Accidental Historian

Repeating the Last Century, Part 2

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful.  This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe.  So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory.  Well, there are two.  The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history.  The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory.  John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs.  This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation.  Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true.  At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries.  The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe.  The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them.  The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization.  The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance.  The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries.  They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out.  More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor.  We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on.  Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it.  Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot.  It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus.  It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe.  Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing.  Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier.  Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan.  The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested.  They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism.  They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts.  In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.  In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911.  Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records.  This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system.  China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire.  With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force.  The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China.  Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China.  On the eastern edge was the ocean.  On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina.  On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India.  To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes.  There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand.  Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors.  China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history.  Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy.  This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands.  European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider.  It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China.  Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society.  As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things.  In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.  In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward.  Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s.  That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors.  Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability.  From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things.  First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo.  We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean.  Those voyages are all the records we have.  Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however.  China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s.  They were looking west, south, and north.  The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself.  Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean.  Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan.  The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols.  The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes.  These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out.  Further, we must consider the aftermath.  Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch.  His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia.  But the strain was too great.  His successors adopted a drastic alternative.  The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned.  Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden.  And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question.  It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off.  I will be working on two separate sets of posts.  The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more.  The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why?  Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history.  It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete.  Let’s see if this is any different…

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[1]John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 88.

[4]Ibid.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 1

History is a complicated subject.  There’s really no way to get around that fact.  The problem, though, is that most people think that history is really, really simple.  Everyone took history in school, after all.  The history they took was just a collection of names and dates and places and all anyone had to do was remember who did what on which day.  Simple, right?

Names and dates and places and important battles are easy to remember and put into a multiple choice test.  Knowing names and dates and places, however, isn’t what history is about.  The point of the study of history is to figure out why a particular person was in a particular place to fight a particular battle or make a certain discovery or whatever.  That particular bit of understanding tends to be rather involved and it’s why there are a lot of people out there who can write books extending to several hundred pages about things most people can’t be arsed to read even an article abstract on.

We know a great deal about history, though, because of all of those historians who spend their days writing about crap that most people don’t care to know or understand.  The simple truth is, in fact, that although we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about history, there’s very little out there that can completely re-write the history books.  This is why when some kook comes out with a new book about how so-and-so did such-and-such and there’s been a gigantic cover-up real historians shrug and then go on with their business.  It’s self-evident to actual historians that such a thing isn’t possible, so they tend to ignore it.

It is, in fact, trivially easy to disprove the kooks in most cases.  The problem is, though, that it requires an assertion of historical knowledge that most historians have or will readily accept but that isn’t exactly common knowledge amongst non-historians.  It’s much easier, really, to say, “Yeah, that’s not how that worked,” than it is to actually explain why it is that it didn’t work that way.  The difference in effort, too, explains part of the reason why trained historians don’t spend a lot of time debunking the kooky theory.  They just go back to their real interest, which is incrementally changing the history books to incorporate new knowledge and remove outdated theories based on our understanding of the world before that knowledge came to light.

There is one way that historians end up rewriting history books, however.  It’s not about pulling new information out of the ether.  It’s not about making some mind blowing discovery that negates everything we thought we knew before.  It’s about taking what we already knew and looking at it from a different perspective.  Historians do that all the time.

One of the most magnificent examples of re-writing our understanding of history came out in 2008.  English historian John Darwin published a massive tome called After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  I actually picked up a copy of the book back in the summer or fall of 2008 because the book looked fascinating.  His goal, as the subtitle suggests, was to break down the history of global empire for the previous six centuries.  He did so in just over five hundred pages, which means that the book is both densely packed with information and argument and shallow in how deeply it deals with the background information behind any single idea or argument.  In short, it’s the sort of book that only a historian can truly appreciate, since it requires a deep underlying understanding of many things.

I first read the book shortly after I bought it and I remembered appreciating it but not getting too much out of it beyond an appreciation for what Darwin’s arguments were.  I pulled it out again well over a month ago and started re-reading it, this time much more slowly than in the past.  The second time around I think I managed to appreciate just how truly magnificent and breathtaking the book is in its breadth and scope.

Darwin’s argument, basically, is that traditional western interpretations of history are wrong in that they’re written with a certain air of inevitability and cultural superiority.  This is truly important, since we’re sitting on the back end of the legacy of European colonialism and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that legacy.  More importantly, though, we’re still dealing with the ingrained cultural notions that are the inevitable outcome of that colonial ideal.  Europeans and Americans still function under the misapprehension that there’s something inherently superior in Caucasian culture and genetic makeup when compared to non-Caucasian culture and genetics.

Darwin’s work also butts up against the most common non-Western notions of history.  Since Westerners had an understandable tendency to attempt to erase the history and culture of their colonial possessions and replace it with their own, supposedly superior, culture and history, we do have pretty wide gaps in the historical records of the people colonized by Westerners.  Those gaps have been subsequently filled in by partisans who have tried to play up their culture and downplay or outright villainize the involvement of Europeans.  Interestingly enough, though, in many cases these histories either implicitly accept Western framing of the notion of history or attempt to completely obliterate Western history in an attempt to de-legitimatize Western historians.  Both approaches are highly flawed and lead to conclusions that are far from accurate.

This time around I was most fascinated by Darwin’s treatment of world history from 1880 or so through the early days of the Cold War.  I realized while rereading the book that we seem to be basically replaying large parts of world history in the years leading up the World War I.[1]  His arguments brought the world of today into greater focus.

As such, consider this the introduction of a series on John Darwin’s magnificent work and what it means to genuinely overturn standard notions of history.  Before I get to the 1800s, however, I feel it’s a good idea to make a baseline comparison between Darwin and someone else who thought he’d overturn all of history as we know it.  That’s right, we’re going to go look at Gavin Menzies.

Hooray!

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[1]Up to a certain point.  The geopolitical realities of the world in 2012 are far, far different from those of 1912.  The United States has no military or economic peer and there is no uneasy détente between equally balanced European powers who have their claws dug into colonies all over the world.  I do not, in short, expect that we’ll end up plunging into World War III at any point in the near future.  That said, it’s fascinating to see how people talk about the world today and compare it to how they talked about the world a century in the past.

Western Exceptionalism

One of the problems I've been having with my cavalcade of new ideas for the blog for 2012 is that I haven't really had any good ideas for going back to the well.  The problem with writing about history is that you need a theme.  All I've had so far is, "Well, maybe I should go back to writing Byzantine Logic."  While that's not a bad thought, it's also somewhat limited in scope and applicability.

Basically, you have to be a history wonk, a religious wonk, and someone who can really, really care about the Eastern Roman Empire and it's various squabbles to get in to that series.  While there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that such people exist (as I am living proof), I also know that it's necessary to diversify.  The big problem is...how?

Well, I'm glad you asked, ladies and gentlemen.

Ed Brayton posted a fascinating bit on the Arab Spring just today.  It's primarily excerpts from an essay by Turkish author Mustafa Akyol on Muslim liberty.  The part that struck me was this:

My short answer to that big question, which I explore more deeply in my book, is the change in political context: At the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire fell, giving rise to more than a dozen nation-states, almost all of which were colonized by European powers. Colonization inevitably led to anti-colonization, and replaced liberalism with a reactionary collectivism. The question, “How can we be like the West?” got replaced by “How can we resist the West?”

This is a provocative statement.  It also, at least in my mind, conflates the reactionary Muslim attitude known as "Islamism" that has been the driving force behind the reactionary Muslim elements with that other great reactionary "-ism" of the 20th Century: Communism.

Communism as we know it from the mid-20th Century on would be completely unrecognizable to Karl Marx.  That's because it took root not amongst disaffected factory workers in the West like Marx thought, but amongst poor rural farmers in what would become known (thanks to the fight between the USA and USSR) as the Third World.  Why?  Leon Trotsky, basically, and the policies collectively known as Trotskyism.

Communism never took hold in North America and Europe, but it caught on in Latin America and Asia precisely because Trotskyism exported the theory and support of Permanent Revolotion to people for whom revolution was massively important.  Their revolution, however, wasn't that of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, but the colonized against the colonial.  The West, in short, made their own enemies.

Communism did not find fertile soil in large swaths of the former Ottoman Empire, however.  The key motivator there was religion.  Islam offered a rallying cry against Western expansionism that dated back to Saladin rallying the squabbling Muslim kingdoms under the banner of Jihad to throw back the marauding Crusaders.

This, I believe, is something that can define the scope of a big project.  I don't intend to look at Communism as an economic system or Islamism as a form of religion.  I also don't care about the Bolshevik Revolution or Mao's conquest of China that much.  Instead I want to look at Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ayatollah Khomeni, Muammar Gaddafi, and, yes, Osama Bin Laden.  I want to look at revolution as a reaction to colonialism.  I also want to look at the Muslim world before colonialism.

That last bit, by the way, will be impossible to do without heavily involving the Ottoman Empire.  Seems that this might just dovetail nicely with a renewed bout of Byzantine Logic...