A European Historian takes on Asia

Experiencing the east through the historical lens of the west is to miss a lot. Education in Europe is essentially eurocentric. The perpetuation of the myth of the civilizers of the known world and the desire to retain a sense of self respect in the face of post-colonial revisionism means for many students even going as far as their master’s degrees, Europe and European ideas are where it’s at!

But why? What’s so special? Or is it, I wonder, just too difficult to stretch beyond the borders of Europe; to engage with a language, culture and history so very different from the one at home.

On the one hand it is about language. Chinese, Japanese, even Korean have roots that evade any connection with an Indo-European tongue. To even begin these languages one must begin as a new born, mimicking every sound, creating a new vocabulary and a new base of reference.

With that language comes a new culture. And for Europeans so very sure of themselves there is a sense of trepidation. If language is the limit of your world, then to approach a culture without that language and expect a full and complete understanding can be an exercise in futility. But you can get to grips with the culture if you have the time, the patience or patient friends with time.

There is another approach however. And if brave enough it can work very well. My approach to most historical areas I have little knowledge of is to dive in and hope I swim. The idea is to take one moment, one event in the history of a country and learn about it. Try to understand what it was, what caused it and from that point work forward and backwards. Using the point you have picked as the block on which the see-saw of history balances.

When I began to study China I chose the Taiping rebellion. An utter catastrophe in so many ways. A Christian convert in the 1850s and 60s took hold of a part of China roughly the size of Germany, creating his own lands and his own laws while standing in opposition to the Emperor of China. It was audacity. These religious zealots took charge of large swathes of Jiangsu and in the resulting conflict 20,000,000 people are thought to have perished. It is the biggest conflict you probably never knew happened (if educated in the west).

It happened because of the pressures put on China by colonial powers, because of the fascination with the proto-communist egalitarianism of the ideology of the Taiping and because of the frustration with the waning power of the Chinese Imperial system. What it did, despite its eventual failure, is convince the world and the colonial powers, that China and the idea of Imperial China, was one that was soon to be forgotten. It was the beginning of the end for the Chinese Ancien Regime. The colonial powers saw weakness and took advantage of it in the Opium Wars and the Boxer rebellion and eventually with the power of the Qing reduced to feckless courtiers and octogenarian dowagers the whole shambles collapsed in upon itself.

I studied similarly Korea. Just studying a single event, a day for a country like Korea can show how mere moments alter the path of a nation forever. A study of this hermit kingdom with a rich culture that extends back before the Common Era, allows one to see how the avaricious impact of colonialism damaged terribly this fantastic country. But Korea was a country that had been too complacent, to reticent to engage and modernize so when the black ships of the French and Americans arrived in the middle of the Nineteenth century, intent on forcing trade with the Koreans at the point of a sword or cannon they were unable to stem the influence of foreign powers upon them. This led directly to the aggression of the resurgent Japanese, the first Sino Japanese war and the eventual annexation of the country.  

In Japan, instead of a slide into the kinds of rebellion suffered by China, the 1860s saw the start of a march towards a more coherent nation. The 1868 Meiji restoration delivered a Japan that was singular in its message (a lesson for the marketers of the twenty first century). Japan would thrive, and Japan would modernize. As a westerner who has started to engage, now looking in at these two great nations it is at this point we can start to see the differences and almost the moment that the nations fix their fortunes for the coming century.

Japan modernized, rejected its past and embraced the future of colonialism and conquest. China held on to its past, its systems of Empire and it crumbled (although ironically, Japan’s eventual fall came as a result of their overreaching military hubris, while China's rise was built on a country unified in defiance of Imperialism).

To be a western trained historian in the midst of this is an exciting experience. It gives clarity to the history that I studied for my various degrees, it allows me to see the moments I was focused on in Europe against the moments I was missing in Asia. While the USA was having its civil war, the Taiping Rebellion was conquering China. While Europe was gearing up for the Great War, China was taking its first steps towards republicanism. While Europe and the USA had the roaring twenties, Chiang Kaishek was attempting to unify China during the Northern expedition.

To study Asian history is to see the world anew and to discover people, places and pasts that although by only a thin thread, are intricately connected to us all from the west through commerce and the inevitable clashes of civilizations.

Barry is Head of History at Wellington College Shanghai