In a recent study, I sought to analyze political and cultural patterns across mainland Southeast Asia during roughly a thousand years, from c. 800 to 1830.Footnote 1 In brief, I argued that each of mainland Southeast Asia's three great north-south corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration. This process was territorial in the sense that some twenty-three small polities in the fourteenth century were assimilated, gradually or convulsively, fully or partially, to three overarching imperial systems by the early 1800s. Integration was administrative insofar as within each imperial system mechanisms of provincial control, economic extraction, and manpower organization became more penetrating, stable, and efficient. Integration was cultural in the sense that hitherto self-sufficient communities across each of the three principal zones came to accept linguistic, ethnic, and religious norms sanctioned by imperial elites.
Obviously, one can find numerous specific differences between these three zones, with integration in the eastern sector—what we know as Vietnam—most contingent and hesitant. Yet at a workable level of abstraction, in all three sectors not only political and cultural trajectories, but also the dynamics of consolidation proved reasonably similar. In each case integration drew strength from synergies between agricultural extension and intensification (processes subject to climatic as well as social determination), foreign trade, imported European-style guns, wider literacy, the demands of intensifying interstate competition, and accumulated institutional expertise. Most such factors had their own etiology, but all modified one another in ways that were both open-ended and potentially cumulative. Moreover, in all three zones chronologies of integration were broadly synchronized, with periods of political florescence alternating with periods of collapse and territorial fragmentation. Indicative of the growing solidity of each zone, especially in the western and central mainland, successive interregna, in the fourteenth, late sixteenth, and late eighteenth centuries, grew progressively shorter and less dislocative. While cultural integration also accelerated from the late 1400s and more especially from the early 1700s, as befit a phenomenon that depended less on central direction than on continuous local capillary processes, cultural change in each zone was less subject to rupture and reassembly than was political unification.
This paper proposes, in ruthlessly compressed, schematic fashion, to use mainland Southeast Asia as a prism through which to identify two extensive sectors of pre-1830 Eurasia that I term the “protected rimlands” and the “exposed zone.” The first category includes mainland Southeast Asia itself; Japan; northeastern Europe, represented in this discussion by Russia; and western Europe, represented by France (but for which any number of countries, including England, Spain, or Portugal, could have served equally well). Although these realms supported manifestly different political and cultural forms, all experienced patterns of cyclic-cum-linear integration that resembled one another both in chronology and in underlying process. What is more, their common location on relatively inaccessible Eurasian peripheries ensured that each protected rimland supported: (a) a relatively late, derivative civilizational genesis; (b) a pattern of political and cultural development to the early 1800s that remained entirely in the hands of indigenous elites; and (c) a modest imperial population and, outside Russia, a modest imperial territory which, singly or together, proved compatible with progressive political centralization.
The second Eurasian category includes much of Southwest Asia as well as South Asia and China. Because they were subject to many of the same external forces and internal logics as the protected rimlands, after 800 c.e. these exposed zone realms experienced developmental rhythms and internal progressions broadly similar to the protected rimlands. Yet at the same time, their more central position within Eurasia and local geographies produced: (a) primary civilizational geneses appreciably earlier than in the protected rimlands; (b) political and cultural patterns during the second millennium c.e. that fell increasingly under the direction of externally derived conquest elites, primarily Inner Asian, but in India from 1764, British; and (c) less compact populations and territories, less amenable to sustained centralization, than in most protected rimlands.Footnote 2
I define “early modernity” as that phase of Eurasian history which lay between massive Eurasian-wide dislocations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the political ruptures of 1789 and the early nineteenth century; which was characterized by unprecedentedly rapid commercial circulation, technical diffusion, political and cultural integration; and which therefore anticipated some of the principal themes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history.Footnote 3 By this definition, whereas in the protected rimlands control of early modern integration remained a local monopoly, in the exposed zone Inner Asians, despite their unpromising nomadic origins, became the principal agents of early modern political, and in some cases culture, formation. Although Southwest Asia, under Ottoman control, also might have served to illustrate Inner Asian influence, proximity to Southeast Asia and personal interest lead me to focus on China and South Asia. I review both overarching similarities and specific differences between China and South Asia. Finally, as a Southeast Asianist, I turn to the island world to consider a history which until c. 1600 resembled that of mainland Southeast Asia, but which thereafter in critical respects came to resemble that of the exposed zone.
Before proceeding, I readily concede that the criteria on which these large comparisons hinge—namely, long-term patterns of political and cultural integration and indigenous versus external agency—hardly exhaust the possibilities for Eurasian classification. Very different, but entirely valid criteria—urban hierarchies, agrarian productivity, industrial potential, commercial organization, gender roles, family structure, religious organization, literary output, or literacy rates, to name but a few—would slice the Eurasian pie quite differently and would emphasize similarities between mainland and island Southeast Asia that my schema obscures all too easily. Nonetheless, my focus on long-term political and cultural integration promises several novel benefits. By identifying developmental similarities between Southeast Asia and other sectors of Eurasia, such an inquiry allows us for the first time to place Southeast Asia in global context. Of more general interest, it further weakens the tenacious, if increasingly exhausted historiographic opposition between the West and the Rest, to use Samuel Huntingdon's phrase,Footnote 4 in favor of broad new classifications according to which some Asian societies had far more in common with Europe than with fellow Asian realms. At the same time, by recognizing overarching similarities in chronology and dynamics between protected and exposed zones and by exploring differences within each of these categories, it avoids replacing the East-West binary with a new overly rigid dichotomy. Rather, it views Eurasia during a thousand years as an internally variegated, but coherent and increasingly coordinated ecumene. Finally, although space precludes detailed illustration, a consideration of variations within an overarching framework actually can enrich local research by making it easier to isolate variables responsible for particular local outcomes.
MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA AND OTHER PROTECTED RIMLANDS
In what ways, then, did mainland Southeast Asia c. 800–1830 resemble Russia, France, and Japan? I would point to seven commonalities. First, lying on the periphery of older Eurasian civilizations during the second half of the first and/or the early second millennium c.e., mainland Southeast Asia, northwestern Europe, northeastern Europe, and Japan all domesticated religious, literary, and administrative traditions imported from older Eurasian centers and underwent what Barbara Rice terms “secondary state formation.”Footnote 5 For its high cultural template Southeast Asia looked to South Asia and China; northern Europe looked to the Mediterranean; and Japan, to China.Footnote 6 Principalities founded in this period—Pagan, Angkor, Dai Viet (in modern Vietnam), Kiev, the Carolingian/Capetian kingdom, and the ritsuryo polity in Japan—were “charter states” insofar as their religious, dynastic, and/or territorial traditions were regarded by local successor states as normative and legitimating. By later standards, these polities were administratively decentralized, content with a partly ritual sovereignty, territorially modest (the Carolingian kingdom being a notable exception), and often substantially dependent on autonomous religious organizations for agrarian reclamation and rural control. A yawning cultural gap typically separated a tiny charter elite who, at least in their clerical component, were literate in universal sacred languages—Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Latin, Old Church Slavonic—from illiterate, predominantly or partially animist commoners, among whom linguistic, ethnic, and religious identities remained highly localized and fragmented.Footnote 7
Charter florescence in each region drew strength from some or all of the following factors: In some outlying regions of Eurasia from the late first millennium, more frequent contacts with older centers of infection may have begun to transform smallpox and measles from uniformly fatal epidemics affecting all ages to mere childhood diseases. This would have permitted coordinated population and economic growth in widely dispersed rimlands, enhancing the resources on which would-be centralizers in each locale could draw.Footnote 8 More certainly, a marked warming of the northern hemisphere during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly, c. 850/900–1250/1350, extended the growing season in northern Europe and intensified monsoon rains on which Southeast Asian wet rice relied. Again, agricultural/demographic vitality favored political concentration.Footnote 9 (After c. 1300 climate would continue to exercise a loose coordinating role, but its influence would diminish both because the Medieval Climate Anomaly was unusually pronounced, and because as agrarian and commercial systems grew more complex and self-sustaining, they became less vulnerable to climatic disruption.) Insofar as the economies of China, South Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean also prospered for all or part of the period c. 900–1350, long-distance exchanges, direct and indirect, between those regions, Southeast Asia, Japan to a lesser extent, and Europe grew apace, strengthening the trade-mediated flow of cultural and administrative technologies from established Eurasian cores to rimlands.Footnote 10 Finally, in circular fashion, as charter polities cohered, domestic pacification joined new institutional and market networks to promote further increases in reclamation, to erode kin- and slave-based impediments to production, to improve food distribution, and thus to accelerate population growth.Footnote 11
Second, between 1240 and 1390 the chief states in five of the six areas under review—western, central, and eastern mainland Southeast Asia, Russia, and France—all disintegrated. The Ashikaga shogunate in Japan also faced mounting difficulties, although collapse was averted until the 1460s. Most basically perhaps, these more or less coordinated transitions reflected political strains resulting from centuries of sustained economic and political expansion. In Burma, Angkor, Dai Viet, and France growing land shortages in long-settled areas contributed to popular distress and intense intra-elite factionalism. Everywhere, with the possible and partial exception of Japan, a sharp climatic downturn at the close of the Medieval Climate Anomaly c. 1250–1450 aggravated agrarian shortages. In the three Southeast Asian regions, Kiev, and twelfth- to fifteenth-century Japan we also find a politically destabilizing, inherently centrifugal shift in economic activity from the charter core to peripheral regions, whether to new agricultural districts (the Kanto plain in Japan), newly prosperous commercial sites involved in long-distance trade (northern Russia, Phnom Penh), or districts that benefited simultaneously from agrarian and commercial expansion (Lower Burma, the lower Chaophraya basin, southwestern and northeastern Russia). In every case long-standing institutional fissures, once contained, now widened ominously. The Hundred Years War in France—pivoting on the contradiction between early Capetian tolerance for overlapping spheres of influence and the more exclusive territorial ambitions of the centralizing Valois and Plantagenet states—offers the best-known illustration, but other examples include growing tensions between the royal fisc and untaxed monastic wealth in Pagan and between Grand Princely authority and the autonomy of regional princes in Kiev. The Mongols also helped to coordinate thirteenth/fourteenth-century disorders, whether through military threats (to Kiev, Pagan, and Kamakura Japan), indirect support for Tai military expansion at the expense of Pagan and Angkor, or their unwitting dissemination of the Black Death from the Inner Asian steppe to western Europe and Russia in the mid-1300s. But insofar as the Black Death sped along commercial networks that grew in direct response to generations of burgeoning market demand, the plague also should be seen, at least in part, as a function of antecedent prosperity. Finally, in part because the Black Death inflated mine labor costs, in part because of technical difficulties and lode exhaustion in key mining regions, bullion shortages across Eurasia impeded commercial recovery during the late fourteenth and much of the fifteenth centuries.Footnote 12
Third, following these post-charter breakdowns, political consolidation resumed at various points between 1450 and 1580 and in every case continued to gain in scope and vigor well into the nineteenth century. Outside Vietnam (which remained divided into northern and southern seigneuries from 1620 to 1771) and Japan, successive interregna therefore grew shorter and less disruptive. That is to say, in Burma, Siam, France, and Russia, the era of fragmentation that started in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries was appreciably longer than the disorders that afflicted all these regions in the late 1500s and early 1600s, which were more prolonged and chaotic than late-1700s interregna. Quantifying this pattern, we find that in western mainland Southeast Asia, the lengths in years of the first three interregna were 252:15:5; in the central mainland, 190:22:4; in France, 220:116:36;Footnote 13 and in Russia (which had only two post-charter interregna) 210:15.Footnote 14 In every instance, the first era of fragmentation saw the most profound institutional and cultural upheavals as well. By extension, because interregna in these far-flung realms tended to overlap, compensatory post-crisis administrative and military reforms also coincided to a stunning degree. As such, institutional reform simultaneously reflected and promoted political coordination across the protected rimlands.
This is certainly not to suggest that by some absolute criteria of efficiency and power, all such regimes were similar. I do claim, however, that in every case, judged by local standards, early-nineteenth-century regimes were more formidable than their early-seventeenth-century predecessors, which were an advance on their fifteenth-century antecedents, and so forth. Within their respective regions, the regimes of Toungoo/early Konbaung Burma, Late Ayudhya/early Chakri Siam, Nguyen Vietnam, Romanov Russia, Bourbon France, and Tokugawa Japan all marked the zenith of pre-modern state formation. All six cohered around the turn of the seventeenth century and, Bourbons aside, survived into the nineteenth century. At the outset, all six combined novel systems of provincial control and military mobilization with ambitious programs of popular regimentation, of which the Burmese ahmu-dan system, Russian serfdom, and Tokugawa estate divisions were representative. All exercised stable authority over unprecedentedly extensive territories, with annexations particularly rapid in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is more, in all six states royal authority expanded through comparable mosaic strategies. This entailed not the destruction, but the subjection of outlying courts and institutions, whose loyalty the capital ensured by appointing senior personnel and/or by subordinating those bodies to an overarching network of royal agencies. And because this extension was a halting, gradual affair, for most of the period under review all six states remained concentric ring systems, that is, closely administered cores surrounded by provinces whose practical autonomy increased with distance.Footnote 15
Fourth, in each area both short-term collapse and long-term consolidation reflected the interplay between demographic and commercial expansion and changing institutional demands. In some contexts, whether by fueling provincial autonomy or by creating critical shortages of land, bullion, or administrative posts, economic growth intensified intra-elite rivalries and institutional weaknesses. This was true in Europe and Southeast Asia at the end of the charter era, as I just noted, as well as in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan, and again in varying degrees in France and Southeast Asia during less prolonged breakdowns in the eighteenth century. But over the long term the growing solidity of each state reflected the combined effects of:
(a) An expansion in populationFootnote 16 and aggregate production, which strengthened each state's resource and recruitment base, together with growing monetization, which enhanced the efficiency of resource extraction. Everywhere, albeit to different degrees, we find a long-term movement from in-kind taxes, labor services, and land grants, to cash taxation, wage labor, salaries, and commercial rewards. Economic expansion, and an associated increase in Smithian specialization and commodification, in turn reflected synergies between agrarian extension and intensification; rising domestic and international market demand; dramatically enhanced post-1450 bullion flows from Japan and then the New World, which ended Eurasia's bullion famine and facilitated monetization in one region after anotherFootnote 17; and state interventions, unintended as well as deliberate, that radically reduced transaction costs.
(b) More inclusive cultural identities, to be discussed shortly, which increased provincial and popular identification with the capital.
(c) Cumulative improvements in administrative, fiscal, and military efficiency, spurred in part by rising interstate competition and by the global diffusion of ever-more-powerful European-style firearms after c. 1520. Introduced by Portuguese adventurers to Southeast Asia and Japan and by Central Europeans to Russia, firearms promptly revolutionized warfare in one realm after another, favoring the wealthiest, most innovative polities and accelerating consolidation. In Southeast Asia, Russia, and France, virtually every major administrative and fiscal reform after 1350, and more especially 1520, responded to the demands of external warfare or domestic rebellion. Japan was an exception proving the rule insofar as the Warring States period of 1477–1600 was the era of most intense administrative and military innovation in Japanese history, while thereafter the Pax Tokugawa dramatically reduced such pressures.
Fifth, in each realm starting in the charter era, but with accelerating force from the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, cultural motifs became more vertically uniform, particularly in each imperial core, and more horizontally uniform, especially among provincial elites. I refer to religious practices, language, and ethnic self-identification, but also to literary, sartorial, architectural, and artistic usages as certified by royal courts and allied local elites. Although thus connected through various feedback loops to political integration, cultural standardization was more continuous and less episodic than political change, because it relied more heavily on local processes. Limited though it may have been, everywhere cultural diffusion benefited from growing literacy and a wider, more rapid circulation of goods, people, and texts, all of which tended to privilege capital norms. By the mid-1700s at latest, all six realms supported vernacular language literatures that featured novel genres and more socially inclusive dialects, settings, and characterological structures than charter-era writings, which typically had relied on universal sacred languages (Sanskrit, Pali, classical Chinese, Latin, Church Slavonic). Typically too, cultural integration was associated with new religious/educational structures, which in turn drew sustenance from commercialization, urban expansion, and administrative requirements.
We thus find a persistent irony: as international linkages grew stronger, the cultural unification of ever larger numbers of people whose only tongue was the vernacular created more geographically exclusive, culturally bounded categories. Popular acculturation normally entailed greater peasant acceptance of orthodoxy as defined by universal textual religions and a corresponding retreat in openly animist practices and female claims to supernatural access. But insofar as the masses could never master Sanskrit, classical Chinese, or Latin, the rise of vernacular literatures and literacy simultaneously reduced the role within the overall culture of these once unrivalled sacred languages. So too, in all six realms the growth of state power radically and persistently compressed the wealth and political autonomy of religious institutions—although only in France did secularization produce an explicit transfer of sanctity from church and monarchy to the “nation.”
The political implications of such cultural shifts were profound. On the one hand, to expand Philip Gorski's notion of the “disciplinary revolution,” by promoting ethics of self-discipline and social obligation, new religious/cultural currents—Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, Orthodox, Tridentine—reduced the need for imperial coercion and thus compensated for the yet limited reach of officialdom.Footnote 18 On the other hand, particularly on imperial frontiers where in-group/out-group competition was most intense, acceptance of motifs associated with the capital strengthened identification with the throne. By mixing conscripts from different localities, by increasing local dependence on the throne, and by generating ethnic stereotypes and myths of communal danger and salvation, warfare enhanced group attachment. In different contexts, hairstyles, dress, language, or religion could become recognized symbols of this maturing identity. To be sure, such sentiments differed from twentieth-century nationalism because until the mid-1700s in France and at least the late 1800s in the other five realms, sovereignty resided not in the people, but in the ruler. Religious loyalties often trumped secular culture; society was hierarchical, not civically or juridically egalitarian; and popular involvement with frontier dangers remained episodic and intermittent. Nonetheless, even in Siam, where the link was weakest, a growing practical, if undertheorized, association between ethnicity and political allegiance magnified the coherence and mobilizing capacity of each realm.Footnote 19
Sixth, with the chief exception of Vietnam, these realms all enjoyed relatively good internal transport and/or a demographic imbalance between imperial core and outlying areas markedly favorable to the capital. Moreover, Russia apart, all controlled modest domains, in the order of 330,000 to 900,000 square kilometers. To the extent that Siberia and the steppe were “empty” appendages to Russia's densely settled European core, centrifugal dangers in Russia were no more, and in some ways less, pronounced than in the other five, far smaller polities. In short, size and communications rendered all these realms, save Vietnam, reasonably cohesive by the standards of early modern administrative technology.
Finally, as befit their common designation as part of the protected rimlands, to 1825/1830 all six realms enjoyed substantial and growing insulation from external invasion, whether overland from Inner Asia or by sea from Europe. France and western Europe were protected against Inner Asian cavalry by distance and inadequate pasture. In Southeast Asia malarial climate and jungle-clad mountains, in Japan ocean barriers, ensured that Mongol incursions were brief and of limited impact. Russia, of course, became subject to Mongol-Tatar control from 1240. Rather than attempt direct rule of the forest zone, however, the Mongols entrusted administration and tax collection to Russian princes, who continued to identify as Orthodox Christians. In any case, Mongol-Tatar influence receded rapidly from the late 1300s. Thus in Russia as in other protected rimlands, political and cultural development remained in the hands of local elites. Notwithstanding Vietnamese literati deference to China and eighteenth-century Russian noble indebtedness to France, in all six realms freedom from Inner Asian conquest encouraged a higher degree of vertical cultural unity and a more continuous political and territorial evolution than we shall find in the exposed zone of Eurasia.
To repeat, broadly comparable trajectories across the protected rimlands did not necessarily yield comparable levels of efficiency, innovation, or internal cohesion. Administration, for example, in France in 1800, nay 1500, was far more uniform, monetized, and penetrating than in Burma or Siam in 1800. Whereas France as early as 1520 had destroyed sovereign jurisdictions within its territory, Burma and Siam remained systems of nested sovereignties whose outlying dependencies enjoyed a merely tributary relation to the center. Partly because of printing and denser urban and commercial circuits, partly because of more favorable geography, linguistic and cultural practices also were more uniform in France—and Japan—than in Siam or Burma. On the other hand, military innovation was more continuously transformative and more likely to engender ethnic alterity in Europe and Southeast Asia than in Japan. By the same token, in the absence of sustained military threats, the Tokugawa state remained more segmented than its Indic Southeast Asian counterparts.
It is precisely this juxtaposition of broadly similar long-term political and cultural trajectories with innumerable particularities that renders the above parallels so striking—and so curious and demanding of explanation. That explanation, to recapitulate, involved a fluid mix of factors, including coordinated climatic shifts in northern Europe and Southeast Asia (coordination with Japan seems to have been more limited), perhaps shared epidemiological regimes, Mongol influences, rising world bullion flows after 1450, the post-1520 dissemination of European firearms, Smithian economic specialization at both regional and international levels, and parallel institutional experiments in response to parallel political breakdowns. Political coordination throughout the rimlands grew closer after c. 1450 primarily because of expanding global trade, a marked rise in world silver supplies, and the diffusion of European-style guns.
AREAS SUBJECT TO EXTERNAL DOMINATION
Let us shift now to consider China and South Asia, areas that, along with Southwest Asia, were part of the exposed zone. Given broadly comparable agrarian/demographic rhythms and intensifying overland and maritime contacts, we can hardly be surprised if exposed zone realms exhibited at least some of the same features as Europe, Japan, and mainland Southeast Asia.
China
These similarities arguably were most pronounced in China, whose evolution resembled that in the protected rimlands in a number of key respects.Footnote 20 Most familiar, in China—locus classicus of the dynastic or administrative cycle—successive post-charter interregna grew shorter and less institutionally and socially dislocative. In charter function, if not chronology, the Han empire of 202 b.c.e. to 220 c.e. was China's equivalent to Pagan, Angkor, Dai Viet, the Carolingian/Capetian kingdom, and risturyo Japan. That is to say, the Han was the first to unify securely most of China proper and to foster that Legalist-Confucian ideological amalgam and those administrative ideals—civil supremacy, official literacy, rotated appointments, unified sovereignty—to which all later dynasties would look for inspiration. Han collapse ushered in by far the longest interregnum, from c. 190 to 589, which brought into question the very survival of central authority. By comparison, the last interregna, from Yuan to Ming and from Ming to Qing, were short-lived and, especially in the last instance, institutionally placid. In between lay dynastic transitions of intermediate duration and rupture. The resultant ratio of post-charter interregna, 399:119:152:17:17, reproduces the aforementioned pattern of Southeast Asian realms, France, and Russia.
Again in China as in the protected rimlands, secular improvements in administrative efficiency were symptom and cause of milder interregna. Although adumbrated in some respects during the Han and Tang Dynasties (618–907), the late imperial system of civil service examinations and bureaucratic administration matured only during the Southern Song (1127–1279). Besides providing more impersonal procedures for selection and promotion, Song examinations—together with a network of private and state schools that prepared students for examinations—involved local elites to an unprecedented degree in supra-local cultural and social systems. Hence the social base for imperial authority expanded. The Ming (1368–1644) refined the examination system, provincial organization, and military control, while the Qing (1644–1911) further rationalized laws and administrative procedures, improved government communications, provided more realistic levels of local financing, and evinced a novel concern for popular economic welfare and for the dissemination of Confucian social norms among the peasantry. In Paul Jakov Smith's estimation, the Qing represented “the culmination of traditional governance” and “the epitome of a statecraft tradition that goes back to the twelfth century.”Footnote 21 Precisely the same could be said for late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century administration in Burma, Siam, Vietnam, Russia, France, and Japan.
At roughly the same time as France, Russia, and the chief mainland Southeast Asian states expanded their realms, Qing conquests in Inner Asia, which depended on Manchu martial skills, commercially-attuned logistics, subtle manipulation of Mongol politics, and a Russian alliance, more than doubled Ming imperial territory.Footnote 22
From Han through Qing, we find, too, a more or less continuous horizontal extension (and local redefinition) of Chinese ethnicity, family norms, written culture, and religion from the North China plain into what are now South, Southwest, and West China. Sinicization relied on a tripod, familiar from the protected rimlands, of frontier colonization, commercialization, and state patronage. But in China—whose scale defied comparison with most protected rimland states—these were supplemented by four superb, quite original instruments of horizontal homogenization: (a) an exceptionally precocious bureaucracy which, along with partible inheritance and deeply rooted notions of unified sovereignty, was inimical to the development of regional power bases; (b) a non-phonetic logographic script, which inhibited the expression of local languages and cultures on the European and Indic pattern; (c) a standardized educational corpus focusing on problems of social control and governance that enmeshed literati in expressly imperial perspectives; and (d) civil service examinations uniform across the empire. Starting in the late Tang but with unprecedented force in the late Ming and Qing—the same period as saw accelerated vertical circulation in all six rimland societies—what had been a vast gap between elite and mass in terms of family, ritual, and cultural practices also narrowed perceptibly. Such trends drew strength from growing rural productivity, wider literacy, the mushrooming variety and volume of block-printed materials, state patronage of Neo-Confucian teachings, and closer gentry-peasant and urban-rural interactions.
A final broad similarity between China and the Eurasian peripheries—a most seminal parallel that in varying degrees shaped all other trends—was broadly coordinated economic growth. Against a universal background of slowly accumulating technical and organizational expertise, cycles of economic/demographic expansion and contraction in Southeast Asia, Europe, and China (and less consistently, Japan) ran loosely parallel, with growth particularly notable from c. 850/900 to 1250/1350, c. 1470 to 1630, and c. 1700 to 1820. Population growth and commercial intensification provided the wherewithal for state expansion, and for horizontal and vertical acculturation. Again, the principal agents of coordination between China and other Eurasian regions were climatic cycles, epidemiological adjustment, international Smithian specialization, rising world bullion flows, and the dissemination of Southeast Asian and New World crops. European-style guns also assisted the early Qing, but on the whole, they proved less critical than in most rimlands because guns were of marginal value against Inner Asian cavalry.Footnote 23
How, then, did China differ from the protected rimlands? One difference, basic as it is obvious: along with the Fertile Crescent and North India, North China was one of only three Eurasian regions of “primary state formation.” Articulated political structures, urbanization, writing, and associated technologies, chiefly those of the Shang (1600–1050 b.c.e.), appeared in China some 1,500 to 2,500 years earlier than in the protected rimlands under review, and produced a charter political unification, that of Qin and Han, anywhere from 800 to 1,200 years earlier. Although benefiting from the gradual transmission of metals, domesticated plants and animals, chariots, and other technologies from West Asia, early Chinese civilization did not look to an external donor in any self-consciously imitative fashion. As such, China and other primary sites differed from the protected rimlands.Footnote 24
Moreover, as befits my definitional distinction between protected rimlands and the exposed zone, whereas mainland Southeast Asia, western and northern Europe, and Japan were increasingly shielded against Inner Asian incursions, China—along with Southwest Asia and South Asia—lay open to ever-more-insistent domination by nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples from the steppes, uplands, and forests of Inner Asia.Footnote 25 Although steppe incursions into North China had become a serious problem for sedentary cultivators as early as the third century b.c.e., from 1000 to 1800 c.e. Inner Asians—Khitans, Jurchen, Mongols, and Manchus—directed political and, to a lesser degree cultural development in China with increasing confidence and sophistication. Indeed, I would argue that Chinese history during the second millennium was governed by two grand dynamics: first, the growing cohesion and complexity of the Chinese socio-political and economic order, which I just sought to sketch; and second, the growing subjection of that same order to control by pastoral and semi-agricultural peoples from across the Inner Asian frontier.
Without Inner Asian involvement, post-charter China may never have been re-unified. Admittedly, “barbarians” helped to fragment both the Han and Song empires. But Inner Asians solved the very problem they themselves had helped to create, because Chinese re-unifiers in the late 500s drew on Inner Asian military traditions, and because after another 150 years of division, Mongol armies in 1279 rejoined North and South China—which Marco Polo still regarded as separate countries. The Chinese Ming dynasty inherited the Mongol achievement. Likewise, without the Manchus, China proper almost certainly never would have been joined to Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Thus, whereas in the protected rimlands territorial consolidation after 1200 or 1300 was the work of indigenous elites, in China it was led by Inner Asian conquerors. In domestic terms as well, the Manchu Qing Dynasty revitalized an administrative system that under the Ming had shown serious signs of exhaustion and brought that tradition, as noted, to unprecedented levels of efficiency.
How could Inner Asians dominate a population which was not only incomparably larger—the ratio of Manchus to Chinese in 1648 was in the order of 1:500 Footnote 26—but far wealthier on a per capita, not to mention aggregate, basis, and possessed of a far more sophisticated cultural and political system? Most immediately, Inner Asian dominance reflected superior equestrian and archery skills, a culture that prized stamina, aggression, and violence, and a tradition of universal male military service. More critical in the long run was Inner Asian mastery of Chinese and West Asian military technology, of Chinese administrative technique, and of Neo-Confucian culture. These skills were honed through growing Inner Asian contacts with Chinese and other sedentary peoples, contacts that in turn battened on the prosperity and demographic growth, in both China and the steppe, which characterized the period c. 850–1250. In giving Neo-Confucianism a universal dimension, Inner Asians transformed that doctrine into a sign of civilization, not Sinicization, and so legitimated their rule over China. Such accommodations grew naturally from the hybrid cultural milieu of the Inner Asian/North China frontier where Khitan, Jurchen, and Manchu power took root.Footnote 27 Coming from an essentially preliterate tradition and faced with the incomparable sophistication of China, aspirant Inner Asian rulers had no choice but to adopt Chinese civilization wholesale. As a result, we shall find, in Qing China the balance between indigenous and conquest cultures tilted far more heavily toward the former than in Mughal India, where in turn the balance favored indigenous traditions more substantially than in the Spanish Philippines.
Nonetheless, the old saw that Inner Asian conquerors succeeded only because they became as Chinese as their subjects has now yielded to a more nuanced emphasis on the deliberate maintenance of ethnic difference. On the one hand, the incomparable vigor of the Qing owed much to the Manchus' minority status itself, their fear of being overwhelmed, their esprit de corps, and their compensatory determination to demonstrate their Confucian bona fides in the eyes of skeptical Chinese. On the other hand, beneath the façade of Neo-Confucian impartiality lay persistent ethnic tensions without parallel in the protected rimlands. If many Chinese literati accepted that “barbarians” could become civilized, other Chinese, literati and peasants alike, nurtured a visceral xenophobia which targeted Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, and Manchu rulers and which colored both Song and Ming political thinking. For their part, Confucian universalism aside, Inner Asian rulers never forgot that the continued cohesion of the conquest elite required not only the systematic privileging of Inner Asian over Chinese claims, but legal, administrative, even residential segregation along ethnic lines. In the Qing era Mark Elliott terms these practices “ethnic sovereignty” and “Manchu apartheid.”Footnote 28 Whereas European, Japanese, and mainland Southeast Asian elites sought systematically to introduce their own cultural and religious norms to provincial and plebeian populations, Manchus forbade Chinese to learn Manchu and institutionalized ethnic privilege in the Eight Banners system. Whereas in the protected rimlands nativist or protonational writings enjoyed broad official support because they targeted people beyond the frontier, the Yuan and Qing proscribed such writings because they were directed against the conquerors themselves. And whereas in all protected rimlands, the core ethnicity's monopoly on power ensured that no minority culture enjoyed comparable patronage, Manchu pride and their strategic need to cultivate allies against the Chinese led them to appeal to different audiences in distinctive idioms, all equally authentic. That is to say, while supporting Neo-Confucianism in China proper, the Qing patronized Yellow Hat Lamaism in Tibet and Mongolia, Islam in Xinjiang, and shamanic cults in their homeland. Whereas the Ming saw lands surrounding China as a series of concentric circles all destined for Sinicization, the Qing saw their empire as a horizontal alliance of five permanently independent blocs.Footnote 29 Similar policies prevailed under Mongol and Khitan rulers. In short, Inner Asians promoted an imperial ideology in China that was appreciably more segmented than that in the typical protected periphery.
I would note in passing that in China as in other sectors of the exposed zone, civilizational precocity and vulnerability to Inner Asian conquest appear to have been two sides of the same coin. The same geographic openness to new crops, animals, and technologies moving along Eurasia's great east-west avenues of trade, migration, and communication as had favored the early development of civilization in the exposed zone during the third and second millennia b.c.e. later left that zone especially vulnerable to Inner Asian incursions. Conversely, the same physical isolation via distance, malarial climate, jungle, mountain, and oceanic barriers as impeded the early transmission of Eurasian economic and technological stimuli to the protected zone later afforded those same areas substantial protection against Inner Asian conquest.Footnote 30
Along with civilizational precocity and subjection to Inner Asian conquest, China differed from the protected rimlands in the extraordinary size of its population (350,000,000 in 1800Footnote 31) and territory (11,000,000 square kilometers in 1800). Russian territory (18,000,000 square kilometers) was larger, but as noted, Russia's imperial population (42,000,000) was not only of a different order of magnitude, but was more concentrated in one sector of the empire. Our other protected rimlands had populations and territories well below 10 percent those of Qing China. China's extraordinary scale testified to the aforementioned instruments of horizontal cultural integration—namely, bureaucracy, logographic scripts, Confucianism, examinations—and to a moderately centripetal geography in China proper, where the North China plain and the marvelous water transport of South China facilitated central control. More critically, the vast size of the Chinese empire after 1279 testified to the power of Inner Asian military machines.
Holding together vast territories, however, was hardly the same as preventing administrative devolution. Over thirty years ago G. William Skinner argued that if Chinese administrative units had multiplied at the same rate as China's population, the central apparatus for purely technical reasons would have lost the ability to monitor and coordinate field administration, while the massive increase in taxes needed to support so monstrous an apparatus would have torn the empire apart. Hence whereas population from Han to Qing grew more than six-fold, the number of local administrative units and of local officials virtually stagnated. Whereas in early modern Europe responsibility for public services ascended to progressively higher jurisdictions, in China it devolved, and the central apparatus had to accept a secular decline in local effectiveness.Footnote 32
At least four objections can be raised to Skinner's thesis: (a) Although the total number of post-Tang officials remained more or less constant, secular improvements in documentation, legal codification, communications, personnel evaluation, and recruitment enhanced bureaucratic efficiency. (b) The number of private secretaries and sub-bureaucrats below the level of official appointees rose sharply to meet local demands. (c) Local gentry, merchants, and lineage heads were usually only too willing to support imperial projects. (d) As Confucian social norms spread to lower strata, they improved Gorskian-style social discipline without an extension of government personnel.
And yet the larger contrast with small- and medium-sized rimland states remains. In all the latter realms between 1400 and 1800, the ratio of officials-to-subjects rose sharply, but in China it plummeted. Chinese imperial influence over sub-bureaucratic personnel—routinely vilified as greedy verminFootnote 33—and over local gentry and merchants was limited by inadequate local information, by vested economic interests, and by the fact that none of these groups depended on the center for appointment or income. Nor could cultural ties compensate for weak policy control. This is not to claim that in 1780 local governance necessarily was less effective in China than in, say, Burma or Siam. By some yardsticks—rural pacification, popular indoctrination—it was more impressive. But it does argue that, judged against local precedents, in China size precluded the same sustained centralizing trend that we find in rimland states. Territorial and demographic scale also help to explain why nineteenth-century China faced critical economic-cum-political pressures, culminating in the Taiping rebellion, without rimland analogy.
Finally, size bears on the question of why Chinese authorities were consistently less interested than their rimland counterparts in fiscal maximization. Best estimates are that the high Qing captured in taxes no more than 5 percent of gross national product, compared to 12–15 percent in Russia, 9–13 percent of national commodity production in France, and 16–35 percent of national commodity production in Britain to 1812.Footnote 34 If we consider that in 1080 Chinese imperial revenue averaged about 13 percent of national income, and in 1550 6 to 8 percent, we find, again in contrast to all documented rimland states, that the percentage of the surplus captured in imperial taxes shrank steadily vis-à-vis the share retained by local systems.Footnote 35 In part this low-tax regime reflected Neo-Confucian philosophical commitments; in part, the fact that when China was unified, the isolation that accompanied subcontinental dominion conferred a relative freedom from military pressure such as European and Southeast Asian states never enjoyed. But a third explanation must be that even in the late Ming and late Qing, when military necessity dictated serious tax increases, extraction beyond this modest level proved beyond the state's political and technical capacity. To have raised taxes sharply on the commercial economy or on unregistered lands would have invited resistance from those gentry elites without whose voluntary services local government simply could not function. If the capital had tried to circumvent local elites by increasing the number of paid provincial bureaucrats, the salary bill would have eaten up virtually the entire tax increase and probably would have overwhelmed the center's ability to monitor and control those additional personnel. In the Qing a major increase in bureaucratic recruitment, which of necessity would have been overwhelmingly Chinese, also might have endangered Manchu dominance.Footnote 36
In sum, by embracing everything from the steppe to the tropics and from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, successive Chinese empires eliminated or minimized multi-state competition, which made possible a low-tax regime. Conversely, by limiting central demands on local elites, light taxes helped the empire hold together. Only in the absence of sustained large-scale warfare, perhaps, could so improbable an entity as China have survived.
South Asia
South Asia exhibited some of the same basic patterns as the protected rimlands and China.Footnote 37 In brief, periods of polycentricity between successive South Asian empires—in particular, between the Gupta empire (320–550 c.e.) and the Delhi Sultanate (flourished 1206–1398), the Sultanate and the Mughals (flourished c. 1560–1710), and the Mughals and the British (who controlled Bengal by 1764 and most of South India and the Ganges basin by 1803)—grew shorter and, in many ways, less dislocative.
As elsewhere, administrative culture across South Asia also grew more efficient. Between c. 800 and 1250/1300—which corresponded to the Southeast Asian charter era, to Carolingian/Capetian experiments in France, to the Kievan federation in Russia, and to the Song administrative revolution in China—new Indian states extended their directly-ruled cores, displaced chiefly lineages with agents more dependent on the throne, and promoted military professionalism. Importing Perso-Islamic traditions, the Delhi Sultanate and more especially the Mughals also instituted fresh systems of revenue assignments to support their powerful cavalry, nurtured a cosmopolitan high nobility with weak local ties, and integrated agrarian and pastoral areas with novel efficiency. The Mughals, moreover, organized extensive land cadastres, routinized procedures, demanded cash taxes, and sought to convert hereditary notables across the countryside into quasi-officials who identified in some degree with imperial culture and accepted incorporation into a central hierarchy.
For their part, of course, the British were heirs to a West European military and political dynamic that was yet more removed from South Asian practices than its Perso-Islamic counterpart. The British created by far the largest standing army in Indian history, together with a peculiarly bureaucratic regime, directed exclusively by whites. Through such innovations and a more effective demilitarization of the countryside than local regimes had dreamed possible, the British began to construct a fixed sedentary order able to sustain unprecedentedly heavy taxes. Symptom and cause of administrative improvement was a lurching, centuries-long expansion in the territories controlled by successive empires.
What is more, long-term trends toward vertical and horizontal cultural integration in each rimland realm and in China had parallels in South Asia. I refer to the southward diffusion of North Indian Sanksritic political and literary norms from the early and mid-first millennium, the northward extension of bhakti devotionalism from South India starting in the late first millennium, the growing acceptance of brahmanic notions of caste across the subcontinent from the mid-1600s, and the integrative thrust of Perso-Islamic culture after c. 1200. It must be said, however, that these integrative tendencies coexisted with regional cultures far more vigorous than in China, and that in most periods cultural integration in South Asia was probably no more pronounced than in Europe at large.
Finally, political integration in South Asia responded to familiar economic stimuli and followed a loosely familiar rhythm. Thus, from 800 to 1350 rapid agrarian colonization (which, as in Southeast Asia, benefited from stronger monsoon flows), closer dry zone-agrarian linkages, expanded temple networks, and new commercial links with adjacent sectors of Eurasia supported wealthier, more cohesive, more competitive kingdoms, including both Hindu polities and the Delhi Sultanate. These same centuries, I repeat, saw charter prosperity across Southeast Asia and Europe and “the first commercial revolution” in Song China. Like other sectors of Eurasia, North India and the Deccan suffered economic and political dislocations of varying degrees of severity between 1300 and 1450, which yielded to a new phase of sustained commercial and agrarian expansion for much of the sixteenth century. Aided by New World silver, which facilitated Mughal taxation and trade, growth continued into the early 1700s.Footnote 38 Although an earlier emphasis on firearms' transformative contribution to Mughal success has been reduced, European- and Middle Eastern-style guns clearly aided siege and field operations.Footnote 39 As catalyst of agrarian expansion, and as beneficiary of that same dynamic as well as of firearms and expanding world trade, the Mughal empire therefore should be seen as another species in the same early modern genus as Toungoo Burma, Late Ayudhya Siam, Nguyen Vietnam, Muscovite Russia, Valois/Bourbon France, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China.
But chronology and geography also set South Asia apart from the protected rimlands. For one thing, as a Eurasian core and a site of primary state formation, the North Indian plain, like the North China plain, engendered a charter civilization centuries before outlying sectors of Eurasia. Late Harappan culture (2600–1750/1250 b.c.e.) overlapped with early Shang civilization in China, while the empires of the Mauryas (320–180 b.c.e.) and Guptas bracketed Qin-Han unification in China. As was also true of North China, civilizational precocity in North India allowed it to serve as a cultural template for more isolated regions, including Tibet, parts of Inner Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Moreover, as part of the exposed zone, South Asia, with China, lay open to ever-more-influential Inner Asian incursions. And as in China, although these began in the first millennium b.c.e., if not earlier, only from the eleventh or twelfth century c.e. did they begin to transform sedentary societies in sustained and decisive fashion. Here, too, a quantum increase in Inner Asian influence seems to have benefited from rapid post-850 population growth in both steppe and sown and from a corresponding intensification of agrarian-pastoral contacts, which provided Inner Asians with the cultural and technical skills needed to create stable direct-rule regimes. In the case of those Turkic, Turko-Mongol, and Afghan tribal peoples who led incursions into India, Islam was the chief catalyst in this acculturation. As in China, the precocity of local civilization in the third and second millennia b.c.e., and the ease with which Inner Asians invaded sedentary society centuries later, both testified to the area's openness to external influences. New crops, new technologies, and nomadic warriors moved easily along the same routes of trade and migration.
In South Asia as in China, Inner Asian military superiority pivoted on superior horses, nonpareil equestrian and archery skills, and superior tactical coordination. Along with their Perso-Islamic cultural heritage and strong esprit de corps, from the late twelfth century these advantages allowed Turkic conquest elites to modify the main lines of South Asian development. Administratively, the Delhi Sultans, their immediate successors in North India, and the Mughals introduced, as noted, a variety of arrangements to fund and coordinate cavalry. Culturally, notwithstanding Islam's initially alien character, the conquerors' need to conciliate local warrior lineages so as to ensure a smooth flow of revenue joined with the prestige of Perso-Islamic norms to promote among Muslim and non-Muslim warrior elites a more or less uniform set of linguistic, ceremonial, and social practices. Persian, for example, became the chief language of intellectual, literary, even mystical expression for Muslim and non-Muslim adepts, so that the divide between those knowledgeable and those ignorant of Persian was less a matter of religion than of class.
Arguably the primary long-term effect of these Inner Asian interventions was to discourage Indian regional expressions, both cultural and political. To appreciate this impact, consider that for some 650 years in the north, from the collapse of the Gupta empire to the founding of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, and for at least another century in the south, India supported a competitive polycentrism loosely reminiscent of Europe between the collapse of the Carolingian empire and the crisis of the fourteenth century. In lieu of a single overarching hegemon, in both India and Europe local states based on discrete agrarian cores began to extend those cores and to defend their conquests with novel military and tax mechanisms. Most intriguing for Eurasian perspectives, in both Europe and South Asia regional consolidation encouraged and reflected a growing localization of elite culture. Starting in the late first or early second millennium, at roughly the same time as English, French, Castilian, Tuscan, and other vernaculars began to emerge from the tutelage of Latin to buttress expressly regional polities, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian vernaculars emerged from the carapace of Sanskrit to create vernacular literatures that were tied to emerging regional kingdoms. Thus the Cola and Pantiya kingdoms patronized literature in Tamil; the Hoysala kingdom, in Kannada; the Kakatiyas, in Telugu; the Yadavas, in Marathi; the Gajapatis, in Oriya; and the Solankis, in Gujarati.Footnote 40
Admittedly, South Asian regional regimes labored under heavier burdens—concepts of parcelized sovereignty, caste, weaker links between ethnicity and language—than their European counterparts. Nonetheless, it is entirely plausible that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries South Asia, like Europe, was headed toward a stable multi-state system whose actors would assume ever-more-coherent cultural as well as political personalities. We shall never know, because external conquests aborted the process—not once, but three times.
The Delhi Sultanate conquered all of North India in the thirteenth century and, in great blitzkrieg movements in the early 1300s, went on to destroy the southern Hindu kingdoms of the Yadavas, Hoysalas, Kakatiyas, and Pantiyas. This effectively severed the incipient link, particularly strong in the south, between regional kingdoms and regional languages in favor of more universal Perso-Islamic norms. The Sultanate itself collapsed in the mid- and late fourteenth century, whereupon another multi-state system arose loosely reminiscent of the pre-Delhi era. Although these new states, both Muslim and Hindu, were loath to acknowledge pre-Delhi legacies, and although they continued to patronize Perso-Islamic culture, many also showed a renewed interest in regional languages for literature and/or administration. Once again, however, incipient fusions of regional culture and power aborted: by 1600 virtually all regional regimes had fallen to the Mughals, who fervently championed a Persian lingua franca and imperial, rather than regional, norms of literature, art, and architecture.
With Mughal disintegration in the 1700s dawned a third and final era of polycentrism, when successor states, both those that devolved from Mughal provincial governments and those that developed from below, fused Mughal legacies with local traditions to foster new regional patriotisms.Footnote 41 But again the sense of historic precedent was shallow, rarely extending earlier than the Mughals. And for a third time external conquests—not Inner Asian this time, but British—plucked regional states up by the roots. Like Turkic invaders in an earlier age, the British had organizational and technical advantages—in this case, exclusive control of the seas, superior finances, institutional continuity, and patriotic cohesion—against which local regimes proved increasingly feckless. And like the Turks, the British favored their own linguistic and cultural usages over regional traditions.
In short, thanks primarily (though not exclusively) to Inner Asian and British military conquests, in India we search in vain for centuries-long linkages characteristic of the protected rimlands between increasingly homogenous regional/national cultures and increasingly coherent regional states with demonstrable continuities in name, self-image, territory, institutions, elite language, and official religion.
But if exposure to Inner Asian and finally British arms ensured that regional kingdoms were more transient in South Asia than in Europe, mainland Southeast Asia, or Japan, such kingdoms proved far stronger and more persistent than in China. Regional literatures and elite cultures in China were conspicuously anemic, if not altogether absent. And whereas between 200 b.c.e. and 1800 c.e. northern and north-central India were politically fragmented roughly four times longer than they were unified, in these same centuries the chief zones of Chinese settlement lay under a single imperial authority two and a half times longer than they were separated. Neither Delhi Sultans nor Mughal emperors ever established secure control over the entire Deccan. Why, then, was imperial unification both norm and reality in China, but fleeting aspiration for most of South Asian history?
Again, a variety of factors were in play. Geography arguably was less favorable to transregional formations in South Asia. Communications and transport in watery South China were far easier than in the rugged, inhospitable Deccan, while the presence of mobile pastoralists and warriors along arid corridors extending the length and breadth of South Asia favored a pervasive rural militarization and local autonomy without Chinese analogue. Second, reinforced by South Asian ecology but also representing a cultural variable independent of ecology, the South Asian state was conceived as a collection of nested sovereignties whose irreducible autonomy contrasted with Chinese insistence on undivided imperial sovereignty and on local officials as revocable agents of the emperor. Third, South Asia had no civil service examinations and no standardized political corpus to instill expressly universal loyalties. Fourth, in long-settled agrarian areas, caste—which contrasted with the normative Mencian emphasis on social inclusion and mobility—weakened vertical social and ethnic solidarities. Fifth and of critical import, whereas Chinese logographic, non-alphabetic writing militated against the creation of regional writing systems able to express sub-imperial cultural and political aspirations, Indian alphabets, being phonetic, were ideally suited to the latter project. In this respect, Indian scripts were of a piece with European and Southeast Asian scripts. Sixth, as noted, the extraordinary expanse of the Chinese empire and the associated absence for long periods of serious military threats permitted a minimal tax regime, which in turn reduced strains on the imperial fabric. But neither the Delhi Sultans nor the Mughals achieved a comparable military monopoly. Indeed, in the mid-1300s, and again in the late 1600s, unsuccessful campaigns in the Deccan contributed directly to imperial collapse.
Last, the cultural affiliations of Indo-Muslim rulers probably left them more vulnerable to domestic challenge than their counterparts in China, not to mention the protected rimlands. Recent South Asian scholarship—which runs curiously counter to the latest historiographic emphasis on enduring differences between Inner Asian rulers and Chinese subjects—has warned against essentializing Muslim-Hindu divisions. Instead, it focuses on intra-Muslim and intra-Hindu variety, Mughal ecumenicism, personal loyalties, an all-India warrior ethos, and the universal appeal of Perso-Islamic high culture. One can accept all this and still point out that compared to protected rimland elites, who were invariably of majority ethnicity, a determination to maintain ruling class cohesion led Indo-Muslim rulers to cultivate a very narrow constituency, with West Asian immigrants and their immediate descendants typically holding from 40 to 80 percent of high Mughal posts, and Muslims 70 to 92 percent—even though Muslims were probably no more than 15 percent of the imperial population.Footnote 42 While patronizing non-Muslim shrines, Mughal rulers also insisted ever more forcefully on the ritual primacy of Islam. Not surprisingly, perhaps, post-Mughal Maratha, Sikh, and Jat polities were led by regional elites who had been excluded from Mughal inner circles and who commonly insisted on the ritual primacy of their faiths over Islam. But in China, recall, Jurchens, Manchus, and other Inner Asians, coming from substantially preliterate steppe traditions, combined ethnic exclusion with a full-throated embrace of Chinese high culture. Ironically, although dictated by Jurchen and Manchu cultural poverty, as an aid to imperial integration this policy in the long run proved more successful than Perso-Islamic strategies in South Asia.Footnote 43
In brief, as part of the exposed zone, South Asia in the second millennium was increasingly dominated by Inner Asian, and eventually British, conquest elites. Yet because it oscillated between multi-state systems and trans-regional, externally derived empires, South Asia's political fate was more oscillatory, more Sisyphean than that of China.
ARCHIPELAGIC SOUTHEAST ASIA
Finally, as a Southeast Asianist, I ask: How did archipelagic Southeast Asia fit this schema of protected rimlands and exposed zones? Key sectors of the islands exhibited a curious two-stage history.Footnote 44
Until the sixteenth century, the oceans facilitated commercial and cultural exchange, while protecting what are now Indonesia and the Philippines, much like Japan, against assault from afar.Footnote 45 In this period developmental rhythms in island and mainland Southeast Asia were fundamentally comparable, and archipelagic Southeast Asia should be seen as part of the protected rimlands. Thus in the same period, c. 700–1300/1350, as the charter states of Pagan, Angkor, and Dai Viet flourished on the mainland, intertwined processes of maritime commercial expansion, local cultural experiment, and agrarian reclamation (at least in Java) contributed to impressive Hindu-Buddhist polities in central Java and southeast Sumatra. These states exhibited a number of generic features familiar from the charter mainland, including an Indianized, literate elite; a promiscuous cultic eclecticism; superficial, substantially ritualistic instruments of political integration; and in Java, monumental religious architecture. As proto-Burmese and proto-Vietnamese identities cohered on the mainland, we find in coastal areas of the western archipelago early expressions of Malay identity.Footnote 46 Insofar as archipelagic ports relied on Indian Ocean and Chinese trade, they benefited directly from that general Eurasian prosperity characteristic of the period c. 850–1300.
In the island world as in much of Eurasia, the 1300s and 1400s produced severe dislocations, including the eclipse of southeast Sumatra in favor of Malay peninsular sites and a shift in Java's political center of gravity from the interior to the north coast. Both changes responded to Eurasian commercial intensification, and as such resembled the contemporaneous rise of coastal extremities at the expense of Pagan and Angkor, or more distantly, of northeast and southwest Russia at the expense of the Kievan heartland.
Between c. 1450 and 1680, which Anthony Reid has termed Southeast Asia's Age of Commerce,Footnote 47 a further increase in Indian Ocean and Chinese demand for spices, forest and maritime products—a demand born of recovery from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century dislocations in key sectors of Eurasia—transformed the cities, polities, and religions of island and mainland Southeast Asia alike. In the islands, arguably the most dramatic change was the spread of Islam. Insofar as the new faith helped to generate a distinctive Malayo-Muslim coastal culture along a thousand-mile arc from western Sumatra to the southern Philippines, ethnic/cultural homogenization in the islands recalls, however loosely, the contemporaneous expansion of Burmese, Siamese, Vietnamese, French, Russian, and Japanese ethnicity and the associated dissemination of textual religious norms (Theravada, Neo-Confucian, Catholic, Orthodox) at the expense of animist traditions. In political terms, the fifteenth-century rise of Melaka to hegemony in the western archipelago paralleled imperial consolidation on the mainland. Most critical, in the islands as in other protected rimlands, political and cultural change to c. 1500 proceeded entirely under local auspices. Whereas in South Asia Islamization depended initially on Turkic military conquests, in the archipelago, notwithstanding the arrival of Sufi proselytizers of diverse provenance, Islam never had an extra-regional military patron.Footnote 48
From the sixteenth century, however, Europeans, anticipating later British interventions in India, began to alter the main lines of archipelagic development. At this point, parts of the island world began shifting from protected to exposed zone status, a transition that would accelerate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Once a barrier to external imposition, the sea now offered the principal entree. (Of course, after 1500 vast regions in the Americas and Africa, formerly protected, also became arenas of intense European involvement.)
Without reverting to an exaggerated Eurocentric dichotomy between Western dynamism and indigenous stasis, we can accept that by capturing Melaka in 1511, the Portuguese pierced the archipelago's principal commercial ganglion, destroyed its chief Muslim entrepôt, and encouraged, quite unintentionally, the rise of local states more aggressive and cohesive than Melaka had been. Such trends intensified with the arrival in the early 1600s of the powerful Dutch East India Company (VOC). To fend off the Dutch and one another, the coastal polities of Aceh, Banten, and Makasar, as well as Mataram in south-central Java, extended their authority over key producing zones, upgraded their firearms and military organization, and attempted centralizing reforms that recall contemporary innovations on the mainland. Yet by and large these indigenous projects failed. The VOC had not set out to acquire territories, merely to trade. But by 1700 its advanced ships and weaponry, institutional continuity, capital resources, regional coordination, and study of Portuguese precedents not only had allowed the VOC, centered at Batavia, to destroy all its chief indigenous rivals, but had awarded the Company control over an extensive archipelagic network of ports and cash-cropping enclaves. These extended from the Spice Islands and Makasar in the eastern archipelago to northern Java and south Borneo in the center, to coastal Sumatra and Melaka in the west. With the aid of Chinese middlemen, the Dutch also penetrated interior Java, by 1757 helping to fragment Mataram, once the most powerful state in the archipelago.
To be sure, one can exaggerate Dutch influence, not least in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Company fortunes waned and Mataram's heirs staged a modest revival. And yet, not only did the Dutch alter the main lines of archipelagic trade, not only did they create a territorial network that bore no obvious relation to any pre-Dutch empire, but they decisively decoupled historical trajectories in the archipelago from those in mainland Southeast Asia. Whereas mainland states, as we saw, became ever-more-coherent and expansive c. 1600–1825, in this same period and particularly from c. 1660, all the chief island polities went into reverse. Under Dutch pressure, once formidable centers lost their peripheries, cultural ties within each kingdom weakened, indigenous urbanization declined, and Indonesians, unable to compete with Dutch or Chinese, withdrew from cash cropping and interregional exchange. The VOC's commercial raison d'être, its urban concentration, and its fear of inciting Muslim hostility precluded serious efforts to convert indigenes to the Dutch Reformed Church. Nor did the Dutch language spread. Despite some local cultural accommodations, the Dutch in Batavia and elsewhere preferred to live in substantial, self-protective isolation, an isolation greater than that of Manchus, not to mention Mughals. And yet, by impoverishing the most creative commercial classes, by reducing the incentive for ambitious Chinese to assimilate to Muslim society, and by wedding political power to a thoroughly alien cultural and administrative ethos, the Dutch in the areas they controlled profoundly modified local cultural as well as political options.
In what the Spanish came to call the Philippines, indigenous leaders did not suffer an eclipse comparable to that of elites in Dutch-controlled areas, if only because the northern and central Philippines had never known stable supra-local polities, urbanization, a world religion, or administrative literacy. The building of a walled capital city, Manila; the unification under Spanish military and church officials of hitherto resolutely local societies; the imposition of taxes and corvees; the cooptation of local chiefs to form an hereditary administrative stratum responsible for organizing those collections; the Christianization of those same elites and eventually of most of the lowland population; the inauguration of Mexican-Philippine-Chinese trade which sustained the new colony financially—these features, collectively, constituted the most radical transformations anywhere in Southeast Asia between 1550 and 1800. Like the Dutch, the Spanish, who were heavily concentrated in Manila, maintained a physical, administrative, and racial distance between themselves and indigenous subjects. Indigenes were subject to separate jurisdictions; spoke little or no Spanish; and were effectively barred from the Catholic priesthood and from offices higher than the humble post of gobernadorcillo. However, both because the Spanish crown was expressly committed to evangelization and—more critical—because the pre-conquest northern and central Philippines, unlike Muslim areas where the Dutch operated, was animist and illiterate, the Spanish were remarkably successful in imposing their own cultural vision.
Why was European influence dramatically greater in the archipelago than in mainland Southeast Asia? As the most protected of the protected rimlands, the Philippines lacked sustained exposure to Indian or Chinese influences such as had catalyzed state formation elsewhere in Southeast Asia. More generally, with its vast ratio of coast to interior, the archipelago, by definition, was more vulnerable to naval power than most mainland regions. In addition, geography placed a lower limit on centralization and military defense. Without substantial agrarian resources, coastal polities in the island world typically had to import rice, which not only rendered them vulnerable to blockade, but also precluded those demographic densities that allowed mainland states to overawe peripheral districts and recover quickly from periodic defeat. Central and eastern Java did contain sizeable populations, but they were divided into more or less discrete clusters, separated by mountains and swamps; in any case, the Dutch penetrated interior Java long after the coast. Finally, as the world's sole producer of cloves, nutmeg, and mace, as a major producer of pepper, and as the funnel for all traffic between the Indian Ocean and East Asia, archipelagic Southeast Asia offered unique commercial attractions. This combination of military vulnerability and mercantile appeal explains why the earliest application of European power in all of Asia focused on the archipelago, and why European inroads in that region antedated comparable penetrations in South Asia and mainland Southeast Asia by anywhere from 100 to 250 years.Footnote 49
To sum up, in basic chronology and local effects, European assaults on Asia's island periphery paralleled post-1500 Inner Asian assaults on Asia's great agrarian heartlands. In each case, small extra-regional conquest elites created what by local standards were unprecedentedly expansive, powerful, resource-rich domains. If these elites differed in the degree to which they sought to promote their own cultural practices—the Spanish and Mughals were most ambitious in this regard—all preserved elite cohesion with self-insulating administrative, residential, religious, and/or administrative conventions. The ensuing cultural gap differed not only in degree, but also in kind from that in most protected rimlands, where elites and subjects typically shared religion, language, and ethnicity.
To be sure, European sea nomads and Inner Asian land nomads responded to different dynamics. Whereas Iberian and Dutch expansion grew from competition between increasingly coherent European nation-states and relied on small groups of professional traders and soldiers separated from their home countries, Inner Asian incursions were led by tribal federations or ad hoc coalitions of pastoral warriors who frequently migrated en masse. Whereas the Europeans' maritime-commercial logic led them to control far-flung enclaves around the globe, Inner Asians assembled substantial cavalries to dominate vast landed territories contiguous to their homelands. Whereas Europeans commonly entered culturally alien areas, Inner Asians often had long familiarity with subject peoples. And while European maritime expansion had limited institutional precedents before 1415, Mughal and Manchu conquests built on experiments from the eleventh century, if not earlier.Footnote 50
Given these discrepancies, why did both of these great pincer movements on agrarian Asia, Europeans by sea and Inner Asians overland, become ever more influential after 1500? It is not difficult to see Iberian and Dutch enterprise as a response to post-1450 Eurasian economic recovery and specifically European technical advances in shipbuilding, navigation, and naval warfare. Can we tie Inner Asian advances to a similar commercial florescence and intensification of steppe-sown interactions? The Mughals, as noted, benefited from overland trade with Southwest Asia and more particularly from bullion imports, which aided fiscal extraction. As Peter Perdue has shown, Manchu expansion in Inner Asia was also in some sense a function of commercial intensification in northwest China proper.Footnote 51 It is unlikely, however, that commercial vitality alone can explain Mughal or Manchu success. Following Marshall Hodgson, one could argue that nomad empires and European thalassocracies were both “gunpowder empires” borne of similar technological shifts, but, again, recent research has downplayed the contribution of firearms to both Qing and Mughal power.Footnote 52 And if we are to seek common roots, how do we explain the relative novelty of European expansion? Can we improve upon the truism that although Europe, China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia all exhibited remarkable economic vitality c. 850–1300, technical limits rendered overseas European conquests impossible before the sixteenth century?
Whatever the answers to these and similar problems of coordination, we may conclude that all the sectors of Eurasia under review experienced accelerating integrative trends during the second millennium, and especially after 1500. Everywhere these forces drew strength from specific combinations of demographic and agrarian growth, local and interregional Smithian specialization, firearms, and cumulative administrative expertise. But whereas in the protected rimlands indigenous elites continued to direct the process, in the exposed zone Inner Asians and Europeans gained substantial control. Nor have those legacies vanished. In mainland Southeast Asia and Japan, Europeans arriving in the mid-1800s could modify, but not negate early modern territorial arrangements that had evolved gradually under indigenous auspices. By contrast, the current boundaries of China, South Asia, and island Southeast Asia all are a legacy of Inner Asian and European conquests that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
