Samurai; Daimyo; Matthew Perry; and Nationalism: Crash Course World History #34 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 1 - World Knowledge

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World
History, and today we're going to talk about
nationalism, the most important global phenomenon
of the nineteenth century and also the phenomenon
responsible for one of the most commented-upon
aspects of Crash Course, my globes being out of date.
USS "R" not a country! [Explosion noise.]
Rhodesia? [Explosion noise.]
South Vietnam? [Explosion noise.]
Sudan with no South Sudan? [Explosion noise.]
Yugoslavia? [Explosion noise.]
Okay, no more inaccuracies with the globes.
Ahhh, the little globes!
This one doesn't know about Slovakia [explosion
noise],
this one has East-frackin' Pakistan [explosion
noise]
and this one identifies Lithuania as part
of Asia [explosion noise].
Okay, no more globe inaccuracies. Actually,
bring back my globes. I feel naked without them.
[theme music]
So if you're into European history, you're
probably somewhat familiar with nationalism
and the names and countries associated with
it. Bismarck in Germany, Mazzini and Garibaldi
in Italy and Mustafa Kemal, a.k.a. Ataturk,
in Turkey.
But nationalism was a global phenomenon, and
it included a lot of people you may not associate
with it, like Muhammad Ali in Egypt and also
this guy [Lincoln].
Nationalism was seen in the British dominions
as Canada, Australia and New Zealand became
federated states between 1860 and 1901. I
would say "independent states" instead of
federated states, but you guys still have
a queen!
It was also seen in the Balkans, where Greece
gained its independence in 1832 and Christian
principalities fought a war against the Ottomans
in 1878. In India, where a political party,
the Indian National Congress, was founded
in 1885, and even in China, where nationalism
ran up against the dynastic system that had
lasted more than two thousand years.
And then, of course, there are these guys
[Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito], who in many
ways, represent the worst of nationalism,
the nationalism that tries to deny or eliminate
difference in the efforts to create a homogeneous,
mythologized unitary polity. We'll get to
them later, but it's helpful to bring them up now
just so we don't get too excited about nationalism.
Okay, so before we launch into the history,
let's define the modern nation-state. Definitions
are slippery, but for our purposes, a nation-state
involves a centralized government that can
claim and exercise authority over a distinctive
territory. That's the state part. It also
involves a certain degree of linguistic and
cultural homogeneity - that's the nation part.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green! By that definition, China was
a nation-state by, like, probably the Han dynasty.
Dude, Me From the Past, you're
getting smart! Yeah, it could be, and some
historians argue that it was. Nationhood is
really hard to define. Like in James Joyce's
Ulysses, the character Bloom famously says
that a nation is "the same people living in
the same place," but then he remembers the
Irish and Jewish Diasporas and adds, "or also
living in different places." But let's ignore
Diasporas for the moment and focus on territorially-bounded
groups with a common heritage. Same people,
same place.
So how do you become a nation? Well, some
argue it's an organic process involving culturally-similar
people wanting to formalize their connections; others
argue that nationalism is constructed by governments,
building a sense of patriotism through compulsory
military service and statues of national heroes.
Public education is often seen as part of
this nationalizing project. Schools and textbooks
allow countries to share their nationalizing
narratives, which is why the once and possibly-future
independent nation of Texas issues textbooks
literally whitewashing early American history.
Still, other historians argue that nationalism
was an outgrowth of urbanization and industrialization,
since new urbanites were the most likely people
to want to see themselves as part of a nation.
For instance, Prague's population rose from
157,000 to 514,000 between 1850 and 1900,
at the same time that the Czechs were beginning
to see themselves as separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Which is a cool idea, but it doesn't explain
why other less-industrialized places like
India also saw a lot of nationalism.
The actual business of nationalization involves
creating bureaucracies, new systems of education,
building a large military, and often using
that military to fight off other nation-states,
since nations often construct themselves in
opposition to an idea of otherness. A big
part of being Irish, for instance, is not
being English.
So emerging nations had a lot of conflicts,
including the Napoleonic Wars, which helped
the French become the French, the Indian Rebellion
of 1857, which helped Indians to identify
themselves as a homogeneous people, the American
Civil War - I mean, before the Civil War,
many Americans thought of themselves not as
Americans, but as Virginians or New Yorkers
or Pennsylvanians. I mean, our antebellum
nation was usually called "THESE United States."
After, it became THE United States.
So in the U.S, nationalism pulled a nation
together, but often, nationalism was a destabilizing
force for multiethnic land-based empires.
This was especially the case in the Ottoman
Empire, which started falling apart in the
nineteenth century as first the Greeks, then
the Serbs, Romanians, and Bulgarians, all
predominantly Christian people, began clamoring
for and, in some cases winning, independence.
Egypt is another good example of nationalism
serving both to create a new state and to
weaken an empire. Muhammad Ali, who was actually
Albanian and spoke Turkish, not Egyptian Arabic,
and his ruling family encouraged the Egyptian
people to imagine themselves as a separate nationality.
But okay, so nationalism was a global phenomenon
in the nineteenth century, and we can't talk
about it everywhere, so instead, we're going
to focus on one case study: Japan. You thought
I was going to say Germany, didn't you? Nope.
You can bite me, Bismarck.
Japan had been fragmented and feudal until
the late sixteenth century, when a series
of warrior landowners managed to consolidate
power. Eventually, power came to the Tokugawa
family, who created a military government,
or bakufu.
The first Tokugawa to take power was Ieyasu,
who took over after the death of one of the
main unifiers of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi,
sometimes known as "The Monkey," although
his wife called him - and this is true - "The
Bald Rat."
In 1603, Ieyasu convinced the emperor, who
was something of a figurehead, to grant him
the title of shogun. And for the next 260
years or so, the Tokugawa bakufu was the main
government of Japan. The primary virtue of
this government was not necessarily its efficiency
or its forward-thinking policies, but its
stability. Stability: the most underrated
of governmental virtues. Let's go to the Thought
Bubble.
The Tokugawa bakufu wasn't much for centralization,
as power was mainly in the hands of local
lords called daimyo. One odd feature of the
Tokugawa era was the presence of a class of
warriors who, by the nineteenth century, had
become mostly bureaucrats. You may have
heard of them: the samurai.
One of the things that made this hereditary
class so interesting was that each samurai
was entitled to an annual salary from the daimyo
called a stipend. This privilege basically paid them
off and assured that they didn't become restless
warriors, plaguing the countryside - that is, bandits.
We tend to think of samurai as noble and honorable,
but urban samurai, according to Andrew Gordon's
book A Modern History of Japan, they were
"a rough-and-tumble lot. Samurai gang wars
- a West Side Story in the shadows of Edo
Castle - were frequent in the early 1600s."
And you still say that history books are boring.
As with kings and lesser nobles anywhere,
the central bakufu had trouble controlling
the more powerful daimyo, who were able to
build up their own strength because of their
control over local resources. This poor control
also made it really difficult to collect taxes,
so the Tokugawa were already a bit on the
ropes when two foreign events rocked Japan.
First was China's humiliating defeat in the
Opium Wars, after which Western nations forced
China to give Europeans special trade privileges.
It was a wake-up call to see the dominant
power in the region so humbled, but even worse
for the Tokugawa was the arrival of Matthew
Perry. No, Thought Bubble, Matthew Perry.
Yes, that one.
The Tokugawa are somewhat famous for their
not-so-friendly policy toward foreigners,
especially Western Christian ones, for whom the
penalty for stepping foot on Japanese soil was death.
The Tokugawa saw Christianity in much the
same way as the Romans had, as an unsettling
threat to stability. And in the case of Matthew
Perry, they had reason to be worried.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So the American naval
commodore arrived in Japan in 1853 with a
flotilla of ships and a determination to open
Japan's markets.
Just the threat of American steam-powered
warships was enough to convince the bakufu
to sign some humiliating trade treaties that
weren't unlike the ones that China had signed
after losing the Opium Wars.
And this only further motivated the daimyo
and samurai, who were ready to give the Tokugawa
the boot. Within a few years, they would.
So what does this have to do with nationalism?
Well, plenty. First off, even though the Americans
and the Japanese didn't go to war... yet,
the perceived threat provided an impetus for
Japan to start thinking about itself differently.
It also resulted in the Japanese being convinced
that if they wanted to maintain their independence,
they would have to reconstitute their country
as a modern nation-state.
This looks a lot like what was happening in
Egypt or even Germany, with external pressures
leading to calls for greater national consolidation.
So the Tokugawa didn't give up without a fight,
but the civil war between the stronger daimyo
and the bakufu eventually led to the end of
the shogunate.
And in 1868, the rebels got the newly-enthroned
Emperor Meiji to abolish the bakufu and proclaim
a restoration of the imperial throne. Now
the emperor didn't have much real power, but
he became a symbolic figure, a representative
of a mythical past around whom modernizers
could build a sense of national pride.
And in place of bakufu, Japan created one
of the most modern nation-states in the world.
After some trial and error, the Meiji leaders
created a European-style cabinet system of
government with a prime minister, and in 1889,
promulgated a constitution that even contained
a deliberative assembly, the Diet, although
the cabinet ministers weren't responsible to it.
Samurai were incorporated into this system
as bureaucrats and their stipends were gradually
taken away. And soon the Japanese government
developed into, like, something of a meritocracy.
Japan also created a new conscript army. Beginning
in 1873, all Japanese men were required to
spend three years in the military. The program
was initially very unpopular - there were
more than a dozen riots in 1873 and 1874, in
which crowds attacked military registration centers.
But eventually, serving in the army created
a patriotic spirit and a loyalty to the Japanese
emperor. The Meiji leaders also instituted
compulsory education in 1872, requiring both
boys and girls to attend four years of elementary
school. Oh, it's time for the Open Letter?
An Open Letter to Public Education. But first,
let's see what's in the Secret Compartment today.
Oh, it's a graduation hat. Thanks, Meredith the
intern, for letting me borrow your graduation hat.
Dear Public Education, When you were introduced
in Japan, you were very unpopular, because
you were funded by a new property tax. In
fact, you were so unpopular that at least
two thousand schools were destroyed by rioters,
primarily through arson.
Stan, it doesn't look good when you bring
it in close like that. I look like a 90-year-old swimmer.
And even though public education has proved
extremely successful, lots of people still
complain about having to pay taxes for it,
so let me explain something.
Public education does not exist for the benefit
of students or for the benefit of their parents.
It exists for the benefit of the social order.
We have discovered as a species that it is
useful to have an educated population.
You do not need to be a student or have a
child who is a student to benefit from public
education. Every second of every day of your
life, you benefit from public education!
So let me explain why I like to pay taxes
for schools, even though I don't personally
have a kid in school. It's because I don't like
living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.
Best wishes,
John Green.
In Japan, nationalism meant modernization,
largely inspired by, and in competition with,
the West. So the Meiji government established
a functioning tax system, they built public
infrastructure like harbors and telegraph
lines, invested heavily in railroads and created
a uniform national currency.
But the dark side of nationalism began to
appear early on. In 1869, the Meiji rulers
expanded Japan's borders to include the island
of Hokkaido, and in 1879, they acquired Okinawa
after forcing its king to abdicate.
In 1874, Japan even invaded Taiwan with an
eye toward colonizing it, though they weren't
successful. And in these early actions, we
already see that nationalism has a habit of
thriving on conflict. And often, the project
of creating a nation-state goes hand-in-hand
with preventing others from doing the same.
This failure to imagine the other complexly
isn't new, but it's about to get a lot more
problematic, as we'll see next week, when we
discuss European imperialism. Thanks for watching.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.
We're ably interned by Meredith Danko and
our graphics team is Thought Bubble.
Raoul Meyer: Also, the show was written by
my high school history student, John Green,
and myself, Raoul Meyer.
John: Last week's phrase of the week was "bearded
Marxist." If you'd like to guess at this week's
phrase of the week or suggest future ones,
you can do so in comments, where you can also
ask questions about today's video that will
be answered by our team of historians. Thanks
for watching Crash Course, and as we say in
my hometown, don't forget to be awesome!