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In which John Green teaches you about Imperialism, but not from the perspective of the colonizers. This week John looks at some Asian perspectives on Imperialism, specifically writers from countries that were colonized by European powers. We’ll look at the writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani from the Middle East, Liang Qichao from China, and Rabindranath Tagore from India. these voices from the countries that were colonized give us a sense of how conquered people saw their conquerors, and gives an insight into what these nations learned from being dominated by Europe. It’s pretty interesting, OK? A lot of this episode is drawn from a fascinating book by Pankaj Mishra called The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. You should read it.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we’re going to return to
00:04
our old friend, the rise of the west.
00:06
Ugh, Mr Green, we know. The west rose, we’ve talked about this a million times.
00:11
Yeah, me from the past, I’m sympathetic to your position, but the thing is, this is a
00:14
big deal in world history circles and today, we are going to talk about the rise of the
00:19
west from the perspective of people who don’t live there.
00:30
So today, we’re going to look at how some people who experienced the rise of the West
00:34
firsthand responded to it. We’re going to focus on East Asia and also the Middle East,
00:41
which is also Asia. Anyway, both of these communities dealt with European imperialism
00:45
in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
00:47
So, just a quick note here, European imperialism affected millions of people, including agricultural
00:52
and industrial workers, very few of whom left records of their experience. So we end up
00:56
relying on the words of people who wrote things down, intellectuals. Now, many of those people
01:01
were European, but in this case, most of what we’ll be examining today is covered by a fascinating
01:05
book by Pankaj Mishra, called “The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the
01:10
Remaking of Asia.” Mishra’s book draws heavily from the perspectives of three Asian thinkers,
01:14
and I will remind you, mispronouncing things is my thing. He looks at Middle Easterner
01:18
Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani, Liang Qichao from China, and Rabindranath Tagore from India.
01:23
Through their eyes we can see that Asians did recognize the coming dominance of Europe,
01:27
but they also developed ideas about imperialism that provided a counterweight to Western dominance
01:31
and gave them a way of imagining their role in this new world.
01:35
Alright, let’s go straight to the Thought Bubble.
01:37
Although we tend to equate European imperialism with the late 19th century, especially the
01:41
carving up of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884, for many Asians, the disaster began
01:46
earlier. In China, the Opium Wars began a train of humiliations, most memorable of which
01:50
occurred with the destructed of the Summer Palace in 1860. And imperialism wasn’t great for the Muslim
01:56
world either. By 1896, Al-Afghani described Muslims under European imperialism this way:
02:02
“The foreigners chain up Muslims, put around their necks a yoke of servitude, debase them,
02:06
humiliate their lineage, and they do not mention their name but with insult. Sometimes, they
02:11
call them savages and sometimes regard them as hard-hearted and cruel and finally consider
02:16
them insane animals. What a disaster!”
02:20
Just like today’s historians, Asian intellectuals were quick to recognize that the reason Europeans
02:24
were able to dominate and humiliate them was Europe’s superior industrial technology and
02:28
organization, one early response was to say, “well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, or
02:33
at least, try to follow their models of military organization and education.” We see this in
02:37
attempts at reform, like the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire, Al-Afghani initially echoed
02:42
these calls to study more science and philosophy, but his comparison of philosophers with prophets
02:47
was too radical for the Ottomans and he ended up being expelled from Istanbul.
02:50
Chinese intellectuals responded similarly to the humiliation of the Opium Wars, with
02:54
calls for self-strengthening, a phrase coined by its biggest supporter, Feng Guifen. Given
02:58
China’s almost 2,000 year history of an education system based on Confucian values and classical
03:04
texts, which, to be fair, had worked pretty well for them for most of that time, adopting
03:08
Western models of education and organization was gonna be a tough sell, as Yan Fu, a Chinese
03:13
writer and translator put it,
03:14
“China governs the realm through filial piety, while Westerners govern the realm with impartiality.
03:20
China values the sovereign, while Westerners esteem the people. China prizes the one way,
03:24
while Westerners prefer diversity. In learning, Chinese praise breadth of wisdom, while Westerners
03:29
rely on human strength.”
03:31
One Chinese reformer, Kang Youwei, took up the challenge of blending Western and Chinese
03:35
ideas of governance by attempting to update Confucianism for the modern world and arguing
03:39
that political reform and mass mobilization were central concerns for Confucius himself.
03:44
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So all of that gets to a big question, imperialism was a disaster
03:50
for a lot of people, but there were things about what the West was doing to control much
03:54
of the world that were obviously working. So the question for people outside the West
03:57
became: What, if anything, do we take from this and try to borrow and integrate into our own communities?
04:02
Well, in addition to education and military reforms, many Asian intellectuals felt that
04:06
Europe’s strength was rooted in its political organization, into nation-states. That sounds
04:10
a lot like today’s historians and also economists. Everyone’s crazy about nation-states. Except
04:16
the Mongols.
04:19
And, you know what, I stand with the Mongols on that. I think empire is underrated. I would
04:23
make an excellent emperor, for instance. You know what they’d call me, Stan? Genghis John.
04:28
Anybody? Yeah?
04:30
I hate myself.
04:31
But anyway, some of these intellectuals became proponents of nationalism, like, by 1879,
04:35
Al-Afghani was advocating that Muslims begin to think of themselves as a nation, in the
04:39
sense of a culturally unified people. Here he is in words that recall the German nationalists
04:43
of the time: “There is no happiness except through nationality and no nationality except
04:48
through language…a people without unity and a people without literature are a people
04:52
without language. A people without history are a people without glory, and a people will
04:57
lack history if authorities do not rise among them to protect and revivify the memory of
05:03
their historical heroes so that they may follow and emulate…all this depends on a national
05:09
education, which begins with the fatherland, the environment of which is the fatherland,
05:15
and the end of which is the fatherland.”
05:17
Are you sure that wasn’t a German nationalist, Stan, because that was a lot of fatherlands?
05:21
Maybe it was translated by a German.
05:22
And then there’s India. As the most thoroughly colonized Asian territory, India’s feelings
05:27
about nationalism were very complicated. Some Indians wanted to create a European style
05:31
state organized around Hinduism. But of course, India had a large Muslim minority and also,
05:36
Hinduism, with its caste divisions, wasn’t great for creating political unity. Others,
05:40
like Aurobindo Ghose were critical of adopting too many European ideas, worrying that India,
05:44
quote, “was in danger of losing its soul by an insensate surrender to the aberrations
05:49
of European materialism.”
05:51
Aberrations of European materialism? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
05:55
Oh, that is delicious. Hold on, I gotta play Floppy Bird for a second.
05:58
But many Asians considering adopting European models of nationalism look to one of its biggest
06:03
success stories: Japan.
06:04
For Europeans, Japan became kind of a confirmation of a modernization program, industrialization,
06:10
centralization, and to a lesser degree, liberal constitutionalism, could work. And this was
06:14
also true to some extent for Asian intellectuals, including Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore,
06:19
both of whom visited Japan. But ultimately, Japan didn’t provide a great model for other
06:23
Asians attempting to reform their own states, especially because Japan embarked on its own
06:28
imperial expansion.
06:30
It’s almost as if, in addition to industrialization and centralization and et cetera, imperialism
06:35
was just part of building a strong nation-state.
06:37
So by the early 20th century, many Asian intellectuals were looking beyond Western models. Some,
06:42
like Liang Qichao and Al-Afghani, considered supranational movements, like pan-Asianism
06:47
and pan-Arabism. They envisioned these huge political conglomerates that could transcend
06:52
Europe’s dominance, but eventually, both they and Tagore turned to their own traditions
06:57
as a source of strength. And what they all had in common was a loss of faith in liberal
07:01
democracy as a source of strength, especially after the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Like
07:06
after flirting with Pan-Arabism and being expelled from a different Ottoman city, this
07:10
time Cairo, Al-Afghani became convinced that, quote,
07:13
“Modernization hadn’t secured the Ottomans against infidels. On the contrary, it had
07:18
made them more dependent.”
07:19
He embraced the idea that the best defense against the West was Islam. Mishra says of this,
07:23
“As he saw it, attacking religion risked undermining the moral basis of society altogether and
07:29
weakened the bonds that held communities together, precisely the weakening that had plunged Muslims
07:35
everywhere into crisis.”
07:36
Now, this doesn’t mean that he became what we today think of as an “Islamist radical”
07:40
or an “Anti-Modernist.” Instead, he believed that the Qur’an contained its own calls for
07:45
reform, and that Islam could be a catalyst for change. Ultimately, Al-Afghani believed
07:49
that the transformation of Islamic society had to come from within. Like his favorite
07:54
Qur’anic injunction was:
07:55
“God does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition.”
08:00
In China, Liang Qichao came up with a different source of reform, the strong state. After
08:04
the failure of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, he wrote his awesomely titled, “On The New
08:09
Rules For Destroying Countries.” This was a critique of European imperialism, but it
08:13
was also a call for a strong, somewhat authoritarian state that could stand up to the West.
08:18
Nah, China would never do that. Oh, wait. Wait a second. They did!
08:22
Eventually he came to the conclusion that the Chinese people must now accept authoritarian
08:27
rule. They cannot enjoy freedom. Well, that’s pretty extreme.
08:30
Ohhh, it’s time for the Open Letter. But first, let’s see what’s in the globe today. Oh, look,
08:34
it’s some underappreciated authoritarian rulers.
08:37
An Open Letter to Authoritarianism:
08:39
Dear Authoritarianism: Listen, I am all for democracy, but the tyranny of the majority
08:44
is no joke. And there have been many times when democratically elected governments were
08:48
less pluralistic than authoritarian ones. Not only that, if you can keep corruption
08:53
out of it, there is an astonishing efficiency to doing it your way. Like, who’s gonna make
08:57
this decision. Oh, I know, the Queen! It’s always the Queen, no need for exploratory
09:02
committees or different houses of Congress, the Queen can do it! Maybe I’m just a little
09:06
frustrated with Congressional gridlock, authoritarianism, but I kind of think you’re underrated.
09:11
Best wishes, John Green
09:12
p.s. Just wanna confirm that I am not advocating for authoritarian rule in the United States.
09:16
So Liang also visited the United States, which made him more convinced that liberal democracies
09:21
did not provide an answer, especially because they discriminated so much against Asians.
09:26
And then, World War I and the insane map-drawing spree of the Treaty of Versailles just further
09:31
confirmed all of it. I mean, despite the lofty rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points and
09:35
the League of Nations and everything, the result of the war looked suspiciously like
09:39
the pre-war imperialism that many Asians believed was a cause of the war in the first place.
09:44
But perhaps no one was more skeptical of the “if you can’t fight ’em, emulate ’em” strategy
09:49
of dealing with imperialism than Indians. Gandhi, for instance, went very far in his
09:53
critique of the West’s modernism, saying that it lacked spiritual freedom and social harmony,
09:58
even rejecting many aspects of the industrial revolution itself. I mean, this was a person
10:03
who sewed his own clothes.
10:05
And interestingly, one of the most vocal Indian critics of the West was the one who was perhaps
10:09
most positively received there. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for
10:14
a body of work that essentially said “you guys are terrible at everything.” To quote Mishra,
10:19
Tagore’s message to the West was that “their modern civilization built upon the cult of money and
10:24
power was inherently destructive and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East.”
10:29
Now, he didn’t reject industrialization completely, and he acknowledged that, quote,
10:33
“the age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science,”
10:38
but cautioned an audience in New York that, quote,
10:40
“you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate.”
10:45
So, as we’ve talked about before, our perspective on events really colors our version of the
10:50
truth. Living as we do, in an age dominated by more or less liberal nation-states with
10:55
varying degrees of market freedom, it can be tempting to consider their development
11:00
as both inevitable and good.
11:02
And I’m certainly not going to throw rocks at both a political system and a nation-state
11:06
that allows and enables me to put up videos like this and provides a space for millions
11:10
of you to agree and disagree.
11:12
But when we look at responses to imperialism, I mean, after we get beyond the obvious criticism
11:16
that imperialism generally is bad, we start to focus on the responses to it that confirm
11:22
this deep down feeling we have. You know, that it was bad to extract all of those resources,
11:27
but ultimately, we spread tolerance and pluralism and the nation-state and those all worked
11:32
out. So I worry that we look at self-strengthening in China or the Ottoman reforms as examples
11:37
of where Asians were on the right track, and then we see the failure of those reforms as
11:41
confirmation that Asians were somehow just unready or unfit for the benefits that the
11:47
West had so generously offered.
11:49
But if you look at the actual words and actions of Asians who experienced imperialism first-hand,
11:54
you get a very different picture. Asians thinkers were critical of the West from the very earliest
11:58
stages of new imperialism. Looking back at the evolution of the intellectuals we’ve talked
12:02
about today reminds us that Asians were not simply victims of imperialism’s ideology.
12:08
In fact, they’ve continued to influence ideas about the West today, and not only outside
12:12
the West. When we in the West lament our insensate surrender to the aberrations of European materialism,
12:18
we should recognize that that criticism didn’t necessarily originate from within.
12:22
Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
12:24
Crash Course is made with the help of all of these nice people here in the Chad & Stacey
12:29
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12:38
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12:42
and thanks to you for watching.
12:43
As we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.