the detailed expositions of events, genealogies and chronologies, are in fact a central point in the philosophical approach to world history, which Enlightenment scholars and historians advanced; an approach for which, to summarize, the discussion about the meanings of barbarism and civilization was a major issue. So, parallel and someway connected to the philological and erudite inquiry about non‐European historical documents and sources, which opened the way to a new consideration of Central Asian history, we have to consider another face of the Eighteenth century historical approach. That is a philosophical approach (a ‘conjectural’ approach, following a term diffused in the British and mainly Scottish XVIIIth Century context), which looked for social and historical causes which produce their effect, in various times and contexts, in all human societies and which could give a uniform image of the dynamics of universal history. These two sides, the erudite and the philosophical, which can be theoretically distinguished although not too rigidly separated, express 4 together the core of the European interest for non‐European histories in XVIII century, and mainly the new place of Central Asia in European historiography. This new approach involved, as a major consequence, a new kind of reflection on the meaning of an ancient concept, that of ‘barbarism’, and a significant shift about that. This shift is clearly detectable in one of the seminal work of the Enlightenment culture, which is the Spirit of Laws of Montesquieu. Indeed, it was Montesquieu who placed the meaning of ‘barbarism’ on a level which was not mainly that of moral and religious values, nor particularly connected to violence, cruelty and so on, but which had a specific social and economic meaning. It was the way of getting subsistance that identified the ‘barbarian’ character of some peoples, and barbarism so was strictly connected to cattle breeding and nomadism. The distinction of savages – hunters and gatherers – and barbarians – breeders and nomads – was an essential part of Montesquieu’s ‘sociological’ inquiry, as well known. Barbarism was, at the same time, a stage in the history of human society, in different places and times. Montesquieu didn’t follow an historical approach in his work and remained on the theoretical level of a structural analysis observing the connections between economy, manners, laws and so on. Other authors did, as Gibbon or various Scottish philosophes and historians of the second half of the XVIIIth century, offering a philosophical key to the historical narrative, which directly involved Central Asian history. In chapter 26 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in his depiction of the ‘manners of pastoral societies’, Gibbon offers a concise but deep reflection on the social organization of Central Asian peoples. In these pages the refusal of sedentary life and the “restless spirit” of the peoples which inhabited “the immense plains of Scythia or Tartary” was the engine who moved the chain of events which unified the East and the West of the Eurasian continent: “The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe”. The material reasons which gave to the barbarian people their superiority on the sedentary societies ceased anyway to be effective in the course of time, as a consequence of the development of economy and technology, particularly in Western world, and it was possible so, to identify this dynamics as typical of a period in world history not destined to return. In the progressive and undoubtedly Eurocentric view of the development of civilization as that exposed by Gibbon, the role of the barbarian‐pastoral society, so, is enclosed in a historical framework which is limited to ancient and medieval time, asserting an important element for the periodization of European history and the idea of Modernity as well. 5

Gibbon, anyway, did not agree with the four stages scheme firmly asserted by other British, mainly Scottish thinkers of the late XVIIIth century. His ideas of the distinction between the concept of savage and that of barbarian, are not so precise as in other scholars of his time; nor, for instance, the idea of the barbarian as a mere and perennial antagonist of the development of civilization was shared by other authors in Gibbon’s same terms. Adam Smith, for instance, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence and in some pages of the Wealth of Nations as well, gave to the Asiatic Barbarian a different role, remarking their active and positive action in moving the institutional history of the Western. The history of Feudal institutions, so, and the very history of European Representative Governments, could find explanations for which the role of the Barbarian invaders, and the role of Asiatic pastoral and nomadic societies which gave rise to the wave of invasions, were not destined to be isolated on the destructive side. This was another important contribution for a new reflection on European history and its periodization, drawing the attention to the particular importance of the history of the Roman‐barbarian kingdoms. It was an idea which diverged from Gibbon’s thought, as from Montesquieu’s thought as well, who considered Feudality as an historical phenomenon, which was a unique European historical result. It was a different idea, which rather opened the way to a comparative view of World institutions, among which Feudality had a specific role, which was developed in the following century and beyond. Another important aspect, which arises in the pages of Gibbon, concerns the particular importance given to the history of manners, which explains his special interest for the literature of travels in Central Asia as a privileged source for knowing its history. It was an interest for ancient or medieval authors like Giovanni da Pian del Carpine or William of Rubruck, or very modern as well, as John Bell, for instance, or the General History of the Tartars written by the khan of Khiva Abul Ghazi Bahadur and translated in European languages in the first half of the XVIII century (it was the important set of notes, in this case, due to the work of the translator and giving important ethnographic information, which particularly interested Gibbon). History of manners, history of institutions ‐ political, military, religious – and history of culture, in the broadest meaning of the term, were so connected in Enlightenment historical and philosophical thought for shaping, with different approaches, evaluations and judgements ‐ on which we gave only some selected examples ‐, a new interest for Central Asian history. It was a particular global perspective, so, which XVIIIth century European culture tried to shape, particularly considering the great scenario of Central Asia, which had two main sides, that is, on the first one, that of the reconstruction of the chains of events, filling the too many dark areas in 6 historical knowledge of Central Asia and following for that inquiry the erudite and philological – not yet archaeological ‐ way of approaching ‘Oriental’ subjects; and, on the other side, the theoretical, philosophic‐historian explanation of the material reasons of manners, customs, laws, and, at last, events. Two sides which have to be distinguished but which had also many links and connections, which should be seen and which express the particular character of the XVIIIth century historical thought.