XI

Societies

At the very commencement of the present dynasty [of the Tokugawa shoguns, 1603–1868] the government made regulations as salutary as the welfare of the state, the happiness of the people and the maintenance of order in the interior of the empire required. The active spirit of the Japanese could not fail to seek new objects, and by degrees their attention was turned to the establishment of fixed bases of all the observances due to each individual, according to his station in the different circumstances of life. So that everyone might have precise rules for the government of his conduct towards others of every class, from the highest to the lowest.

—Isaac Titsingh (1745–1812), Illustrations of Japan1

This observation made by Isaac Titsingh, a high-ranking official of the VOC who spent forty-four months in Tokugawa Japan during the years 1779 to 1784 and went on to become one of the earliest European japanologists, stands at the end of a long tradition of seeing Western and Eastern countries within a single and common framework, a framework shared by the elites of many Asian societies themselves. One might call it “the primacy of political power.” Once the rulers—whether despots or feudal monarchs—had established peace and set down basic laws, a space opened up where their subjects could follow their interests and indulge their passions. When they had nothing else to do, they ordered the relations among themselves in hierarchical systems of rank and protocol. In others words: they invented society.

SOLIDARITY AMONG THE CIVILIZED

In the 1740s Montesquieu hit upon the idea of not just describing political conditions by their system of organization—their “form,” as he called it—but also of positing a uniform “principle” that provides the entire community with a point of mental orientation. With that, the step from the constitutional theory of the Aristotelian tradition to political sociology had been taken. In a monarchy it is honor—in a despotism fear—that defines the moral climate of a society and shapes interpersonal relations outside the political sphere. Montesquieu and others further assumed that under a despotism, absolute relations of command and submission were reproduced at every level of social life. The organizing “principle” was diffused throughout a society, which is why the harem, for example, could be taken as a microcosm of the political system. In his Lettres persanes, Montesquieu had already presented the world of the harem, with its hierarchically scaffolded arrangement of possessive overlord, watchful eunuchs, and dependent women, as a model of power relations in general. The structure of the state was replicated in that of the seraglio.

These were important insights, but they were still a very blunt instrument for describing actual social relations. In other parts of De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu himself developed concepts and hypotheses that came closer to an adequate descriptive account of forms of socialization. His most comprehensive umbrella term for this is the “esprit général” of any particular nation. This general spirit consists of a nation’s “climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, and manners.”2 The relative influence of these factors varies from case to case. Mœurs (mores) and manières (manners and customs) are “universal” institutions that have sprung up organically, so to speak. No recognizable foundational intent lies behind them, whereas lois (laws) spring from the active will of a legislator:

The difference between laws and mores is that, while laws regulate the actions of the citizen, mores regulate the actions of the man. The difference between mores and manners is that the first are more concerned with internal, and the latter external, conduct.3

Montesquieu then offers a series of reflections on the relationship between laws, mores, and manners. Chinese civilization strikes him as unique because all three aspects coincide there, with religion fitting harmoniously into the picture as a fourth factor. This multilayered, tightly integrated system of values was practically unassailable, as all previous invaders had discovered; conquered China took captive her savage conquerors. At the same time, this made it almost impossible for the country to be converted to Christianity, as Montesquieu clearly recognized.⁴ There were very few cracks in the civilizational edifice where a cultural aggressor could secure a grappling hook.

For something like a “sociological” prespective, no category is more important than that of mœurs. They are the social code regulating private life; they pertain to the lives of individuals as hommes, not as politically active citoyens. They differ from conventionally mandated forms of social conduct, manières, in that they steer the inner motivations of human beings. Although only a few authors from the second half of the eighteenth century adhered to Montesquieu’s narrow and precise concept of mœurs, his terminological proposals had opened up the possibility of apprehending society in its totality.⁵ The point is not to claim Montesquieu as an ancestor of modern Western sociology. He was more than that: the creator of a general framework of a general social science. Few writers of the second half of the eighteenth century were entirely free from his influence, however indirect and refracted it may have been.

It is important to note that Montesquieu considered his categories to be universally valid. The division between Europe and the Orient, which played so important a role in his theory of despotism, was irrelevant to his social theory. He never refers in broadbrush terms to “Asiatic society,” as would become commonplace in the nineteenth century. He also never plays off a specific concept of anthropology as the science of “them,” the exotic others, against something like “sociology” as the science of “us.” Montesquieuean social theory is transcultural and universal, comparative and counter-teleological, empirical and nonnormative. Societies in all civilizations are studied as they are or as they appear to be; they are not assigned to one of the stages preordained for them by a philosophy of progress.

Montesquieu is as much the cofounder as the symptom of an eighteenth-century intellectual movement that went beyond the mere collection and classification of ethnographic data to inquire into the always-specific rules governing human communal life. Collating curiosities and variétes d’hommes from all the world’s cultures, as the Nuremberg encyclopedist Erasmus Francisci had done with great flair in the seventeenth century and as the Scottish polymath Lord Kames was still doing in 1778, was no longer enough.6 On the other hand, the constitutive idea of modern anthropology still lay in the future: the idea that human communities, particularly those of a “primitive” nature, can be characterized by their kinship networks. Montesquieu does not yet employ the concept of society that would be introduced by nineteenth-century sociology and is still familiar to us today. In the few passages where he speaks of société, he has in mind—in keeping with contemporary usage—“the fact of human interconnectedness as such,”⁷ that is, the opposite of the vita solitaria, asocial solitude. All this does nothing to alter the fact that in Montesquieu, as in those who followed in his footsteps, there begins to emerge a synthesizing approach to material culture and rule-governed coexistence in entities like “peoples” or “nations.”

Such an approach to non-Western societies was attempted on numerous occasions in the eighteenth century. It would be unfair to label them all categorically as “savage anthropology.”⁸ While this term may accurately describe Steller’s account of the Itelmen on Kamchatka, for example, European commentaries on the social hierarchy in China, say, or the Indian caste system have nothing specifically anthropological about them. Within the realm of literate, agrarian high civilizations, something like solidarity among the civilized was the order of the day. Non-European societies were drawn into the interpretive horizon of what was, in principle, already familiar. They might be alien, but they were still comparable to what was known. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that theories of a uniquely “oriental society” or “Asiatic mode of production” began to arise.9

CITIES

For most Europeans, cities were their first experience of Asia: above all, harbor towns such as Istanbul/Constantinople, Alexandria, Goa, Surat, Calcutta, Batavia, Macao, Canton, or Nagasaki. If these places had anything in common, then it was not some quintessentially Asiatic trait but an ethnic and cultural heterogeneity that was nowhere to be found in Europe at the time. Apart from Canton and especially Nagasaki, where they were prevented from mingling with the local population, Europeans formed just one element in a medley of skin colors, customs, and religions. Many of these trading hubs were migrant cities. Commerce lay less in the hands of a long-established local merchant class than in those of diaspora groups. Even in Canton, where the local Chinese were known for their business acumen and controlled the trade routes with Southeast Asia, Captain Krusenstern could observe in 1805:

Canton is particularly interesting to strangers as a great commercial mart, on account of the people assembled here from all parts of the globe. Besides Europeans of all nations, there are people of all the trading countries of Asia: Americans, Mahomedans, Hindostanees, Bengales, Parsees, &c. Most of these come by sea from India to Canton, and return in the same manner. Many have their agents at Canton, and remain constantly there, and do not, as the Europeans, pass the summer at Macao.¹⁰

As a Baltic German in Russian service, and thus not directly involved in the Canton trade, Krusenstern does not overlook the Asian communities in the south Chinese port city, as Western European travelers tended to do. These were even more firmly entrenched as they were there all year round.

Much the same could be said of most of the other great trading centers of Asia, including those in the interior of the continent such as Peshawar, whose colorful street life was memorably described by Mountstuart Elphinstone following his visit there in 1809.11 In Asiatic cities, religious tolerance was more the rule than the exception. It exceeded what was considered acceptable by European standards. In Turkish Smyrna in the 1670s, well before John Locke wrote his Essay on Toleration (1689), there were seven synagogues, three Catholic, three Greek Orthodox, and two Armenian churches as well as a chapel in the English, Dutch, and Genoese consulates.¹² A spirit of commercial enterprise and religious openness fostered the virtue of urbanity, which European observers were far from claiming as a monopoly. Alexander Hamilton, for example, took it to be particularly characteristic of the Arabs in Muscat, while Samuel Turner found it even in Bhutan, a land completely cut off from Western influence.¹³

Other than multiculturalism, oriental cities had few things in common that distinguished them from cities in Europe. In the eighteenth century, the great metropolises of Asia—Istanbul, Cairo, Peking, and Edo (Tokyo)—were unmistakably larger and more populous than their European rivals, London excepted. More remarkable still, there were a great many second-tier cities, especially in China, Japan, and parts of India. In China alone, according to Pater Le Comte, there were more than eighty towns the size of Lyon or Bordeaux. In 1696 he described a phenomenon that had yet to exist anywhere in Europe: urban sprawl on the lower reaches of the Yangzi River.¹⁴ Transportation in Asiatic cities relied to a lesser extent on noisy horse-drawn carriages. Partly for this reason, there were fewer paved roads. Whereas European cities before the era of civic planning seemed to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion, many Asiatic cities gave the impression of having been carefully set out. This was particularly true of Peking, which provided the model for most other Chinese cities with its quadratic layout. If you had seen one Chinese city, Du Halde maintained, you had seen them all.15

Ayudhya, the capital of Siam, was notable for its checkerboard grid of streets and canals.¹⁶ In theory if not always in practice, cities in the Ottoman Empire were set out in concentric circles around the main market and Great Mosque. In the Islamic East, the harmony of architecture, pleasure gardens, and fountains occasionally caught the traveler’s eye. This helped gain places like Damascus, Agra, or Isfahan (before its devastation by the Afghans in 1722) their reputation as earthly paradises. In the Orient, more of life was lived outdoors than in Europe, at any rate north of the Alps. The lively social atmosphere in streets and squares was often seen, described, and occasionally admired by travelers, as was the rare appearance of women in such public spaces. Finally, there were numerous comments about the excellent “policing” of oriental cities.¹⁷

Most descriptions of cities were impressionistic. Occasionally a solid topographical and architectural description was furnished, such as the account of Isfahan given by Chardin or that of Peking provided by the geographers Delisle and Pingré on the basis of Jesuit reports.¹⁸ Travelers like Thévenot or Niebuhr, who were unusually interested in the everday life of ordinary people, made richly detailed observations in laneways and markets. But only a few Europeans, mostly long-term residents of a particular city, were granted a glimpse behind the façade. Sociological analyses of a specific urban society were therefore rare. Even rarer were investigations that heeded the advice once proffered by Bernier: to observe cities not in isolation but in connection with their environment.¹⁹ Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin carried off this feat superbly with his description of Astrakhan.²⁰

BATAVIA’S COLONIAL SOCIOLOGY

A sociology of urban life could most easily be venutured where a large expatriate community allowed for greater ease of access. This was above all the case in Batavia. The capital of the VOC’s Asian empire was particularly interesting owing to its Janus face. On the one hand, it represented the attempt to replicate a Dutch townscape in the tropics. This gave rise, as the abbé Raynal inferred from several travel reports, to “one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”21 Magnificent coaches were as common here as in the cities of Europe.²² On the other hand, the Dutch colonialists had succumbed in their everyday life to what many saw as the corrupting influence of the equatorial climate and the Javanese environment. Of the ten thousand Europeans in Batavia, the abbé remarks again, around four thousand had “degenerated to a point that beggars belief.”²³ Morally upright visitors from the motherland such as the physician Nicolaas de Graaff, who came out to Batavia several times between 1640 and 1687 and described Batavian society at length and in great detail, were appalled by the worldly splendor and dissipation they encountered there among the Dutch: at the mistresses they kept and the bevy of Eurasian children they sired, at the way they embraced native customs such as the chewing of betel by Dutch ladies, at the idleness and ignorance of the womenfolk, and at their excessive cruelty towards slaves, who were expected to perform all manual labor.²⁴ Moreover, says de Graaf, Batavia is a popular refuge for good-for-nothings, loafers, bankrupts, failed students, and other dissolute elements who may expect to obtain a comfortable job in the colonial army where they are unlikely ever to see serious military action.²⁵

De Graaff’s pioneering work of colonial sociology condenses the impressions of earlier travelers into a synoptic image. Visitors in the eighteenth century, such as Pierre Poivre in the 1740s, essentially confirm the good doctor’s account of a mestizo society far removed from European models and standards of propriety. Through their foreignness, social relations in Batavia seemed especially suited to awaken a sociographical need. Those who came directly from Europe were greeted, not by the authentic strangeness they might have expected upon first landing in Asia, but by the often shockingly unexpected estrangement of an ethnically diverse class society operating against a Dutch late baroque backdrop. By the late eighteenth century, malaria and the decline of VOC trade in Asia had so sapped the vitality of the European population that the whites in Batavia, a town that struck Captain Cook in 1770 as a filthy, stinking hotbed of disease,26 gave the impression of having been given the kiss of death.²⁷

The members of the Macartney Mission, who stopped off at Batavia in March 1793 on their way to China, were alarmed to see Madeira, port wine, Bordeaux, and Dutch beer flowing in unhealthy quantities even over the breakfast table. They doubted the will to survive of a colonial community that recalled the later Roman Empire in its corruption and sybaritic excess.²⁸ Sir George L. Staunton described this culturally hybrid class with the disdainful condescension shown by an aggressively expansionist imperial power, convinced of its God-given civilizing mission, towards the betrayal of their civilization and race by those whose continuing rule rested exclusively on habit, bluff, and the ethnic and therefore political fragmentation of their colonial underlings: “The features and outlines of their faces are European; but the complexion, character, and mode of life, approach more to those of the native inhabitants of Java.”²⁹ There was no sign here of solidarity among “whites.” The sympathies of the British observers lay mainly with the local Chinese, who, although almost entirely without rights and constantly threatened with a recurrence of the great massacre of 1740, had energetically taken in hand the colony’s economic life and much of its foreign trade. The Chinese were hardworking, frugal, and family-minded; they displayed a proto-capitalist mentality and morality that, notwithstanding their weakness for opium and gambling, was more appealing to the British middle and upper classes than the decadent slovenliness of the Dutch colonial burghers. During the Napoleonic wars in 1811, when Sir Stamford Raffles assumed temporary command of Java as lieutenant-governor, it was not the Javans or Chinese who were the object of a British civilizing mission but the Dutch expatriates, whose poor example had long tarnished Europe’s reputation in Asian eyes.

CLOSE-UP: URBAN LIFE IN SYRIAN ALEPPO

No Asiatic colonial metropolis, not even Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras, attracted greater sociological interest in the eighteenth century than Batavia. Outside the colonies, few Europeans could gain sufficient insight into the everyday life of the various groups of a given urban population to paint a social portrait of a city.30 In any event, the statistical data and sociological concepts drawn on by researchers today were unavailable at the time.³¹ All the more remarkable is the comprehensive Natural History of Aleppo by the Scottish physician Alexander Russell, published in 1756. A considerably enlarged edition appeared in 1794, edited and expanded by Patrick Russell, who in 1753 had succeeded his half-brother as physician in the British factory in the Syrian city while Alexander was off in India making a name for himself as an expert on snakes.³² The project met with considerable interest and support. Samuel Johnson praised the first edition, while Johann Friedrich Gmelin, a scion of the famous Swabian dynasty of scholars, translated the second into German.³³ Carsten Niebuhr, Sir Joseph Banks, and Daniel Solander assisted Patrick Russell, a friend of Sir William Jones, William Robertson, and Adam Smith, in his revision of Alexander’s text. The concept of a “natural” history encompassed not only descriptions of climate, minerals, plants, and animals but also of urban society in all its aspects and ramifications. What it left out were monuments and antiquities—the subject matter of most Western accounts of oriental cities.

The Russell brothers were among the most methodologically careful writers on Asia of their time. Alexander had lived in Aleppo from 1740 to 1753, Patrick from 1750 to 1772. Their wealth of experience by no means predisposed them to offer generalizations about the Ottoman Empire, let alone the Orient as such. Alexander instead emphasized in his foreword to the first edition that the author’s knowledge was “confined to one city and its environs only.”³⁴ For all that they recognized the achievements of their predecessors, the two siblings identified the weakness of much of the earlier literature in the fact that observations of one place—Istanbul, for example—had too quickly been ascribed a more general validity. Furthermore, neither the distinctions between “the different orders of society” nor the changes in “national manners” over time had been given due consideration. The widespread view that nothing ever changed in the Orient stood in the way of an unprejudiced perception of reality.35 Such an awareness of the spatial, temporal, and social specificity of all observations stood opposed to fashionable, all-encompassing theories about a supposedly immobile and immutable East.

The Russells had a keen eye for the limited perspectives and prejudices of traveling Europeans. They were particularly mistrustful of the numerous Christian monks and pilgrims who hastened through Syria on their way to the Holy Land. They were well aware that only their own medical profession gave them access to a wider variety of milieux than was glimpsed by the ordinary traveler. This in turn allowed them to transform a monograph on the plague-ridden town’s flora, fauna, and epidemiological circumstances—Alexander’s original intention³⁶—into a far more ambitious social panorama of Aleppo. Of the 235,000 residents in 1753 (in Russell’s estimation—more recent research has cut the figure in half)³⁷ there were only fifteen colleagues in the English factory along with eight British private households, reduced to four by 1772. The factory doctor thus had plenty of time left over to pay calls on local patients.³⁸ Above all, the physicians were granted access to a number of the city’s harems, a sphere that otherwise remained totally off-limits to foreigners.

The work begins with an exceptionally careful description of the city: its streets and its squares, its buildings and its gardens, its climate and its supply of food from the surrounding countryside. Readers are guided methodically through the town and its agricultural hinterland, enabling them to paint a mental picture of Aleppo. The following sociographical chapters initially deal with “the inhabitants in general” (their demographic distribution, languages, appearance, clothing, social life) before examining individual ethnoreligious groups in greater detail: Muslims, “Franks,” native Christians, and Jews. The Russells do not restrict themselves to describing local customs, although this is what interests them most. They also inform readers about the city’s economic context as well as dedicating a long chapter to Turkish civic governance. In the “thickness” of their description, the sections on Europeans in Aleppo recall the best attempts at a colonial sociology of Batavia from de Graaff to Thunberg. The chapters on native milieux, meanwhile, are unique in eighteenth-century literature on Asia. Only the incomparable Chardin comes close, and Kaempfer could perhaps have achieved something similar on Japan had he been allowed to see more of the country. The same level of descriptive detail would not be reached until Sir Stamford Raffles’s description of Java from 1817 and the abbé Dubois’s book on India from the same year.

Even if the Russells cannot conceal their distaste for a range of Aleppan peculiarities, from the style of beard worn by the men to the obscenity of the puppet theater and the oppression of the peasantry,39 they still strive for a stance of objectivity and scholarly neutrality. There is hardly any negative stereotyping of the Arab Muslim population as “barbarians.” Time and again, the Orient is defended against its European critics and simplifiers: the official disdain for non-Muslims does nothing to prevent freedom of religion and conscience and a respectful treatment of Christian Europeans.⁴⁰ While it may be true in theory that women are held captive in the harem, this is not the case in practice.⁴¹ Men in Aleppo speak of their wives with greater decency and discretion than is customary in Europe.⁴² Opium smoking is by no means as widespread as believed. The authors continue in a manner typical of their acute sense of discernment:

It [opium smoking] prevails indeed more at Constantinopel than at Aleppo, where happily it is hitherto held almost equally scandalous as drinking wine, and practised by few openly, except by persons regardless of their reputation. The natives of Aleppo the least scrupulous in the use of opium are people of the Law; owing probably to the influence of example; for a new Cady coming annually from Constantinopel, it seldom happens that either he himself, or some of his officers, do not by their own practice, give a fresh sanction to a custom they have learnt at the capital, where the offence is regarded as venial and stands little in the way of preferment in that line.43

Those who consume alcohol in Aleppo never openly admit to doing so, but always plead medicinal grounds.

The authors continually emphasize the purposeful adaptation of mœurs to the specific circumstances in Syria. Their admiring description of public baths underscores this point, while at the same time allowing them to return to one of their favorite topics: the separation between private and public space.⁴⁴ The theory of oriental despotism had expressly denied such a separation, maintaining that the despot’s power extended over all realms of life, just as, conversely, there could be no possibilities for a meaningful social life between the household and the court. In Aleppo however, as is now shown, the public baths where women from all social levels and milieux intermingle form a kind of female public sphere. What Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had already observed in 1717⁴⁵ is now expressed more clearly:

But the Bagnio is almost the only public female assembly; it affords an opportunity of displaying their jewels and fine clothes, of meeting their acquaintance and of learning domestic history of various kinds; for particular Bagnios being more in vogue than others, the ladies are assembled from remote districts, and if accidentally placed near each other on the same Divan, it is reckoned sufficient for joining in confidential conversation, though they were not acquainted before.⁴⁶

Baths are a social microcosm. They have their own rites, symbols, hierarchies, division of labor, and taboos. The male equivalents are the coffee houses for the lower classes and, for the social elite, the reception halls of their residences, where they pay each other visits and discuss political as well as business matters. The private sphere of the harem is reserved not just for the ladies but also for the lord of the house. In its principal function, it is less a site of voluptuous sexuality (as envisaged by European male fantasy) than “a sanctuary into which only the most urgent business dares intrude.”47 The public sphere thus does not end at the doorstep, as it does for the European middle class, but at the threshold to the inner chambers.

The Natural History of Aleppo is also significant for the sketch it offers of a natural and social history of the passions. In contrast to the assumption of static national character types that were a dime a dozen in the literature on foreign countries, Alexander and Patrick Russell insist on a civilizing process that affects and involves the sexes and individual social groups within a nation in different ways. Thus Ottoman dignitaries (“the Osmanli”) are normally “courteous and polite,” not at all the imperious and vengeful patriarchs so often described in print and displayed on the European stage. They are generally friendly towards their social inferiors; only when contradicted do they give way to anger. With those of a higher station, however, they show themselves devoted and eager to please. If vulgar psychology explained despotism through fear of the ruler, the Russells know that emotional self-control plays a more important role:

they feel, but conceal their emotion. It is an habitual power of controlling the passions, to be acquired only by practice, and consequently is possessed in different degrees, proportionate to the occasions which individuals, in the progress of life, may have for exercising it. The Osmanli of middle age, who have risen slowly from obscurity, to eminent stations, possess this talent in a high degree.⁴⁸

The courtier must be an expert in affect management, regardless of whether he appears before the sultan in Istanbul or at the court of his representative, the pasha of Aleppo. Merchants or rural Arabs behave quite differently. The customary habitus of city-dwelling commoners is “an affected gravity,” ever liable to erupt into fits of rage or public disorder. Is there anything specifically Aleppan, Ottoman, or oriental about this? Here too we receive a sociological rather than an ethnological answer: very little, since the courtly character type is in principle much the same across different societies and civilizations; so too is the commercial habitus.49 If for example the Muslim and “Frankish” merchants in Aleppo could only overcome their mutual suspicion and bridge the social gap that had arisen on both sides, they would soon come “to think of one another in a more liberal manner.” But the Russells are aware that this will never happen, largely because the Jews and indigenous Christians are constantly stirring up the Europeans against the Muslims, their inveterate enemies.⁵⁰ Cultural misunderstandings work to undermine the intrinsically feasible solidarity of social function and class position.

While the Russells thus dispute the all-too-simple clichés of oriental despotism, they do not in principle refuse to broaden their depiction of local ways into a political sociology. In their reading, the chief characteristic of the politicial situation in the Ottoman Empire is the exercise of tyranny throughout the social hierarchy, not just at its apex. The pashas or governors under the sultan’s command act like absolute sovereigns, as do the agas below them, and so on. The repressive-servile type of the courtier is reproduced at every level, just as Montesquieu’s “principles” permeate all spheres of society. Whereas the “courtly vices” are concentrated in the capital city in the European monarchies, in the Ottoman Empire they proliferate in even the most farflung administrative outpost. And because the demand for luxury among the Ottoman upper class had increased over the course of the eighteenth century, illegal confiscations of property—more precisely, the extortion of wealthy subjects through protection rackets—had grown apace.⁵¹

So much for the doctors’ general diagnosis. In a later chapter on the government of Aleppo, this image is then refined and relativized: it turns out that the pashas are not omnipotent after all; they are not permitted to pass the death sentence or confiscate private property; and their edicts can be appealed in Istanbul with a fair chance of success.⁵² The Russells do not allow their freedom of judgment to be impaired by European ideological fashions, while their strict empiricism spares them the problems that can arise when firsthand observation is used as the basis of “philosophical” reasoning—a trap into which the great Volney had maneuvered himself. Categories like tyranny and despotism, overburdened with a long history of occidental semantics and Orientalist fantasy, are incapable of capturing the realities of social power, such as the role of notables, patrons, and other leaders who operate outside the structure of the state. Such civic worthies are at once the exploiters and the spokespeople of their local communities. They occupy precarious positions as intermediaries that they can turn as much to their own advantage as to the public good.53 An analysis in categories such as “interests” and “coalitions”—categories that modern political science has yet to supersede—allows the Russells to banish the chimera of oriental despotism even more successfully than had Anquetil-Duperron or Mouradgea d’Ohsson with their legalistic argumentation. Even though the lofty principles of Islamic-Ottoman law were frequently violated, the real antagonism of the contending power factions leads to a situation where, “notwithstanding the frequent violations of the people’s rights, the ordinary course of affairs proceeds more equitably than might be expected in a government where the people are commonly supposed to be the mere slaves of despotic power.”⁵⁴ In the end, popular unrest very often acted as a corrective. Hunger strikes or protests against excessive taxation invariably caused whichever pasha was in charge of the affected province to lose favor with the sultan.

Alexander and Patrick Russell regarded conditions in Syria—and, although they wisely avoided generalizations, in the Ottoman Empire as a whole—with an unexampled cool-headedness that never crossed over into cynicism and indifference. Nobody else so successfully teased apart the interwoven strands of state, society, religion, ethnicity, and national character. The subtlety that Montesquieu developed in his theory, but then largely revoked through the coarseness of his concept of despotism, is preserved in The Natural History of Aleppo. The text, far removed from the alienating simplifications of a “savage anthropology,” is one of the forgotten founding documents of European sociology. Whether its individual findings have been confirmed by today’s Orientalists is as irrelevant a question as whether, say, Tocqueville’s analyses of America were “correct.” More than two centuries on, the voice of the Russell brothers is still worth listening to—not least because the authors, like Carsten Niebuhr or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her many impressionistic letters from Constantinople,55 communicate a spirit of warm human generosity. Concluding a string of critical remarks about the dark side of socialization in the Ottoman upper class, the Russells assure their readers that nothing lies further from their intention than to purvey a collective stereotype of Turks and Arabs. During their three decades in Aleppo, they had met with “persons of the utmost honor and integrity” at all levels of society.⁵⁶

SLAVES

In 1729 Mehmet Efendi traveled to France as ambassador of the Sublime Porte. One of his tasks was to secure the release of Ottoman slaves being held in French galleys in direct contravention of international law.⁵⁷ These people, eighty of whom were eventually freed, had been slaves in Istanbul before being captured by French warships. Several decades later, Turkish prisoners-of-war were still reportedly being held in slavery in Italy and other European countries.⁵⁸ In 1763 Adam Smith had to admit that in Scotland, many of those employed in mines and saltworks were living in slave-like conditions.⁵⁹ In the Age of Enlightenment, not all of Europe between the Elbe and the Pyrenees was thus spared the institution of slavery. In 1771, John Millar discussed slavery as something of a universal stage in societal evolution and pointed out three individual paths to absolute dependency: captivity, voluntary submission, and judicial sentencing.⁶⁰ He makes clear that slavery is not restricted to earlier barbaric ages. The sentence of a judge presupposes the civilizing achievement of a judical system, and modern slavery almost invariably is justified and regulated by some kind of legal framework.

Yet it is still remarkable that by the mid-eighteenth century, almost the only part of the world where slavery was not the fate of a considerable proportion of the population was Western Europe. By stark contrast, during the same period the transatlantic slave trade and the slave economy in Europe’s American colonies were in full swing. On the sugar islands of the Caribbean, especially the French and British colonies, there were slaveholding regimes of a brutality unmatched since the days of the late Roman Republic. Enlightenment philosophers from Montesquieu to Condorcet had forcefully condemned these arrangements yet been powerless to change them. Public attitudes only started to shift—and the momentum for emancipation to build—with the Quaker-founded abolitionist movement. Its most important milestones were the ban on the African slave trade by Parliament in London in 1807 and the release of 780,000 slaves in the British Empire in 1834.

Against this background there is little more to note than that slavery, which was present to some degree almost everywhere in Asia, was not viewed as an especially foreign or abhorrent aspect of Asiatic societies. The most critical commentaries were occasioned by two phenomena: on the one hand, the extraordinarily harsh form of slavery (by Asian standards) inflicted on people from the “Outer Islands” of Indonesia—but never Javans—in Dutch Batavia;61 on the other, the so-called “oriental slave trade,” whereby Arab dealers supplied the harems of the entire Islamic world with “black eunuchs,” principally from Ethiopia. Countries such as China or Vietnam were barely touched by this international eunuch market, however. They could more than cover their domestic needs—here largely concentrated on the imperial or royal court—by castrating their own subjects.⁶² Moreover, eunuchs were no Afro-Asian speciality. They had played a significant role in Byzantium until at least the eleventh century, while church music and opera in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy relied on a steady stream of castrati from the lower classes.

From the Kirghiz Steppe to Burma, from Turkey to Japan, travelers constantly registered slave-like conditions of dependency. Yet with the possible exception of a few small regions in Central Asia, these were nowhere seen as socioeconomically predominant. Even the Orient’s harshest critic could not deny that wherever one looked in the world, only Europeans were in charge of slaveowning societies. There was no such thing as plantation slavery in Asia. Most slaves, it was reported, were employed in the home, often held for limited terms in bondage for debt. By and large, commentators found slaves in Asia to be better treated than those subject to European colonial regimes. They were assigned domestic duties and were frequently valued, even treasured, as sources of prestige. However, as the successes of abolitionism gradually blotted out the greatest stain on Europe’s moral reputation, the tone of pronouncements on the remaining forms of slavery in Asia became correspondingly darker.63

While the increasingly vulgarized theory of despotism insisted that subjects in most Asiatic countries were the very opposite of free citizens, the application of a more narrow juridical or sociological concept of slavery brought to light the relative unimportance of slavery in Asia. Christoph Meiners sought to explain this apparent contradiction by arguing that the worst despots tended to treat their slaves the best, since they made ideal tools for oppressing the populace.⁶⁴ Grand theories of slavery, such as those put forward by Turgot and Linguet, Adam Smith, and John Millar, had few Asiatic examples to draw on. Indirectly, though, they could shed light on conditions in Asia. Thus, Turgot claimed in 1766 that farming with an enslaved workforce became economically unviable once large territorial states were formed.⁶⁵ In 1763 Adam Smith demonstrated that tenant farming was always economically superior to slavery. Citing the Mughal Empire, Iran, and Turkey as examples, he pointed out that absolute monarchs would need to move against the institution of agrarian slavery if they wanted to weaken the elites who profited by it; the “arbitrary” character of rule was shown here precisely in the measures taken against private property. Slaves were worst off, he contended, in a slaveholding democracy.⁶⁶ John Crawfurd, a later student of the Scottish Enlightenment, argued that a full-blown despotism best guaranteed its security and taxation revenue by preserving the personal freedoms of smallholding farmers.⁶⁷ The most conspicuous example he adduced for this was Java, well known to him as a diplomat.

Whatever attempts at explanation were offered, Asia, the homeland of political unfreedom in the eyes of many, was clearly not a continent of personal unfreedom. This distinction pertained even in Siam, where the king exploited his subjects as a conscript labor force—something that would have been unthinkable in early modern China. The inhabitants of Siam, Simon de La Loubère explained in 1691, were either free or enslaved:

The difference of the King of Siam’s Slaves from his Subjects of free condition is, that he continually employs his Slaves in personal labours, and maintains them; whereas his free Subjects only owe him six months service every year, but at their own expense.68

Despite having to perform onerous duties in countries like Siam and Burma, nowhere in Asia were slaves so disenfranchised or so dependent on the goodwill of their masters as on the Caribbean Islands or in the tsarist empire. Likewise, there were no Asian countries where slaves formed a majority of the population. Theorists of despotism thus had no factual basis for claiming that Asians typically languished under the yoke of slavery.

The most perceptive “philosophical” observers of history were interested in a very different phenomenon: the rise of slaves to political power. The most striking example of this was offered by the Mamluks in Egypt.⁶⁹ From the ninth century onwards, enslaved members of Turkish nomadic tribes from the steppes of Central Asia had served the Abbasid caliphs as a Praetorian guard. Building up their power over time, by 1250 they had established their own state in Egypt. It collapsed in 1516–17 under an Ottoman invasion. In the early eighteenth century, a Mamluk political revival got underway. By midcentury, something like a neo-Mamluk military caste had come to dominate society and rule Egypt under largely nominal Ottoman suzerainty. European observers were fascinated by a social group that for centuries had reproduced itself, not by the usual means of procreation and aristocratic lineage, but through a constant supply of young Christian slaves from Georgia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans.⁷⁰ Uprooted and foreign-born young slaves ruled the country in a situation of permanent usurpation: they had usurped both the legitimate power of the sultan and the social status of a homegrown nobility. Volney, who studied them closely on his travels, called them “a slave militia turned despots” and saw their constant infighting as the realization of something like a Hobbesian state of total anarchy.71 Destroyed in 1805 by Muhammad Ali, the new autocrat on the Nile, the Mamluk regime appeared as a curious throwback to the dark Middle Ages, but also as an example of the paradoxical coexistence of the most tyrannical order with the most rampant disorder.

SCHOLARS AND AESTHETES IN POWER

In European eyes, Mamluk rule looked typically “oriental” because it was not based on the principle of hereditary aristocracy. The son of a Mamluk did not stand to inherit the political and social status of his father, although as a scion of the ruling class his material needs were provided for. Young men imported into Egypt as slaves, accepted into the Islamic community, and given military training were constantly rising to high positions of power. Did this not prove, once again, that the stabilizing, civilizing element of aristocracy was lacking in oriental societies, or at best was restricted to the descendants of religious founders like Confucius and Muhammad? Had not Francis Bacon and Niccolò Machiavelli already taken the absence of a nobility to be a chief characteristic of despotic states?

If Europeans ever experienced a cognitive shock in their encounters with Asia that prompted a comparative sociological relativization of their own social normality, then it was the seventeenth-century insight that highly sophisticated civilizations could survive and even flourish without an aristocracy. The most obvious example was China under the Ming and Qing dynasties. Here matters could be described very simply: leaving aside a politically powerless Manchu “banner aristocracy” that was utterly dependent on imperial largesse and grew ever more irrelevant as the eighteenth century progressed, there was no such thing as aristocracy in China. There were no dynastic magnates, no vassals, no patrimonial privileges, no feudal dues, no great landholdings, no courtly society outside the imperial power center, no code of chivalry, and no estates-general or parliaments. When an English children’s book from 1817 nonetheless attested to “nine orders of nobility in China,”72 this was not a complete fabrication, for the bureaucratic hierarchy (which was indeed made up of nine ranks) fulfilled many of the functions performed by the aristocracy in European society—or at any rate by the noblesse de robe of the French ancien régime.

This was a view shared by some of the Jesuit fathers. The Jesuits had been the first to introduce European readers to China’s unique social order. Their reports convey far less a sense of perplexed astonishment than was presumably experienced by other travelers upon encountering a high culture with no aristocracy. The Jesuits themselves were a post-feudal meritocratic elite who derived their sense of self and their claims to status from their intellectual ability. The same could be said of the Chinese “literati,” who must therefore have appeared to the padres as congenial colleagues, if not mirror images of themselves. The “mandarins” they encountered at court had spent years mastering the classical texts in preparation for the gruelling and highly competitive state examinations. These were conducted at three levels: regional, provincial, and central. Success at the first level entitled the candidate to the lowest rank, termed the “Baccalaureus” by several European commentators. The scholar could now take his place in the legally privileged elite group of the shenshi or “gentry.” Only if he went on to achieve success in the central examination, gaining his “doctoral degree” in the presence of the emperor himself, was he now qualified—although by no means guaranteed—to secure one of the few bureaucratic offices in the territorial administration of this enormous country and at the imperial court. These coveted offices, like the title of gentry, were nonhereditary. Each generation had to prove its worth by passing through the gigantic apparatus of the state examination system.⁷³

These conditions were without parallel in Europe; at most, they recalled career prospects within the church.⁷⁴ They had already been attentively described in the wonderfully detailed reports on China by Matteo Ricci (1615), the founder of the mission there, and the Portuguese missionary Alvarez Semedo (1642), who had traveled through much of the empire between 1613 and 1637.75 Semedo insisted on calling the meritocratic elite of “mandarins” a “nobility”: a nobility of intellectual and aesthetic virtue.⁷⁶ An anonymous German author put the matter in a nutshell in 1679: “They [the Chinese] associate nobility with the person and not with his blood.”⁷⁷ And Mendoza, in the first great modern book on China, had already recognized in 1585 that no Western analogy quite captured what made China so peculiar: the mandarins were something like aristocrats for the Chinese, although we would consider them to be scholars.⁷⁸ Two social roles that were kept apart in Europe were thus conflated in Ming dynasty China.

Those who spoke of the mandarins as China’s nobility did so either for didactic purposes, to make a bewilderingly foreign institution more comprehensible to their readers, or because they viewed Chinese society as a variant of a universally valid norm and simply could not imagine a social order without an aristocracy. Such misgivings subsided over the course of the eighteenth century. Ever more authors acknowledged the unique make-up of the social system in China. Those searching for an ideal community particularly approved of the union of a social upper class with a bureaucratic elite in the Middle Kingdom. Here there was no split between an old landed aristocracy and a new urban functionary elite such as that which had accompanied the development of the early modern state in Europe. Put differently, in China inherited wealth played no role as a source of status and power outside the state. Extraordinarily elegant and almost geometrically pleasing in its design, the system was completely defined by the polarity of a competitive machinery that selected qualified candidates from below and an imperial will that deployed them from above, particularly following the elimination of irrational impediments to its smooth functioning such as the eunuch tyranny of the late Ming.

Above all, seventeenth-century men of letters were entranced by the idea that in China erudition and lifelong learning were rewarded by social success. Only naïve enthusiasts could believe, however, that a disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was what lay behind such studiousness. The social order was set up in such a way that the only chance of improving one’s lot lay in education. “Since the fate of the Chinese depends entirely on their merits,” Le Comte wrote in 1696, “they devote all their lives to study.”79 In the eighteenth century, the idea of a competent, corruption-free state administration that genuinely worked for the public good fascinated European observers. It attracted authors of the caliber of Justi and Quesnay, who like most of their contemporaries drew their information mainly from Du Halde.⁸⁰ The objection that China was idealized in these “Sinophile” texts may be correct, but it misses the point. On the one hand, Chinese bureauracy in the first half of the eighteenth century was indeed perhaps the best functioning in the world; its idealization was therefore not a flight of fancy, merely an extrapolation from reality. On the other hand, reports from the Middle Kingdom—summarized by Du Halde in 1735 and further popularized in 1749 in the eighth volume of Prévost’s travel compendium—gave European theorists their first opportunity to come to grips in a detailed way with the problems of administration and governance (in the sense given the term by political science today). More interested in a political system’s capacity to deliver results than in its legitimacy, theorists such as the French physiocrats and the German Polizeywissenschaftler regularly cited China as a model polity. It seemed to demonstrate just how much a well-ordered paternalistic state could achieve. Confucian political ethics, whose key works became available in translation from the 1680s, offered surprising and independent support for the old European idea of the monarch as the good shepherd of his flock.

Once it could no longer be denied that China lacked an aristocracy, it depended on the individual commentator’s view of the European nobility whether this absence was found to be regrettable or not. Those following in the footsteps of Edmund Burke saw the ownership of great estates as a sign of advanced civilization and a necessary guarantor of stability and social harmony.⁸¹ Those who joined James Mill and other exponents of Benthamite utilitarianism in seeing the nobility as a class of parasites, by contrast, welcomed its absence as a crucial step forward on the path to modernity. In the background stood the more general question of whether it was justified to separate power and prestige from inherited wealth and attach it to learning and scholarship instead.82 Increasingly, that question received a positive answer.

At the same time, reports began to accumulate of growing corruption among Chinese authorities. By the mid-eighteenth century, corruption seemed to have reached endemic proportions under the Qianlong emperor.⁸³ So long as the trial of the Indian governor-general Warren Hastings—followed with the keenest interest throughout Europe—kept the question of British corruption on the table, it was difficult to decry Chinese impropriety without appearing hypocritical.⁸⁴ Following the clean-up and restructuring of British administration in India under Lord Cornwallis in the 1790s, however, a new and superior form of rational state organization seemed to have emerged in Asia to rival the long-tainted Chinese bureaucracy. Its driving forces were noninheriting younger sons of the Scottish, English, and Irish landed aristocracy. As a rationally organized and scrupulously fair administration under aristocratic leadership, it stood opposed to the irrational government of China by sedentary pen-pushers mired in corruption and incompetence. What was viewed as inferior was not so much the idea of Chinese bureaucracy, which was hardly ever criticized in principle, as its degradation in actual administrative practice.

The lettered aristocracy or scholarly elite was the most striking idiosyncrasy of Chinese societal organization. What could be said about the remainder of society? The Universal History identified three classes in China: the mandarins, the literati, and the plebeians.⁸⁵ The difference between the officials (the “mandarins”) and the far-larger talent pool from which they were recruited (the “literati”) was here clearly seen and perhaps even overstated. But what were the distinctive characteristics of the “plebeians”? That they were not segmented into hermetically sealed castes, as many observers had assumed based on their knowledge of India, was made crystal clear by Pater Parennin in a long letter sent from Peking in September 1735.86 Unfortunately, the letter came too late to add sociological weight to Du Halde’s China encyclopedia, which appeared in the same year. Parennin warned his European readers against unwittingly transferring categories like “caste” or “tribe” from one Asian country to another, but he also emphasized the value of comparison. Precisely the comparison with Europe revealed that—leaving the mandarinate to one side—Chinese society, just like European societies, was made up of merchants, innkeepers, and handworkers as well as an underclass of vagabonds, outsiders, and outlaws.⁸⁷ Hardly any livelihoods were inherited. No Chinaman was forced by law or custom to take up his father’s trade, and few did so of their own free will. A laborer or artisan who had saved enough money strove to become a merchant and later to invest whatever wealth he may have acquired through trade in preparing his sons for the state examinations.⁸⁸ That the Chinese were industrious businesspeople was evident to all who saw them in Southeast Asia, Macao, or Canton. In China trade was allowed to develop freely. The economy as a whole was unencumbered by a leisured and unproductive aristocracy.⁸⁹

The botanist and agronomist Pierre Poivre, one of the few eighteenth-century travelers to show an interest in Chinese agriculture, expressed his admiration for its productivity and what one might call its modernity in lectures held in Lyon in 1763 and 1764. In his view China, and to a lesser extent Cochinchina as well, were successful agrarian societies that had proved themselves capable of feeding a growing population; they were so successful, in fact, that they might serve Europe as a model in many respects. The state vigorously promoted farming. In China there was neither slavery (as in Siam, Malaya, and the European colonies) nor despotic primary ownership of the land, only free labor on the basis of secure private property. Idleness was disdained even in the most elevated circles; women made a productive contribution and were not hidden away in harems; the tax burden was tolerable and easy to predict; upward social mobility was barely hindered by accidents of birth allotting penury to some and privilege to others; valuable land was not wasted, as in Europe, on aristocratic hunting grounds or on raising more horses than were needed.90

Poivre obviously shared Quesnay’s idealization of China; indeed, he was one of his physiocratic followers. Nonetheless, his analysis is not mistaken in its general tendency. He only exaggerates the profile of a society characterized by nonfeudal agrarian relations, a high degree of social mobility and a widepread work ethic: China as the utopia of bourgeois free enterprise in Asia. Goethe perceived something similar when, having read a Chinese novel recently translated by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, he remarked to his amanuensis, Johann Peter Eckermann, on January 31, 1827, that he found the characters entirely understandable and familiar: “With them, everything is sensible, bourgeois, without great passion and poetic verve, and their behavior therefore has much in common with my Hermann and Dorothea and the English novels of Richardson.”⁹¹

CASTES: RELIGIOUS STRAITJACKET OR SOCIAL UTOPIA?

Whether or not there was an aristocracy and what should be made of it was the subject of lively debate for other Asian countries as well. The results were never clear-cut, as a few samples may suffice to indicate. The social system of Tonkin seemed the most similar to the Chinese, although its hereditary class of military mandarins formed something like a nobility. Society there was strictly divided into mandarins and subjects, it was stated in 1807.⁹² In Burma space for “aristocratic commonwealths” was found within a despotic system.⁹³ Together with Iran, Siam was generally considered to be the most despotic state in all Asia. Here, as in China, there was no hereditary aristocracy, yet the machinery for social advancement provided in China by the examination system and mandarinate was also lacking. As a result, social standing was determined by such fickle forces as commercial success and royal whim. As one of the leading experts on the country put it: “It is the richest man who is respected as the most noble, and true merit is estimated according to the superiority of fortune and the extent of favor shown by the ruler.”94 Chardin’s finding that there was no aristocracy in Iran was widely repeated on the strength of his incontestable authority. Those who climbed the social ladder in Iran, Fryer maintained, owed their success to a miracle, not to their own efforts.⁹⁵ In Indonesia, nobility was not to be expected according to the theory of despotism, though the indefatigable Dr. Crawfurd still managed to describe it.⁹⁶

The question of aristocracy in the Ottoman Empire was extensively debated. It was agreed that there was no hereditary aristocracy there. Hammer-Purgstall was prepared to acknowledge a kind of aristocracy of merit, nothing more.⁹⁷ An investigation of the proto-sociological literature on the Ottoman Empire brings to light an insight that has been hidden by our focus on the problem of despotism: even those who conjured up the despot’s heavy hand could not help but recognize the comparatively high incidence of upward mobility. In the mid-sixteenth century the imperial ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the most influential European authority on the golden age of the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent, had already painted the portrait of a meritocratic society in which the path to high office stood open to the worthy. In a much-quoted passage, first published in 1581, he assured his readers that “those who hold the highest posts under the Sultan are very often the sons of shepherds and herdsmen” and proud of their modest background. “They do not consider that good qualities can be conferred by birth or handed down by inheritance, but regard them partly as the gift of heaven and partly as the product of good training and constant toil and zeal.”⁹⁸ Like everyone else who expressed their admiration for this kind of meritocratic “open elite,” Busbecq was pursuing an antiaristocratic agenda. He did not overlook the main drawback of such an arrangement: everything depended on the autocrat’s sound judgment, his ability to pick the right people for the top positions in state and society.

This analysis was confirmed time and again. The Ottoman Empire boasted a mobile, competitive society in which the “virtuous burgher” (le bourgeois vertueux) stood in high repute.99 Merchants, including numerous members of minorities such as Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, had a fair chance of making their own fortunes. Gibbon and others praised the Janissaries, at least at their apogee, as a post-feudal corps of crack troops.¹⁰⁰ Although organized quite differently from China, the Ottoman Empire showed similar meritocratic features that distinguished both systems from the stricter and less permeable social hierarchies prevailing in large parts of Europe.

Yet the opposite extreme to social fluidity could also be found in Asia: a strictly regimented, hierarchical society where people were bound for life to the position assigned to them at birth. The vertical social mobility that impressed many European observers of China and the Ottoman Empire was here conspicuous in its absence. This, at any rate, was how commentators viewed the society of Hindu India, which in many parts of the country coexisted with that of the Muslim conquerors without the two spheres ever coming into alignment, let alone amalgamating.

In the seventeenth century, the more mobile and open conditions in China and the Ottoman Empire were startlingly unfamiliar from the viewpoint of a Europe that was still largely stratified into sharply defined estates. In the course of the eighteenth century, by contrast, when social structure in the more socioeconomically advanced countries of Europe became less rigid, the ossified Indian caste system increasingly came to be seen as both alien and objectionable. The European tendency to engage with the outside world by means of conceptual opposites contributed to this perception of incommensurable strangeness even in a world beyond magic and miracles. India, above all, was transformed from the stuff of oriental fairytale into a paradigm of sociological alterity. This was mainly a matter of evolving terminology.

Until Montesquieu and the Scottish and Göttingen Enlightenment, early European attempts to describe and apprehend the social reality of non-European civilizations had used the same concepts that were applied to Europe as well: estate, order, nobility, peasant, état, rank, and so on. The example of China showed that such concepts risked assimilating a foreign reality to what was already known and familiar, thereby obliterating the foreignness that had drawn interest to it in the first place. Yet at least since the first Jesuit reports, attentive observers had been quite capable of capturing the differentia specifica of a non-European society through the modified application of European concepts. Alongside this there emerged concepts of European origin that nonetheless referred exclusively to Asiatic conditions and had no referent in European reality: “mandarin,” for example. Many originated with the earliest European observers of Asia, the Portuguese.

One such concept was that of “caste.” This word had at first been widely and flexibly used to denote many possible human collectives in Asia. It was not until the eighteenth century that the semantic elements of segregation, internal homogeneity, or even biological purity were pushed into the foreground, causing the term’s meaning to become narrower and more precise. This too did not yet mean that castes were seen as something typically and exclusively Indian. Up to Max Weber and beyond, “caste” could be defined as a culturally neutral sociological category, for instance as a special case of the concept “class.” Thus Conrad Malte-Brun spoke of caste in 1812 as “a hereditary class that is exclusively engaged in a particular occupation.”101 Although he found this phenomenon confined to Asia, he identified it not just in India but in Iran, Arabia, and Egypt as well. In 1835 Frédéric de Rougemont, a historical geographer who took extraordinary care with his terminology, ventured the following definition: “A class is a caste if birth irrevocably determines the way of life (genre de vie) and social rank of the individual.”¹⁰² In principle, such castes could feature in very different types of societies.

By the time Rougemont was writing, however, two interrelated ideas had prevailed: firstly, that “caste” was something typically Indian and secondly, that the phenomenon was intimately linked with the native religion, now dubbed “Hinduism”—a coverall term that had no indigenous equivalent.¹⁰³ This exoticization or perhaps anthropologization of Indian sociology proceeded gradually during the eighteenth century. It was no mere figment of the Western imagination, nor an arbitrary imposition of alien categories onto a social world whose patterns and logic remained inscrutable to European observers. What happened was more complicated and occurred within an epistemic triangle. Firstly, there was that complex mosaic of social formations that, to this day, makes up “Indian society,” in other words: the incontrovertible reality of power and hierarchy, of social inclusion and exclusion, of unevenly distributed life chances. Secondly, Indian groups and individuals had their own highly diversified and contradictory interpretations of social reality, interpretations that seeped into the perceptions formed by foreign observers. And thirdly, these observers brought with them their own conceptual equipment that, through comparison and analogy, helped to make sense of a social world that was strange though hardly less complex than conditions in Europe at the same time. European observers were particularly intrigued by the contrast between high upward mobility in China and the freezing of vertical mobility in India where—not just among the Hindu population—hereditary caste status could not be changed by individual effort or preferment. The only hope for advancement lay in a slow, long-term elevation of the collective status of one’s caste in the overall social hierarchy. European countries during the incipient transition to bourgeois society occupied a place between these extremes, moving in a “Chinese” direction from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the very time when meritocratic mechanisms in the Chinese Empire began to lose their efficacy. In the same process, an India under European rule became, in European eyes, stranger than it had ever been before, at least as far as its society was concerned.

The first account of an Indian society to be based on firsthand observation over many years was written by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg. From 1706 until his death in 1719 at the age of thirty-six, he was active as a Pietist missionary in the small Danish colony of Tranquebar (south of Madras).104 Ziegenbalg learned to speak and read the local language, Tamil, with great fluency. In close contact with natives, he undertook extensive social and cultural research as a participant observer. Only a few of the reports he sent to Europe were published at the time. The editors at mission central in Halle made sure that Ziegenbalg’s all-too-understanding attitude towards the Indians and their social and religious life did not reach the public uncensored. Ziegenbalg’s masterpiece, the great monograph Malabarisches Heidentum (Malabar Heathendom), had been sent to Halle in manuscript form in 1711; it was kept there under lock and key until it was finally published in 1926. Ziegenbalg was less interested in the social organization of the Tamils than in their religion and other aspects of their life and ideas. All the same, something akin to a sociology of southwest India can still be distilled from his brief remarks.105

Ziegenbalg found that the social cosmos he was studying was primarily structured around a multitude of occupational groups. He was fascinated by the equal opportunities for participating in public affairs that all these groups were afforded. This led him to place greater emphasis on the openness and flexibility of Tamil society than on its character as a strictly segmented, coercive order.¹⁰⁶ He rarely speaks of “castes,” never of a “caste system.” The (South) India of 1700, as presented by Ziegenbalg, was thus a kind of “open” society, no different fundamentally from the Chinese and Ottoman social orders described by his contemporaries. Corporatively structured Europe with its guilds and estates was hardly more modern in comparison.¹⁰⁷

The simplistic image of India as a world of self-contained castes that from the mid-eighteenth century came to dominate European perceptions arose on the basis of reports whose authors could seldom benefit from Ziegenbalg’s rich experience and linguistic expertise. Montesquieu gave this image forceful expression in a laconic remark: in India, unlike in Europe, the social order was defined by religion. This led to a situation where the individual castes regarded each other with a kind of horror born of a sense of religious propriety (Montesquieu plays with the words honneur and horreur): “A certain honor established by religious prejudices in the Indies makes the various castes hold one another in horror.”¹⁰⁸ With that, the natural hierarchy regulating other societies was suspended: there were Indians who for reasons of caste affiliation felt dishonored if they had to eat with their king. Noblesse oblige, the sense of paternalistic obligation felt by European higher-ups towards those less fortunate than themselves, is absent here too.

As so often, Voltaire is more cautious. He emphasizes how difficult it is to make valid generalizations about non-Muslim India. The subcontinent is “inhabited by twenty different nations whose manners and religions show few similarities.”109 Over the following decades, commentators shuttled to and fro between these two broad approaches: Voltaire stood for a more discriminating view of regional cultures that refused to see India as Europe’s Other, Montesquieu for a more sweeping, vigorously generalizing approach that posited the existence of a homogeneous Indian civilization with the caste system, the subcontinent’s most characteristic institution, at its center.¹¹⁰

Information about the lifeworld of the non-Muslim majority was drawn from a wide range of scattered European sources. During the eighteenth century no large-scale summative work on South Asia appeared that was comparable in stature to Chardin on Iran, Du Halde on China, or La Loubère on Siam. Not only did the great Indian manuscript by the Protestant Ziegenbalg remain inaccessible, so too did the original version of the Mœurs et coutumes des Indiens (1777) by the Jesuit father Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux, subsequently quarried in 1817 by the unscrupulous abbé Dubois. The Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, which the Jesuits dispatched from India, therefore had to be studied separately and augmented by Dutch, English, and French sources for want of handy summaries.¹¹¹ This was the only way that even a minimally adequate impression of Indian society could be gained by European scholars. In Jesuit letters and travel reports, many of the Indian castes that would go on to be explored in twentieth-century anthopology and sociology were described or at least mentioned for the first time.¹¹²

Those wanting to present a rough outline of Indian society often made do with the classification into four major caste groupings or varna (in European texts sometimes called “estates”): spiritually exalted Brahmins, warriors and rulers, traders, and manual laborers, often in a servile position.113 The abbé Raynal memorably depicted such a four-caste society in his portrait of India. Castes, he informed his sizeable readership, had existed unchanged since time immemorial. While they demonstrated the incomparable precociousness of Indian high culture, they also presented the greatest possible barrier to the “natural progress of society.”¹¹⁴ Raynal, who often calls castes “classes” (which in relation to the varna is not entirely false), emphasizes the religiously sanctioned impermeability of the social hierarchy while also pointing out ways in which it could be bypassed: either temporarily on journeys of pilgrimage, where rules prohibiting intercaste contact could not be rigorously enforced, or permanently by taking on the “monastic” status of a fakir.¹¹⁵

Raynal, a radical and sometimes maverick proponent of Enlightenment values, was in 1770 still remarkably measured in his critique of the caste system, which he presented as a kind of exacerbated class society. A few years later, the economist Adam Smith and the natural scientist and traveler Pierre Sonnerat pronounced more damning judgments. Smith took the castes to be an important (although by no means the decisive) factor retarding India’s economic development, a deplorable systemic flaw that falsified the natural yield on capital and the market price of labor.¹¹⁶ Sonnerat, who appears to have seen little of the country itself on his journey to India, denounced castes as an expression of collective irrationality and a violation of man’s “natural equality.”¹¹⁷

A remarkable link between the two objections, the economic and the philosophical, was made by August Hennings, an acolyte of Raynal’s and friend of Moses Mendelssohn’s. As a Danish public servant, Hennings had access to unpublished or untranslated reports of the Danish-Pietist mission in Tranquebar. Hennings was full of praise for the Indians’ and especially the Tamils’ natural aptitude for science, the arts, and handicrafts. Such talents were still in evidence here or there but were coming—in his view at least—to be ever more imperfectly realized. No anthropological reasons lay behind this; human agency was solely to blame. Society had been split up into self-perpetuating castes, which Hennings interprets not as timeless religious institutions but as historical instruments of class domination; despotism, exacerbated in large parts of India by Muslim and especially European conquest, further intensified the process of social atomization. As a consequence, the Indian mind and soul had atrophied and social productivity had stymied. Hennings places the responsibility for this squarely and solely on the “barbarism of the government,”

which instead of encouraging sociability, utterly severs the bonds of society, and instead of stimulating people to common reflection, keeps them isolated or cut off, as it were. That is why thirty Indians are incapable of accomplishing the work of ten Europeans, they have almost nothing in the way of tools, machines and the like, and taste and inventiveness have dried up entirely.118

Unlike Raynal, whom he otherwise admired for his anticolonial stance, the Enlightenment radical Hennings thus did not see the caste system as a time-honored, quintessential, and ineradicable element of Indian civilization that condemned the latter to perpetual stagnation, but rather as a sociopathological aberration to be eliminated through reform or even revolution. Starting from a principle of equality that owed less to natural law than to Christian conviction, the high EIC official Charles Grant came to a similar finding in 1792: the caste system was an instrument of extreme slavery.¹¹⁹

Despite such harsh judgments, it is astonishing how many defenders the Indian caste system nonetheless found in the Age of Enlightenment. Edmund Burke admired what today might be called the identity-forming power of caste affiliation.¹²⁰ The abbé Perrin, an eminent authority on the country, denied that castes, pace August Hennings, debilitated the soul. On the contrary, every caste, even the least respected, infused whoever belonged to it with a sense of pride in their group, its traditions, and its venerable age. Granted, a member’s loyalty extended only to the border of the caste and no further. Each caste formed its own self-contained “moral republic”; that is why patriotism and a striving for social advancement were so foreign to Indians.¹²¹ Pater Cœurdoux praised the castes for the successful social control they exerted over their members through their caste-specific laws, customs, and institutions. The Indians were accordingly prevented from relapsing into barbarism through a kind of internal self-discipline. The castes also thereby mitigated the effects of despotism, since the state would have no cause for meddling with a society that could already regulate itself.122 Finally, the high Brahmin castes were the Indian version of an aristocracy, which, unlike its French counterpart, protected itself from mésalliances and social decline by strictly prohibiting exogamy.¹²³

In Cœurdoux’s socially conservative interpretation, blood ties united only family members and did not suffice “to foster the mutual aid and support required in civil society.”¹²⁴ People therefore had to be brought together into larger groups (corps) in which they could develop and defend their common interests. The bonds (liens) between individuals needed to be made unbreakably strong. In this respect, the “ancient Indian legislators” had been astonishingly successful. In 1777 Cœurdoux and his editor Desvaulx did not see the longevity of the caste system as a symptom of Indian backwardness. Quite the contrary: in their eyes it was proof of a wise dispensation, one that forged the sense of solidarity that was indispensable to “civil” life. Johann Gottfried Herder agreed: “Undoubtedly, the system of the bramins, when it was first established, was good: otherwise it could not have spread so wide, penetrated so deep, and endured so long.”¹²⁵ This interpretation was the polar opposite of that put forward by Hennings: castes here provided the strongest bulwark against social atomization and fragmentation. Herder (who does not overlook the dark side of the caste system) and the abbé Dubois contributed the additional idea that a spirit of tolerance governed relations between castes. In lifestyle, customs, and religion, members of every caste could be happy in their own way, “as long as the general and universally respected laws of good behaviour are not infringed.”¹²⁶

The hymns in praise of the caste system would be less interesting if they had been sung exclusively by conservative French priests. Yet William Robertson, one of the most respected Enlightenment historians, arrived at similar results in his late work on India (1791). To be sure, Robertson admitted in anticipation of the predicted Enlightenment counterargument, the caste system erects “artificial barriers” between people and so sets limits on the natural “operations of the human mind.”127 Men of genius would struggle under such a system. The promotion of genius was not the main goal of societies, however. The caste structure presented average human beings with a meaningful division of labor, channeling their abilities into particular occupations that gave them a chance to shine. This explained the extraordinary perfection of Indian craftsmanship as well as the abundant supply of commodities for domestic consumption and export.¹²⁸ There was a key difference, however, between Robertson’s words in praise of castes and those of an author like Cœurdoux: whereas the French Jesuit ascribes a kind of universal exemplarity to the caste system, for the Scottish historian it was suited only to preindustrial India, while Europeans in his own day, living in a completely different social order, understandably regarded it with the greatest distaste.

In the early nineteenth century, such relativism could barely be tolerated. On the basis of new studies on India carried out since 1784 by learned members of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta gathered around Sir William Jones,¹²⁹ two very different philosophical critics published influential condemnations of the caste system. In James Mill’s History of British India (1817), the first volume of which was largely taken up with a systematic investigation of Indian civilization, castes appear as intrinsically abhorrent: “that institution, which stands as a more effectual barrier against the welfare of human nature than any other institution which the workings of caprice and selfishness have ever produced.”¹³⁰ While most defenders of the caste order saw India’s Muslim conquerors as barbarian outsiders whose best efforts to break the resistance of “Hindu” society had proved unavailing, James Mill, otherwise no friend of Islam, credited the Muslims with the superior civilization. In his eyes, the absence of caste barriers and even of a European-style hereditary aristocracy recommended Islamic nations, notwithstanding their tendency to despotism, as places where effort could be rewarded with social advancement. It was therefore only fitting that he took umbrage at British attempts—above all in the Permanent Settlement of 1793—to create in India, alongside the existing caste system, something like a class structure dominated by a new landowning aristocracy.131

By somewhat willfully interpreting Brahmins as “priests,” Mill was able to marshall the entire “priestly fraud” rhetoric of the Enlightenment. At no other time and place in history had priests attained such power over the thoughts and deeds of a majority of the population as in India; and they had continued to wield this ever more anachronistic power to the present day.¹³² For Mill, the caste system was only one of many indications that an antiquated social order was standing in the way of progress. The romantic idea that the wise Brahmin “legislators” of India had created a perfect system in the infancy of mankind, only for it to fall into decay in later ages, was of no interest to Mill, the progress-minded reformer and avowed enemy of all that was obsolete.

Soon after the appearance of Mill’s book, Hegel engaged much more extensively with the caste phenomenon. Before critiquing the phenomenon, he set out to describe it objectively on the basis of the widest possible range of sources available to him at the time; he was familiar not only with Mill’s History of British India but also with the most recent work by the abbé Dubois and the Indologist Henry Thomas Colebrooke, among others.¹³³ Approaching the phenomenon from a completely different angle, Hegel ultimately arrived at similar findings to the utilitarian James Mill. Whereas in China everyone was equally subject to the sovereign’s unchecked will, the Indian world was founded on an elemental inequality that had become second nature. Given the immovable rigidity of caste divisions, “people relate themselves to the divine and to other people as they do to natural things.”¹³⁴ Society remained opaque and hence insusceptible to reform.

Hegel’s argument against the caste system owes nothing to ideas of equality grounded in natural law or Christianity. The system’s obstruction of economic development is also of little concern to him. What displeases him is, firstly, the fact that individuals are “naturally” socialized into a group that they joined by accident of birth (rather than by “ethical” decision) and which they cannot leave of their own volition.135 Every aspect of life is dictated by requirements that nobody dares measure against the yardstick of reason: “The most inane things are imposed on Hindus. The Hindu institutions rule out all that rests upon one’s own free will.”¹³⁶ Subjective freedom and an individual conscience could not arise under such conditions. Secondly, Hegel misses in India (before the British colonial period) a legal order that encompasses and transcends particular communities.¹³⁷ If China is in Hegel’s view a civilization of boundless and unstructured universality, its substance exhausted in the imperial will and a limited number of very general ethical maxims, India strikes him as an overly structured civilization where differences and particularities are rendered absolute. This is nowhere more obvious than in the caste system.

To sum up, castes had already made an impression on the first modern visitors to India. They remained a stock theme of travel literature and were made the subject of sociological or ethnographic inquiry by several authors, especially Ziegenbalg and Cœurdoux. If they had at first been one element among many in the Indian social landscape, by the second half of the eighteenth century they had moved to the center of Western views of India. The decline of the Mughal Empire and the social groups it drew on for support made India appear all the more “Hindu.” The sociological quintessence of this Hinduized India appeared to be the globally unique phenomenon of the caste, which came to be schematized in early nineteenth-century European perceptions into a caste system.

How this system was judged went through several phases. To missionaries like Ziegenbalg, it aroused suspicion only when it stood in the way of their efforts to convert the heathen. With Montesquieu’s brief remark from 1748 there began a line of criticism that saw castes as standing in the sharpest possible antithesis to the free organization of social life, owing to the massive constraints they imposed on individuals by virtue of birth, tradition, and spiritual particularism, as well as their underlying postulate of natural human inequality. Until the turn of the century, such criticism was opposed by those who lauded the caste system as a bedrock of social order. Similar views lingered on in romantic idealizations of small-scale, hierarchical relations, although they proved unable to overturn the verdicts of Hegel and the philosophically coarser yet still (in the English colonial and scientific context) highly influential James Mill. The caste system became emblematic of the perverse, deviant path taken by India in modern world history.138

The abbé Dubois should be given the final word. He will not easily be forgiven for copying his chapters on the Brahmins from Pater Cœurdoux. But it should not be forgotten that the 1825 edition of his Mœurs, institutions et cérémonies des peuples de l’Inde—far superior to the English edition of 1816—contains a great deal of additional material that appears to derive from the abbé’s personal observations. This includes a chapter “On the Wretched Condition of the Indians.”¹³⁹ Dubois here fully frees himself from the perspective on caste that otherwise defines his work, describing the poverty and misery he saw in India with an unpolemical precision unmatched in the Western literature on Asia of the time. Many Europeans admired, he remarks, the fine materials and handicrafts exported from India. Yet they had no idea that most were manufactured in mud huts under conditions of abject poverty. From such observations, Dubois goes on to develop a hierarchical model of eight income classes, each with its own vividly described economic and social way of life. He begins with the poorest class, which in his estimate encompasses the half of the Indian population owning less than 120 francs’ worth of property. They perform the most unpleasant or arduous forms of agricultural labor. This class includes pariahs living outside the caste order, members of almost all the castes, and nomadic tribespeople. At the tip of this social pyramid, which lies athwart the caste order, stand the wealthiest urban merchants as well as men who have been able to accumulate riches over years of government service. Remarkably, Dubois’s completely modern-sounding sociology of contemporary India, which refrains from all exoticizing distortion, is embedded in a work that, through its extensive depictions of caste practices, did more than any other to cultivate the impression of India as an alien world.

FEUDALISM

The judgments made by European observers on social conditions in Asia were not just determined by the circumstances under which they were observing and the extent of their prior knowledge; they were also influenced by normative ideas. A conservative Catholic priest like Cœurdoux, who could only conceive of a good society as one ordered along lines of hierarchy and class privilege, naturally took a more favorable view of the caste system than a philosophical radical and egalitarian liberal like James Mill, who condemned the inheritability of social status and political rights as fundamentally illegitimate and therefore also attacked the privileges of the English aristocratic elite. Similarly divided reactions were provoked by what was termed “Asiatic feudalism.” At one end of the spectrum stood a social romantic like Edmund Burke, who admired the Indian princes as guarantors of stability akin to the English nobles. At the other end, an early bourgeois economic theorist like Pierre Poivre blamed the incessant warmongering of an archaic and parasitic aristocracy in Malaya for the country’s economic backwardness, contrasting it with the exemplary order in utterly unfeudal China.140

In the early modern period, the term “feudal” had been restricted to feudal law. Montesquieu expanded it in 1748 to the seigneurial system, understood as rule by local lords over subjects who enjoyed only limited freedoms. Voltaire saw a reform-minded monarchy in a more positive light than Montesquieu and therefore held the nobility’s political wisdom in lower esteem. He spoke critically of a système féodale, which he characterized as a splintering of state power among innumerable petty tyrants. After Charlemagne, this kind of “anarchy” had at first proliferated throughout Europe; in some countries, including France and England, it had eventually been replaced by a strong monarchy or a mixed constitution, but in Germany it had persisted down to the present day.141 Whereas Montesquieu regarded feudalism as a primarily European development, just as he understood its opposite, despotism, to be an Asiatic speciality, Voltaire found evidence of the phemomenon in Asia as well. With that he took the “first step towards a universal-historical typology.”¹⁴² Anquetil-Duperron, thoroughly familiar with conditions in India, suggested that South Asia had produced a combination of feudalism and despotism that had no parallel in early modern Europe.¹⁴³

Travelers recognized feudal conditions in a strong aristocracy, which either was barely held in check by a comparatively powerless central authority or dispensed with a ruler altogether in a république féodale,¹⁴⁴ as well as in a warlike “spirit of chivalry” that pervaded all of society, or at least its uppermost stratum. Besides the Malays, such conditions were detected among the Afghans, Ceylonese, Sikhs, Marathas, Kurds, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, and even on Tahiti.¹⁴⁵ If early seventeenth-century European observers had marveled at how countries like China and Vietnam could be ruled in despotic-bureaucratic rather than feudal-chivalric fashion, by around 1800 the tables had been turned: oriental feudalism now appeared as a curious relic of the Middle Ages or as a reminder of the archaic conditions that still persisted on Europe’s periphery. James Baillie Fraser felt reminded of his Scottish homeland when visiting Nepal, a country he had studied in depth. He recalled

that condition of things which existed in the highlands of Scotland during the height of the feodal system, where each possessor of a landed estate exercised the function of a sovereign and made wars and incursions on his neighbours, as a restless spirit of ambition or avarice impelled him.¹⁴⁶

Like the Scots before them, so too the Indian Marathas with their decentralized command structure ultimately succumbed to the more strictly organized English forces. Contemporary observers described the Marathas as “a military republic, composed of chiefs independent of each other,”147 and drew parallels to the European Middle Ages or the recently dissolved Holy Roman Empire. Hegel summarized this image in 1822/23 when describing the anarchic and unstable “feudal condition” in India before the Pax Britannica was imposed: an internally riven warrior caste that was little more than a “pack of thieves” (Raubgesindel), endlessly locked in blood feuds with the princes above them and the subject population below.¹⁴⁸

In such assertions, feudalism figured as a form of society that was spread all over the world. John Richardson, never one to shrink from bold claims, even expressed the view that feudalism first arose in Asia before later being introduced into Europe.¹⁴⁹ Many specific instances of classification were contested. Were the Indian princes, particularly following the downfall of “despotic” Mughal supremacy, a “feudal” elite, as contended by Voltaire (India was ruled by “thirty tyrants”) and disputed by James Mill?¹⁵⁰ Were there regional pockets left within the vast and fragmented social landscape of South Asia where a fragile kind of chivalric feudalism survived under Hindu auspices? The former colonial official James Tod believed this happened among the Rajputs and in 1830 devoted a bulky work of romantic historiography, both fanciful and erudite, to the subject.¹⁵¹ Later in the nineteenth century, when the question of an autonomous Indian feudalism had become academic, the British colonial masters entertained the romantic illusion that the Indian princes remaining under their sovereignty constituted an authentic feudal nobility.¹⁵²

In one country, nonetheless, a viable feudal system seemed to have survived to the present day: Japan. In the 1660s François Caron, whose knowledge of the country was second to none, had already described an order in which there was an effective center of power, the shogun in Edo, with a layer of ruling princes under him, the daimyo, who in turn were surrounded by vassals of their own.¹⁵³ The shogun was far from omnipotent: he himself was bound by the laws of the realm, was forbidden from confiscating the property of princes, and had only a limited right to interfere in their domains. Unlike the emperor of China, he was not supported by a centralized bureaucracy. For Montesquieu and the theorists of despotism who leaned on his authority (such as the abbé Raynal), Japan subsequently figured as another example of despotic conditions. Engelbert Kaempfer, long the most influential and indeed practically the only expert on Japan, had described the Japanese political system in far less detail than the Iranian. That is why the “despotic misunderstanding” was possible; the sparse material presented by Kaempfer could be interpreted in this way.

In 1769 the independent-minded Louis Castilhon pointed to the role played by territorial princes and nobles in Japan, which was uncommonly large for a supposedly despotic state. He made some extraordinary statements that stand diametrically opposed to the dominant tendency of his age: while almost all of Asia from the Mediterranean to the Sea of China languished under the yoke of despotism, only the Japanese—for all that they lacked European science and customs—enjoyed “our rights and our freedom.”154 In Japan, according to Castilhon, there was a hereditary aristocracy and a military mentality. Ambition and honor—utterly foreign to the essence of despotism, in Montesquieu’s view¹⁵⁵—were primary motivating factors. In short, the Japanese were the “English of Asia.”¹⁵⁶ Of all the countries in Asia, only Japan bore a resemblance to European nations in its institutions and national character. The figure of the Japanese knight came to fascinate Europe only in its decline; the nineteenth century’s interest in the sword-bearing samurai far surpassed that of earlier periods. Yet Japan’s exceptional role as a country that in many respects was closer to Europe than any other Asian civilization was already apparent in the eighteenth century.

MASKS AND EMOTIONS

Sociological analysis need not just be the study of groups, strata, and classes—something like “macrosociology.” In the eighteenth century there was also a “microsociology” that took an interest in everyday culture. There was a receptiveness to sociability, to human contact, to the movements of the soul in situations of cooperation and conflict.¹⁵⁷ “Civil society,” discussed mainly by French and Scottish thinkers since the midcentury, was not just understood as a space where the interests of private subjects could compete against each other free of state interference;158 it was also a sphere of controlled affects and refined emotions beyond schematic roles. Around 1800 the view was frequently expressed that one of Europe’s advantages over the rest of the world—and over its own classical past as well—lay in the gentleness and courtesy of its human interactions. Europeans congratulated themselves on being more empathetic social creatures and on having attained a higher degree of individualization: European society was held together more through a finely calibrated balance of personalities than through the dictates of convention. With that, an anthropological distinction was made that continues to shape our view of Asians. It was summed up with pithy irony by social anthropologist Jack Goody: “They have customs, we have sentiments.”¹⁵⁹

This view coincided with an important shift in the focus of attention. The former preoccupation with mœurs or, as Démeunier ’s book title puts it, with usages et coutumes, assumed that every society was governed by its own set of rules. Customs are the recurring patterns of everyday life, above all in the preparation and consumption of food and in ceremonies for festive occasons: weddings, funerals, religious rites, and so on. Travel accounts from the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries linger—often with great care and attention to detail—on this rule-bound and ritualized side of foreign societies.¹⁶⁰ The notion of sociabilité that arose in the late eighteenth century reflected this schematic behavior at a higher level and shone a light on it from outside. What was at issue now was no longer just the rules themselves but also the extent to which different societies were rule-governed in the first place. That such differences even existed was in itself a new insight.

Changing assessments of Chinese politeness may serve to illustrate this shift. Ever since the first early modern reports on China had appeared, it had been clear that assiduous politeness, a serene composure, or however else one might choose to designate a high degree of affect control was a distinguishing feature of the Chinese people—or at any rate the literati. European visitors should therefore take pains to preserve an unruffled demeanor at all times, Pater Du Halde advised in 1735, lest they seriously damage their standing with the Chinese through temperamental outbursts and fits of rage.161 In China there were rules of conduct for every situation, the Dominican Navarette had already remarked in 1670; no room was left for spontaneity, and the precision of the unwritten rules of propriety left little room for interpretation and conflict.¹⁶² Du Halde stressed that the formality and solemnity of the Chinese was by no means the expression of a fixed national character but rather the result of a long socialization process, “for they are not lacking in temperament and liveliness but learn early on to become masters of themselves.”¹⁶³ Once a closer acquaintance with the Chinese had been formed and trust established, however, social relations proceeded “with the same familiarity and ease as would be the case in Europe.”¹⁶⁴ The imperturbable politesse displayed by upperclass Chinese was thus something of a public mask. Du Halde had nothing against it, simply observing that this was the Chinese idea of civilized behavior.

John Barrow visited China with the Macartney Mission in 1793/94, later writing a book that, for all its pomposity and prejudice, contained some remarkable notes towards a sociology of the Chinese people. Far more strongly than the Jesuits, whose reports Du Halde had worked up in his China encyclopedia, Barrow was struck by the split between the social masks worn by the Chinese and their innermost being. This entailed an extreme disparity between public and private conduct. Almost all the Qing dignitaries

with whom we had any concern, whether Tartars or Chinese, when in our private society, were easy, affable and familiar, extremely good-humoured, loquacious, communicative. It was in public only, and towards each other, that they assumed their ceremonious gravity, and practiced all the tricks of demeanour which custom requires of them.¹⁶⁵

These observations are similar to those cited by Du Halde, yet the assessment has shifted considerably during the intervening seventy years. The ritualization of social life (or at least that part of it that plays out in public view) is no longer depicted neutrally as a Chinese peculiarity, still less presented as a laudable cultural achievement. It now serves instead to indicate social petrification. “Unsociable distance” defines not just relations between the sexes and generations but the entire life of society.166 In Barrow’s analysis, China was lacking what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call les liens, social bonds. In public life, too, there were hardly any unions, civic associations, or religious communities that made it easier for people to come together and articulate their common interests. The younger generation, in particular, suffered a great deal as a result:

The young people have no occasional assemblies for the purpose of dancing and of exercising themselves in feats of activity, which, in Europe, are attended with the happy effects of shaking off the gloom and melancholy that a life of constant labour and seclusion from society is apt to promote. They have not even a fixed day of rest set apart for religious worship. Their acts of devotion partake of the same solitary cast that prevails in their domestic life.¹⁶⁷

For Barrow, the isolation of individuals in China—an instance of social atomization on a grand scale—mainly results from society being dominated by a despotic state apparatus. With this interpretation, he places himself in the Montesquieuean line of thought that saw the “principle” of despotism in fear. Writing half a century after Montesquieu, however, he had a clearer notion of civil society, understood to be more than the mere absence of control from above. China was for him a society of isolated and mistrustful mask-wearers, damned to stagnation and intellectual sterility.¹⁶⁸

The incomparable civility of the West, so often discussed in the late eighteenth century, continued to be seen in its mastery of social niceties. These included the art of conversation, as cultivated in English coffeehouses and country manors and in the salons of Paris. Its first great theorist was David Hume. The great classical orators who had been studied and emulated to date appeared to him as alien and unrefined. Greco-Roman antiquity was for him a purely rhetorical civilization, a culture of declamation and stilted figures of speech. Modern Europe, by constrast, was a civilization of witty conversation in intimate settings. One was defined by monologue, the other by dialogue.169 As other commentators registered, formal speech was characteristic of non-European cultures as well, albeit not of China, where eloquence was neglected in favor of written communication.¹⁷⁰ The art of speaking was highly developed among the Arabs and stood, as Sir William Jones explained, in close connection with an oral tradition of folk poetry.¹⁷¹ The missionary Pierre Lemonnier de La Bissachère made the astonishing discovery that in Tonkin, almost the only way to be exempted from onerous labor duties for the state was to win over the mandarins through well-composed addresses. That is why the Tonkinese were trained from an early age in the art of public speaking.¹⁷² In his ethnographic description of southeast India, completed in 1711, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was full of praise for the “natural eloquence” of the Tamils. Unfettered by the rigid rules of formal rhetoric, they were possessed “of a glib tongue” and able “to discourse at length” on any suitable subject. Their fluency and spontaneousness might serve as an example to Europeans.¹⁷³

In the later eighteenth century, European observers expressed ambivalence about the value of such achievements. On the one hand, displays of oratorical virtuosity (in a Malay court, for example) were impressive and bespoke the speaker’s civilizational merits.¹⁷⁴ On the other hand, the art of public speaking belonged to a stage of social development that Western Europe had put behind it: communications in Europe were now mostly conducted in the medium of writing; besides on the stage, the spoken word had all but disappeared from literature; eloquence in court had become the preserve of specially trained lawyers. The intimacy of speech, its ennoblement from an instrument of rhetoric to a vehicle of free conversation, further demonstrated the superiority of European modernity.

Not all travelers and commentators on Asia were convinced, however, that life in the West was clearly preferable to an average existence in the East. William George Browne, an important researcher on Africa and the Near East who from 1792 to 1798 had traveled widely between the Sudan and Asia Minor, concluded his travel report by offering a “comparative view of life and happiness in the East and in Europe.”175 Browne begins by contrasting general characteristics: the European is impatient, active, and sanguine, whereas the Oriental is indolent, grave, and unimaginative. These qualities are not anthropological invariants; they result from differences in education. Each system has its advantages. The same holds true of the way women are treated. Confining them to a harem means that “social intercourse is … rendered less vivacious and amusing” than in Europe, “but numberless inquietudes are avoided.” Adultery, which in the West exposes the husband to ridicule, his wife to scandal, and her lover to penury, is unknown in the East.¹⁷⁶

The “easy compliance” that distinguishes social relations in the Orient likewise has much to recommend it over European restlessness. Quarrels are fewer, formalities less burdensome, and there is less pressure to keep up conversation than in the salon culture of the North, where “the abortions of fancy and caprice” are taken for outpourings of wit. The abstinence in food and drink habitually shown at the table by Easterners contrasts with the gluttony of European dinner guests. Browne is no Rousseauian enthusiast, no ideologist of a simple life close to the fountainhead of nature. He is an open-minded observer of two very different life forms whose respective advantages he evaluates with pragmatic shrewdness.

THE BIRTH OF SOCIOLOGY FROM THE SPIRIT OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

The eighteenth-century literature on Asia produced numerous texts of great sociological distinction. Being confronted with strange climes and customs led their authors to eschew the simplistic dichotomies offered by many an armchair traveler. They endeavored instead to describe, in as painstaking and realistic a manner as possible, the foreign ways they had often experienced themselves as participant observers. Who were the best of these pioneer sociologists? The great travelers of the seventeenth century may be considered their precursors: Bernier on the Mughal Empire, Chardin on Iran, Semedo on China. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, no text from the quill of a European eyewitness surpasses the volume on Aleppo by the brothers Alexander and Patrick Russell in the “thickness” of its sociological description. But several approach this high standard: Desideri on Tibet, Marsden on Sumatra, Elphinstone on Afghanistan, Kirkpatrick on Nepal, Cœurdoux, Dubois, and Buchanan on India, Koffler on Cochinchina, Malcolm on Iran, Niebuhr, Jaubert and Volney on the Arab Near East.

Volney, a member of the late Enlightenment group of intellectuals, the Idéologues, is the foremost theorist of them all. His theoretical contribution lies in the concept of genre de vie, designating a society’s way of life. This concept took on enormous significance in France, becoming extraordinarily important for the human geography of the early twentieth century, above all for Paul Vidal de la Blache and his followers. Although Volney frequently uses it in a considered manner, he never offers an abstract definition.177 Genre de vie is a theoretical construct that mediates between the macrolevel of society as a whole and the microperspective of observed social activity. The concept draws the consequences from an insight that could only fully be grasped through the study of non-Western societies: that societies differ from each other not just hierarchically—according to estates, ranks, or classes—but also spatially, ethnically, and in their lifestyles. Talking about genres de vie made it possible to describe what later came to be known as milieux. For Volney, the concept lies at the intersection of his two intimately connected points of view: the état physique, that is, the natural environment, and the état politique, the political and social conditions of a country. Within a country there can be a multitude of very different genres de vie: those of Syria’s urban notables and rural Bedouins, Egypt’s Mamluk elite and dirt-poor fellahin.

When he wanted to make a trenchant point, Volney did not shrink back from advancing the most general historico-philosophical speculations or from sharply opposing East and West. Yet the concept of genres de vie allowed him as an empiricist (which is what he was above all else) to concentrate on observable social contexts. The “Orient” cannot be seen, only constructed. A way of life, by contrast, can be studied through the evidence it presents to the senses. Overseas travelers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the pioneers of just such an experiential science of lifestyles and their material presuppositions. Alexander von Humboldt and Alexis de Tocqueville were its greatest practitioners.178 Through their writings, the New World became the best described and analyzed part of the world, at least until the mid-nineteenth century. For all the justified attention they have received, however, the best studies on Asia should not be allowed to fall into oblivion. They too contributed to the birth of sociology from the spirit of cultural difference.

ON HOSPITALITY¹⁷⁹

Finally, a few remarks on how societies behave at the very concrete and tangible interface with the Other. Societies differ tangibly in the ways they respond to foreigners approaching them from outside. Reactions vary on a scale from killing the trespasser or shipwreck survivor to hailing strangers as long-awaited deities. In the famous murder of Captain Cook on February 14, 1779, in Kealakekua Bay (Hawai’i), the extremes of welcome and violence merged into a single contradictory event of emblematic stature. Hardly any other question is of greater political relevance today than the issue of how foreigners should be received.

The strict policing and surveillance experienced by Europeans in closed countries with strong law enforcement institutions such as China and, even more so, Japan, was an exception that affected relatively few travelers to Asia. In most other Asian countries, travelers’ freedom of movement was unimpeded by systematic state interference.¹⁸⁰ Travel in the Islamic world, India, and Southeast Asia may have been arduous and not infrequently dangerous, but at least it was possible; indeed, it was arguably easier than traveling through Christian countries would have been for Muslims (very few tried before about 1830). Western travelers who had experienced religious intolerance at home—the French Protestant refugee Sir John Chardin was a case in point—cherished the greater religious freedom in Islamic countries.181

At the end of the eighteenth century only a few regions, notably the area around Bombay with its famous Elephanta Caves, boasted anything like an embryonic tourist infrastructure. Everywhere else, the traveler had to rely either on the logistics of public transport—the caravanserais in Persia and North India were a celebrated example—or the help of the local population. Remarks on the treatment shown foreign guests were therefore a standard feature of travel narratives.

On the basis of such depictions, there developed a more general discourse on hospitality and its various modifications (although these were rarely clearly distinguished): hospitability—that is, hospitality extended in a spirit of friendship—and the right to hospitality of strangers in a strange land. A second source of this discourse was the ancient historians and geographers. Time and again, for example, the passage in the Germania (written probably in 98 CE) was cited where Tacitus credits the Germans with unequalled hospitality (hospitium). Nobody, whether familiar or unknown, has the door shut in his face: “they do not distinguish those they know from strangers.” The visitor was escorted from house to house; guest and host plied each other with gifts without giving a thought to their value or feeling under any obligation to the giver.¹⁸²

Hospitality and hospitability could mean different things to different people. At the very least, it meant placing the foreign guest under the protective authority of the head of the household, but it often also entailed more than the mere guarantee that the traveler would come to no harm: extending a warm welcome, sharing hearth and home ungrudgingly and without expectation of return, assisting travelers in their onward journey. European travelers were rarely exposed to the full repertoire of hospitality for the simple reason that they were almost never refugees seeking asylum. The cash, gold, and other valuables they brought with them mostly sufficed to defray any costs to the host. A friendly reception of traveling guests is reported of almost all peoples outside East Asia: the inhabitants of the Indonesian isles,183 the Hindus in Bengal,¹⁸⁴ the Iranians,¹⁸⁵ the Turks,¹⁸⁶ the Kurds,¹⁸⁷ the “Tatars” on the Crimea and in the Central Asian provinces of the Russian Empire,¹⁸⁸ the Balochs in present-day Pakistan, whose propensity to cruelty—thankfully suspended when hosting guests from abroad—is highlighted in the reports,¹⁸⁹ and the Burmese, who are singled out for praise for being hospitable on principle, not out of naivety and weakness.¹⁹⁰ On the Aleutian Islands, a stranger goes from hut to hut, “and they all share their food with him.”¹⁹¹

Even Europeans who took pride in their critical view of the Orient acknowledged the widespread hospitality they encountered there as a particularly attractive feature of the East. “No part of oriental manners,” wrote the traveler to Syria and antiquarian Robert Wood in 1757, “shows those people in so amicable a light as their discharge of the duties of hospitality.” And he added: “Indeed the severities of Eastern despotism have ever been softened by this virtue, which so happily flourishes most where it is most wanted.”¹⁹² Many statements of this kind reflect the clichés of the travelogue genre and an ethnic stereotyping that expects hospitality from wild mountain warriors and peaceful camel herders. But particularly accurate travelers sometimes allow reality to shine through with its mixed offer of experiences.

In 1738, for example, Dr. Thomas Shaw, esteemed by both contemporary readers and posterity as a reporter of impeccable integrity, gave exact information about his travel experiences in the Maghreb and the Levant.¹⁹³ Understandably, the most helpful source of hospitality had been his compatriots: the numerous British merchants in the Near East who ran trading posts on the coast. In the cities and villages of the interior, the traveler could take heart whenever he came across a special guest house in which strangers were put up for the night at the expense of the local community. But it might already be occupied, or the custodian with the key could prove impossible to track down. Where such public facilities were unavailable, and where private inns or hostels were also not to be had, Shaw sometimes discovered that the much-vaunted hospitality of the East was nothing more than a pious legend. On these occasions, the wandering preacher found himself forcibly reminded of words from the Old Testament: “… and when he went in, he sat him down in a street of the city: for there was no man that took them into his house to lodging.”194 Shaw was never taken in for the night by Arab families, at any rate. When traveling in open countryside, he and his few companions slept under the stars; a tent would have marked them as well-to-do and made them easy prey for robbers.

Only those who had lived in a country for a long time were capable of looking beyond their own limited travel experiences. Alexander Russell pointed out that not every foreigner was accorded a friendly reception in Aleppo. The oft-described kindnesses of the oriental host were reserved for those who had been accepted as guests. Among private Turks, this required a recommendation. Hospitality thus functioned only within a preexisting network of relations.¹⁹⁵ Those who entered the tent of a Bedouin, Volney wrote later, could feel assured of their safety, but getting into the tent in the first place was no straightforward matter.¹⁹⁶ Carsten Niebuhr, the most renowned eighteenth-century traveler to Arabia, agreed with Russell that the famous Arab and Turkish hospitality had already disappeared in the cities: “A stranger can no more expect there than in Europe that people who do not know him will invite him into their homes.”¹⁹⁷ In villages where the arrival of a European was perhaps still a novelty, however, the Arabs were “hospitable to this day.”¹⁹⁸ “To this day”—with that, Niebuhr answered one of the questions set him by the Paris Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres: whether the Arab hospitality attested to in the Bible still existed.¹⁹⁹

The literature of romanticism was again densely populated by hospitable Arabs. Tales of Arab tribesmen who allegedly placed their own wives and daughters at their guests’ disposal were indispensable for painting a romantic picture of the Orient.²⁰⁰ The Swiss traveler to the Orient Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a sober and precise witness, also mentions this “barbaric system of hospitality,” adding a nice story about a particular branch of the Asyr tribe living south of Mecca:

If the stranger rendered himself agreeable to his fair partner, he was treated next morning with the utmost attention by his host, and furnished, on parting, with provisions sufficient for the remainder of his journey; but if, unfortunately, he did not please the lady, his cloak was found the next day to want a piece, cut off by her as a signal of contempt. This circumstance being known, the unlucky traveler was driven away with disgrace by all the women and children of the village or encampment.201

The Grand Theory of hospitality that was popular in Enlightenment-era Europe mostly operated at a remove from such ethnographic details.²⁰² From around 1760, hospitality was widely associated with “barbaric” phases of social evolution. William Robertson, a good empiricist who regarded with skepticism the more audacious attempts by his friends and contemporaries to sketch a “conjectural history,” saw late antiquity and the Middle Ages as something like a golden age of hospitality. There was much need of it at the time: the dissolution of the political, economic, and cultural ties that had held together the ancient world had led to such a fragmentation of life in Europe that a bare minimum in traffic and trade between nations could only be maintained by guaranteeing the security of strangers. Robertson points out that hospitality in the Middle Ages was more than a mere custom or moral imperative; it was a legally enforcable duty.²⁰³ This leads him to formulate a law of inverse proportion: “hospitality abounded while the intercourse among men was inconsiderable.”²⁰⁴ According to Robertson, hospitality moves to the fore in times of crisis as a functional equivalent to a well-regulated society. It comes to assume vital importance in the dark and anarchic periods of transition between the renaissances of world history.

Adam Smith, who approached history with greater speculative brio than his fastidious friend Robertson, developed his own version of a functionalist explanation several years later. In societies where a lack of overseas trade and investment opportunities means that there are few possibilities for employing surplus production, “rustick hospitality at home” presents an obvious avenue for conspicuous consumption.205 Smith had in mind not just hospitality towards strangers but also the munificence of feudal lords, who would often expend fortunes on their retainers and clients. In Smith’s account, this simple economic mechanism is found in all commercially and industrially less developed societies, in Scotland as much as in Arabia. It thus does not stand in any particularly close connection with the Orient. The only thing that prevents hospitality—generally a costly undertaking for the host—from becoming economically ruinous is the fact that travel is dangerous and therefore rare in times of barbarism.²⁰⁶ In primitive ages, hospitality is thus an economic necessity; later, in more complex societies, it becomes economically irrational. Around the same time, another Scottish social theorist, Adam Ferguson, situated hospitality more precisely in the stage of pastoral nomadism. Rather than offering an economic explanation, he understood it as part of a moral economy of honor that largely disappears with the transition to the next stage of social development.²⁰⁷

Even the earliest theorists of post-feudal modernization had seen the fate of hospitality as an index of social development. Montesquieu was one of the first to note that hospitality was made defunct by trade. Commercialization brought with it peace, but only between nations, not between individuals, since now everything in life could be bought or sold at a fixed price: “the smallest things, those required by humanity, are done or given for money.”²⁰⁸ Conversely, the combination of robbing the neighboring collective and demonstrating hospitality towards individuals remains in place where commerce is not yet in the ascendant. Condorcet, the apostle of progress, refused to acknowledge the conflict between hospitality and commercialization identified by Montesquieu. He saw both as civilizing, pacifying factors that promote intertribal contacts in the agrarian stage that follows on from nomadism.²⁰⁹

Unjustly forgotten today, Dr. William Falconer was an encyclopedist and universalist social thinker in the Age of Enlightenment as well as a physician of some repute. Like Montesquieu before him—and in contrast to Rousseau and his disciples—Falconer warned in 1781 against idealizing the pastoral life in the manner of the old bucolic tradition. When studying the customs of “pastoral nations” in their “barbarous state,” he was amazed “that although addicted to pillaging strangers, they practice hospitality to a great degree.”210 The individual stranger enjoys the freedom to journey unmolested, since he poses no threat to the host society and robbing him would bring neither practical advantages nor glory. Yet Falconer then makes an interesting observation that takes him a step beyond both his master Montesquieu and stage theorists such as Smith, Ferguson, and Condorcet: “As to internal corruption, or that which arises from the influence of money, I am inclined to think that this also is diminished by the change of the way of life. The nations who live in a pastoral state, are the most venal and corrupt in the world. The Arabs and the Tartars will do any thing for money.”²¹¹ In short, monetarization is no reliable indicator of modernity. At an early stage of societal evolution, money can already dictate relations within a community and wreak havoc by attenuating social bonds and eroding solidarity. Already in ancient times, warlike nomadic tribes had repeatedly sold their military services or their neutrality for cash, while the Romans’ famed political virtues would have been inconceivable without their society’s foundation in agriculture. According to Falconer, the decline of hospitality is thus not primarily caused by commercialization and the spread of a monetary economy. He sees it rather as having fallen victim to social hierarchization. The condition of nomadism, being overwhelmingly egalitarian in structure, demands a certain degree of ceremony to allow status and prestige to be allotted when people come together. This encompasses the various forms of hospitality:

But an agricultural state is nearly, in every respect, the reverse of that just described. There is a necessity for different ranks, as well as functions and occupations, in such a society; the nature of their employment being local, precludes them from variety of acquaintance; and their sense of honor is seldom so nice as to render transgressions in point of behaviour, unless accompanied with some substantial injury, great objects of concern. In short, the politeness of agricultural nations, like what Mr. Montesquieu has observed of the English, is rather in their morals than in their behavior.212

They have a moral sympathy for helpless strangers but are little inclined to do anything for them.

Falconer observed the development of hospitality with the cool gaze of an early sociologist. Others judged more resolutely. David Hume regarded the demise of “antient hospitality [which] was the source of vice, disorder, sedition and idleness” as a welcome sign of progress.²¹³ In his ethnographic material, Jean-Nicolas Démeunier found confirmation of the thesis advanced by the Scottish philosopher Henry Home (Lord Kames) that there was no more universal human inclination than an aversion to strangers.²¹⁴ Wise legislators and trade had temporarily been able to take the edge off such instincts and inculcate a more hospitable attitude, yet in a further step, “administrators” in many nations had promoted a spirit of patriotism (“un goût exclusif pour la patrie”) that had reversed the civilizational gains.²¹⁵ The treatment of strangers had gone from being a matter for individual families and local communities to a political concern; governments had taken control of alien affairs. This was the only satisfactory explanation for why, in the modern age, there were once again states that had completely closed themselves off from the outside world. Démeunier thus detects a more complicated pattern in the history of hospitality than the linear narrative of progressive modernization offered by many a stage theorist. He cites as an example an unusual case: the Paulistas in Brazil, a criminal frontier squad, ten to twelve thousand men strong, who maintained their own quasi-state, treated strangers with the utmost brutality, and admitted new recruits into their ranks only after subjecting them to severe trials. But he could also have been thinking of Japan, given that, of all the theorists discussed here, he was the one best equipped to grasp the nub of the Japanese case: the manipulation of xenophobic impulses by the state.

Démeunier ’s pessimistic scenario runs counter to the Enlightenment sensibilities of his time. These are presented in distilled form in a particularly extensive, richly documented discussion of hospitality published in Leipzig in 1777, one year after Démeunier . The author of this extraordinary book, entitled On Hospitality. An Apology for the Human Race (Von der Gastfreundschaft. Eine Apologie für die Menschheit), was Christian Cayus Lorenz Hirschfeld, still known today for his five-volume Art of Gardening. Here we find a thorough compilation of the ethnographic material and a discussion of many motives that also play a major role in the contributions of other authors. Hirschfeld views hospitality as a collective, national affair rather than as a merely personal one. It is a “natural” human “drive,” but it can only come to fruition when certain obstacles are overcome, such as the “absurdity” shown by men “still in their primitive state” in taking flight from approaching strangers.216 That hospitality is a natural drive is experimentally confirmed by the fact that islanders in rarely traveled seas extend a warm welcome to strangers.²¹⁷ The most recent Tahitian reports of Bougainville and Cook, which Hirschfeld was able to read in time to incorporate their findings, appeared to support this view. Hirschfeld further contours his basic idea when he speaks of an “indirect natural drive, rooted in the drives of sociability and sympathy.”²¹⁸ That is why this drive can be historicized. Hirschfeld operates within the parameters of Franco-Scottish stage theory, which he was one of the first German authors to draw on, going into great detail to discuss hospitality at the various developmental stages of hunting, fishing, herding, and so on. As a strident critic of colonialism, he generally sees defensive xenophobic reactions as provoked.²¹⁹ After all, only those under attack feel the need to defend themselves.

Hirschfeld shows particular interest in the emergence of a culture of hospitality in its classical homeland, the Orient. He places more emphasis on a conducive natural environment than on the functional-sociological factors to which Adam Smith was drawing attention around the same time:

The mildness and brightness of the sky, the enjoyment of so much natural beauty lying all around, roused people’s spirits and and enlivened their sensations. In lands such as these, the stage of initial savagery could be neither intense nor long-lasting.220

Such anthropological factors explained why Arabs, Iranians, and Turks, in particular, received strangers with such openness. Hirschfeld then distinguishes between the naïve hospitality of the Arabs, which “is rather a natural kindheartedness born of simplicity,” and the more elegant and civilized, largely postnomadic Iranians, who treat their guests with “refined courtesy.”²²¹ Hospitality also serves in all Islamic countries—and especially in Turkey—to moderate the despotic form of government. The severity of the political system is partly balanced out by the social virtues of ordinary citizens.²²²

For Hirschfeld, unlike for Hume, the decline of hospitality, culminating in its disappearance from present-day European society, is less a sign of successful modernization than a deeply ambivalent phenomenon. “What goes by the name of hospitality in civilized nations” is no longer a “time-honored virtue” but a mere social convention.²²³ Europe has become the homeland of commercial travel:

The spirit of trade, which connects all nations, has broken the bonds of charity among private persons. It has furthered and strengthened the love of profit, and so, as this has extended its dominion, it has disrupted the tender motions of nature which linked man to his fellow men. The only party that has benefited is the rich.²²⁴

Hospitality has become a saleable commodity in the progressive societies of the West. We have entered the era of the hotel trade and tourism. Hirschfeld takes up and extends Montesquieu’s analysis. The unstoppable commercialization of life transforms the guest from a hospitably received stranger into a paying customer. The host makes way for the hotelier.

The last beacon of the European Enlightenment, Alexander von Humboldt, also recognized the dialectic of social modernization and the dissolution of the interpersonal ties that had formerly been stabilized by tradition:

It has been remarked that, with the exception of a few very populous towns, hospitality has not yet perceptibly diminished since the first establishment of the Spanish colonists in the New World. It is distressing to think, that this change will take place, when population and the colonial economy shall have made more rapid progress; and that this state of society, which we are agreed to call an advanced state of civilization, will by degrees have banished “the old Castilian generosity.”225

Humboldt noted this in July 1799 in Cumaná, a town on the coast of today’s Venezuela. Carsten Niebuhr had experienced something similar thirty years before in Yemen. The end of hospitality as a right, custom, and duty, its transformation into private virtue or commercial enterprise, was a harbinger of more fundamental change in societies that had long been deemed all but unchangeable. In far-off corners of the non-European world, watchful travelers heeded the dawning of a new age.

The Grand Theory of hospitality, as formulated by authors such as Montesquieu, Falconer, Ferguson, and Hirschfeld, was a curious episode in the early history of sociology. It revealed that the forces of social development, never more virulently on display than at the time these authors were writing, had turned the age-old tradition of hospitality into a dysfunctional luxury. As a private and common-law institution, the right to “hospitality”—which Immanuel Kant, in his Perpetual Peace from 1795, was still seeking to ground in international law—had fallen victim to a process of modernization that had begun even before the onset of industralization. From now on, hospitality could no longer be claimed; it was left to the individual’s whims, feelings, and interests. Europe had been alienated from traditional ways of dealing with the alien. Now, whenever such customs were still encountered abroad, they were regarded as a curiosity, an archaic remnant of stages in human evolution that the West had long since outgrown. The more self-consciously European universalism celebrated its triumph, the greater the distance that opened up between itself and everyone else. In the end, Europe was left on its own.