The thesis of Osterhammel’s massive tome is that “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” He considers the Enlightenment to be the timespan of the long eighteenth century, from around 1680 through 1820. Osterhammel’s breath and depth in this book is impressive. It is a comprehensive survey of European Enlightenment thought on Asia, taken from a plethora of primary sources: explorers, merchants, and expats, as well as from contemporary social scientists and theorists who relied on these travelogues to expound more sweeping pronouncements. Osterhammel is candid when authors might be embellishing the truth or spinning complete yarns from cloth. He is also a keen judge of their prejudices and strengths. Osterhammel also spends a great deal of space comparing and contrasting what different Europeans thought of differences between Asian cultures. Through the course of the book, Osterhammel seamlessly weaves between large themes and a minutia of facts in a coherent fashion. Among the larger topics discussed are border policy, urban planning, language and translation barriers, despotic governance, aesthetics, religious differences, slaves, treatment of women, social stratification, and political modernization.
Osterhammel begins by conceding that “Asia” itself was a European term. “In the eighteenth century the individual peoples of Asia did not identify themselves as “Asians”…. Societies on the Asian continent were considerably more heterogeneous than their contemporary European counterparts.” There also was not a homogenous pattern of thought from the European minds regarding Asia. It’s thinkers were diverse and nuanced. When discussing India, he mentions, “no accusation hit Warren Hastings harder than Burke’s claim that he adhered to a relativist “geographical morality” in his dealings with the Indians, treating them in ways that would be proscribed in Europe as tyrannical and criminally reprehensible.”
However, as an interesting general statement, Osterhammel describes the difference in cultures many Enlightenment thinkers felt there was between the countries of Asia deemed most relevant to European outsiders. “Nobody in Europe dreamed of calling the Japanese “barbarians.” Japan was the only country in Asia that was always recognized as a civilization in its own right. Differing opinions could be expressed about China, even if the voices proclaiming it to be barbarian remained at all times in a minority. The opposite held true of the Turks, who were respected by Europeans for their military prowess far more than they were admired for their cultural achievements. Even their most vocal champion, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ultimately saw the conflict between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as one “between civilization and barbarism.”… The Persians, conversely, had been regarded since the days of Herodotus as a highly civilized nation, an appraisal that their political renaissance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century seemed only to confirm. The chaos that descended on the land in the eighteenth century cast doubt on this judgement. Persia now became the only Asiatic country in which a Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all—appeared to have been realized in the present…. No contemporary inhabitants of Asia fitted the eighteenth century’s image of “barbarian” better than the Tatars.… Unlike the desert Arabs, the competing candidates for the role, the Tatars not only fulfilled the criterion of nomadic people who had moved beyond the stage of primitive savagery; they also embodied the raw forces of history that had been pacified not long before.”
In regards to the nomadic lifestyle of many in the Near East, Osterhammel makes an astute point. He states, “because nomads are not tied to any fixed place, temples as well as immobile images of the divine are foreign to them. As a consequence of their way of life, they therefore possess fairly abstract ideas about god, making them receptive to monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, the most aniconic among them.” However, throughout most of his book, Osterhammel tries to let his sources do the talking, battling out competing theories between themselves, with little commentary from Osterhammel in between. He reports what Enlightenment contemporaries thought about the East without value judgement and in the context of the times. Osterhammel commends Montesquieu as “the creator of a general framework of a general social science…. [Montesquieu] also never plays off a specific concept of anthropology as the science of “them,” the exotic others, against something like “sociology” as the science of “us.” Montesquieuean social theory is transcultural and universal, comparative and counter-teleological, empirical and nonnormative. Societies in all civilizations are studied as they are or as they appear to be; they are not assigned to one of the stages preordained for them by a philosophy of progress.”
Osterhammel also points to how European scholars contrasted the lack of an aristocratic class throughout most of Asia with their own cultures. “Had not Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli already taken the absence of a nobility to be a chief characteristic of despotic states?” Now, during the Enlightenment, “the seventeenth-century insight [was] that highly sophisticated civilizations could survive and even flourish without an aristocracy…. There was no such thing as aristocracy in China. There were no dynastic magnates, no vassals, no patrimonial privileges, no feudal dues, no great landholdings, no courtly society outside the imperial power center, no code of chivalry, and no estates-general or parliaments…. The bureaucratic hierarchy (which was indeed made up of nine ranks) fulfilled many of the functions performed by the aristocracy…. The “mandarins” [Europeans] encountered at court had spent years mastering the classical texts in preparation for the grueling and highly competitive state examinations…. The scholar could now take his place in the legally privileged elite group of the shenshi or “gentry.” Only if he went on to achieve success in the central examination, gaining his “doctoral degree” in the presence of the emperor himself, was he now qualified—although by no means guaranteed—to secure one of the few bureaucratic offices in the territorial administration of this enormous country and at the imperial court. These coveted offices, like the title of gentry, were nonhereditary.” As a contemporary German scholar put it, the Chinese “associate nobility with the person and not with his blood.”
Osterhammel points out that Europe, educated and modernized by Enlightenment thought, was poised to takeover after Asia’s own self-inflicted decline. “When early modern Asian states did collapse, this was hardly ever the result of European intervention; the Crimean Khanate was a notable exception. The British, for example, played no part in the breakup of Aurangzeb’s Mughal Empire; they merely understood how to take advantage of it…. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Europeans, now armed with the highly efficient institution of the militarized chartered company, set about integrating Asia’s coastal regions into worldwide trading networks.”
Throughout Osterhammel’s book he stresses that, for the most part, the cross-cultural learning was a one-sided affair. Scholars and travelers from Europe explored, studied, and debated the merits of Asian cultures. For much of the Enlightenment, Asia was viewed in the West as different and exotic, but not necessarily inferior. In contrast, Asians, for most of the long eighteenth century, rarely showed the slightest curiosity towards the Other. “Asian interest in Europe was desultory. Phases of mental opening to the West, such as the high water mark of Chinese curiosity about Europe reached in the second half of the Kangxi emperor’s reign (circa 1690-1720) and the Ottoman “Tulip Period” shortly thereafter (1718-30), proved short-lived. Only in Japan, the most inaccessible of all Asian countries after Korea, was Europe studied in anything like a systematic way on the basis of imported books, mainly in Dutch. This willingness to learn from the outside world was the legacy of a centuries-long absorption of Chinese civilization…. The anticolonial self-strengthening reforms undertaken by Haidar Ali in India, later pursued with similar intent by Pasha Muhammad Ali in Egypt, belong to a new era: they are already reactions to Europe’s burgeoning power.”
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