X

Real and Unreal Despots

This day, being the Emperor’s birthday, we set out for the Court at three o’clock a.m.… We immediately descended into the garden, where we found all the great men and Mandarins in their robes of state, drawn up before the Imperial pavilion. The emperor did not show himself, but remained concealed behind a screen, from whence, I presume, he could see and enjoy the ceremonies without inconvenience or interruption.…

At length the great band, both vocal and instrumental, struck up with all their powers of harmony; and instantly the whole Court fell flat upon their faces before this invisible Nebuchadnezzar.… Indeed, in no religion, either ancient or modern, has the Divinity ever been addressed, I believe, with stronger exterior marks of worship and adoration, than were this morning paid to the phantom of his Chinese Majesty.

—George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney (1737–1806), Journal (unpublished) of his mission to China, entry for September 17, 17931

A dignified and affable gentleman celebrates his eighty-second birthday. His British visitors have met him three days before, amazed at how sprightly he is for his age. He happens to be the most powerful person in Asia: Qianlong, emperor on the Dragon Throne for the past fifty-eight years. He is not really adored as a deity—the concept of sacred kingship is absent from Confucian political theory—but protocol expects him on this particular day to act the mute role of the numinous center of the universe: an absent presence and a present absence. No European king would be honored by his courtiers prostrating themselves in the dust. One of Qianlong’s colleagues among the crowned heads of Europe, long reviled by his enemies as a “despot,” mounted the scaffold at the Place de la Révolution in Paris a few months earlier. How different is Qianlong? Is he a despot, perhaps the quintessential oriental despot? Lord Macartney, a sensible and seasoned diplomat who has seen a lot of the world, is not so sure. Qianlong does not seem to be a raving tyrant but rather a hugely experienced politician trapped in the gilded cage of state ceremony. Words from the Bible flit through the ambassador’s mind: he has seen “Solomon in all his glory.”2

THE HEIRS OF NERO AND SOLOMON

In the transcultural typology of leadership styles developed in the early modern period, Cambyses, Attila, Genghis Khan, Timur, and Nadir Shah, the early Islamic caliphs and Sultan Mehmed II (the conqueror of Byzantium), along with Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, and sometimes also Louis XIV of France, were all placed in the category of “conquerors.” As warrior princes they were obviously figures of extreme authority. Yet their military charisma tended to overshadow the harshness of their domestic regime. The “tyrants,” a second category, included monarchs who even in times of peace were thought to have ruled arbitrarily, cruelly, and unjustly. These too could appear in both East and West. Henry VIII of England belonged in this rogues’ gallery, as did Philipp II of Spain (from the Protestant point of view) and Ivan IV, “the Terrible.” Peter the Great was also frequently regarded as such a tyrant, at least by those who emphasized his brutality over his constructive achievements. In India the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq (reigned 1325–51), who allegedly slaughtered his subjects on organized hunts, was long the subject of obloquy.³ The period’s most sadistic ruler, however, was no oriental despot but a marginal Christian petty tyrant who ordered every Turk he had captured to be impaled without further ado: the voivode of Wallachia, Vlad III (“Dracula,” “Tepeš”). Hammer-Purgstall calls him the “madman of the stake” (Pfahlwüterich) and reports that the voivode’s great adversary, Sultan Mehmed II—himself not one to shrink from harsh measures—admired him for his ruthlessness.4 The reign of terror established in the southwest Chinese province of Sichuan by the rebel Zhang Xianzhong between 1644 and 1647 falls into the category of extraordinary “elemental-historical” violence. The number of fatalities cited by Pater Martin Martini may have been exaggerated—six hundred thousand in the city of Chengdu alone—but Zhang was still undoubtedly one of the worst mass murderers in Chinese history.⁵

Not coincidentally, Zhang Xianzhong was an atypical parvenu and rebel whose atrocities aroused little interest both in later Chinese literature and European writings on China. On the whole, it is striking just how few Asiatic monarchs of the early modern period were represented by European observers as monstrous tyrants: not a single emperor of the late Ming and early Qing dynasty; among the Mughal emperors perhaps only the fratricidal Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707);⁶ elsewhere in South Asia, there is Rajasinha II of Kandy (r. 1635–87), whose cruelties are related by Robert Knox.⁷ Among the Ottoman sultans, Mehmed II (r. 1451–81) and Selim I (“the Grim,” r. 1512–25) are singled out as particularly unscrupulous power politicians, but only Murad IV (r. 1623–40), whom Cantemir claims to have been personally responsible for fourteen thousand murders,⁸ and on a less extreme scale his weaker successors, the psychopathic Ibrahim (r. 1640–48) and his son Mehmed IV (r. 1648–87), seemed to rival a Nero or Domitian in their unquenchable thirst for blood. This “most bloody, vicious and gruesome period of Ottoman history,” as the judicious Hammer-Purgstall put it, came to an end in 1656 with the appointment of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha as grand vizier. Granted sweeping powers, he himself ordered the execution of thousands of officials compromised by their complicity with the previous regime.⁹ The Safavid shahs seemed in European eyes to come closest to the model of the oriental despot. But tales of capricious misrule and uninhibited bloodlust were only told of two shahs (not without reason, it must be said): Shah Safi I (r. 1629–42), a contemporary of the cruel sultan Mehmed IV, and Shah Safi II, also known as Suleiman (r. 1666–94).10 No single eighteenth-century Asian ruler was painted in similar colors. Genuine Asiatic despots were thus thin on the ground in the Enlightenment era.

In European texts, thirdly, Asian monarchs were more frequently seen to belong in the positive category of state-founders, empire-builders, and sage legislators than they were pilloried as tyrants. King Solomon was the Asiatic prototype for such figures, who in modern European history included Henri IV of France, Queen Elizabeth, Emperor Charles V, the ambivalent tsar Peter the Great, the tsarina Catherine II, Empress Maria Theresia, and the Prussian kings of the eighteenth century, among others. Their crackdowns on enemies and insubordinate subjects were viewed as evidence of prudent statesmanship, not wanton tyranny. The more philosophical European colonizers of Asia aspired to be législateurs themselves: Sir Stamford Raffles fancied himself the Solon of Java, while the judge Sir William Jones had ambitions to be remembered as an Indian Justinian. Voluntary abdication following a successful reign was considered a rare sign of regal wisdom: Diocletian, Charles V, the Qianlong emperor (in 1796, three years after the visit of the Macartney Mission), and Sultan Murad I all distinguished themselves in this way.

Even in the eyes of those who held the Jesuit encomiums to China to be grossly exaggerated, the Kangxi emperor stood beyond reproach, and even the personality of his less easily idealized grandson Qianlong was almost never cast into disrepute.¹¹ Sir William Jones called him “a man of the brightest genius and the most amiable affections,”¹² and the reports of the near-simultaneous Macartney Mission did nothing to call this judgment into question: not only Lord Macartney himself, but even the more Sinophobic members of the delegation, above all Sir John Barrow, were impressed by the elderly emperor. Joseph de Guignes admired the wisdom and political skills of Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai, whose rule over China (1280–94) he did not even hint at dismissing as primitive Mongol tyranny.¹³ Gibbon’s assessment of the Ayyubid sultan Saladin, the great adversary of the Crusaders, was ambivalent but generally positive, and he went so far as to call the Seljuq ruler Malek Shah (r. 1072–92) “the greatest prince of his age.”14 Sultan Suleiman “the Magnificent,” also known as “the Lawgiver” (Kânûnî, r. 1520–66), appeared an ideal ruler even to European observers of the eighteenth century.¹⁵ The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) had many admirers and few critics in Europe. His celebrated religious pluralism contrasted sharply with the cruel persecution of heretics under his exact contemporary Philipp II of Spain. Even James Mill, the pitiless judge of everything Indian, found little to chide in Akbar.¹⁶ Akbar’s great-grandson Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), more brutal and closed-minded than almost all his predecessors, found an influential contemporary apologist in François Bernier, who knew him well. Bernier represented him as a kind of enlightened despot, although this evaluation would have better suited his father, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58). Robert Orme, the official historian of the EIC, considered Aurangzeb worthy of being “ranked with the ablest princes who have reigned in any age or country.”¹⁷

King Narai of Siam (r. 1656–88) was generally represented in Europe as an active and energetic autocrat, who to an unusual degree (recalling his contemporary, the Kangxi emperor) was curious about the world outside his own country.¹⁸ The less well-known King Alaungpaya, who founded the dynasty that went on to rule until 1885, was respected as the restorer of Burma and “a man of great genius and courage.”¹⁹ Much the same was said of Emperor Gia-Long, who united a divided Vietnam in 1802. Particularly interesting, finally, is the case of Shah Abbas I, bynamed “the Great” (r. 1588–1629). Given his immense political achievements, European observers like Pietro della Valle and Adam Olearius were willing to forgive this creator of the modern Iranian state for governing his land with the utmost autocratic severity and for having his next-of-kin assassinated (as did Suleiman the Magnificent and Peter the Great) and several of his sons and grandsons blinded. Roubaud, otherwise vehemently opposed to despotism in all its forms, held up Shah Abbas in 1770 as an exemplary ruler. Sir John Malcolm, believing that under conditions of an all-pervasive despotism that penetrated every corner of state and society, rule by oppression and violence was the best option for a prudent statesman, excused him in 1815 through a kind of casuistic justification for murder.20

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Asiatic rulers were thus by no means universally depicted and condemned as heartless oppressors of their own people. On the contrary, it was possible to find only a few verifiable examples of such tyrants. It was much more common to praise Asian monarchs as latter-day Solomons and princes of peace (Akbar, Kangxi), canny statesmen from whom even European sovereigns might learn a thing or two. Lord Macartney had good reason to be dissatisfied with Kangxi’s grandson, the Qianlong emperor, as a negotiating partner. Yet he concluded his private notes about their memorable encounter on September 14, 1793, with the following reminiscence:

Thus, then, have I seen “King Solomon in all his glory.” I use this expression, as the scene recalled perfectly to my memory a puppet show of that name which I recollect to have seen in my childhood, and which made so strong an impression on my mind that I then thought it a true representation of the highest pitch of human greatness and felicity.²¹

In no way unusual was Qianlong’s categorization as an autocrat who governed strictly but with the best interests of his realm and his subjects at heart. In an age when European territorial states were still in the process of formation, European observers showed respect for similar achievements in Asia. Indeed, in Eurasia as a whole the early modern period was one of incipient state formation, centralization, and bureaucratization. European “grand viziers,” such as Thomas Cromwell in England or cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin in France, could easily bear comparison with the Köprülü prime ministers, just as the Tudor monarchs, Louis XIII of France, and the Great Elector of Brandenburg resembled their Asiatic colleagues Shah Abbas I, Tokugawa Ieyasu (the founder of the early modern Japanese state), and Nurhaci, who through his concerted modernization program set the Manchus on track to seize power in China in the next generation. These parallels were widely recognized in Europe at the time, preventing all-too-stark East-West dichotomies from arising. The monarchical state created by Louis XI in France, William Robertson wrote in 1769 without a hint of criticism, was “scarce less absolute, or less terrible, than eastern despotism.”22 When the Jesuits compared Kangxi with Louis XIV in 1700, they thought they were paying both of their patrons a compliment.

MONTESQUIEU READS SIR JOHN CHARDIN

The immemorial despotism of the East is a fact so familiar to every reader, that it seems to be received, as we receive the knowledge of a law of nature, without any troublesome investigation of the causes which produce an effect so wonderful and invariable.²³

When despotism was presented as a fact of nature, as here by the historian and colonial administrator Mark Wilks in 1810, it happened in a discourse that bore no direct relation to observations of how governments actually operated on the ground. While few Asiatic rulers were personally represented as despots, despotism appeared to be ubiquitous in the East. As a kind of unquestioned axiom, this assumption was largely immune to empirical correction. Anything that contradicted it could be interpreted as the exception that proved the rule. The ambassador Dr. John Crawfurd thus had considerable difficulty admitting “that the country [Siam] prospered under his [King Rama’s] administration and that he was rarely guilty of acts of atrocity.”²⁴ Such a sober observation flew in the face of fashionable theory.

“Despotism” was understood as a systemic concept: it referred less to the behavior of specific rulers than to a particular form of political order. How much was ascribed to the system and how much to “performance” varied from case to case. A few options were possible. Firstly, the repressive praxis of individual autocrats could be taken as evidence for the repressive features of the system itself;25 secondly, the two could be kept separate, opening up the possibility that a virtuous prince could still glean some good from a bad system;²⁶ thirdly, the system could be presented on its own terms and the praxis then measured against this yardstick. That was the approach taken by the knowledgeable Armenian dragoman of the Ottoman Empire, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, when he downplayed some unmistakably tyrannical aspects of Turkish rule with the argument that the Ottomans had been untrue to themselves and their originally good and just state institutions.²⁷

Two further aspects of the concept of despotism, besides the systematic nature of the phenomenon, can already be discerned in ancient Greek political theory: despotism as an illegitimate, degenerate form of monocratic rule that rides roughshod over the law, and its specific association with “barbarians.” Aristotle fatefully developed a relativizing argument that led to a split in the realm of political norms: even though despotism was the worst of all constitutions for the Hellenes, it could still be appropriate for the “barbarians” since they lacked all awareness of liberty. According to this anthropologically informed argument, “because the barbarians are more servile in their nature than the Greeks, and the Asiatics than the Europeans, they endure despotic rule without resentment.”²⁸ The same form of government could thus be evaluated differently depending on sociocultural context.²⁹

The eighteenth century’s ideas about “oriental despotism” were in part trivial, serving no other purpose than the polemical one of associating forms of European absolutism with negative stereotypes pertaining to the “Oriental,” particularly the Turk. English writers waxed indignant that the tyranny of Louis XIV, for example, surpassed that of the “Grand Turk.”³⁰ David Hume expected his readers to have a basic prior understanding of Ottoman politics when he cast the government of Elizabeth I in a dim light by spotting a resemblance with “that of Turkey at present”: “The sovereign possessed every power except that of imposing taxes.”³¹ The “discourse” in the Elizabethan parliaments, he pointed out, was so tame and docile that it was “more worthy of a Turkish divan than of an English house of commons.”32 When such associations and analogies laid claim to theoretical substance, they stood in a tension between two genealogies. On one side, early modern political philosophers from Machiavelli through Jean Bodin to John Locke took up the Aristotelian theory of constitutions and sought to make it relevant to the present.³³ On the other side, European observers looked for ways to describe political conditions in Asia. In the sixteenth century, returning Venetian ambassadors produced realistic analyses of how the Ottoman political system functioned in actual practice. These reports (“relazioni”), some of which were read out in public and subsequently printed, remained largely free of anti-Islamic polemics. They offered instead a coolly objective take on the strengths and weaknesses of a neighboring world power that was vitally important to Venice’s existential interests. From around 1575, the empire of the sultans was increasingly viewed as illegitimate and subject to arbitrary rule; at the same time, Venetian reports lost something of their factual, sharply observed lucidity and became ever more taken up with denunciations of an order that was increasingly perceived to be alien.³⁴ The Ottoman Empire continued to be an important factor in European diplomacy, and no foreign office in Christian lands could afford not to gather the best possible information on an empire that remained formidable even in its slow “decline” from superpower status. However, from the seventeenth century European interest was additionally directed towards Iran and Mughal India. Sir Thomas Roe, Bernier, Tavernier, Chardin, Thévenot, Kaempfer, and other travelers did not rest satisfied with relating anecdotes about oriental court life; they tried to explain the particular forms of autocracy they came across in early modern Muslim empires.³⁵

Montesquieu’s significance for the theory of oriental despotism lies in his having brought together both genealogies—that of normative political philosophy and that of descriptive “political science”—in his magnum opus, De l’esprit des lois (Spirit of the Laws, 1748). In doing so, he arrived at “the definitive formulation of despotism.”³⁶ Montesquieu combines earlier motifs in a kind of “ideal type” or conceptual construct. He identifies three forms of government—republican (in democratic and aristocratic variants), monarchical, and despotic—and distinguishes them according to the different “principles” that animate their respective political cultures. These are virtue (vertu) in a republic, honor in a monarchy, and fear in a despotism. Before he sketched his concept of despotism, Montesquieu had already followed Tacitus in drawing an impressive psychogram of tyranny and fear in the person of Tiberius.37 The ideal type of despotism, which has to be put together from numerous scattered remarks in De l’esprit des lois, also encompasses the structures of despotic rule. It reveals the following characteristics, which as a rule distinguish despotism from the princely rule of the monarch:

(1)  The despot stands above the law. His will and his whims are the law.

(2)  There are no largely independent countervailing forces (estates, church) to limit the despot’s power.

(3)  The despot exercises his power through an administrative elite that, unlike a hereditary aristocracy, is completely under his thumb. Even the highest dignitaries can never be sure of their social standing or even their lives.

(4)  Under a despotism subjects are akin to the “slaves” of an overlord. At any rate they see themselves as slaves.

(5)  Under a despotism no land is held in private ownership. All land belongs to the despot, who asserts his rights to it to varying degrees. The despot usually also designates himself the heir to all private property.

(6)  The predominant affect in a despotic system, fear, determines not only relations with the ruler but also those between his subjects, who see each other as potential informants and close themselves off in mutual suspicion. This prevents the emergence of nonstate solidarities or a bourgeois public sphere.

(7)  Despotic conditions reproduce themselves in small-scale units such as the household or family.

(8)  Life under a despotism is not geared towards construction, planning for the future, and economic growth. Instead, people live in the present and exploit nature for short-term gain:

In these states, nothing is repaired, nothing improved. Houses are only built for a lifetime; one digs no ditches, plants no trees; one draws all from the land, and returns nothing to it; all is fallow, all is deserted.38

Montesquieu’s conception of despotism could be understood independently of context as a universally applicable category. That is what gave it critical force. Precisely because monarchy could slide into despotism in Europe as well, Europeans had no cause to congratulate themselves on their insusceptibility to this form of government. Yet Montesquieu, along with most of his contemporaries, was in no doubt that despotism was peculiarly characteristic of Asia. It had been “naturalized” there.³⁹ Montesquieu did more than merely assert this; he asked why this should be the case. He found two independent natural variables. On the one hand, the vast spaces that typified Asia, with its boundless, sweeping plains, necessitated a degree of administrative centralization that was possible only under a despotic form of government.⁴⁰ On the other hand, its hot climate bred a passivity and servility that made Asians more apt than inhabitants of cooler climes to submit to an authoritarian and arbitrary regime.⁴¹ There was an analogy between immoderate climate and immoderate rule. In historical reality if not in theory, despotism was thus a characteristically oriental form of government.

Montesquieu’s concept of despotism steered attention away from tyranny’s outward appearance towards its structures and causes. The typological approach lived off the constant contrast between monarchy and despotism, and it inevitably made Asia appear—if only for reasons of methodology—as the political antitype to Europe. The ideal type had to be presented as distinctly as possible for it to be set in sharp relief.⁴² Montesquieu’s hatred of despotism is unmistakable: just thinking about “those monstrous governments” makes him shudder in revulsion.⁴³ To that extent, Montesquieu played a role in lending intellectual support and respectability to anti-Asiatic sentiments. Asia was a zone of chronic instability lacking in certain “orders of the state” and fundamental laws,44 home to a primitive form of government founded on the stupefied ignorance of both the leaders and their enslaved subjects. Liberty here stood opposed to servitude there, the art of politics to an absence of politics, the skillful balance of powers to the forces of despotic command.

Montesquieu built his comparative political sociology on the basis of something like an early form of empirical political science. He himself had no personal knowledge of any political system in Asia, nor did he depict any such system in detail. When his followers traveled to the Orient, they often found the master’s analyses confirmed by what they saw.⁴⁵ His ideal type is a combination of several traits that he had found mainly in the literature on Muslim empires. The analyses of the Iranian political system carried out by Chardin or Kaempfer had given a much clearer account of how this system functioned and came to a less negative overall verdict than Montesquieu a few decades later. Sir John Chardin, read by Montesquieu in the edition of 1735 and one of his most important sources, may serve as an example. What did Montesquieu borrow from him, what did he neglect or overlook?⁴⁶

For Chardin, Persian rule since Abbas I had been despotic and arbitrary; the Persian people were “the most harshly oppressed in the world.”⁴⁷ Yet Abbas I, the creator of this system, was content merely to disempower the grandees of his empire. It was his successor Safi I who began to liquidate them at will, a purge that served no practical political purpose. Under his rule, the court became a place of terror. Chardin introduces an important distinction between court and country that is nowhere to be found in Montesquieu:

In Persia, as in any other country on earth, the great lords are more vulnerable than others. Their fate is most uncertain and often a highly lamentable one. The people, by contrast, enjoy more security and comfort than in certain Christian countries.⁴⁸

Chardin here adopts a socially differentiated perspective that is missing in his famous reader: despotism has little impact on how most people live. If it touches them at all, then it is not necessarily to their detriment.49 Those who have cause to find this system “lamentable” are the representatives of a threatened aristocracy and an intimidated civil service, not the populace at large.

Whereas despotism appears in Montesquieu as a faceless and highly determined system that leaves little room for statecraft, Chardin emphasizes precisely the extraordinary importance attached to the prince’s personal qualities under conditions of extreme autocracy. For someone who knows Iranian history as well as Chardin does, Montesquieu’s god-king languishing in his harem, “lazy, ignorant and voluptuous,”⁵⁰ is more a phenomenon of weakness and dynastic decrepitude. Successful rulers like Abbas I and to a lesser extent Abbas II were very active despots indeed. They no more conformed to the harem cliché than did the Qing emperors, the sixteenth-century sultans, and the “grand mughals” from Akbar to Aurangzeb. None of these rulers could be said to have been the blind victims of their passions.⁵¹ The organizational problems faced by despotic systems had more to do with a lack of formalized channels for advice, such as a European-style state council or college of nobles, with the influence of a kitchen cabinet consisting of the queen mother, eunuchs, and concubines, and with endless succession disputes brought about by a lack of primogeniture rules (also discussed by Montesquieu).⁵² But as Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi drily riposted in 1762, was it really the case that in Europe, the royal favorites and mistresses were less influential, the crown princes better educated, and the dynastic succession principles more rational, given the number of inept or feeble-minded kings on the throne, than in the much-despised “barbaric” states of Asia and Africa?⁵³ China at least, regarded by many as despotic, seemed to prove the opposite. The fact that emperors there were able to choose the most capable of their (usually) numerous male offspring to succeed them had resulted in the Middle Kingdom being led between 1661 and 1799 by three of the most outstanding rulers to be found anywhere in the world at the time.

Chardin had pointed to a further remarkable context disregarded by his reader Montesquieu: a regime that acts tyrannically in its domestic affairs often adopts an irenic or even defensive foreign policy. Tyranny and a thirst for conquest are structurally distinct. Why? Bloodlust at court stems not from military virtues, such as those cultivated by Abbas I, but from luxury, decadence, and ill discipline. Princes brought up in the harem behave monstrously towards those around them once they ascend to the throne, while at the same time they lack the virile, martial spirit needed to defend the empire, let alone extend it. The most dangerous madmen are therefore also weaklings who squander the national and dynastic interest and leave their kingdom vulnerable to attack from foreign enemies.54 Moreover, a despot fears his people and so takes the precaution of disarming them, thereby weakening the military power of the state.⁵⁵ When Chardin left Persia in 1677, the terrible shah Safi II was in power. The military, however, had fallen into a state of abject decay.⁵⁶ This aspect was very rarely considered by theorists of oriental despotism.

Chardin again demonstrates his sociological perspicacity when broaching the question of landed property. In 1669 François Bernier had written and subsequently published a widely read letter to Minister Colbert in which he drew on his authority as a respected traveler to explain how all the land in the Mughal Empire, with the exception of individual houses and gardens, belonged to the emperor.⁵⁷ Montesquieu, like many other authors on Asia, had taken up this idea, generalized it, and expressed it a little more cautiously: in many—although not all—despotic states, the ruler declared himself the sole proprietor of all land and heir to all his subjects.⁵⁸ In doing so, Montesquieu ignored what he had read on this topic in Chardin. In an extended discussion, Chardin shows that there were four categories of ownership of agricultural land: state land, royal domains, land belonging to religious institutions, and land owned by private citizens. The king could draw direct income from his crown holdings alone, at the customary Iranian rate of a third of the total harvest. State land was managed quite differently; it was administered by provincial governors and was mainly used to supply the military. Lands held by religious institutions (predominantly foundations) were amassed through donations and corporately owned; they were considered sacrosanct and could not be touched by the king. Private land may nominally have been under royal control, but it was rented out at cheap rates in ninety-nine-year leases that were renewed automatically. As such, it was de facto kept permanently in private hands.59

Chardin’s exact description thus in no way supported the claim that the despot enjoyed monopoly rights on land, a thesis which in Montesquieu, at the latest, lost contact with historical reality and took on an almost mythical life of its own. Indeed, Chardin’s account directly contradicted this thesis. There could also be no talk of the peasants being particularly hard pressed. Chardin stresses instead their relatively modest burden of taxation, tolls, interest payments, and seigneurial duties, and comes away impressed by their average living standards: “They live at their ease, and I can affirm that there are incomparably poorer peasants in the most fertile countries of Europe.”⁶⁰ Chardin was no convinced Iranophile, but at the end of his investigation into the mid-seventeenth-century Persian state and economy, he arrives at an overall assessment that offers only limited support for Montesquieu’s later theory of despotism.⁶¹ Compared with many European states, the system shows a number of distinct advantages: there is no head tax and the tax burden is generally light; the populace remains relatively unmolested by the military; peasants are well treated by their landlords, coexisting in what today would be called a functioning “moral economy” of mutual rights and obligations: “It is possible to say that the lord and his subject are connected by a kind of unwritten contract: losses and gains are shared on an equal basis, and the poorest suffer the least.”⁶² The Persian people are well-off, and were it not for the shah’s reign of terror at his court in Isfahan and the occasional malfeasance of corrupt ministers and governors, there would be no reason to characterize the political system of Safavid Iran as in any way “barbaric.” It is ridiculous to claim that the shah’s subjects are his “slaves.” On the contrary, the Huguenot émigré Chardin adds, the Persians are blessedly free of the pressure that weighs down on Christian societies from the church. There are neither parasitical monasteries and priests nor an intolerant monitoring of people’s thoughts.63

Europe’s best-informed expert on Persia (along with Raphaël Du Mans) was not out to downplay the real evils of despotism, which he depicted impressively enough. But he took them to be a potentially treatable symptom of ruling-class degeneracy rather than the death rattle of the entire system. They affected the majority of Persians only insofar as it was not in their interests to have the central state weakened by an incapable ruler. The best yardstick for measuring the quality of a political order was not provided by court intrigues but by the living conditions of ordinary subjects, particularly the poorest among them. According to this criterion, the system created by the great Abbas I had proved eminently successful.⁶⁴ It was wrong, in Chardin’s view, to use the word “despotism” as an exhaustive characterization of Iran, or for that matter the entire East. Unlike Montesquieu, he studiously avoided amplifying shades of difference into rigid binary contrasts with Europe. From the viewpoint of its achievements, Safavid Iran by no means came off worse than the other two countries Chardin knew best: France under Louis XIV and Restoration England. At one point he casually mentions a further aspect of the cliché of oriental cruelty: torture in legal cases was far less often applied than in Europe, and although the law foresaw capital punishment for the worst offenses, he had not witnessed a single public execution during his fifteen years in Persia.⁶⁵

The Iran that interested Montesquieu as a case study for his theory of despotism was not the chaotic Iran of the early eighteenth century—ruled in name if not in deed by the hapless last Safavid shahs, overrun by Afghan invaders, and then dominated by the warlord Nadir Shah—but the country at the height of its power, stability, and prosperity under the early dynasty. Montesquieu was concerned less with accounting for the “elemental-historical” forces that periodically laid waste to civilization than with elaborating the ideal type of a particular species of political system. Travel reports provided the great thinker with more than mere data. An author like Chardin had developed a deeply considered description, explanation, and evaluation of conditions in Iran. In doing so, he had kept one eye firmly on Europe: not as an idealized norm, nor as an object to be critiqued from an exotic new standpoint, but as a measure for empirically comparing life in Persia with life as it was lived in other countries around the same time. Montesquieu radicalized and simplified this method into an asymmetrical typology. From Chardin’s in-depth analysis of Iran, he extracted only what could be used to illustrate the constructed type of le despotisme.

Chardin emerges as the better sociologist and political scientist, Montesquieu as the bolder political philosopher. As chunks of empirical analysis were incorporated into a uniquely varied system for a universal sociology, they took on new meaning, becoming both dogmatized and trivialized in the process. The complications and contradictions of despotism as it actually existed were ironed out into the seamless unity of an idealized negative stereotype that seemed, in an almost visionary way, to anticipate features of twentieth-century totalitarianism, to which it was perhaps better suited than to the Orient of the Enlightenment era. To be sure, Montesquieu himself was clear that his ideal type of oriental despotism was a construct of quasi-geometrical abstraction. In 1734 he had already remarked in his text on the grandeur and decadence of the Romans:

It is an error to suppose that there is any human authority in the world which is, in all respects, despotic. There never was and there never will be such. The most enormous power is always limited on some side.66

Yet this caveat was not repeated in his magnum opus. Although Montesquieu was circumspect enough to allow for exceptions to his general pronouncements, the final impression left with the reader is nonetheless that of a divided world. This division is not derived from any racial or national characteristics. There is no anthropological transfiguration of the Western individual in Montesquieu, no denigration of Asiatic cultures as such, no teleological philosophy of history culminating in the supposedly unique achievements of the West. For all that, there is still something inevitable about Asiatic bondage, given Montesquieu’s premise that political and social conditions are determined by environmental factors, that is, by climate and topography. Montesquieu’s answer to the question of how this perverse form of (mis)rule can be overcome—a question that stands at the heart of the discourse on despotism—is at bottom pessimistic. While individual despots may come and go in often bewildering succession, the numerous “revolutions” in Asiatic countries lead to nothing more than the eternal return of the ecologically determined same.

DESPOTISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Montesquieu condensed, concentrated, simplified, and generalized the older discourse of despotism to come up with an ideal type that could be used for purposes of comparison.67 Detached from the framework of De l’esprit des lois, this ideal type launched a career of its own that freed it for a variety of uses. It could be polemically exaggerated, empirically tested, or used as material for a philosophy of history. Each involved demolishing the context in which the type had originally appeared in Montesquieu. His great comparative tableau was dismantled and harvested for parts.

By and large, polemical exaggeration served the purpose of denouncing one’s neighboring country, or even the rest of the world, as despotic while simultaneously basking in one’s own happy exceptionalism. Montesquieu had already praised Europe’s unique good fortune in this respect. Such rhetoric was open to the objection voiced by Jean-Charles de Lavie: “Since all nations in the universe, save the Europeans, are subjected to the same type of domination—is it then possible to say that this type is illegitimate?”⁶⁸

A more serious advance on Montesquieu was the historico-philosophical interpretation. It saw despotism as a separate stage in the course of historical evolution. There were a number of different and quite diverse ways of conceiving this. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, a civil engineer and admirer of Montesquieu whose main interest lay in human prehistory, conducted research into the “spirit” of myths and rites.69 In a work published in 1761, two years after the author’s premature death, he interpreted despotism as the intensified form of an early theocracy. Its chief characteristics were that the divine now assumed regal features while the political ruler, conversely, came to be viewed as divine. Both characteristics were combined in a quasi-religious cult of the state. The ruler was ascribed magical powers. Religious and political intolerance went hand in hand. Abuse of power led under certain conditions—as in ancient Greece and Rome—to the breakdown of despotic rule and its replacement by a republican form of government. According to Boulanger, what emerged from the original theocracy in the West was not despotism, as in the East, but anarchy. The West, however, has always been exposed to despotic infection through its Asiatic colonies.⁷⁰ Yet the ancient republics were themselves inherently unstable, incapable of breaking free from their despotic inheritance; the transition to imperial rule in Rome clearly showed this. Boulanger does not discuss how despotism came to an end once more, but the implications of his ideas for the state and church under Louis XIV were clear.⁷¹ Decades later, incidentally, without referring to Boulanger and most likely in ignorance of his work, the historian of India Mark Wilks would define the essence of despotism in a very similar way, as the fusion of divine and human law.⁷²

Boulanger had thoroughly investigated a particular transition in the early development of religious and political institutions without extrapolating from it a general model of progress. Such models only advanced to the center of Enlightenment thought in the years following Boulanger’s death. The first example was furnished in impressive fashion by Turgot’s various sketches for a fully secular universal history, written around the same time as Montesquieu’s masterpiece.

The philosopher, economist, and statesman Turgot analyzed despotism more cogently and searchingly than Montesquieu ever did.⁷³ He saw it as a phenomenon that inevitably accompanies the formation of large territorial states in highly populated agrarian societies. He dismissed climate as a determining factor; the political sphere is subject to the same laws everywhere on Earth. The cardinal difference between Asia and Europe is that in Asia, a series of conquests meant that despotism arose too early for there to be any established “mores” to offer it concerted resistance. In Europe, it emerged at a later point in time (around the period of the Roman Empire), when it could no longer fully permeate society. In Turgot’s eyes, a despotic system is organizationally unstable since it rests on a simple hierarchy of terror and exploitation. There are no crossbeams in place to support the tottering political edifice; a fickle military, frequently in the form of a politically ambitious praetorian guard, plays a decisive role. The position of the supreme executive, the chief minister, or “grand vizier,” is often so precarious as to render effective government all but impossible.74 A despotic system can nonetheless prove long-lasting. It oppresses the entire intellectual life of the country, using education to break the initiative and sap the willpower of its citizens; committed freedom fighters are therefore in short supply. Despotism ultimately becomes a matter of habit: people put up with it because they know nothing else. Turgot describes the political effects of this kind of social despotism even more forcefully than Montesquieu:

It may be added that in these vast despotic states there is also introduced a despotism which extends over social manners, which dulls men’s minds even more; which deprives society of the greater part of its resources, its delights, and the cooperation of women in the running of the family; which by forbidding the social intercourse of the two sexes reduces everything to uniformity, and induces in members of the state a tired lethargy which is opposed to all change and therefore to all progress.⁷⁵

On the whole, Turgot takes despotism to be a more or less permanent fixture of Asian societies that is largely immune to change from within. Its structural weakness is more than made up for by its capacity to lodge itself immovably in the minds of its people.76 The East appears to have maneuvered itself into a cul de sac of world history.

Condorcet too, greatly influenced by Turgot, lamented in 1793 “a shameful stagnation” of Asia’s despotic systems.⁷⁷ Several lesser-known authors modified this image. Charles-Athanase Walckenaer, who in 1798 cut back Condorcet’s ten-stage model of human history to six, bade farewell to the black legend of despotism and drew his own conclusions from the obvious fact that the descriptions of seventeenth-century travelers no longer captured the reality of late eighteenth-century Asia. The East had not been left untouched by the progress of trade, industry, and the arts. Such progress could strengthen the hand of an individual despot if he could skillfully exploit new opportunities to his advantage. By the same token, however, the inexorable march of progress weakened despotism as a system: a ruler could only profit from growing world trade, for example, by allowing merchants greater freedom of movement. Such liberalizing measures, dictated by the monarch’s own interests, would not necessarily spell the end of despotism, but they could at least deprive it of its sting (ferocité).⁷⁸ In contrast to Turgot, Walckenaer thus does not assume that Asia has gone its own unique way in history; rather, he expects a convergence of systems in the not-too-distant future.

A different argumentative strategy arrived at the opposite results. It tied in with the contradiction—already hinted at by Lavie—between the empirical observation of despotism and its normative evaluation. If despotism could be explained by objective factors such as climate, what possible grounds were there for critique? Julien Joseph Virey, for example, recalled Solon, who when asked whether he had enacted the best laws for the Athenians replied that he had given them the best they would receive. Did not every nation necessarily have the constitution that best matched its character, and was it not conceivable “that despotism is perfectly suitable for Asia, whereas a republican government would only cause a great deal of unrest”?⁷⁹ Human society could not, as Condorcet believed, be perfected according to a one-size-fits-all model; there were only culturally specific solutions to problems. With that, the discourse on despotism had been linked up to the great debate on universalism and relativism. The East-West dichotomy that had been so central to Montesquieu’s discussion no longer played a central role.

Were “ideal types” claiming global validity and abstract “stage models” covering all of world history of any use at all for understanding reality? In 1774 Linguet answered this question in the negative and argued against “geometric precision.” Political systems differ from each other in how they regulate the relationship between commands and their execution; here there are “an infinite number of degrees.”80 Despotism is a pathological degenerative condition that can befall any constitution, whether republican or monarchical, a generally fatal “political fever” symptomized by a loss of rationality, morality, reliability, and moderation.⁸¹ Such “putrefaction of a state” does not concentrate power in a single hand but disperses it among many. It is not a form of government because it resembles a government without form.⁸² Linguet goes back historically behind Montesquieu, speaking the language of classical republicanism and the theory of political virtue. It is the paradoxical twist of his argument that Asian political systems have been less prone to this kind of decadence than the countries of Europe ever since the sordid drama of late imperial Rome. Why? Their “laws” are older and simpler and thus more resistant to erosion,⁸³ although this is an idea that Linguet fails to substantiate sufficiently from the evidence he adduces. His “Asia” is, even more than in the cases of Montesquieu or Voltaire, a projection screen for arguments about Europe. His outspoken critique of despotism did not save Linguet from the charge that he wanted to introduce a centralized state to France. In June 1794, this proto-Bonapartist thinker fell to the guillotine.

Other authors, too, tried to escape the orthodoxy of the Montesquieu school. One alternative was “middle range” theories of despotism. Dr. John Crawfurd, the diplomat and Southeast Asia expert who has still yet to be appreciated as a theorist in his own right, was thinking only of the Indonesian archipelago when he attempted in 1820 to detect recurring historical patterns. He took his cue from two observations. Firstly, in that part of the world conquest now played a far less important role as a basis for despotic rule than philosophers of history had been wont to ascribe it. Despotism thus had to be explained from the internal affairs of a country. Secondly, political unfreedom tended to increase as societies became more civilized. Crawfurd joins Walckenaer in making a link between political development and civilizational evolution, but the link he identifies is a very different one. Advancing “modernization” does not check despotism; on the contrary, it is what makes despotism possible in the first place. Crawfurd, the philosophical diplomat, develops an evolutionary model consisting of “five distinct forms of social union”: (1) the unconstrained egalitarianism of savages; (2) elective kingship; (3) a hereditary monarchy subject to aristocratic oversight and control; (4) federation with an elected head; (5) unrestrained despotism.84 The last form is characteristic of Java, the island with the most highly developed economy in the region. Crawfurd goes on to depict the extreme subservience of Javans towards their monarch while also noting that the establishment of effective despotic rule is associated with internal peace, greater legal security, better administration, and the abolition of the slave trade. With the loss of political freedom, the Javans had gained “a larger share of personal freedom.”⁸⁵ Crawfurd avoids taking the usual rhetorical potshots at despotism, but neither does he lapse into the cynical relativism that proclaims the “Asiatic” to be both ignorant and unappreciative of liberty and hence deserving of nothing better than oppression.

As if writing in the spirit of an empirically validated Thomas Hobbes, Crawfurd here takes up a countertheme that pervades much of the discourse on despotism: the fear of anarchy, of the Hobbesian state of nature, of the war of all against all. This may have been only a historical memory in a Europe that had left civil and religious wars behind it, but in Asia, which in the eighteenth century had witnessed the collapse of political order in Persia, India, Siam, Vietnam, and several other countries, it was hard to think of a more pressing political problem. Nothing was worse for human beings than a breakdown in public order, and a strong despot was always preferable to a mob of uncontrolled and uncontrollable “petty tyrants”—that, at any rate, was the general tenor of European commentary.86 This was an all-but-irrefutable objection to the standard denunciations of despotism. There were indeed worse things than an all-powerful autocrat, at least until the advent of totalitarianism in modern times. Yet the argument was not completely disinterested. After all, once the local strongman had left the scene, a new guarantor of peace and stability could move in to take his place: the colonial powers.⁸⁷

Volney, the most experienced philosophizing traveler and the most ambitious traveling philosophe, came to similar conclusions. His remarks on oriental despotism reunited what had been torn asunder since Chardin: personal experience and theoretical reflection.⁸⁸ Volney’s historico-philosophical treatise, Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), follows Turgot in deriving despotism from the empire-building activities of great conquerors and in offering psychological and cultural explanations for the longevity of despotic systems.⁸⁹ In doing so, Volney draws general conclusions from his first book, the Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie from 1787. Here he had literally taken under the microscope despotism’s modus operandi and its consequences, above all the economic irrationality of a political order that prevented people from producing wealth and laid waste to nature.⁹⁰ Volney was particularly interested in the causes of despotism. He advised against all-too-audacious speculations and generalizations à la Montesquieu, arguing instead—like Crawfurd after him—for empirically grounded theories that were regional in scope.⁹¹ He disputed Montesquieu’s claim that climate had a determining influence on social and political conditions, and he likewise rejected the anthropological argument for the aversion to labor purportedly shown by Orientals.⁹² Evidently, the ancestors of today’s Near Easterners had once exerted themselves to titanic feats under near-identical climatic conditions.

For Volney, the military despotism of the Ottomans and the Egyptian Mamluks was not an objectively necessary phenomenon, but one that demanded a political explanation. The Ottoman Empire was a ruthlessly exploitative colonial power, founded on conquest and devoid of legitimacy.⁹³ The Orient’s civilizational backwardness with regard to Europe, the deplorable state of the sciences and stagnation of the arts was not—as Volney’s rival Savary had contended—anchored in practically inalterable givens like language and writing; rather, it was due to the fact that political circumstances, working hand in glove with religion, kept people bound in the chains of ignorance: “The true cause is the difficulty of procuring the means for self-education, above all the rarity of books.”94 The West’s superiority lay in its scientific and scholarly accomplishments, in its triumph over religious hypocrisy, and in social institutions that promoted the increase of knowledge. Volney accordingly opposed all varieties of physical or anthropological determinism. Because the current state of affairs in the East did not have to be fatalistically accepted, it was amenable to political change. Although Volney did not explicitly call for a European intervention in the Near East, the right and perhaps the duty of progressive Europe to set free the victims of despotism lay on the horizon of his reflections.

“ORIENTAL DESPOTISM” UNDER SUSPICION

By historicizing and politicizing despotism, Volney contributed decisively to the concept’s demystification. Despotism was not the Orient’s inescapable destiny; it was the outcome of a historical misstep and as such could be corrected. Volney nonetheless continued to demonize the phenomenon of despotism, if anything to a greater extent than his predecessors. Enlightenment stalwarts, by contrast, had cautioned against hysteria. Thus Adam Ferguson, anything but a lackey of princes, had remarked laconically in 1767: “Despotism itself has certain advantages, or at least, in time of civility and moderation, may proceed with so little offence, as to give no public alarm.”⁹⁵ Christoph Meiners pointed out that it was the great achievement of Roman-Byzantine despotism to have kept the barbarians at bay.⁹⁶ And August Hennings, an early German liberal writing around the same time that Volney was condemning Turkish military despotism, voiced his suspicion (apropos the literature on India) that vilifying oriental despotism might be a way of diverting attention from conditions closer to home:

The exaggerated depictions of Asiatic despotism that may be found even in Raynal and others, the tales of bloodthirsty regents and oppressive Omrahs and Rajahs,97 are nothing new for the student of European history, and when Bernier castigates the shameful flattery of the Asiatic nobles, in crying out “O Wonder! Wonder!” at every word uttered by the Grand Mughal, this is surely no different from the tone that prevails among us at court today.⁹⁸

The same criticism could have been made of Montesquieu as well. Fed on a diet of such lurid “tales,” travelers sometimes expressed their surprise at not encountering the expected horrors. Visiting Vietnam in 1792, Barrow saw nothing of the tyranny he had read about at home. Touring the same country three decades later, Crawfurd found the common people to be lively and happy, “as if they had nothing to complain of.”⁹⁹

Many other authors subjected the theories of Montesquieu, Turgot, and their adherents to empirical scrutiny, although their detailed descriptions, unlike Volney’s, were divorced from any historico-philosophical interpretive framework. The complete opposite of philosophy of history was provided by Thomas Brooke Clarke in his Publicistical Survey of the Different Forms of Government of All States and Communities in the World (1791). This extraordinarily fine-grained attempt to taxonomize all the political systems found on Earth, dedicated to the Margrave of Baden, could not avoid tackling Montesquieu’s famous problem of how to distinguish (absolute) monarchy from despotism. Clarke did not define these forms by their internal driving forces but by their observable appearance. He distinguished between limited and unlimited monarchies. In “sovereign or unlimited monarchies,” the monarch is beholden to nobody but himself, ruling by laws that either preexist his reign or that he decrees in his own name. Despotism is defined in Aristotelian terms as a degenerative form of sovereign monarchy. It appears “when the monarch has unlimited power over the life and property of his subjects, and without ruling according to law, can treat his subjects arbitrarily as slaves.”100 Tyranny, for its part, is an extreme form of despotism in practice, where citizens are subjected to “wanton and inhuman bondage and torment.”¹⁰¹ Clarke applies this legalistic definition in a culturally neutral fashion when he undertakes a statistical survey of the globe. He must have been an avid reader of travel literature to have been able to gain an overview of even the smallest principalities. The only tyrannies he can discover are in Africa: the kingdom of Morocco as well as fourteen realms in Central Africa, among which he considers “Caffange” and “Monoemugi” to be the worst in the world. There are also a great many despotisms in the same continent. Almost all of Asia is ruled despotically, with some exceptions: China is classified as the sole unlimited monarchy in Asia and thereby placed on an equal footing with Russia, Prussia, France, the Habsburg hereditary lands, and the Papal States. Among the limited monarchies, Clarke lists Korea as well as tributary states or protectorates whose sovereignty is constrained by an external overlord: Tibet, Cochinchina, Golkonda (as a vassal of the Mughal Empire), or various sultanates in the Indonesian archipelago that are subordinate to the Dutch. Democratic states are to found only in Europe; these include the free imperial cities and the cantons and municipalities of Switzerland. Anarchies, on the other hand, are an Asian speciality, found in the Caucasus, the Kalmyk Steppe, and Arabia.

In his quaintly pedantic though insightful tables, Clarke employs a very broad and formal concept of despotism that in its empirical coverage roughly accords with Montesquieu’s way of viewing the world. Early on, and long before Montesquieu’s radical simplifications, consideration had been given to possible gradations in despotic praxis. Thus the not at all badly informed author of a genealogical handbook observes in 1711 that the Turkish sultan rules absolutely while being at constant risk of palace revolts. The king of Morocco rules even more absolutely, since he is the only greater monarch who treats his subjects as if they were his actual slaves. The grand mughal is richer and more glorious than the sultan and has less reason to fear resistance at his own court. The emperor of China is attended by less pomp and ceremony but is more parsimonious and therefore wealthier than all other despots; he rules less through violence than through his perfect information system, which brings him news from everywhere and carries his commands to the farthest reaches of the empire.102 Such comparisons within Asia never ceased to fascinate. Montesquieu’s subsumption of diverse historical phenomena under the overarching category of “despotism” left many unconvinced. Perhaps there was no such thing as “despotism” per se, only different kinds of despots?¹⁰³

Montesquieu himself had an inkling that his concept of despotism did not quite fit China, in particular. Japan only played a marginal role in his investigation, as a country with particularly draconian laws. While the abbé Raynal depicted it as a paragon of despotism,¹⁰⁴ others insisted that it was the only sizeable country in Asia not to have fallen into the clutches of a despot. Far from succumbing to the enervating allurements of the harem, Japan’s rulers were the most conscientious in the continent.¹⁰⁵ In this case, the dichotomy of monarchy and despotism seemed completely inapt: was Japan perhaps a composite form of despotism and feudalism?¹⁰⁶ And how was it possible that in immediate vicinity to the Mughal dynasty, and thus under almost exactly the same climatic conditions, the Sikh state could arise, which was republican and perhaps even democratic in constitution?¹⁰⁷

Against Montesquieu’s ideal typology, Voltaire had already objected that there had never been a “pure” despotism. He had also caught the author of De l’esprit des lois making reckless use of some very problematic sources.¹⁰⁸ In 1753, while Montesquieu was still alive but without mentioning his name, Voltaire came to some critical insights about negative stereotyping. Political theory, he observed, had always recognized the potential for a monarchical government to degenerate into tyranny. Now such occasional aberrations had suddenly been turned into a distinct political system. The excesses reported by travelers had summarily been declared to be the very essence of this system, and certain peculiarities of the sultan’s palace in Constantinople had been used to license sweeping conclusions about the nature of the Ottoman state and even the Orient as a whole. In this way, “a frightful phantom” (un fantôme hideux) had been deliberately conjured up in order that that the virtues of European absolute monarchs might shine all the more brightly against this dark background. “Oriental despotism” was thus nothing more than a gigantic attention-deflecting strategy on behalf of the crowned heads of Europe.

The idea of oriental despotism as a lawless reign of terror, Voltaire continues, has no basis whatsoever in historical experience. It is neither credible that ancient civilizations such as those in Persia and China could have flourished without binding legal statutes, nor can it be conceived how anyone could have been induced to transfer absolute rights over their property and their body to a ruler. It is hardly plausible that the son of a craftsman in Constantinople should not be allowed to inherit his father’s workshop.109 And was it even the case, the wise John Richardson asked in the spirit of Voltaire, that premodern state apparatuses were already compact enough to allow for a centralized power of command?¹¹⁰

Voltaire did not engage in theoretical debate. For him there was no such thing as a theory of despotism, since the whole notion stood on far too shaky a foundation. His appeal to healthy common sense encouraged others to subject the theory’s undisputed assumptions to rigorous scrutiny. The key question was not whether the theory could satisfactorily account for this or that borderline case (China or Japan, for example), but whether it held water even where it claimed the greatest validity: when applied to the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Montesquieu had outlined his worst-case scenario under the impression of some pages that Sir Paul Rycaut had written at the end of the worst period of tyrannical misrule in Ottoman history. They were ideally suited to his purpose. Yet as we have seen, when it came to Chardin’s sober and nuanced report on Iran, the political philosopher took liberties that turned what the traveler wrote on its head.

ANQUETIL-DUPERRON: THE DESPOT’S NEW CLOTHES

The most radical reckoning with Montesquieu’s theory was undertaken by his compatriot Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron.111 Much like Volney a generation later, Anquetil had the advantage of knowing Asia—in his case India, where he had lived for almost six years—and understanding Asian languages.¹¹² In his comprehensive Législation orientale from 1778, he set out to demonstrate that, firstly, a tradition of written law binding both rulers and ruled existed in Turkey, Iran, and Mughal India; and that, secondly, private citizens in all three states enjoyed property rights to mobile and immobile goods, which they were free to do with as they pleased. With that, the idea that there was a special form of (“oriental”) despotism had become untenable, and the political systems of Muslim Asia could be reintegrated into the general theory of monarchical government.¹¹³

Anquetil-Duperron was a supremely learned man. In 1771 he had published his epochal translation of the ancient Iranian Zend Avesta. This was the first scholarly work on an Asiatic text standing completely outside the biblical and classical Mediterranean traditions and, as such, it deserves to be seen as a founding document of a truly polyphonous global history.¹¹⁴ He had been driven to take an interest in the problem of Asiatic despotism by his experiences around 1760 with British colonial rule in India, then just getting underway before his eyes. The motives for Anquetil-Duperron’s anticolonialism were not entirely pure, however, since his increasingly apparent hatred of England made him willing to grant the French certain colonial privileges. He believed postrevolutionary France, unlike Great Britain, to be capable of forging mutually beneficial relations with the Indian states on the basis of equal rights.¹¹⁵ Within a French domestic context, Anquetil-Duperron belonged—along with Voltaire, the radical writer Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, and the former ambassador to the Sublime Porte and later Foreign Minister (1774–87), the Comte de Vergennes—to a royalist party that attempted to bolster the monarchy by blunting the edge of “despotism” as a polemical weapon against Bourbon “misrule.”116 All this does nothing to alter the fact that Législation orientale is animated by the impulse to defend the Muslim peoples and states of Asia against their European detractors, to work against their stigmatization as the countertype and archenemy of the West, and to contest the argument that oriental and occidental history had developed along qualitatively different paths. With an energy unmatched by any of his contemporaries, Anquetil sought to correct the exotic physiognomy and demonic grimace that had long distorted the European portrait of the “Asiatic.”¹¹⁷

Anquetil begins his work with a dedication Aux peuples de l’Indoustan, in which he prophetically draws out the difference between the old conquerors of India, the Mughals, and the new ones, the Europeans. Whereas the fierce Mughal warriors from the north, mollified by the warm climate and gentle customs of India, had assimilated successfully to their new country, the same could not be prophesied of their fanatically rapacious successors from overseas. The English were far more likely to transform India beyond recognition.¹¹⁸ Anquetil’s introduction is a rhetorically dazzling critique of the caricature of the Orient that had taken root in the West. There was method to the absurd exaggerations of the publicistes, since they were only pandering to Europe’s sense of its own uniqueness: “Europe revels in the wisdom of its laws, while the rest of the world, the Orient in particular, is alleged to be the plaything of a single individual!”¹¹⁹ Anquetil does not blame the much-maligned travelers for this situation, but rather the great theorists who had systematically misread their reports from the comfort of their leather-backed armchairs. In principle, an unprejudiced and judicious assessment of serious travel reports could have resulted in a correspondingly realistic, reasonable, and plausible view of Asia. This is precisely what Anquetil claimed for his own investigation, which thus became a triumphant vindication of those voyagers whom Anquetil—we have already encountered him as a theorist of “high” travel—credits with an unclouded perspective (désintéressement).¹²⁰

His method consists in falsifying arguments claiming general validity by citing refutations from the relevant literature. Where Montesquieu maintains that honor, the hallmark of a monarchy enjoying support from the nobility, is unknown in the fearful climate of despotism, Anquetil-Duperron produces page after page of counterevidence. Where Montesquieu says that despots are ill educated, lazy, and loath to appear in public, Anquetil has no difficulty proving the opposite. Even on the rare occasions when theorists of despotism—occasionally Boulanger comes under attack as well—describe a phenomenon correctly, they still misunderstand its effects. For example, it may well have been the goal of some despots to control their subjects as intensively as possible. But the absence of fixed laws constantly being invoked by the theorists would have thwarted this very intention. In the absence of a built-up bureaucracy, solely the execution of a rule-bound, universally recognized sovereign will could promise success.121 It would further lie in no despot’s interests to be universally feared by his people. He would seek instead to cultivate the good will of those groups in the population, such as city-dwellers, who could ally with him against the ambitions of elite groups. Put anachronistically, Anquetil saw that all regimes rely on the loyalty of the masses to ensure their long-term survival. More generally, he shows that a political system that functions in the way Montesquieu claims despotism to function would be doomed to failure.¹²² The ideal type is thus neither the conceptual duplicate of a reality nor the vision of a plausible possibility. And so it goes on for more than three hundred pages. Anquetil-Duperron chases his opponents’ arguments up hill and down dale, firing a barrage of quotations and learned commentary in their direction until they have been all but shot to pieces. By the end, the strict opposition of East and West has been transformed into a multitude of finely graded political and social possibilities. Having been dramatized and exoticized by Montesquieu and his ilk, oriental politics is now hauled back into the sphere of experience and common sense.

Anquetil also asks why the discourse on despotism should be so sharply polarized. Things are not always as clear-cut as in the case of a traveler who was said to have been commissioned by the Pope in the 1680s to write an attack on the Turks.123 Anquetil comes to the conclusion that the theory of despotism is ultimately the ideology of conquerors and plunderers. One’s own brutal misconduct is easier to excuse once one has convinced oneself that politics in the Orient is a rougher business than at home, and always will be owing to the unchanging climate. Under the assumption that Indians are strangers to property law, they can be plundered and their lands confiscated with an untroubled conscience.¹²⁴ In the eyes of Anquetil-Duperron, who was living in India during the period of early British smash-and-grab imperialism that enriched the “nabobs,” the whole theory of imperialism is nothing but a license for Europeans to commit crimes in India and later, as he prophetically foresees, in other parts of the non-European world as well. Finally, Anquetil detects a hypocritical double standard applied by those who come back home and then loudly complain about the arbitrariness of Asiatic governments. Europeans in Asia expect—simply by virtue of being European—to get away with anything, yet if required to pay a toll or surrender contraband in Europe, it would never occur to them to kick up a fuss. In Asia, however, such legitimate assertions of state sovereignty are decried without fail as acts of “despotism.”¹²⁵

Anquetil-Duperron’s great polemic, carried out in the spirit of Voltairean enlightenment, remained untranslated and was evidently rarely cited; its arguments met overwhelmingly with rejection.¹²⁶ The Montesquieuean ideal type, rapidly become the stuff of cliché, was not so readily abandoned by those who found it congenial to their purposes. In 1793, for example, Christoph Meiners was still presenting a completely antithetical viewpoint, buttressed by all the usual evidence on oriental despotism.¹²⁷ In 1842 the retired statesman Lord Brougham devoted a lengthy discussion to the “absolute monarchies of the East” in his Political Philosophy, one of the last nineteenth-century works of political science to take conditions outside Europe into account. Although he attempted to paint a nuanced picture and excluded China from his list of despotic states, in the end the old clichés survived unscathed, as if Anquetil-Duperron’s objections had never been voiced. Here despots continued to tax and bully their subjects into cowed submission, restrained at best by a few brave priests and the fear of popular revolt; here they continued to strangle, behead, drown, crucify, dismember, and impale their subjects as their fancy pleased them; here the ever-present threat of expropriation continued to block the emergence of any future-oriented commerce.128

INDIA: TRANSLATIO DESPOTICA

Anquetil-Duperron failed to make headway against the prevailing climate of opinion. He lived long enough, however, to see his findings confirmed by a number of scholars. One of these was Charles William Boughton Rouse, an EIC high official in Bengal and later in London, sometime parliamentarian and translator from the Persian, who sent him a copy of his Dissertation Concerning the Landed Property of Bengal (1791). Rouse’s contribution can only be understood in the context of the very complicated Anglo-Indian debate on the nature of landed property in India that had been underway since 1769. This debate had direct practical consequences in the so-called Permanent Settlement of Bengal, a revolutionary new system of property law and taxation, introduced by Lord Cornwallis in 1793, that nominally remained in force until the end of British rule in 1947.¹²⁹ What interests us here is Rouse’s opinion on one of the central questions of the theory of oriental despotism. On the basis of his own on-the-ground investigations, Rouse took the side of those who posited the existence of heritable landed property in India and demanded that the British colonial power recognize the native ownership structure. Because written titles could not be produced in the vast majority of cases, this line of argument had to be based on traditions (“immemorial usage”), customary law (“constant practice”), and tacit recognition (“universal sense of the people”).¹³⁰ Rouse emphasizes that under Mughal rule the great landowners and patrons, the zamindars, had been arbitrarily deprived of their rights only in exceptional cases. De facto if not de jure, their possession of the land had been inviolable and heritable.131 He goes on to trace the history of the opposing view back to Bernier and Alexander Dow, giving honorable mention to Voltaire and Anquetil-Duperron for having refused to join the chorus of abuse directed at oriental despotism.¹³² Rouse’s most important insight was that, in representing Asiatic society as wholly other, European observers were not showing an open-minded acceptance of diversity; on the contrary, they were merely absolutizing their own limited standards of judgment.¹³³ The construction of difference did not create space for tolerance but confirmed the superiority of the cultural arbiter. Unsurprisingly, Rouse’s view had no discernible effect on British policy in India.

Rouse’s declared empiricism was not a disinterested scientific stance. It served political ends. The same can be said for almost the entire discourse on despotism towards the end of the eighteenth century. The political battlefield increasingly shifted from the critique and defense of European absolutisms to the question of the legitimacy of European imperial maneuvers abroad. When oriental despotism was discussed around 1760, the real topic of conversation was Europe. Those who spoke of despotism around 1800 and in the years that followed—especially in Great Britain and Germany—were also still talking about Europe; but they now had in mind a new kind of autocracy in the form of Napoleon’s postrevolutionary dictatorship, which provoked hugely diverse reactions ranging from ardent enthusiasm to bitter enmity. In this context, Asia became more important than ever: an Asia that for the first time gave Europeans the opportunity to slip into the role of oriental despots themselves.¹³⁴

This was nowhere more obvious than in India. The “oriental despotism” of the Mughal emperors, as popularized by Sir Thomas Roe, François Bernier, and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, had basically ceased to exist with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, or at the latest with Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1737. There was no longer a “grand mughal”—that mythical figure of wealth and power that had initially been formed in Akbar’s image and which Johann Melchior Dinglinger had worked for August the Strong of Saxony into an opulent fantasy of gold and precious gems; it can still be admired today in the Green Vault in Dresden.135 The British in the guise of the EIC, an armed and quasi-sovereign trading company, were its heirs. This newfangled colonial rule was the target of a critique that availed itself of the catchword “despotism.” It first came from the side of imperial rivals. British, French, and German authors denounced the Dutch on Java and Ceylon—not unjustly—as brutal despots. Holland’s freedom and wealth, Johann Traugott Plant argued in 1793 in his great work on Asian archipelagos, were built on the tears and sweat of enslaved Indonesians.¹³⁶ French observers interpreted British rule in Bengal in particular, where the EIC had its earliest and most secure power base, as a modernized form of despotism. The Bengalis, the abbé Raynal contended as early as 1770, only a few years after the British had established their rule on the Ganges Delta, had good reason to mourn the despotism of their former overlords:

A methodical tyranny has taken the place of an arbitrary one. The raising of revenues has become general and regular, suppression of the people is made permanent and absolute. The destructive power of monopolies has been perfected, and new monopolies have been created. In a word, every source of trust and public happiness has been altered and corrupted.¹³⁷

Other French critics also railed against a new English despotism in South Asia.¹³⁸ Whereas Raynal had still depicted Mughal rule as a dark and violent regime that had now been surpassed by the “methodical tyranny” of the EIC,¹³⁹ Edmund Burke reserved the concept of despotism for British misdeeds in his parliamentary impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings. According to Burke, the British had trampled on a system that could not be denied a certain legitimacy and lawfulness.¹⁴⁰ In an analysis of the Indian political tradition that at times recalled Anquetil-Duperron (whose work Burke appears not to have known, however), Burke demolished point for point Montesquieu’s theory of despotism as applied to India; needless to say, Hastings had cited Montesquieu in defense of his own contested administrative methods.141

In 1783 Burke’s patron and comrade-in-arms, the leading opposition politician Charles James Fox, went so far as to call EIC policy under Hastings “a despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world.”¹⁴² British assertions on the structure of the Mughal Empire were henceforth guided by the question of how the newcomers viewed the last power to have unified the greater part of the subcontinent under its scepter. The further back into the past the rule of the great Mughal emperors reached, the more calmly it could be contemplated. Here two tendencies stood opposed to each other. On the one hand, the terrors of the old despotism were kept alive for pedagogical reasons, to inculcate an attitude of gratitude in the Indians for the joyful present.¹⁴³ On the other hand, negative judgments were concentrated on the petty tyrants of recent memory—including the sultan of Mysore and the Maratha Peshwas—who had been the target of military operations during the hot phase of British colonization. The more negatively such enemies were portrayed, the more justified measures to unseat them from their thrones could be made to appear. The glory years of the Mughal dynasty were swallowed up in a fog of nostalgia. The fact that Lord Wellesley, the aggressive conqueror, had grandiose and extremely expensive government buildings erected in Calcutta during his governor-generalship was partly motivated by the desire to assert British power on an imperial scale.¹⁴⁴

It took several more decades, however, before Britannia came into the symbolic as well as territorial inheritance of the Mughals. This first occurred when Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India in 1877. Three related visions of how India should be governed were mooted in the period from 1790 to 1830, roughly:

(1) the late Enlightenment idea, represented by the governor-general Lord Cornwallis (in office from 1786–93), the creator of the Permanent Settlement and the colonial bureaucracy, that personal despotic rule should be replaced by the impersonal rule of law;145

(2) opposed to this, the romantic idea, arising in the circle around Lord Wellesley among men like Sir John Malcolm, Sir Thomas Munro, and Mountstuart Elphinstone, that charismatic white leaders and “uncrowned kings” should place themselves at the head of loyal native followings, seeking through a kind of dynamic despotism to catch up with the processes of state formation that had already occurred in early modern Europe;¹⁴⁶

(3) the idea, promoted by the historian and EIC official James Mill and fellow proponents of utilitarianism or “philosophical radicalism,” that the residues of native despotism should be eliminated as quickly as possible; through “a revolution masterminded by skilfull administrators,” a temporary British dictatorship would introduce Indians to the benefits of the most valuable (i.e., not all) Western civilizational achievements.¹⁴⁷

Each of these three models of rulership was trialed at different times in various regions of India.

DESPOTISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

China played an altogether different role in the late eighteenth-century European discourse on despotism. In China, unlike in India, the ancien régime was still intact. Compared with the Ottoman Empire, it had been much less affected by influences from the West. At this point, nobody seriously entertained the idea of military intervention in China, let alone colonial subjugation. The political dimension of discussions on China lay in the fact that here, even in the early nineteenth century, an “eastern” political system appeared neither to be destabilized from within nor to face military threats from without. Two uniquely Chinese characteristics were obvious: on the one hand, imperial rule there was not a foreign import but a two-thousand-year-old product of indigenous culture; after 1644, the Manchus had introduced reforms to stabilize the system, eliminating structural defects such as the inordinate power wielded by court eunuchs.148 On the other hand, this long history led to a series of real rulers (as portrayed in the gallery of Confucian historiography) merging into a composite image of the archetypal emperor: the mythical ideal emperors of the early period, decadent monsters,¹⁴⁹ violent dynasty founders, and tyrants such as the first emperors of the Qin (Qin Shi Huangdi, r. 221–210 BCE) and the Ming (Hongwu, r. 1368–98), as well as the wise Tang emperor Taizong (r. 626–49), who struck Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi as a paragon of monarchical “moderation”—and of course the active autocrats of the Qing Dynasty: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong.¹⁵⁰

The path from “Sinophilia” at the start of the eighteenth century to “Sinophobia” at its end has been charted on numerous occasions in recent Western literature on China.¹⁵¹ Even if the texts do not permit us to reconstruct this trajectory in all its particulars, there may be something to it. Only the Jesuits (and their fierce critic, the Dominican Domingo Fernández Navarette) had produced in-depth accounts of the Chinese political system. Du Halde’s 1735 encyclopedia of China remained the authoritative source for the remainder of the century. Every assessment of the country, whether positive or negative, was overwhelmingly based on the material assembled there. With the exception of Gemelli Careri, no private travelers reported back from the Middle Kingdom, while most participants in diplomatic missions glimpsed only the externals of court life, relying for all other information on what the Jesuits told them. In the late Ming period, Jesuits had drawn a rather anonymous picture of a static system. During the turbulent and bloody midcentury dynastic overthrow, the raw forces of history—Hegel’s “elemental-historical”—had intruded to force a revision of this hieratic perspective. Once the turmoil had subsided, the three great Manchu emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong ushered in a new era when a perfected bureaucracy was combined in the ruler’s person with the charisma of office.

This combination is reflected in Du Halde. In his account, the political system of the Qing period is neither an unbridled despotism nor an authoritarian bureaucracy where the emperor acts as a kind of king in council.152 Du Halde, partly following his fellow Jesuit Louis Le Comte,¹⁵³ develops the following theses on Chinese political order and political culture under the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors:

(1) The emperor’s power is “absolute and almost unlimited”; he exercises it personally as an active autocrat. There are no regional potentates who could potentially stand in his way; the imperial princes have little opportunity to assert their independence from the throne (in obvious contrast to the Mughal Empire).¹⁵⁴

(2) The emperor’s power is nonetheless restrained in its execution by:

• written laws;
• the emperor’s concern for his public image and for how posterity will judge him;
• the ideology of paternalism, which expects the emperor to treat his subjects with the stern benevolence of a paterfamilias;¹⁵⁵
• the independent Censorate, a bureaucratic agency whose officials could criticize their colleagues and even the emperor and his court in the name of the public good;¹⁵⁶
• the tradition of successful popular uprisings against unworthy emperors.

(3) The generally meritocratic examinations for entry into the civil service guarantee the high quality of the bureaucracy.¹⁵⁷

(4) Mandarins have almost absolute power over the population in matters of civil law. There is nonetheless a measure of protection against malfeasance and incompetence in that unrests are initially blamed on the official in whose administrative district they break out.¹⁵⁸ He is therefore well advised to make sure they do not arise in the first place.

In Du Halde, as indeed in all the literature on China, one searches in vain for vivid evocations of Caesarean madness. (In Southeast Asia too, incidentally, there was only one true homicidal maniac on a throne after the mid-eighteenth century: King Bodawpaya of Burma, who reigned from 1782 to 1819).159 Chinese despotism thus never exercised the European imagination in the same way as its Iranian or Ottoman counterparts. Readers had to be satisfied with stories that were more amusing than horrifying, like the following tale told by Pater Amiot in 1752: the Qianlong emperor wanted to celebrate his mother’s sixtieth birthday with a festive boat ride on a canal. When the day dawned unexpectedly cold, thousands of Chinese were ordered to keep stirring the water to prevent it from freezing over.¹⁶⁰

Du Halde’s solid compendium inspired several European authors, above all French physiocrats from the circle around François Quesnay, to extravagant idealizations of the system they found described there. Their enthusiasm was so palpably implausible that it could not fail to provoke a Sinophobic reaction—from Cornelius de Pauw, for example, who argued the exact opposite. Yet when Christoph Meiners claimed in 1796 that Chinese despotism was the worst in the world,¹⁶¹ this was no less absurd than earlier declarations that, in modern China, the utopia of wise philosopher-kings had finally been realized.¹⁶² The debate on China conducted during the second half of the eighteenth century, principally in France, was less grounded in reality and less specific than contemporary European discussions of India or the Ottoman Empire. A question of the utmost political significance that could also be subjected to empirical examination, such as the problem of landed property in India, was missing in the Chinese context.¹⁶³ Whereas the topic in India was how knowledge of the country could be applied to the benefit of its own colonial administration, discussion of China remained stuck on the old question of whether Europe had anything to learn from the Middle Kingdom. Even in the nineteenth century, this question was not (yet) answered with a simple “no”; the model of China played a certain role in the introduction of civil service examinations in Great Britain, for example.¹⁶⁴ But after the tempering of European monarchies in the phase of enlightened absolutism, and with the waning in importance of patriarchal ideas in European political theory, the Chinese model seemed to be of continuing relevance only in relatively minor areas such as the agricultural arts and the moral-philosophical foundations of politics.

By the end of the great eighteenth-century debate on China, there was widespread agreement that China should not be considered a clear case of despotism; Montesquieu himself had already expressed reservations on this score.165 What else was at issue? The Jesuits’ last word (almost) came in the form of the abbé Grosier’s precise description of the country’s public administration. Grosier went far beyond the old schemata for categorizing despotism and completely ignored the big typological concepts of political theory.¹⁶⁶ Neither of the two diplomatic missions from the 1790s yielded fundamentally new information on China’s political system.

Sir John Barrow was usually not one to pass up an opportunity to berate the Chinese for their civilizational backwardness. Yet apart from pointing out the usual malpractices (especially corruption), even he found little to criticize in their political order, which he labeled by the conventional name of despotism. He even paid China some surprising compliments: the press was as free there as in England, and there was no censorship. Despotism may have broken the bonds of solidarity between men, but at least it had gifted the country a long period of peace. Although the emperor was nominally regarded as the proprietor of all lands, Chinese farmers and tenants were de facto in secure possession of their fields and landholdings. Markets were free; there were hardly any monopolies. No feudal hunting and fishing privileges or other seigneurial rights barred access to lakes, rivers, and the sea. Taxes were low and were sensibly regulated.¹⁶⁷ In fact, Barrow found very little that was objectionable in the Chinese constitution; he considered it to be essentially rational in design. While it never occurred to him that it might have lessons to teach Europe, he also did not find it particularly alien and “oriental.” For the majority of the population, it was even quite bearable. Lord Macartney arrived at a similarly even-tempered judgment. But he perceived the very real fissures in the system more clearly than his subordinate on the mission to China, and he saw that the concentration of power in a single person would turn from a blessing into a curse once the empire passed into the hands of a less capable monarch.168

The last great analysis of China to stand under the impression of the magnificent High Qing comes from an author who, like Barrow, adopted a fundamentally critical attitude towards China and who, far excelling Barrow in his knowledge of the land and its language, was taken by the (ex-)Jesuits to be the most dangerous besmircher of China’s good name: Chrétien Louis Joseph de Guignes.¹⁶⁹ The son of the famous Orientalist had first visited Peking in 1784 with the Lazarists, the Jesuits’ successors in the China mission, and he went on to spend many years representing France in Canton. He accompanied the Dutch Titsingh/Van Braam embassy of 1794/95 as an interpreter before returning to France in 1800. As a Sinologist—he was commissioned by Napoleon to publish a Chinese dictionary (1813)—and long-serving diplomat, he was something like the French counterpart to Sir George Thomas Staunton, then junior member of the Macartney Mission and founding father of British Sinology.

De Guignes eschews the concept of despotism. In his chapter on China’s government, he is concerned in the first instance with analyzing its most conspicuous feature: bureaucratic management. At the center of his analysis stands not the emperor but the roughly two-thousand-strong corps of high “mandarins” who administered the empire and held it together. The paternalistic rhetoric that the Jesuits had always taken at face value interests this nonnormative author only in its functionality: the veneration of the chef de l’empire by his subjects must be kept alive through constant indoctrination and propaganda.¹⁷⁰ The achievements of the Chinese political system—the preservation of peace, public welfare, and territorial integrity—depended entirely on the quality of the officials, and the principal task of the imperial centers was to ensure that this quality was maintained. De Guignes expressed more clearly than anyone before him that good laws and the Chinese version of an “ancient constitution” posited by a number of authors were not enough, that governing China was a gigantic management task requiring constant vigilance. For all the lip service paid to Confucian ethics, officials were structurally corrupt and tended to tyrannize those under their jurisdiction. A strong central authority was therefore needed to keep the machinery of state in good working order. Just as Barrow and Macartney had already warned of a “revolution” in China, so de Guignes recommended that China not press for Western-style reforms. These would only prove unsuitable, for “it is impossible to govern Asians in the same way as Europeans.”171 To say this about noncolonial China was to argue for the continuation of native despotism; to say it about colonial India was to urge the new, enlightened masters to occupy the positions left vacant by the despots of old.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: PRAETORIAN GUARDS AND PAPER TIGERS

So far as the political system of the Ottoman Empire was concerned, neither an attitude of retrospective nostalgia (as in the case of Mughal India) nor one of wonderment at the survival of a unique form of premodern governance (as in the Chinese case) was possible around 1800. The legitimacy and stability of Ottoman rule palpably affected the foreign policy of the European great powers in the area between North Africa and the Persian Gulf. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 had ended with a crushing defeat for the Sublime Porte. The territories surrendered and concessions granted to Russia in the peace treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) were so considerable that historians conventionally take it to mark the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline from great power status to a rump state capable only of acting in its own defense. In the process of mental distancing by which everything Turkish was excluded from a European community of values, the question of whether despotism prevailed in the Ottoman Empire no longer played a primary role. The most important differentiating criterion was not any lack of freedom in the sultan’s realm but rather its “civilizational,” technological, and economic backwardness with regard to the likes of France and England. Volney was one of many who held this view.

All the same, Volney believed that despotism was an essential cause of these retrograde conditions. In his pamphlet Considérations sur la guerre actuelle des Turcs (Reflections on the Current War of the Turks, 1788), a kind of addendum to his travel report from the previous year, he juxtaposed the old, decadent, and enfeebled Ottoman Empire with the young and dynamic great power Russia, advising the French Foreign Ministry to relinquish its traditional pro-Ottoman stance in favor of a free trade policy and diplomatic (but not military) support of the tsarist regime. The tsarina acknowledged his efforts with a medal, which he felt obliged to return in 1791 following his conversion to revolutionary activism.172

Volney was far less interested in the formal organization of power than in a regime’s tangible effects on the people over which it ruled. In his travel report from 1787, he had defined despotism as a situation in which “the mass of inhabitants is subjected to the will of a faction of armed men, who treat them according to their own interest and pleasure,” citing Ottoman rule in Syria as his prime example.¹⁷³ In the Considérations as well, he spoke of Turkish despotism as a matter of common knowledge. While conceding that the tsarist empire likewise displayed despotic features, he contended that their consequences were far less devastating. He thereby ignored the judicial line of argument that had played a growing role in the discourse on despotism since Anquetil-Duperron, at the latest. A response to the Considérations was promptly fired off by a proponent of this tendency, the consul Charles de Peyssonnel (fils), whom we have already met as the chivalrous defender of the Crimean Tatars. Peyssonnel insisted that there was a full-fledged despotism in Russia because the sovereign there stood above the law, whereas in the Ottoman Empire the sultan was subjected to a “code of theocratic laws.” On the theme of unfreedom, he remarked in passing that the Turkish soldier was in principle a free man, while his Russian opponent remained a serf and chattel.¹⁷⁴ The consul also took the opportunity to parry Volney’s frontal attack on Turkish “barbarism.” Thus where Volney, like many before him, blames the Turks for destroying the monuments of classical antiquity, Peyssonnel counters that the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Genoese, and the modern Greeks had also played their part. Had the Turks destroyed Hagia Sophia? And should today’s French be held accountable for the ruinous state of the Arena of Nîmes?175

Peyssonnel’s attempt to salvage the honor of Ottoman culture and the Turkish national character was anachronistic even at the time. It never stood a chance of a fair hearing; his voice was soon drowned out in the chorus of philhellenes baying for revenge against the devilish Turk. On the other hand, however, the revisionist view of the sultan’s supposedly lawless and uninhibited autocracy largely carried the day. Montesquieu had presented the Ottoman Empire as an extreme example of the unification of all state powers in a single person, a leviathan that denied its citizens even basic legal protections or the right of redress.¹⁷⁶ The Ottoman Empire seemed further to confirm the “monolith thesis” put forward by the classical theory of despotism, according to which despotic government was marked by an absence of balancing forces. Yet doubt was cast on this thesis through a comparison of specific systems of rule. Cracks were opening up in the smooth façade of Montesquieu’s ideal type.

As Hegel recognized more clearly than most,¹⁷⁷ nowhere were the forces working against the sovereign’s supreme power weaker than in eighteenth-century China, where there was neither a church nor semiautonomous regional magnates, and where the famous Censorate was always overruled in cases of doubt. For all that, most observers agreed that China was an unusually well-governed, internally peaceful country. The Mughal emperor may not have had a strong Islamic priesthood to contend with, yet he still had to negotiate with the grandees of his empire, as Voltaire rightly maintained against Montesquieu, making the occasional compromise inevitable. Princely revolts were also a structural element of the system. By comparison, the sultan in Istanbul was even more hemmed in.

Voltaire was not the first to point out that hardly any sultans were able to assert effective control over their own infantry units, the Janissaries (Yeniçeri); indeed, many were deposed or even assassinated by this elite guard. Frequently, Voltaire observes, the sultan may terrorize his household and his court with impunity, but he has little power outside the palace walls; he is the “oppressed” rather than the “oppresser.”178 The position of sultan was thus far more precarious than that of a European monarch. “To preserve the fidelity and attachment of the Janizaries,” William Robertson remarked in 1769 in his astute dissection of the Ottoman system, “was the great art of government, and the principal object of attention in the policy of the Ottoman court.”¹⁷⁹ For long periods, revolt functioned as an ersatz form of government.¹⁸⁰ Along with the military, religion set limits to the sultan’s power. Islam had long been regarded as a mainstay of despotism until Sir James Porter demonstrated that the sultan’s ability to take unilateral action was constrained by religion and the law.¹⁸¹ On the one hand, the Islamic hierarchy of the ulema, the religious legal scholars, had considerable potential to thwart the sultan’s will; on the other, religious and secular law, which guaranteed (among other things) private ownership of landed property, was supported by people’s widespread awareness of their rights and could not be violated with impunity, even by the sultan. Commoners in the Ottoman Empire should also not be imagined as a herd of slaves suffering in silent oppression. They were instead a political force to be reckoned with:

Notwithstanding the transcendant expressions the Turks use when speaking of their Sovereign, they will frequently murmur, talk freely, abuse him and his ministers, throw anonymous scurrilous papers into the mosques, and seem ever ripe for rebellion, if outraged by frequent and unusual oppression and tyranny.¹⁸²

The greatest European authorities of the next two generations joined Porter in emphasizing the importance of the law as a factor in preserving order. Neither Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson (whom Peyssonnel had already cited in 1788 in support of his criticisms of Volney) nor Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall claimed that the Ottoman Empire had anything like a Western-style constitution enshrining habeas corpus and protecting citizens from arbitrary interference by the state. But by familiarizing European readers with the Ottoman legal system, their detailed accounts destroyed the cliché of the oriental despot as an almighty, overbearing tyrant.183 The knowledgeable Istanbul merchant Thomas Thornton, who argued in a similar vein, called Montesquieu’s “pure” despotism “a metaphysical abstraction,” a theoretical construct corresponding to nothing in the real world.¹⁸⁴

Montesquieu’s specter of Ottoman despotism was finally put to rest during the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807), a cultivated and cautious reformer.¹⁸⁵ Now there was little talk of despotism as a system. Those who still spoke of despotism alla turca did so more in Volney’s sense, as a terroristic and retrograde praxis that arose from time to time. Turkey’s problem, according to some of the leading experts on the country, was not so much an excess of autocracy as the lack of a truly enlightened despot. Mouradgea d’Ohsson, the great authority on conditions in Turkey, yearned in 1788 for what the Ottomans’ enemies had long feared: “a superior mind, a wise Sultan, enlightened and vigorous,” who could jump-start the country into modernity.¹⁸⁶ In 1798 Bonaparte believed that this could be his own role, at least in Egypt, where the French, as Marshall G. S. Hodgson put it, “set up as much as they could of the apparatus of the Enlightenment”: a modern state, hospitals, scientific laboratories, and so on.¹⁸⁷

EX OCCIDENTE LUX

The theory of despotism as a degenerate form of government has a pedigree that can be traced back to ancient Greece. The idea that a violently autocratic form of government was better suited to Asia than to Europe had already arisen among Hellenic authors. In the early modern period—in Jean Bodin, for example—the concept of despotism fitted into a universal taxonomy of constitutions that was no longer (or not yet) aligned with the binary opposition between East and West. Such a dichotomy first became prevalent through Montesquieu’s ideal-typical contrast between monarchy and despotism. This could also be interpreted, in a more strongly normative reading than that proposed by Montesquieu himself, as an opposition between legitimate and illegitimate rule. Such an interpretation met with protest from figures such as Voltaire, Burke, and Gibbon, who warned in the name of historical experience and practical reason against a one-sided ideological appropriation of the concept.188 Their arguments found support among experts who, at a time when it was almost impossible to find any actual rulers in the Orient who lived up to their generic reputation for monstrous tyranny, offered detailed refutations of the theory of despotism: Sir James Porter, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Claude Charles de Peyssonnel, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, C. W. Boughton Rouse, the abbé Grosier, and others. While this counterattack could not be faulted on its own terms, from around the 1780s it flew in the face of the most pressing political issues and the intellectual climate of the day. The topics of chief concern were now the organization of colonial India, the expected breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and the gradual erosion of the social and political system in China. Legal and constitutional questions faded into the background. More important was the alleged civilizational split between East and West.

The polemically slimmed-down concept of despotism that Volney introduced into the debate proved ideally suited to this new situation. Arbitrary rule, ignorance, and administrative-economic mismanagement were compressed into a modernized cliché of barbarianism that made up for in propaganda value what it lacked in theoretical sophistication. It became the basis for the rhetoric of liberation that, following the final war against Tipu Sultan and the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, would accompany every subsequent intervention by a European great power in Asia and Africa. This presupposed that the old Montesquieuean environmental and climatic determinism had been abandoned and a new anthropological-racist reductionism had not yet been embraced. The Orient was by no means condemned to eternal bondage through heat and the weakness of the “oriental character.” Despotism, Sir William Jones declared in 1792, was the decisive difference between Asia and Europe, and its elimination would usher in a new dawn for the Asiatic nations.¹⁸⁹ The peoples of the Orient were capable of being free, just not of freeing themselves. Freedom had to come from outside. Europeans even took the provisional measure of installing themselves as modernizing despots and législateurs: at first in India, then elsewhere. By the Napoleonic era, the Enlightenment discourse on despotism was thus being used to justify an emancipatory imperialism that believed itself to be a temporary expedient, and was still some way removed from the later doctrine that the European master race had a God-given mandate to rule in perpetuity over its racial inferiors.