XIII

Into a New Age

THE RISE OF EUROCENTRISM

The love of lengthened tones and modulated sounds, different from those of speech, and regulated by a stated measure, seems a passion implanted in human nature throughout the globe; for we hear of no people, however wild and savage in other particulars, who have not music of some kind or other, with which we may suppose them to be greatly delighted, by their constant use of it upon occasions the most opposite.

—Charles Burney (1726–1814), A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1776)1

It [musical criticism] must acknowledge as beautiful what any human being, what any nation would deem to be beautiful by the lights of its knowledge and by the degree to which it has developed its capabilities.… The modern Greeks, the Turks, the Persians, the Chinese, the American savages, form melodies from scales which differ so greatly from our own that we are unable to find the least order and beauty therein. Their music is nonetheless beautiful, because it pleases them and because they would discern in our own music the very disorder that we criticize in theirs.

—Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818), Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (General History of Music, 1788)²

Throughout antiquity, and among oriental nations in the present era, the sole ingredients of music have been melody and rhythm, whereas among modern Europeans, and in their colonies in the new world, a simultaneous harmony of sounds has been added to the other elements to form a complete art.… In all times and at all places there have been popular songs and religious chants; only among modern Europeans has there been an art of music.

—François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours (General History of Music from the Most Ancient Times to Our Days, 1869)3

We now draw an arc from the years of a mature Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century. Consider a seemingly marginal issue: is a world history of music possible, and if so, how should it be written? This question intrigued some of the foremost musicologists of their respective ages. And because they were fully aware of the advanced philosophical and historiographical tendencies of their times, their judgments carry considerable weight and are symptomatic of fundamental intellectual shifts. Each of the three quotations in the epigraph is embedded in complex aesthetic arguments and theories of cultural evolution.

It is easy to do an injustice to the great Belgian scholar François-Joseph Fétis, who knew as much about music among the Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and South Asians as it was possible to know before the advent of empirical ethnomusicology in the late nineteenth century.⁴ He was certainly no bigoted “Eurocentrist.” Yet the fact remains that the great Enlightenment scholars Charles Burney in London and Johann Nikolaus Forkel at Göttingen, who almost simultaneously published the first world histories of music that transcended the Occident, were of one mind in their generous acknowledgment and appreciation of non-Western music—music that was almost entirely unknown to them given the lack of recording techniques and the uncertainty of notation at the time. Their arguments were more of a “conjectural” than of an empirical nature: “music” is to be found everywhere, and even if it has reached the highest pitch of perfection in Europe, there is no reason to condemn the sonic expressions and social music-making of other civilizations by the universal and absolute standards embodied in the art of Joseph Haydn (Burney’s good friend) and Johann Sebastian Bach (on whom Forkel was the leading expert). With Fétis, we enter a different world: a dichotomous world of music versus nonmusic, art versus folklore, refinement versus primitivism. Non-Europeans are left behind in the race for perfection, they lose the right to their own taste, and Europeans no longer even show them the courtesy of finding their music interesting.5

BALANCE AND EXCLUSION

The eighteenth century was an age of balance between little Europe and big Asia. Having long been on the defensive, “Europe” now launched a counterattack on the Turkish great power, although it was unable to establish anything more than colonial outposts in the empires of the East prior to the conquest of Bengal in the 1760s. Only the opening up of North Asia—the trans-Ural expanses of the tsarist empire—continued apace, barely noticed outside the region. 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 use it to their advantage. During the century and a half following the Manchu conquest of China in 1644, breakouts of continental tribal societies were at least as important a factor in Asian history as the seaborne incursions of European maritime powers. 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. Overseas shipping routes extended from Yemen and the Persian Gulf all the way to the port of Nagasaki on the East China Sea. Asiatic trade was linked with the Atlantic via the Cape of Good Hope and with the Americas via the Spanish Acapulco-Manila link. Nonetheless, at this stage the European powers did not yet one-sidedly dominate the Asian market and force it to operate by their laws. Native shipping remained respected as a competitor and indispensable as a partner; Europeans only gradually came to play a role in this so-called “country trade” between Asian ports. In order for European products to penetrate their vast hinterlands, native merchants were always essential.

Above all, Europeans succeeded in taking over the production of coveted export commodities only in exceptional cases, as in some areas of the spice trade. Taking advantage of booming European demand, Asian producers dramatically expanded their volume of trade in goods such as tea and cotton ware. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the economies of entire regions of China and India were geared towards the European export market. The later colonial-mercantilist relationship between an Asia that produced raw materials and a Europe that sold them back in the form of manufactured industrial and commercial goods was not yet in sight. The advantages accruing to Asia from its intensified commerce with Europe, particularly in view of its positive balance of trade, more than outweighed the damage done by marauding EIC “nabobs.” Around 1820, when industrialization had already gotten underway in parts of Western Europe, per capita income in Asia and Oceania was still probably around half the level of Western Europe.6 The great disparity in wealth between Europe and Asia first opened up over the following decades.

The balance of power and two-way commerce between Asia and Europe were not reflected in symmetrical mutual perceptions. Modern Europe emerged as the culture of learning and knowledge par excellence. A steady stream of Europeans traveled to Asia, conquering the continent with the pen before subjugating it with the sword and the gunboat. Asia, represented in a voluminous travel literature, in translations of oriental texts, in images and objets d’art, aroused keen interest as a field of inquiry for a universal science of humankind: an Anglo-Scottish “science of man,” whose groundwork was laid by the era’s great philosophers; a French science de l’homme, more strongly oriented towards the natural sciences; and a Kulturgeschichte or “cultural history” of the human race, Germany’s characteristic contribution to the late Enlightenment study of the world.7

By contrast, 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)⁸ 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.⁹ This willingness to learn from the outside world was the legacy of a centuries-long absorption of Chinese civilization.¹⁰

In the realm of ideas, the equilibrium of the eighteenth century was thus not expressed in the back and forth of cross-cultural perception but rather in ambivalences and a broad spectrum of judgments within the European mind itself. Europe fantasized the Orient as a fairytale alternative universe while simultaneously investigating it with the instruments provided by the new experiential sciences. It created both colonialism and the critique of colonialism, most forcefully in such rhetorically skilled authors as Edmund Burke, Denis Diderot, and the abbé Raynal. Such tensions and contradictions in how Europeans perceived the world came especially to the fore under conditions of a temporarily reduced dogmatism. On the one hand, the seventeenth century’s astonishment at the splendor and wealth of Asiatic courts and cities had given way to a more skeptical view. The spell cast by the old mother culture had been broken.¹¹ On the other hand, the nineteenth century’s smug assumption of superiority still lay some way off. Asiatic civilizations—at first mainly China, later India—posed intellectual challenges that seemed worthy of discussion and debate. Experimenting with different perspectives, playfully adopting the viewpoint of the non-European Other, and relativizing one’s own criteria of evaluation were more than just literary tricks. Theories of perception and travel, combined with sophisticated procedures for critically interrogating the most important medium of intercultural information, the travel report, worked against naïve credulity and unfounded speculation. Few were convinced by simple dichotomies. Before 1790 hardly anyone saw a stark opposition between the cultural macrospheres “East” and “West,” fewer still believed them to be incompatible, and no one posited a “clash of civilizations.” Those who nonetheless heightened the contrasts, as Montesquieu did with clear methodical intent in his theory of despotism, had to reckon with forceful criticism.

For eighteenth-century Europeans, the history of Asia was a subject of burning interest. It had not yet—as the nineteenth century would have it—come to itself in European global supremacy. A new understanding of history, informed by a sense that the West’s recent great leap forward was both unique and unprecedented, was developing not only in contrast to Europe’s past but also against the backdrop of Asia’s present. Europe’s self-extrication from the old uniformity of Eurasia was becoming a central theme in the philosophy of history.

A second motif resonated alongside it: the final pacification of the “barbarian hordes” who had once ridden forth from their Central Asian homelands to unleash wave upon wave of destruction on the settled civilizations of the West. The taming of the primal forces of history was so recent a phenomenon that it still impressed Edward Gibbon as one of the signal achievements of the modern age. He ends the first half of his great work with a deep sigh of relief that the progress of civilization, and specifically agriculture, had finally defused the peril of militant nomadism. In a passage dating from 1780–81,12 written with Catherine the Great’s “powerful and civilized empire” in mind, he proclaims the successful subjugation of the steppe—and he adds a rider in the next sentence:

The reign of independent Barbarism is now concentrated to a narrow span; and the remnants of Calmucks or Uzbeks, whose forces may be almost numbered, cannot seriously excite the apprehensions of the great republic of Europe. Yet this apparent security should not tempt us to forget, that new enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the world.13

Gibbon, like most of his European contemporaries, was unaware of what was then brewing among a less-than-obscure people right on his Swiss doorstep. He contemplated the various declines and falls offered to a student of the past and seems not to have completely discounted the prospect of future empire-building. But he certainly did not perceive the looming general crisis, and he failed to predict the French Revolution and Napoleon.

The Hunnic, Arab, Mongol, and Turkish threats that had struck fear in the hearts of earlier generations now faded from view, leaving only Nadir Shah, the “comet of war,” to overawe eighteenth-century European spectators. 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. In them, for the first time, Asiatic dynamism appears not as a storm from the steppes but in the more sober guise of institutional modernization. However imperfect in execution, herein lie the beginnings of a strategy that the Japanese would come to master in the nineteenth century: the appropriation of Western means to acquire immunity to Western domination.

The wide range of societies in Asia was carefully examined in Europe. They could not be dismissed wholesale as “barbarian,” nor were they banished to a separate ethnological discourse that interested experts and no one else. A universally oriented, comparative approach to society had not yet been split into sociology, the science of “us,” and anthropology, the science of “them.” Travelers such as Engelbert Kaempfer, the brothers Alexander and Patrick Russell, Carsten Niebuhr, and the Comte de Volney made the social orders and ways of life they encountered in civilized Asia the objects of a detailed sociography, while for theorists such as Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson these were incentives for establishing a social science from the spirit of cultural difference. By investigating other worlds—worlds that did not necessarily strike them as incommensurably alien—such writers arrived at a more clear-sighted understanding of their own. European societal forms emerged in sharper profile the more clearly they could be distinguished in their particulars from their Asiatic counterparts. Asia was comparable to Europe so long as Europe did not yet take itself to be incomparable.

Curiosity, openness, and respect for the people of Asia are found for the last time in the generation that includes the historians Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and the geographers Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. We have heard frequently from Heeren and Hammer-Purgstall in earlier chapters. A few brief remarks about Humboldt and Ritter may suffice. Alexander von Humboldt knew Asia only from his late Russian journey; he had written little about the continent, most of what he did write being limited to questions of physical geography. It is enticing to imagine what might have come about had the same empirical and critical approach that makes his account of Mexico from 1808 one of the founding documents of modern social analysis been applied to an Asian country.14

Carl Ritter never set foot on Asian soil, yet his importance as the last great synthesizer of what Europeans knew about Asia in the early modern period cannot be overestimated. His gigantic Erdkunde (World Geography), which appeared in its definitive second edition from 1832 onwards and never went beyond Asia, is a historically oriented cultural geography of Asia’s macroregions or, put differently, a history of Asiatic civilization in a spatio-ecological context. The breadth of Ritter’s vision would not be equaled until the mid-twentieth century, when the French historian Fernand Braudel published his epochal work on the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century. In a herculean feat of empirically grounded imagination, Ritter went beyond the obsessive collection of data pursued by the older German sciences of “statistics” and Staatenkunde to compile descriptions of Asian cultural landscapes as historical “individualities.” Ritter was convinced that divine creation had been purposefully tailored to human needs. He was particularly interested in the (mostly) successful attempts made by human communities to adapt to given physical and climatic conditions.

Because he favors functionalist explanations, drawing out how cultural practices and societal institutions relate to their always-specific natural environments, Ritter steers clear of thinking in terms of national or racial characteristics. It is obvious which side he stands on in the debate between biological and geographical determinism. He nonetheless avoids ascribing a causative influence to environmental factors. Instead, he regards nature and landscape as the stage on which humans secure their survival and develop their culture. Like Johann Gottfried Herder before him, whose imprint on his thinking is unmistakable, Ritter disputes the possibility of an absolute standpoint from which civilizations could be judged. In his eyes, civilizations differ not through any substantive value (such as the degree to which they are “civilized”) but in the measure to which they successfully husband the limited resources at their disposal—in their environmental management, so to speak.15

From the 1770s onwards, however, the Herderian position increasingly came under attack from Asia’s “philosophical” critics. Distancing themselves from the crassly Asiaphobic attitudes of some older travel reports,¹⁶ they claimed to have penetrated the veil of appearances through exact study and careful reasoning. After the eccentric Cornelius de Pauw, the naturalist Pierre Sonnerat was the first serious proponent of such an evaluative approach, which was common to later authors whose philosophical convictions could otherwise not have been more different: travelers such as the idéologue Volney and the utilitarian Barrow, or sedentary commentators on Asia such as the Scottish stage theorist James Mill, the Christian philosopher of history Friedrich Schlegel, and in many respects also Hegel, whose highly nuanced judgments appear to have been purged of all subjective opinion. Asiatic civilizations were now summoned before a tribunal that judged them by the supposedly universal criteria of rationality, efficiency, and justice—and generally found them wanting. Others applied the alternative criterion of these civilizations’ receptiveness to Christianity.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, research into ancient and medieval Asia was organized into new academic disciplines, but only a few outsiders, such as the historian and long-serving governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, defended the dignity of modern Asia.17 At the same time, the hitherto self-evident interest in Asia disappeared from discourses such as history, political economy, and sociology. They narrowed their focus to Europe and lost their comparative dimension in the process.¹⁸

It would be too simplistic to describe the development that led to this end point solely as a shift from a “positive” to a “negative” image of Asia. It is better characterized as a slow movement from an inclusive Eurocentrism, which regarded European superiority as a working hypothesis subject to correction in individual cases, to an exclusive Eurocentrism that took such superiority as axiomatic. From around the 1780s, this fundamental shift in “self-description” at the level of semantics was bound up with real cases of exclusion: for example, the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire in European Great-Power diplomacy, the exoticization and ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars and other peoples on the fringes of the Islamic world, the exclusion of Indians from judicial and higher administrative appointments in the EIC, and the refusal of European ambassadors to submit any longer to Asiatic court ceremony. No single action better illustrates this new distance than Lord Macartney’s bow to the Qianlong emperor on September 14, 1793. Prior to Macartney, who was far from a rabid imperialist and arrogant Eurocentric, every European ambassador had consented to perform the kowtow, prostrating himself three times before the Dragon Throne.¹⁹

At the same time as it distanced itself from Asia, Europe tightened its grip on the continent. The British took to heart the cautionary examples of the Portuguese and Dutch, whose excessive familiarity with their colored subjects had supposedly diminished their authority and white man’s mystique. They wanted to rule like the Romans, not the Greeks, who had succumbed to the temptations of the East in their Hellenistic late period.

The rise and triumph of European exceptionalism put an end to the solidarity among Eurasian civilizations that had still been taken for granted in the Enlightenment era. But it also concealed a more far-reaching tectonic shift in mentality. The decades around 1800, the European “saddle period,” witnessed a change in the mental map of the world as well. It was around this time that there first formed a sense of Europeanness as we know it today, which was just as much an awareness of Europe’s position among the world’s continents and civilizations as it was one of what the postmedieval nations of the West had in common. Exclusion and self-definition went hand in hand. Europe projected itself on the screen of the non-European. It did so, above all, as the only culture that had instituted systems claiming universal validity. The closer the contact with foreign cultures—whether in India, Egypt, or the Caucasus—the greater the challenge to the European sense of order. It was no accident that scientific colonization followed on the heels of military invasion. The conscientious and methodical note-taking of individual travelers such as Volney made way, particularly in India and Egypt, for systematic data collection by the colonial state or occupying power.20 The disenchantment of Asiatic civilizations began with the wish that they be forced to give up their secrets.

The unfabling of the East deprived these civilizations of their enigmatic self-evidence. They became objects of scientific curiosity, tasks for the acumen of learned specialists and the organizational talent of energetic administrators. Ambiguities dissolved in the acid bath of professionalized rationality. A line was now drawn between the two worlds, making it more difficult to cross borders and switch roles. It would not have been easy to affix a single identity to a Jesuit in China in 1720; the church had often sought to do so in vain. Were the court Jesuits in Peking Europeans, representatives of particular nations, or members of a supranational elite? Were they Christian clerics, experts in natural science, or Confucian scholars? Nineteenth-century missionaries were barely affected by this problem: in their minds, they were bringing light from the West to the benighted heathen. Or to take another example: when Carsten Niebuhr or even Johann Ludwig Burckhardt traveled in Arab dress, they did so because they found it both practical and courteous towards their hosts. Their nineteenth-century successors like Richard Burton turned this into costume and masquerade, dramatized in tales of bloodthirsty fanatics plotting against the life of the heroic traveler. The superior white master mixed incognito with the natives.

The unfabling of the East also led to a narrowing of intellectual horizons. The humor of a Niebuhr, the irony of a Gibbon (who when in doubt reserved a dash more caustic wit for the civilized than for the barbarians) gave way to sarcasm and condescending caricature. The assumption of European superiority poisoned intercultural good taste. At best, the default position of permanent condescension tolerated its polar opposite: exalted infatuation with the East. Yet the starry-eyed Orientalists all too often remained Eurocentrically or narcissistically trapped in their quest for a deeper authenticity that had somehow been betrayed in present-day Asia.

The sweeping changes that occurred in the decades around 1800 have called forth a number of ambitious interpretations. Reinhart Koselleck, who introduced the concept of a “saddle period,” emphasizes the temporalization and acceleration of perception, Michel Foucault the replacement of tableau-like classificatory thinking by the discovery of an active depth dimension, Niklas Luhmann the end of old-European semantics, Martin Thom the build-up and breakthrough of a new kind of ethnic nationalism.21 While each of these interpretations contains important impulses that bear directly on our topic, they do not add up to anything like a coherent overview. The following concluding pages make no claim to offer a general theory of the European mind around 1800. They attempt solely to shed more light on the discursive transition that occurred between (roughly) 1780 and 1830.

FROM ALADDIN’S CAVE TO DEVELOPING NATION

This transition can be clearly traced in economic assessments. Throughout the seventeenth century, travelers had rubbed their eyes in astonishment before the unimaginable splendor of the courts of Istanbul, Isfahan, and Agra. The sultan’s wealth was “incredible,” Tavernier states in 1675.22 Once the glory of these courts had faded and fear of the morally corrupting influence of oriental luxury had grown, the emperor of China, who maintained a more frugal court and seemed to preside over a better managed economy, was widely considered to be the richest monarch in the world. Travelers such as Bernier or Gemelli Careri as well as some missionaries were dismayed by the poverty they encountered in many parts of India.²³ Yet until the mid-eighteenth century, visitors to countries like China, Japan, Siam, and Cochinchina were still struck by the prosperity of the common people.²⁴ The ancient topos of Asia’s superior fertility seemed to have been confirmed anew. These reports and judgments were surely not unfounded. Visitors who did not hail from such wealthy regions of Europe as the Netherlands, the Île de France, or southern England must have been favorably impressed by living standards in many parts of Asia. The superficial impression that tropical or subtropical nature rained its blessings on the spoiled children of the East with them barely having to lift a finger, condemning them to lives of indolence and torpor, was gradually overlaid by admiration for the agricultural, horticultural, and hydrological achievements of Asiatic countries.²⁵ As late as 1818, a German geographical handbook was still proclaiming the Japanese to be the best farmers in the world.²⁶

Very few of these positive judgments withstood the new barrage of criticism. In 1817 James Mill described Indian farming techniques—more precisely, those of the Hindus—as primitive.²⁷ The abbé Dubois concluded a careful analysis by finding that India was an underdeveloped country—but at least it was a civilized one: “Among all the civilized countries in the world, this one was the poorest and most miserable.”²⁸ This could of course reflect an actual decline that would have to be corroborated from native sources, yet the criteria of judgment had shifted in the meantime. To the same extent that economically and structurally determined food shortages became less common in Europe, their existence in Asia became all the more conspicuous. While the terrible famines that ravaged India between 1770 and 1800 could still be discussed partly as a problem of the native economy, partly as a consequence of EIC economic policy,29 the great hunger that afflicted China around the same time was clearly a domestic Chinese phenomenon for which no foreign intervention could be blamed. China’s defenders found themselves placed in a difficult position, one that their opponents were only too happy to exploit. There gradually arose a new image of China as a land of mass starvation.³⁰

The new science of economics played its part in causing the once-gleaming jewels of the East to lose some of their luster. Broadly speaking, European notions of rationality were deployed against Asiatic irrationality, as when Chardin reproached the Iranians for their poor saving habits,³¹ or when it was correctly pointed out that the value of gifts exchanged in China was determined by the rank of the donor, not by equivalence—a completely irrational and premodern form of behavior, in European eyes.³² Economic analysis became more sophisticated once the observer avoided taking nature’s bounty and the ruler’s visible riches as a direct measure of the overall wealth and economic potential of a society, seeking instead to move beyond surface appearances. The first to do so, writing in the 1760s, was the traveler, botanist and physiocrat Pierre Poivre.

Poivre, who had visited India, China, and several Southeast Asian countries, was unresponsive to court spectacle and refused to see it as an indicator of a nation’s wealth. He drew on many examples to show that a favorable climate and fertile soil were not enough to ensure a thriving agriculture. Only an agrarian constitution guaranteeing farmers legal freedom and the maximum enjoyment of the fruits of their labor, combined where possible with a policy that stimulated economic activity, was conducive to human happiness.³³ Poivre consequently opposed despotism and royal proprietary rights; slavery, forced labor, and serfdom; parasitic aristocrats and indolent monks; monopolies and excessive taxation. He saw his ideal of an affluent society of legally protected farmer-proprietors under a benign and patriarchal ruler realized in China and partly also in Vietnam, but nowhere else in Asia.³⁴ He reserved withering scorn for what he saw as the dire economic conditions in the maladministered Mughal Empire, despotic Siam, anarchic Cambodia, feudal Malaya, and colonial Java.

As a good physiocrat, Pierre Poivre regarded agriculture as the fountainhead of public welfare. Wherever he went, he gave his opinion on local conditions with the trained eyed of the botanist and agronomist. As one of the first travelers to pay almost no attention to urban Asia, including the dazzling artisanal achievements that had so fascinated earlier visitors, he was instrumental in creating the image of Asia as a continent of peasant societies. Village life, not glittering cities, stood at the center of Poivre’s physiocratic reports and observations.

Later travelers, schooled in the ideas of Adam Smith and political economy, applied different criteria of rationality. They paid attention to the efficiency of means—and chided the Indian princely states for their extravagance; they subjected economic policy to cost-benefit analysis—and found the system of conscript labor (corvée) in Siam and Cochinchina to be senseless; they trusted in the invisible hand of the market—and saw public granaries in China and Cochinchina, not as a sign of paternal concern and a form of natural disaster insurance, but as a market-distorting instance of hoarding. To be sure, the new doctrine also discovered redeeming features in some Asiatic countries: the free trade system in the Ottoman Empire, for example, or the exemplary absence of poor laws in China.35

Several leading theorists—Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, James Mill, and his son John Stuart—already recognized the problems caused by unequal rates of economic development around the world. The great problem of the “static” character of Asiatic countries, which had long preoccupied philosophers of history, received its most intellectually ambitious treatment to date in Adam Smith’s theory of the stationary or steady-state economy, itself part of a larger theory of the conditions of wealth creation. Jean-Baptiste Say and others continued this line of investigation. The wonderment provoked at the beginning of our epoch, around 1680, by the grand mughal’s fabulous splendor had been replaced at its end, around 1830, by a sophisticated theory of underdevelopment.36 From now on, the key phenomenon calling for explanation was Asia’s relative backwardness, not its wealth.

DECLINE, DEGENERATION, STAGNATION

Nineteenth-century theories of global economic development, with their differentiation between dynamic and static or backward countries, were but the latest manifestation of an older discourse of stagnation and decline. This discourse cannot be retraced here in all its multiple ramifications, only sketched in a few aspects.

In the eighteenth century, the idea that “savages” had no history was a commonplace boasting an ancient pedigree. Very few thought to question it. The ahistorical nature of primitive society was confirmed by a negative finding: they left no traces—no ruins, no inscriptions, no books. Such an absence of material remains was less common in Asia than in other parts of the non-European world. The continent was strewn with the relics and rubble of earlier civilizations. These needed explaining. Many of these ruins were obviously modern in origin and hence bore witness to military turbulences and those “revolutions” that, prior to the French Revolution, tended to be associated more with Asia than with Europe. Others pointed to a prehistoric past.

What amazed and sometimes shocked people about Asia were its extremes. On the one hand, European visitors to China, Japan, and Korea were constantly struck by what they did not see: ruins. The wooden construction techniques traditionally used there meant that temples and palaces quickly succumbed to fire, termites, or organic decay. Little was more than four or five centuries old. Given the absence of ancient monuments, Europeans accustomed to ruins found it hard to orient themselves in unmarked landscapes that, unlike the trackless forests and boundless plains of North America, were nonetheless clearly home to age-old cultures.³⁷

On the other hand, there still existed monuments of colossal dimensions that had withstood the combined assault of climate, natural disasters, and history: antiruins created by a race of titans, so unlikely did it seem that they were the work of human hands. In 1585 Mendoza had already interpreted the Great Wall of China as part human project, part geological process.38 Johann Michael Wansleb’s awestruck reaction upon catching sight of the Egyptian Pyramids on October 3, 1664, was typical: “One is almost appalled at the sight and cannot comprehend how such enormous stones could have been raised so high.”³⁹ Later travelers were not so naïve. Volney noted the contradictory feelings that overcame him when he first beheld the Pyramids: astonishment, terror, admiration, respect, a sense of human insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Yet these soon gave way to mounting anger at the self-indulgence and brutality of the despots who had forced “these barbarous works” on their people.⁴⁰ There was widespread agreement, meanwhile, that both the Pyramids and the Great Wall were not ruins.⁴¹ Only a few Europeans saw the Central Asian sections of the Wall that had already collapsed by the eighteenth century, and hardly anyone shared Edward Gibbon’s realistic insight that the great border defenses would rarely have been of much use against barbarians, anyway.

The Pyramids and the Great Wall of China had a unique standing in the knowledge of the eighteenth century as timeless, apparently everlasting monuments. More characteristic was the ruin as an emblem of transience. In Europe, north of the Mediterranean, there was nothing to match in scale the ruined cities and landscapes that could be seen in Asia even before the archeologists arrived on the scene. These included Ephesus in Asia Minor, Baalbek and Palmyra in Syria, and above all Persepolis in Iran, the subject of frequent description and commentary from the 1670s, at the latest.⁴² Before Europeans began studying the figures and inscriptions of Persepolis and interpreting them as prototypical oriental antiquities, other questions stood in the foreground, such as whether Alexander the Great had the right to burn down the Achaemenid summer residence in 330 BCE. While some deplored the deed as an act of vandalism, the influential art historian Dubos claimed that Alexander had destroyed the palace with good reason, on account of its unsightly design flaws.43 At any rate, there was no doubt as to who was responsible for the ruinous state of the ancient Persian palace complex: the ruins of Persepolis were the work of a Hellenic conqueror.

There was nothing puzzling or picturesque about the ruins of Alexandria, by contrast, nothing that stimulated deeper reflection: a gigantic, desolate rubblefield that had been known north of the Mediterranean ever since Jean de Thévenot’s visit in 1657.⁴⁴ An English traveler noted upon inspecting it in 1817:

The outer gate leads to an enclosure that presents a scene of wretchedness unequaled even in this land of desolation. A considerable part is occupied by ruined cottages and prostrate temples: the mouldering remains of ancient splendour lie mingled in confused masses with the havoc of modern rapine.⁴⁵

The process that transformed a ruin into a heap of rubble was difficult to arrest, and at some point such a degree of formlessness was reached that nothing was left for the imagination to work upon. Once “the plan of the whole” could no longer be discerned, the ruin lost its aesthetic appeal and historical expressiveness.⁴⁶ In Asia, that was very often the case even for relics of relatively recent origin. European travelers saw the evidence of the latest havoc wreaked by war or earthquake in the Near East, in China after the Manchu conquest, in Iran following the Afghan invasion of 1722, and in and around Delhi, where traces of the destruction unleashed by Timur in 1399 had still not entirely been eradicated by the time Nadir Shah sacked the city in 1739.⁴⁷

Modern Europeans had themselves already left behind ruins in Asia, such as abandoned Portuguese and Dutch forts. In the case of Georgia and Armenia, whole countries were described as having gone to rack and ruin.⁴⁸ In 1799 the Saxon writer Johann Adam Bergk characterized the entire Old World as a single rubblefield, advising his readers to migrate to America, the only place where new construction efforts stood a chance of success; there alone was it possible to resume the project of “educating the human race for the better.”⁴⁹ The ruin metaphor here takes on the broader meaning that made it possible for Raynal to describe the customs of the “currently living” Indians as a field of ruins, or for Herder to state that China, “like a prehistoric ruin, has stayed stuck in its semi-Mongolian condition.”50

Because European visitors lacked the awareness of historical continuity that made monuments of the classical past and the Middle Ages seem essentially familiar to them, Asiatic ruins rarely occasioned aesthetic contemplation, romantic rumination, or melancholic brooding on the transience of earthly things. All the more important were the historical and historico-philosophical reflections linked to observations of Asia. Three broad thematic trends may be distinguished here: the discourse of decline, the discourse of decadence, and the discourse of stagnation.

The discourse of decline derives from ancient ideas about the ineluctable rise and fall of empires. Charting this movement had always been considered one of the historian’s primary tasks; the revival of cyclical notions of history in the Renaissance gave it fresh impetus and it was subsequently adopted by Enlightenment historiography. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, writing at the end of this line of tradition, still speaks the old language of classical fatality when he declares decline to be the “lot of all empires” and inscribes his own history of the Ottoman Empire into the cyclical model.⁵¹

Projected onto Asia at the start of the early modern period, this pattern of thought had a significance that was more topical than historico-philosophical. From the late sixteenth century, confrontation with the Ottomans made it imperative to look for weaknesses and first cracks in the imposing façade of Turkish power. This lent a strong empirical accent to the discussion of decline in relation to the Ottoman Empire. The fall of the Iranian Safavid state and the Indian Mughal Empire proceeded far more rapidly and more surprisingly than the creeping debilitation of the Ottoman Empire, restricting European observers to the role of posthumous chroniclers.

In particular, the Mughal collapse following the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 aroused considerable interest, since each of its possible interpretations held implications for the self-legitimation of the new European overlords as well as lessons for the future.52 For example, those who assigned principal responsibility for the Mughal debacle to military overextension and the rise of religious intolerance under the “fanatical” Muslim Aurangzeb warned the British against repeating these mistakes and urged them to refrain from proselytizing their Indian subjects.⁵³ The eighteenth-century discourse of decline dealt with Asiatic cases individually while also encompassing the erosion of the Portuguese and Dutch empires.⁵⁴ Only towards the end of the century were the individual examples drawn together into a scenario of pan-Asiatic decline: triumphantly by those who heralded the dawning of European global supremacy, elegiacally by anticolonial critics who lamented the despoliation of South and Southeast Asia through foolish self-destruction and foreign conquest.⁵⁵

Although the discourse of imperial decline had its basic template in classical antiquity, it was transposed to modernity when applied to Asia. Gibbon built a bridge between the two with his great interpretation of the downfall of the Byzantine Empire. The Scottish engineer, economist, and statistician William Playfair even developed a remarkable general theory of imperial decline that still has much to contribute to today’s discussion.⁵⁶ Yet such universality was uncharacteristic. All that interested those who deployed this discourse about India, for example, was the fate of the early modern Mughal Empire, not that of the illustrious ancient Hindu culture.

The discourse of degeneration, by contrast, was concerned with precisely such phenomena. It stood on the border between older myths of a golden age and more recent theories of cultural evolution. The fundamental theme, subject to multiple variations, can be easily summarized: nations that present themselves to us today as savage, barbarian, or effetely pseudo-civilized are in truth descended from age-old high cultures, although they have long been estranged from their origins. Philosophers elaborated on this theme with great ingenuity; Jemima Kindersley expressed it in her usual no-nonsense manner:

However pure the system of religion might originally be, it is certain the Hindoos have no reason, at present, to boast; for the whole of it, at this time, consists in absurd unaccountable ceremonies, which the people do not understand the meaning of; nor, I may venture to say, do many of the Brahmins themselves.57

The discourse of degeneration can already be found in English authors of the Renaissance. They regarded the kind of “savagery” encountered by sailors in America, not as a primitive state of nature from which the human race had gradually emerged, but as the product of an early cultural flowering that had long since gone to seed. Savages were thus, unbeknownst to them, something like the living ruins of their own past.⁵⁸ Such reflections were transferred primarily to India in the eighteenth century. India seemed to offer an example for how the originally pure light of religion had been all but snuffed out by superstition and ritual. This was conceived more as a slow process of inner decay than as a catastrophic barbarian incursion from outside.

Around the mid-eighteenth century, when Europeans were still unable to read Sanskrit and knew next to nothing about ancient India (far less than about ancient China), Voltaire had enthused about the wisdom of the ancient Indians and found support from no less an expert on India than John Zephaniah Holwell.⁵⁹ Once philologically informed research into ancient India had gotten underway under Sir William Jones’s leadership in the 1780s, this interpretation was given a new lease on life, even if the negative judgment on the later Hindus expressed by those affiliated with the Asiatick Society of Bengal was not so damning as that reached by less scholarly proponents of a similar viewpoint.

The degeneration discourse implied a linear, discontinuous concept of time, not a cyclical one. The figure of discontinuity could, if it was deemed necessary, easily be used to justify a lack of interest in the present state of Asia, since this to all appearances was only a pale imitation of its former glory. At the same time, Europeans could see it as their mission—either on their own or in concert with native collaborators—to revive and restore the cultural authenticity they believed had gone lost in the present age. Such a program sounds “Orientalist” but was in fact subversive in the early nineteenth-century context because the high culture that was to be reconstructed was a non-Christian one.60 Interpretations of India in the decades around 1800 overwhelmingly spoke the language of degeneration.⁶¹ They linked up with speculation on the origin of language, poetry, art, and wisdom, with the Aryan myth, and with the hypothesis of a single Urvolk,⁶² stimulating new theories of human prehistory and ethnogenesis.

The “conjectural,” only partly demonstrable idea of a decline from a pure Brahmin archaic past did not remain uncontested. Goethe and Hegel, for example, looked askance at their romantic contemporaries’ predilection for primal myths and primordial Vedic wisdom. Edmund Burke was of the opinion that the obvious decadence of modern India had not been brought about by some legendary early diminution of cultural vitality, nor by Muslim foreign rule, but by the far more recent crimes of European colonizers.⁶³ Evangelical politicians disliked the misty-eyed veneration of India’s heathen legacy. And James Mill, who as an Enlightenment radical and modernizer was unsparing in his critique of the Indian tradition, saw in the degeneration thesis nothing more than a weak fallback position taken up by Asia’s muddle-headed defenders.⁶⁴ The mental slavery he claimed to observe in present-day India had always been a defining feature of Indian civilization. Mill remained firmly wedded to the idea of Asiatic stagnation.

This discourse of stagnation differed fundamentally from that of degeneration in presupposing a progress in human evolution that had reached its climax in modern Western Europe. Stasis could only be recognized in its distinction from dynamism. “Stagnation” figured here as a concept pertaining to the history of civilizations. It did not contend that a stagnating nation lacked history in the conventional narrative sense. On the contrary, a constant parade of new leaders or a series of “revolutions” was eminently compatible with stagnation. Stagnation could be diagnosed when mores and customs, knowledge and mentalities, forms of government and modes of material subsistence remained unchanged over long periods of time, when the material life and intellectual capacities of a nation or an entire civilization were stuck in neutral, so to speak. This idea was obviously nuanced and developed in various ways, and it formed a stock part of the European interpretation of the world from the mid-eighteenth century, at the latest.

To be sure, Europeans rarely had the opportunity to observe other nations and civilizations long enough to be able to adduce any real evidence for their immobility. The standard argument resulted from comparing modern travel experiences with ancient texts: present-day Arabs lived just like the biblical patriarchs; travelers to the Near East thought they saw “the very people spoken of by Moses and the Prophets.”65 In India the works of Arrian and Megasthenes could still be taken as valid descriptions of social conditions.⁶⁶ And James Mill—in an uncharacteristically florid passage—even pictured the Indians of his own day as the living representatives of the entire ancient Orient: “By conversing with the Hindus of the present day, we, in some measure, converse with the Chaldeans and Babylonians of the time of Cyrus; with the Persians and Egyptians of the time of Alexander.”⁶⁷

Edward Gibbon, who was not only the era’s most philosophically subtle historian but also an exacting empiricist, shied away from such flights of fancy. He chose as his own example of societal petrification and cultural ossification the only tolerably well-documented case: the Byzantine Empire. Others were less cautious, claiming for example that the customs of the nomadic Arabs had not changed in the last three to four thousand years,⁶⁸ or that the Chinese today made the same unmelodious and unharmonious music as “in their first infancy.”⁶⁹ Of course, nobody could know this with any certainty. Writers were mostly trading in clichés that then took on a life of their own. Yet when an unimpeachable authority such as Sir John Malcolm maintained that the inhabitants of Persia “have remained unchanged in their appearance and character for more than twenty centuries,” who would have dared contradict him?⁷⁰

When it came to the idea that the age-old, historiographically long-documented Chinese civilization had persisted in a state of immutable identity with itself, the Jesuits who broadcasted this view to the West were faithfully following the Chinese self-interpretation, or more precisely the influential neo-Confucianism of the thirteenth century. Here at least the stagnation thesis was not merely a European “invention” but at least as much the application of an image that the Others had made of themselves. Scholars such as Joseph de Guignes, who knew the East and Central Asian historical sources better than any other European, or Jean-Baptiste d’Anville, who as a mapmaker was keenly aware of the Celestial Empire’s constantly shifting borders, permitted themselves to correct some of the more dubious claims advanced in support of the stagnation thesis.71 Others adopted a more theoretical approach: expressed in modern terms, it was simply not credible that all subsystems of a civilization could exist in a state of suspended animation. Was it not conceivable that—to recall Montesquieu’s distinction—les mœurs could have evolved while les loix lagged behind, making China’s ancient laws unsuitable for the modern Chinese?⁷²

The diagnosis of static conditions could be evaluated in different ways. It was possible, for example, to see the supposedly unvarying dress sense in the East in a positive light. Vast sums of money otherwise spent on keeping up with the latest fashions were thereby saved, and sartorial solutions perfectly adapted to the local environment were not put at risk by capricious changes in taste.⁷³ According to William Marsden, the people of Sumatra were perplexed to see Europeans changing their clothes so often, assuming that they must find all their garments equally unsatisfactory.⁷⁴ Asians’ conservatism in this regard could be favorably interpreted as signaling their affectionate attachment to the old ways, while the absence of political change could be welcomed as a sign of stability and sound governance.⁷⁵ Such judgments became increasingly rare from the 1760s onwards. In his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764), Johann Joachim Winckelmann opposed the progressive development of Greek art to the stagnation and uniformity shown by the Egyptians and Persians, particularly in their representations of the human form.76 Changes in style became a further index of Western superiority. Style was the ennobled version of fashion.

As time went by, dichotomies such as those between vitality and moribundity, creativity and spiritual sterility, “improvement” and the preservation of bad traditions became ever more sharply polarized. In the light of the new evolutionary thinking, stasis could no longer be justified and stability was a moral defect. This showed up particularly clearly in a newly emerging semantic divergence. While the history of Europe was described in a language suggestive of active, strong-willed subjecthood, mechanical or biological metaphors were increasingly applied to Asian societies that appeared to European observers as backward or inert. In 1782 Pierre Sonnerat characterized China as a culture of repetition, lacking the spark of true imagination and genius: “everything is done mechanically or by rote.”⁷⁷ A little later Herder invoked a similar image of a society that for all its incessant bustle seemed to be incapable of propelling itself forward. He spoke of a “mechanical engine of [Confucian] morals” that was “forever checking the progress of the mind,”⁷⁸ and claimed of the Chinese nation that its “internal circulation” was “that of a dormouse in its winter sleep.”⁷⁹

Burke’s Great Map of Mankind, where individual nations differed from each other only by degree, was replaced by the bipolarity of East and West. This in turn was interpreted in the light of the opposition between nature and history. The history of the East was passive, organic, and plant-like; or, in an equally unflattering metaphor, it was nothing but a clattering mechanism reproducing the same stale uniformity. In short, it was unconscious and without purpose. In this view, only the history of the West rose to the higher sphere of ethical volition.

At the summit of evolutionary thinking, in Condorcet and above all in Hegel, this opposition is drawn out with considerable sophistication. In Hegel an unprecedented historico-philosophical apotheosis of contemporary European superiority is combined with an attempt to do justice to the philosophically devalued cultures of Asia in their particularity and individuality. These are portrayed in a manner that surpasses even Herder in its careful empiricism.80 Hegel’s coupling of historico-philosophical exclusion and historico-scientific inclusion had no lasting impact. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the stagnation thesis was absolutized to the point where the peoples of Asia could be described as “ahistorical,” an outcome already anticipated in Herder. Asia, it was now suggested, had never boarded the train of world history.⁸¹ The fact that, in some quarters, even Slavs were denied a history of their own shows how tightly the circle of world-historical subjects was drawn. The best rational presentation of what might have been meant by this, Adam Smith’s and Jean-Baptiste Say’s theory of the stationary economy, was largely ignored outside a small coterie of economists. It influenced history writing and the philosophy of history only in Karl Marx’s late reflections on an “Asiatic mode of production” and in a few scattered remarks of John Stuart Mill.

Of the three discourses that Europeans used to make sense of Asian history, the stagnation discourse was to prove by far the most influential in the nineteenth century. Imperial cyclical models seemed to have become obsolete once almost all the Asiatic empires had capitulated to the Western powers and Victorian colonial strategists had convinced themselves that they could escape the sad fate of their Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch predecessors. The sun would never set on the British Empire, at the very least, which seemed to have broken definitively with the pattern of rise and fall that had foredoomed the empires of old. The discourse of cultural degeneration fell out of intellectual favor as the new Orientalist disciplines and Middle East archaeology, beginning in 1810 with the first investigations of Claudius Rich, the young British resident in Baghdad, caused notions of an early golden age to appear in a more realistic light.⁸² The degeneration discourse was driven into the underground of a scientifically undisciplined, mythopoetic romanticism, only to be revived midcentury by doctrines of racial decadence as a result of “miscegenation.” Solely the stagnation discourse appeared to accord with both the imperialist zeitgeist and the most up-to-date scientific knowledge. In the eyes of its proponents, modern Europe had left Asia trailing in the dust as it stormed from one success to the next.

FROM THE THEORY OF CIVILIZATION TO THE CIVILIZING MISSION

A simplistic view of the world that divided humankind into an active, history-making “West” and the passive, ahistorical “rest” was not the only legacy of the far more subtle reflections made by thinkers of the stature of Voltaire, Gibbon, Schlözer, Ferguson, or even the Janus-headed Herder, who placed unprecedented emphasis on the intrinsic value and meaning of all cultures while at the same time preparing the ground for many a later simplification. Another line in the history of ideas leading from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century can be traced by following ideas of “civilization.”

The Enlightenment’s underlying conception of history and social evolution was universal and unitary. It was based on the idea that people of all nations and races, for all that they differed in appearance, were endowed with the same basic faculties. It was therefore inconceivable that particular nations should be excluded from global processes. “Savages” and “barbarians” partook of them just as much as the so-called “polished” nations found predominantly in Europe, although not just in Europe. Obviously discriminatory terms such as “primitives” were not yet a part of the general discourse. The uncouth behavior of savages may have been repellent, but hardly anyone saw fit to deny them the potential for future development. Were not today’s Europeans descended from the rude heathen tribes described by Caesar and Tacitus? In 1789 poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller vividly articulated this view of history in his inaugural address as professor of history at Jena:

The discoveries which our European seafarers have made in distant oceans and on remote shores afford us a spectacle which is as instructive as it is entertaining. They show us peoples arrayed around us at various levels of development, as an adult might be surrounded by children of different ages, reminded by their example of what he himself once was and whence he started.83

For Schiller history is that of “education” (Bildung); for others, such as Turgot and the Scottish Enlightenment, it concerns modes of material subsistence and the law. There were many rival conceptions. What they almost all had in common was the idea of human perfectibility and the conviction that individual peoples and nations would move at their own pace through the human civilizing process, often envisaged as a sequence of progressive stages. There would thus always be leaders and stragglers. The ultimate explanation for such variations was to be found in environmental conditions, not in anthropological or cultural deficits. The stragglers, provided they had enough wisdom, could see in the leaders a shimmer of their own possible future, while the leaders saw in the people dallying behind them a reminder of their own youthful past: a contrast confirming what they had already achieved but also a warning not to let it slide.

If civilization was a process rather than the sudden result of divine or prophetic intervention, the problem arose of how these graduated stages were to be described and named. The old triad of “savages—barbarians—polished nations” proved too coarse to be of much use. The sequence proposed by the Scots, “hunters—shepherds—farmers—traders,” was easier to “operationalize” but it presupposed a material theory of civilization that not everyone agreed with. There was broad consensus from the 1760s that universal history should be written as Kulturgeschichte or “history of civilization” rather than as a mere summation of national histories. Even some of the most important early accounts of a particular national history—above all David Hume’s History of England (1754–62) and William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759)—were essentially histories of civilizing processes exemplified in national case studies. As early as the 1780s, however, the learned Anglo-Irish cleric George Gregory was pondering whether a history of human civilization ought not to be confined to the early phases up to the consolidation of agriculture and a centralized state, given that national characteristics became ever more pronounced thereafter as a consequence of more or less coincidental “casual interventions.”84 For the time being, however, this methodical doubt did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm for histories of the entire human race. A high point was reached in 1793, when Condorcet described ten eras in the progress of the human mind since the first tribes were formed.

Individual histories of civilization differed, above all, in how they responded to a single key question: were their authors more interested in the origins of civilization, in “the great taming of the human race,” as the Scottish geographer Hugh Murray memorably put it?⁸⁵ Or did they instead—like Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon—have in mind the later evolution of civilization in Europe since late antiquity?⁸⁶ There were as many different opinions on what specifically constituted civilization and which forces were driving it as there were participants in the debate.

The possibility, first mooted by Fréret and Voltaire, that there could be distinct non-European paths to civilization was ever present in the minds of universal historians such as Gibbon and Schlözer. In a highly significant undertaking, the Jena Orientalist Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten, an adviser to Goethe in his studies on world literature, wrote a history of Eastern civilization that was based on extensive knowledge of the sources while still being cast in the theoretical-“philosophical” Enlightenment mold: a worthy counterpart to William Robertson’s celebrated analysis of European history since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.⁸⁷

Kosegarten, whose Orient extends geographically from the Hebrews and Phoenicians to India, tracks the evolution of Asiatic societies from the first emergence of tribal cultures, via the innovations of early legislators and the appearance of religion, ritual, and priesthood, all the way to the threshold of civilizational development he calls the “social and ethical state.”⁸⁸ Avoiding overly bold deductions, he draws above all on the ancient “law books” of the various nations to describe what the great civilizations of the Orient have in common: a productive agricultural sector, a highly differentiated division of labor, elaborate social hierarchies, the institution of slavery (omnipresent, albeit of relatively minor importance), obligations of hospitality and mutual aid, veneration of the elderly and respect for women, and so on. He then distinguishes variants within this pan-Asiatic evolutionary path: for example, societies where priests enjoy the highest honors and those where these are accorded to warriors instead. The modern history of the East had preserved many such early idiosyncrasies without justifying talk of “stagnation.” Change was a constant, and not just in the sense of an inexorable march of progress: women in Arabia had formerly enjoyed greater freedoms than they did today.89

Kosegarten offers little more than a broad outline. His social history of the East, which recalls Heeren in many respects, was never fully worked out. What makes his book so significant is that—perhaps in conscious opposition to what Hegel had declared from the lectern shortly before—it recognizes the history of Asiatic civilization as an integral part of the common history of humankind without judging it by Western standards. Although not published until 1831, the year of Hegel’s death, the book reads like a document of the mature Enlightenment.

Over time, the concealed normativity of the concept of civilization grew ever more apparent. The relativism of Sir William Jones, who in 1787 proclaimed that everyone took civilization to mean only “the habits and prejudices of his own country,”⁹⁰ had already gone out of fashion by 1800. It was not a question of drawing a line between the civilized and the uncivilized. That only began to happen at the end of our period, as when Friedrich Schlegel declared in 1828 that Islam had failed to produce a civilization.⁹¹ For the time being, the widespread assumption of a uniform civilizing process in which individual nations had reached varying degrees of maturity, yet were still capable of making further evolutionary progress, ruled out such strict dichotomies. The problem was rather that of determining how much further a particular community had to advance before it arrived at a fully civilized state, generally identified with present-day Western Europe. This index could be a temporal one, as when Volney precisely located the spirit of the Egyptian Mamluks in the twelfth century, while the rest of the country was still stuck in the tenth.92 Alternatively, each nation was assigned its place on a scale of civilization, much like the United Nations’s Human Development Index today. Needless to say, this called for the creation of relevant criteria (or “indicators,” as we would say now). Rather than being diametrically opposed to barbarism, civilization was thus regarded as a finely graded cultural achievement.

This way of thinking endeared itself especially to British authors. The English had already attempted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to distance themselves from their neighbors and would-be colonial underlings, the “wild Irish.” From around 1800 they felt impelled to gain an overview of conditions within their newly acquired territories in Asia and beyond. Now the task was to demonstrate “to every society the place which they occupy in the great chain of human things.”⁹³ The old cosmological idea of a “great chain of beings” still resonates in this programmatic statement by Hugh Murray from 1808, yet it has been detached from its biological context and transformed into an instrument of social and cultural analysis. It is easy to see how a scale of civilization could be interpreted as a racial hierarchy. This momentous development was portended from the late eighteenth century onwards but did not fully ensue until after 1830.⁹⁴

William Marsden, alongside his contemporaries Volney and Georg Forster perhaps the most impressive specimen of the late Enlightenment scientific and “philosophical” traveler, was one of the originators of this new, finely graded hierarchical conception of civilization. The crucial passage in his History of Sumatra, published in 1783 and last reissued in 1811, deserves to be quoted at length:

Considered as a people occupying a certain rank in the scale of civil society, it is not easy to determine the proper situation of the inhabitants of this island. Though far distant from that point to which the polished states of Europe have aspired, they yet look down, with an interval almost as great, on the savage tribes of Africa and America. Perhaps if we distinguish mankind summarily into five classes; but of which each would admit of numberless subdivisions; we might assign a third place to the more civilized Sumatrans, and a fourth to the remainder.

In the first class, I should of course include some of the republics of ancient Greece, in the days of their splendor; the Romans, for some time before and after the Augustan age; France, England and other refined nations of Europe in the latter centuries; and perhaps China. The second might comprehend the great Asiatic empires at the period of their prosperity; Persia, the Mogul, the Turkish, with some European kingdoms. In the third class, along with the Sumatrans, and a few other states of the eastern archipelago, I should rank the nations of the northern coast of Africa, and the more polished Arabs. The fourth class with the less civilized Sumatrans, will take in the people of the new discovered islands in the South Sea; perhaps the celebrated Mexican and Peruvian empires; the Tartar hordes, and all those societies of people in various parts of the globe, who, possessing personal property, and acknowledging some species of established subordination, rise one step above the Caribs, the New Hollanders, the Laplanders, and the Hottentots, who exhibit a picture of mankind in its rudest and most humiliating aspect.95

Although Marsden later expands on his criteria for civilization, his categorization is impressionistic, albeit based on extensive historical and ethnographical research. It is remarkable not least because it manages to avoid the kind of rigid East-West dichotomies that would proliferate soon after. Marsden clearly places Europe at the apex of the hierarchy, yet it has to share the top two classes with Asiatic societies. China “perhaps” even belongs in the highest category. “Some European kingdoms”—Marsden may be thinking of Spain, Scandinavia, and the states of Eastern Europe—are by no means superior to the Muslim empires of the early modern period. The categorization cuts across religion, skin color, and national characteristics. Marsden is far removed from constructing a racial hierarchy along the lines proposed by Christoph Meiners, who had earlier distinguished between light, fair, and dominant nations, on the one hand, and dark, ugly, and subservient nations, on the other.96 Marsden also distinguishes between a civilization’s golden ages and its periods of decline: Augustan Rome merits top ranking, not Rome per se. The comparison is between historically precise cultural situations, not entire civilizations.

Once the “scale of civilization” came into vogue around the turn of the century, hardly anyone persisted with the judicious multidimensionality of Marsden’s classification. Clear-cut rankings were now the order of the day. In 1804 John Barrow did not rest content with telling his readers what he had witnessed and experienced when visiting China a decade earlier as part of Lord Macartney’s entourage. His goal was to equip them to determine “the point of rank which China may be considered to hold in the scale of civilized nations.”⁹⁷ It is worth noting that China was still included among the “civilized nations” here. Everything depended on how civilized or uncivilized it was. The scale also made it possible to trace movements and make comparisons. A century earlier, Barrow points out, Russia had begun under Peter the Great to work itself out of a state of barbarism. Another hundred years hence “she will make a conspicuous figure among European nations, both in arts and arms.”⁹⁸ China, by contrast, had already been highly civilized two millennia ago but was now chronically enfeebled and arrested in its development: “under its present state of existence” it was “not likely to advance in any kind of improvement.”⁹⁹ “Under its present state …”: it is telling that, in Barrow’s view, China’s fate was far from sealed. It could still be saved by reforms, perhaps taken in hand by a Chinese Peter the Great. Barrow’s guidelines recur in the writings of many others on Asia. When John Malcolm wrote on Iran, James Mill on India, Mountstuart Elphinstone on Afghanistan, Stamford Raffles on Java, John Crawfurd on Siam, Burma, and Cochinchina, Constantin François de Volney on Syria and Egypt, or Alexis de Tocqueville on Algeria, they were inquiring into the degree of civilization attained by the respective population or specific ethnic and social groups. There were practical reasons for doing so in some cases. The prudent imperial legislator needed to give careful consideration to the conditions to which he tailored his regulations.

Blithely oblivious to Marsden’s scruples, pedants set about ranking nations in regular league tables. The Burmese, Crawfurd remarked in 1834, are far less civilized than the Hindu Indians and even more so the Chinese, but they are on the same level as the Siamese and the Javans. They are superior to the inhabitants of the eastern Indonesian islands, although Crawfurd had his doubts about whether these even permit comparison.100 In 1800 the unpedantic traveler Michael Symes had already recognized how problematic such point-scoring could be: “The Birmans in some points of their disposition, display the ferocity of barbarians, and in others, all the humanity and tenderness of polished life.”¹⁰¹ Symes here rekindled a spark of High Enlightenment irony, recalling a time when it was still possible to praise the kindheartedness of cannibals and to see Asiatic nations as one’s equals or even (in some respects) one’s betters.¹⁰²

In this way, the universalist theory and history of civilization of the Enlightenment became, in the nineteenth century, a tool for slotting every society on Earth into a hierarchy based on how far they had progressed—or failed to progress—on the path to modernity. What was beyond dispute was that Victorian England or France, where an important historian of civilization, François Guizot, played a leading political role, stood at the top of the civilizational leaderboard.¹⁰³ A consciousness of European superiority, bolstered by the theory of civilization, now gave rise to new justifications for imperial expansion. Exclusive Eurocentrism fed into the ideology that Europe was called on to remake the world in its own image. The theory of civilization spawned the conviction of a mission civilisatrice: the right or even duty of enlightened Europe to assert the universal values of progress against Asiatic darkness.¹⁰⁴ The expansive sense of mission awakened by the French Revolution had prepared the ground for such an awareness. Ever since, what international law had once excluded on principle seemed a distinct possibility: support for a popular rebellion against intolerable tyranny, or even intervention from outside when despotism or the dead weight of an inhumane tradition nipped protest in the bud.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, the appropriation of land for colonies had been justified, depending on circumstances, with economic goals, princely glory, the need to secure a strategic advantage in the contest between great powers, self-defense in a just war, the right to acquire “unowned” territory (terra nullius), or a Pauline mandate to convert the heathen, but not with humanitarian motives. It was instead the critique of colonialism, reaching a high point in Raynal/Diderot and Burke, that adopted humanitarian arguments. It was in this sense that Condorcet wrote in 1793 in a book that appeared the following year:

Run through the history of our projects and establishments in Africa or Asia, and you will see our monopolies, our treacheries, our sanguinary contempt for men of a different complexion or different creed, and the proselyting fury or the intrigues of our priests, destroying that sentiment of respect and benevolence which the superiority of our information and the advantages of our commerce had at first obtained.

But the period is doubtless approaching when, no longer exhibiting to the view of these people corruptors only or tyrants, we shall become to them instruments of benefit, and the generous champions of their redemption from bondage.105

Condorcet, a tireless campaigner against slavery, was serious about these accusations and expectations. He hoped for a future partnership between East and West, North and South. Yet under what conditions and with what intentions should the “generous champions” spring into action? This was the crux of the matter.

A standpoint that assumes—whether on universalist or relativist grounds—that all civilizations and religions are equal in value, and that all political systems enjoy more or less equal legitimacy (provided they do not degenerate into tyranny), cannot condone the exercise of imperial power. This was the view of Engelbert Kaempfer, Edmund Burke (at least on the India question), Herder, and Kant. In a weaker form, it was shared by most authors of the Enlightenment. Even Montesquieu never called for a crusade against oriental despotism, which he partly attributed to inalterable climatic conditions, anyway. By contrast, the doctrine of the white race’s natural superiority fueled Social Darwinist justifications for aggression and annexation, derived from the right of conquest and the privilege enjoyed by the strong over the weak. This doctrine underpinned the high imperialism of the late nineteenth century. Between these two extremes lay a third position, which had its greatest practical impact between around 1790 and 1830. It flowed from a normative concept of civilization.

The civilization theory of the late Enlightenment operated, as we have seen, with a “scale of civilization.” It was dynamic: the hierarchical ranking of the world’s societies was not set in stone. Geographical-climatic and anthropological-racial conditions, which were largely unamenable to change, could not be assigned primary responsibility for lags in development. The main reasons why a country’s often-enormous natural potential failed to be tapped were of human origin and could therefore be addressed. Despotism and religious “superstition” kept Asia bound in iron chains. They prevented the arts and sciences from flowering, the spirit of invention from prospering, and industry from booming. “Generous champions” (Condorcet) from the free countries of the West could help unleash all that pent-up potential.

This was a secular and pragmatic chain of ideas that had no need of religious and moral backing. Yet once there was added a sense of Christian mission and—as in the case of the influential evangelical politician Charles Grant—a program of moral reform, the interventionist impetus could be further strengthened.106 Intervention from the more civilized West was necessary because the forces of social evolution could not be trusted to ripen of their own accord. After hundreds or even thousands of years of political and spiritual slavery, the people of Asia were incapable of liberating themselves from despotism and superstition. Like Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798, Condorcet’s “generous champions” therefore had to act on their own initiative rather than in response to cries for help from a desperate citizenry. They took it upon themselves to topple despots and rogue states such as the slave-robbing pirate regime of Algiers, to curb religious “excesses” such as the sati, and to introduce legal institutions that would be conducive to modernization. They set about reforming existing colonial systems in the same way, seeking to “uplift” the morals and improve the economic welfare of their subject populations; the British saw this as their task on the Cape of Good Hope, on Ceylon, and for several years (1811–16) also on Java when they took over from what they saw as the selfish and depraved colonial administration of the Dutch VOC. In other cases pressure needed to be applied to recalcitrant native governments: in 1779 the German Enlightenment thinker Christian Wilhelm Dohm, a valiant champion of the rights of women and Jews, had already called for the “unnaturally closed kingdom” of the Tokugawa shoguns to be pried open—if necessary by force of arms—so that the Japanese would come into contact with “culture and enlightenment” and the whole world could profit from trading with them.107 On this view, military intervention was a permissible last resort against such despicable tyrants as Tipu Sultan of Mysore or the Ottoman oppressors of the freedom-loving Hellenes. It was reprehensible for Europeans to keep their newfound happiness to themselves. Civilization, the great Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke announced in 1823 when founding the Royal Asiatick Society, came from India; now modern Europe had the opportunity and indeed the duty to repay its debt by taking in hand the project of civilizing Asia.¹⁰⁸

It would be short-sighted to burden Enlightenment theories of civilization with sole responsibility for the belligerence that Great Britain, France, and Russia started to display in Asia and North Africa in the 1790s. They were one factor among many that a satisfactory explanation of this development would need to consider. But the real-world consequences of shifts in ideas, values, and attitudes ought not to be overlooked. A newly strengthened sense of European exceptionalism in the Napoleonic era, combined with an upsurge in intra-European nationalism, brought about a paradoxical result. On the one hand, it promoted a Eurocentric self-preoccupation that pushed Asia to the margins of public consciousness and elevated the collective narcissism of the world’s number one civilization to previously unknown heights. On the other, it opened up a space for a secular civilizing mission whose ideologists clamored for the chance to impose their will on a crisis-ridden, vulnerable continent.109

The Enlightenment is not to blame for imperialism. No one criticized European world dominance more pointedly and attacked it more vociferously than Burke, Raynal, Diderot, Kant, Forster, or Alexander von Humboldt. But there are connections. The civilization that took itself to be the best performing and most humane in the world did not wait for Asia to show an interest in it. It gave its laws to Asia. In the age of the educational mission—from Lord William Bentinck’s campaign to save the widows of India from the flames to the introduction of good diplomatic manners in East Asia¹¹⁰—the tone became earnest and severe, didactic and unfrivolous. The playful irony of a Johann Georg Gmelin, George Bogle, Edward Gibbon, William Jones, or Carsten Niebuhr disappeared from view. From now on Asia needed to be ruled and schooled, lectured and hectored, exploited and reconnoitered. Asia was hard work. The unencumbered Europe of the Enlightenment made the fateful decision to take up the white man’s burden.