Prologue

The contemporary world first began to assume its decisive shape over two days in May 1905 in the narrow waters of the Tsushima Strait. In what is now one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, a small Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Tg Heihachir annihilated much of the Russian navy, which had sailed half way round the world to reach the Far East. Described by the German kaiser as the most important naval battle since Trafalgar a century earlier, and by President Theodore Roosevelt as ‘the greatest phenomenon the world has ever seen’, the Battle of Tsushima effectively terminated a war that had been rumbling on since February 1904, fought mainly to decide whether Russia or Japan would control Korea and Manchuria. For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war; and the news careened around a world that Western imperialists – and the invention of the telegraph – had closely knit together.

In Calcutta, safeguarding the British Empire’s most cherished possession, the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, feared that ‘the reverberations of that victory have gone like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East’.¹ For once the aloof and frequently blundering Curzon had his finger on the pulse of native opinion, which was best articulated by a then unknown lawyer in South Africa called Mohandas Gandhi (1869 – 1948), who predicted ‘so far and wide have the roots of Japanese victory spread that we cannot now visualize all the fruit it will put forth’.²

In Damascus, Mustafa Kemal, a young Ottoman soldier later known as Atatürk (1881 – 1938), was ecstatic. Desperate to reform and strengthen the Ottoman Empire against Western threats, Kemal had, like many Turks, taken Japan as a model, and now felt vindicated. Reading the newspapers in his provincial town, the sixteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964), later India’s first prime minister, had excitedly followed the early stages of Japan’s war with Russia, fantasizing about his own role in ‘Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thralldom of Europe’.³ The news from Tsushima reached him as he was travelling on a train from Dover to his English public school, Harrow; it immediately put him in ‘high good humour’.⁴ The Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925) was also in London when he heard the news and was similarly exultant. Returning by ship to China in late 1905, Sun was congratulated by Arab port workers at the Suez Canal who thought that he was Japanese.⁵

Excited speculation about the implications of Japan’s success filled Turkish, Egyptian, Vietnamese, Persian and Chinese newspapers. Newborn babies in Indian villages were named after Japanese admirals. In the United States, the African-American leader W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of a worldwide eruption of ‘colored pride’. Something akin to this sentiment clearly seized the pacifist poet (and future Nobel laureate) Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941), who on receiving the news from Tsushima led his students in an impromptu victory march around a little school compound in rural Bengal.

It mattered little to which class or race they belonged; the subordinate peoples of the world keenly absorbed the deeper implications – moral and psychological – of Japan’s triumph. This diversity was startling. Nehru belonged to a family of affluent, Anglophile Brahmans; his father, a beneficiary of British rule over India, was even rumoured to send his shirts to Europe for dry-cleaning. Sun Yat-sen was the son of a poor farmer; one of his brothers died during the Californian Gold Rush that Chinese coolie labour serviced. Abdurreshid Ibrahim (1857 – 1944), the foremost pan-Islamic intellectual of his time who travelled to Japan in 1909 to establish contacts with Japanese politicians and activists, was born in western Siberia. Mustafa Kemal was from Salonica (now in Greece), born to parents of Albanian and Macedonian origin. His later associate, the Turkish novelist Halide Edip (1884 – 1964), who named her newborn son after the Japanese admiral Tg, was a secular-minded feminist. Burma’s nationalist icon U Ottama (1879 – 1939), who was inspired by Japan’s victory over Russia to move to Tokyo in 1907, was a Buddhist monk.

Some of the numerous Arab, Turkish, Persian, Vietnamese and Indonesian nationalists who rejoiced over Russia’s defeat had even more diverse backgrounds. But they all shared one experience: of being subjugated by the people of the West that they had long considered upstarts, if not barbarians. And they all drew the same lesson from Japan’s victory: white men, conquerors of the world, were no longer invincible. A hundred fantasies – of national freedom, racial dignity, or simple vengefulness – now bloomed in hearts and minds that had sullenly endured European authority over their lands.

 

Bullied by the Western powers in the nineteenth century, and chastened by those powers’ rough treatment of China, Japan had set itself an ambitious task of internal modernization from 1868: of replacing a semi-feudal shogunate with a constitutional monarchy and unified nation-state, and of creating a Western-style economy of high production and consumption. In a bestselling book of 1886 titled The Future Japan, Tokutomi Soh (1863 – 1957), Japan’s leading journalist, had laid out the likely costs of Japanese indifference to the ‘universal’ trends set by the West: ‘Those blue-eyed, red-bearded races will invade our country like a giant wave, drive our people to the islands in the sea.’⁶

Already by the 1890s, Japan’s growing industrial and military strength was provoking European and American visions of the ‘yellow peril’, a fearful image of Asiatic hordes overrunning the white West. The defeat of Russia proved that Japan’s programme of catching up with the West had been stunningly successful. ‘We are dispelling the myth of the inferiority of the non-white races,’ Tokutomi Soh now declared. ‘With our power we are forcing our acceptance as a member in the ranks of the world’s greatest powers.’⁷

For many other non-white peoples, Russia’s humiliation seemed to negate the West’s racial hierarchies, mocking the European presumption to ‘civilize’ the supposedly ‘backward’ countries of Asia. ‘The logic of the “white man’s burden”,’ declared Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887 – 1949), India’s pioneering sociologist, ‘has become an anachronism except only to the blindest fanatics.’⁸ Japan had shown that Asian countries could find their own path to modern civilization, and its special vigour. The Young Turk activist, and later minister, Ahmed Riza (1859 – 1930) summed up this resonant admiration:

Events of the Far East have put forth evidence of the uselessness of interventions, frequent if pernicious, of Europe reforming a people. On the contrary, the more isolated and preserved from contact with European invaders and plunderers a people is, the better is the measure of [its] evolution toward a rational renovation.⁹

Struggling with institutionalized racism in white-ruled South Africa, Gandhi drew a similar moral lesson from Japan’s triumph: ‘When everyone in Japan, rich or poor, came to believe in self-respect, the country became free. She could give Russia a slap in the face … In the same way, we must, too, need to feel the spirit of self-respect.’¹⁰ The Chinese philosopher Yan Fu (1854 – 1921) recalled a century of humiliations inflicted on China by Western ‘barbarians’, from the Opium wars to the burning of the imperial Summer Palace in Beijing, and concluded that ‘the only reason we did not devour their flesh and sleep upon their hides was that our power was insufficient’.

Japan had now shown how that power could be acquired. For many Asians, tormented by incompetent despots and predatory European businessmen, Japan’s constitution was the secret of its strength. Armed by its example, political activists across Asia helped fuel a series of popular constitutional revolutions against ossified autocracies (defeated Russia itself lurched into one in 1905). The Ottoman ruler, Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842 – 1918), had closely followed Japan’s modernization, especially as the ever-rising demands of European powers reduced Istanbul’s sovereignty to a pitiable fiction. But many admirers of Japan in the Muslim world were such secular, even antireligious, nationalists as the Young Turk exile and writer Abdullah Cevdet, who wrote of Japan as the carrier ‘of the sword, for the oppressors, for the insolent invaders; the torch for the oppressed, for those that shine unto themselves’. Emboldened by Japan’s victory, in 1908 the nationalist Young Turks forced Sultan Abdulhamid to reinstate a constitution suspended since 1876. The Persians, encouraged by the sight of constitutional Japan defeating autocratic Russia, created a national assembly in 1906.

In the same year Egypt experienced the first major mass demonstrations against British occupation. For nationalist Muslims in Egypt, Japan was ‘The Rising Sun’: the title of a book written just before the Russo-Japanese War by the foremost Egyptian nationalist leader, Mustafa Kamil (1874 – 1908). Students from Muslim countries everywhere now headed to Tokyo to learn the secrets of its progress. The domino effect of Japan’s victory was felt even in the Indonesian archipelago which had only recently been unified by Dutch colonialists, where upper-class Javanese set up the first nationalist party in 1908.

The most far-reaching changes occurred in China, culminating in the overthrow of one of the world’s oldest imperial dynasties in 1911. Thousands of Chinese flocked to Japan after 1905 in what was then the biggest-ever mass movement of students overseas. Many of post-imperial China’s first-generation leaders were to emerge from this group. In 1910, a schoolboy called Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976) in a small town in China’s Hunan province memorized a Japanese song taught by his music teacher, a former student in Japan:

The sparrow sings, the nightingale dances,
And the green fields are lovely in the spring.
The pomegranate flowers crimson, the willows green-leafed,
And there is a new picture.¹¹

Recalling the words perfectly decades later, when Japan menaced China, Mao said, ‘At that time, I knew and felt the beauty of Japan, and felt something of her pride and might in this song of her victory over Russia.’¹²

Elsewhere, too, Japan’s victory galvanized patriotic sentiment and even pushed it towards extremism. One of the casualties of this new mood was the liberal nationalism that Westernized native elites had ineffectually espoused. The mood in Bengal, which Lord Curzon planned to partition, was already militantly anti-British. Riots and terrorist attacks attested to a hardening of anti-colonial feeling from 1905 that the Indian National Congress had so far only mildly expressed. Radicals in Calcutta and Dhaka began to sponsor Bengali students for trips to Tokyo, and anti-colonial agitators based in Europe and America established links with Irish and Russian revolutionaries and Japanese and Chinese leaders in order to smuggle arms into Bengal.

The scholar-gentry of French Indochina, too, began to court notions of revolutionary violence. The pioneering Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau (1867 – 1940) based himself in Japan from 1905 to 1909, educating many students from French Indochina under the banner of his Dong Du (‘Look to the East’) society. Social Darwinist ideas of racial war and the struggle for survival came to infect political discourse in Buddhist Ceylon as well as Confucian China and Islamic Egypt. In Cairo, Rashid Rida (1865 – 1935), whose work later served as an inspiration to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, wrote excitedly about the possibility of converting Japan to Islam, and turning the ‘yellow peril’ of European imagination into a pan-Asian movement for liberation from infidels.¹³

The slaughter of the First World War, a decade after the Battle of Tsushima, would deprive Europe, in Asian eyes, of much of its remaining moral prestige. Japan’s conquest of Asia during the Second World War, though eventually reversed, would help detach much of the continent from the weakening grasp of exhausted European empires. In the long view, however, it is the Battle of Tsushima that seems to have struck the opening chords of the recessional of the West.

 

What Tsushima could not immediately reverse was the superiority of Western arms and commerce which had been impressed upon Asia and Africa for much of the nineteenth century. The twentieth century opened with German soldiers mounting punitive raids against anti-Western Chinese Boxers, the United States suppressing a rebellion in the Philippines, and the British fighting, with the help of Indian soldiers, Dutch settlers in southern Africa. By 1905 these wars had ended with China and the Philippines subdued, and South Africa united under British rule. The West was not to relinquish physical possession of its Eastern territories for many more years. But Japan’s victory over Russia accelerated an irreversible process of intellectual, if not yet political, decolonization.

Speaking in 1924, Sun Yat-sen recalled the somnolent last decade of the nineteenth century when the ‘colored races in Asia, suffering from the oppression of the Western people, thought that emancipation was impossible’:

Men thought and believed that European civilization was a progressive one – in science, industry, manufacture, and armament – and that Asia had nothing to compare with it. Consequently, they assumed that Asia could never resist Europe, that European oppression could never be shaken off. Such was the idea prevailing thirty years ago.¹⁴

Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, Sun Yat-sen said, had infused Asian peoples with a ‘new hope’: ‘of shaking off the yoke of European restriction and domination and regaining their own rightful position in Asia’. And in less than two decades, Sun added, independence movements in Egypt, Turkey, Persia, India, Afghanistan and China had grown vigorous. As Gandhi predicted in 1905, ‘the people of the East’ were finally ‘waking up from their lethargy’.¹⁵ The whispers of the East that Lord Curzon feared would soon swell into full-throated assertions and claims. Scattered and isolated individuals would come together to form mass movements and stoke insurrections. Together they would incite a revolutionary reversal of astonishing swiftness.

From its zenith at the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe’s hold over Asia would dramatically weaken; by 1950, with India and China already sovereign states, Europe would be reduced to a peripheral presence in Asia, shored up only by the newest Western power, the United States, and increasingly dependent on an informal empire constituted by military bases, economic pressures and political coups. Europeans, and then Americans, would find that they had underestimated the Asian ability to assimilate modern ideas, techniques and institutions – the ‘secrets’ of Western power – and then to turn them against the West itself. They had failed to notice the intense desire for equality and dignity among peoples whom Europe’s most influential thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to John Stuart Mill, had deemed unfit for self-rule – thinkers whose ideas, ironically, would in fact prove highly potent among these ‘subject peoples’.

Today Asian societies from Turkey to China seem very vital and self-assured. This wasn’t how they appeared to those who condemned the Ottoman and Qing empires as ‘sick’ and ‘moribund’ in the nineteenth century. The much-heralded shift of economic power from the West to the East may or may not happen, but new perspectives have certainly opened up on world history. For most people in Europe and America, the history of the twentieth century is still largely defined by the two world wars and the long nuclear stand-off with Soviet Communism. But it is now clearer that the central event of the last century for the majority of the world’s population was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and European empires. To acknowledge this is to understand the world not only as it exists today, but also how it is continuing to be remade not so much in the image of the West as in accordance with the aspirations and longings of former subject peoples.

 

Who were the main thinkers and doers in this long remaking of modern Asia? How did they prefigure the world we live in and the one that future generations will inhabit? This book seeks to answer these questions by looking at the history of the modern world from several different vantage points in Asia (the continent being defined here in its original Greek sense, with the Aegean Sea dividing Asia from Europe, and the Nile as the border between Asia and Africa – a geographical conception not dissimilar to today’s geopolitical divisions).

The West has seen Asia through the narrow perspective of its own strategic and economic interests, leaving unexamined – and unimagined – the collective experiences and subjectivities of Asian peoples. It may be disorientating to inhabit this other perspective, and this book will doubtless invoke many names and events that are unfamiliar to its Western readers. But it does not seek to replace a Euro-centric or West-centric perspective with an equally problematic Asia-centric one. Rather, it seeks to open up multiple perspectives on the past and the present, convinced that the assumptions of Western power – increasingly untenable – are no longer a reliable vantage point and may even be dangerously misleading.

From a Western standpoint, the influence of the West can seem both inevitable and necessary, requiring no thorough historical auditing. Europeans and Americans customarily see their countries and cultures as the source of modernity and are confirmed in their assumptions by the extraordinary spectacle of their culture’s universal diffusion: today every society, save some isolated tribal communities in Borneo or the Amazonian rainforests, seems at least partially Westernized, or aspiring towards a form of Western modernity. But there was a time when the West merely denoted a geographical region, and other peoples unselfconsciously assumed a universal order centred in their values. Until late into the nineteenth century, people of societies with belief-systems like Islam or Confucianism at their core – much of the known world – could assume that the human order was still fused inseparably with the larger divine or cosmic order defined by their ancestors and gods.

This book seeks to offer a broad view of how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies. It describes how these Asians understood their history and social existence, and how they responded to the extraordinary sequence of events and movements – the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-Afghan Wars, Ottoman modernization, Turkish and Arab nationalism, the Russo-Japanese War, the Chinese Revolution, the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference, Japanese militarism, decolonization, postcolonial nationalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism – that together decided the present shape of Asia.

The book’s main protagonists are two itinerant thinkers and activists: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 – 97), a Muslim who pursued a long career in trenchant journalism and political exhortation in the Middle East and South Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and Liang Qichao (1873 – 1929), perhaps China’s foremost modern intellectual, who participated in many events that led to the destruction of his country’s old imperial certainties and its subsequent re-emergence, after many horrors, as a major world power. Many of al-Afghani’s and Liang’s ideas ultimately became major forces for change. These early modern Asians stand at the beginning of the process whereby ordinary resentment against the West and Western dominance, along with anxiety about internal weakness and decay, was transformed into mass nationalist and liberation movements and ambitious state-building programmes across Asia.

Many other Asian thinkers and leaders also appear here. Some do relatively fleetingly, like the Vietnamese worker, later called Ho Chi Minh, in his rented morning suit trying to petition President Wilson in Paris in 1919 for an end to French colonialism in Indochina. Others like Sun Yat-sen, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb move swiftly across the changing backdrop. Major figures like Gandhi play supporting roles in this drama; his description of modern Western civilization as ‘satanic’ was preceded by other, more influential such critiques in the Muslim world and China.

The focus on lesser-known individuals is deliberate. It makes it possible, I believe, to see the main political and intellectual tendencies that preceded and outlasted the better-known figures that have come to monopolize, and limit, our sense of India, China and the Muslim world. Liang Qichao bequeathed his obsession with building state power to Mao Zedong and his heirs in Communist China; al-Afghani’s fear of the West and obsession with Muslim self-strengthening prepared the way for Atatürk and Nasser as well as Ayatollah Khomeini, and still animates the politics of Islamic societies.

During their long and eventful lives the Asians discussed in the book manifested all of the three main responses to Western power: the reactionary conviction that if Asian people were truly faithful to their religious traditions, which were presumed to be superior to those of all other civilizations, they would be strong again; the moderate notion that only a few Western techniques were required by Asians whose traditions already provided a sound basis for culture and society; and the vigorous determination, embraced by radical secularists like Mao and Atatürk, that the entire old way of life had to be revolutionized in order to compete in the jungle-like conditions of the modern world.

The form of this book – part historical essay and part intellectual biography – is primarily motivated by the conviction that the lines of history converge in individual lives, even though the latter have their own shape and momentum. The early men of modern Asia it describes travelled and wrote prolifically, restlessly assessing their own and other societies, pondering the corruption of power, the decay of community, the loss of political legitimacy and the temptations of the West. Their passionate enquiries appear in retrospect as a single thread, weaving seemingly disparate events and regions into a single web of meaning. So while describing the general intellectual and political atmosphere in Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I hope above all to retrace their wanderings in the byways of modern history and thought. For these men, though relatively unknown, helped make the world we live in, for better and for worse.