Asian Responses to Imperialism: Crash Course World History #213 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

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