Our venture divides this reexamination of the history of empire in Asia into two important phases, treated in two separate volumes. Volume One, “Making Imperial Asia,” examines the long period of imperial consolidation, fragmentation, and regional re-formation that began with the rise of the Mongol Empire and spanned the next seven centuries to the arrival of “European Industrial Imperialism” in the nineteenth century—a development we deal with in Volume Two. As the focus of this volume is the rise across Eurasia of large, coherent imperial polities, the time period covered by each chapter varies slightly from region to region depending on the pace of developments locally. There are, in other words, simply no convenient beginning and end dates that would apply universally across Asia. It should also be made clear that although the period covered in Volume One is roughly coextensive with the period of world history known generally as the “Early Modern,” this concurrence is only significant to the extent that the “Early Modern” is understood first and foremost as a period of proto-globalization, characterized by increasing economic, political, and cultural exchanges between the different regions of the world.1 Our purpose, in other words, is not that Volume One serve as a potted history of premodern Asia, but rather that it provide a synoptic view of the forms of empire that were present in Asia during an era of marked imperial expansion, and of increasing interimperial contact and exchange.
Given this focus, it is natural that Volume One should begin with the rise of the Mongols. The celebrated Chinggis Khan, who ruled from 1206 to 1227, produced an empire that barely lasted a century—but its reverberations would continue much longer. The reach of Mongol imperial ambitions stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Central Europe, accepting no boundaries and recognizing no equals, creating, physically and politically, the closest thing Eurasia ever experienced to a single “world order.” Every region of the supercontinent found itself under Mongol sway to some degree with the exceptions of Japan, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe. Even in these “protected zones,” as Victor Liebermann calls them, the Mongol threat shook established orders.2 This new world order had a single source, however: the Mongols. Therefore, by definition, the “Pax Mongolica” fell short of being a true “international” order inasmuch as the Mongols denied the legitimacy of other empires or states. Mongol ideas, practices, and concepts of empire did establish new baselines, however, from which much subsequently flowed, just as Mongol military success forged connections in trade, commerce, and the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas that knit Eurasian regions together more tightly than ever before. Our first chapter, on “The Making of Chinggisid Eurasia,” therefore examines the Mongol experience and legacies. It also explains why the breakup of the vast Mongol imperial order was just as consequential as its creation and expansion. From unification under a single dynasty, Asia was fragmented into an array of contending successor realms and states; but at the same time each of these successor states remained intensely aware of their Chinggisid predecessor and sought to recreate many aspects of it in miniature in their more reduced domains. The chapter’s conclusion, that the Chinggisid Era laid the foundations for what became a modern “Imperial Asia,” is fundamental to the rest of this volume.
The fragmentation of the Mongol khanates triggered several volatile centuries in Asia characterized by three broad trends. The first of these is that local “lineages of empire” took advantage of Mongol weakness to reassert themselves in the form of a host of smaller states with competing imperial ambitions. The second trend saw the winnowing of these contending states over the next two centuries as a handful of states consolidated their control over large regions of Asia and, in the process, came to embody new interpretations of their particular lineages of empire. The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries thus became, in many ways, a new imperial “Golden Age” in Asia, when the five empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Romanovs, and Ming (then Qing) came to project their power and influence over most of the continent.
In order to make this process clearer, the chapters of Volume One divide into four broad geographical regions. The Sinic Sphere in East Asia was so extensive and significant that two chapters are required to address the two dynasties that ruled China after the Yuan: one on the “Great Ming” and the second on the “Expanding Qing.” The Turco-Persianate empires, similarly, require two chapters: one on the Ottomans and Safavids in Southwest Asia, and a second focusing primarily on the Mughal Empire in South Asia. The Orthodox Slavic imperial traditions of Northwest Asia are examined in a chapter focusing on the Russian Empire under the Rurikid and Romanov dynasties. Southeast Asia is treated in two chapters, since the greater degree of political fragmentation there constituted something of an exception to the larger patterns of consolidation: one chapter examines Peninsular or Mainland Southeast Asia, and the second reviews the imperial history of Insular or Island Southeast Asia. The third and final trend in post-Mongol imperial Asia was the arrival of European explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries especially in South and Southeast Asia, many of whom pursued their own imperial projects in Asian space. As European imperialisms also differed from each other in important ways, we have treated them in two chapters: the first dedicated to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and the second to the chartered company states such as those of the British and Dutch East India companies.
These new imperial blocks represented not one, but several competing, regionalized world orders. This is not, of course, to say that the different empires in Asia existed in splendid isolation from each other; they clearly did not. There were, however, major differences in ideology, structure, and function that made relations between states belonging to different “imperial lineages” particularly difficult and discomfiting. Diplomacy between the rulers of Vietnam and China or of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, for example, was often tense, but at least communications were facilitated by shared literary languages, religions, political rituals, and understandings of how politics worked. A host of obstacles, however, and not merely geographical distance, impeded relations across imperial lineages between, say, the Ottomans and Ming China. An important part of the story told in Volume One is how these different imperial lineages came into increasing contact with one another and how they dealt with the differences between them.
Five especially prominent features characterized the web of interconnections between the empires of Eurasia and thus reappear in each of the chapters to a greater or lesser extent. The first was the prevalence across Eurasian societies of monarchy and hierarchy—indeed, the very concept of “empire” would have been meaningless without a widespread conviction across multiple regions that human societies were ordered hierarchically both internally and relative to one another. The image of the emperor as a “king of kings,” for example, recurred in virtually all the imperial polities considered here. More egalitarian societies such as the tribal peoples of the Southeast Asian highlands, Borneo, or southwestern China, however, were generally inhospitable terrain for imperial projects.
A second common feature of interimperial relations, which has already been mentioned previously, was the shared experience across much of Eurasia of Chinggisid rule and therefore a lingering model of how imperial unification of the entire known world could take place—whether that model was held up for imitation or avoidance. The third, rather obvious, factor encouraging relations across states was the search for prosperity and power through commerce. Again and again, the desire for trade drew empires into sustained contact across enormous distances and gave them an incentive to overcome differences in language, culture, ideology, and political claims. This was not always the case, however, and empires such as those of the Ming and Qing were quite capable of ignoring the siren song of foreign commerce when it suited them.
The fourth factor was the important role of religions as ideological and cultural unifiers. Islam, for example, was particularly important for encouraging exchanges across a wide range of states from North Africa to Southeast Asia and for giving their rulers a common store of political words, ideals, and practices. Missionaries, proselytes, and religious minorities played a particularly critical role as bridges between different imperial lineages and cultural worlds. The foreign relations of the Ming and Qing, for example, would have been much more difficult without the presence at court of Portuguese Jesuits and Muslim generals.
The fifth and final feature was the role of the sea in linking multiple regions of Eurasia and allowing the circulation of new imperial ideas and practices. Indeed, it is not coincidental that the period covered in Volume One is also that of the “Age of Explorations” and the rise of long-distance sea travel. The sheer size of the great Eurasian continental landmass and the difficulties imposed by climate and terrain impeded in time, manner, and extent the pace and depth of connections between its different regions. For millennia armies, settlers, and trade caravans had moved across the continent at the same pace, and with similar degrees of vulnerability to climate, season, and terrain. Such conditions had militarily favored the great mounted cavalry armies of the Steppe Empires, preeminently the Mongols. Only Romanov Russia and Qing China eventually developed any significant capability to reorder the vast interior spaces of Central Asia on any large and lasting scale, and both could only march inexorably but slowly. Movement by sea, however, was potentially another story. It is true that for a long time movement by sea resisted transformation by human invention. Wooden ships propelled by the winds filling their sails were larger and more efficient in 1400 than they were in 400, but they could not move much faster, nor could they surmount restrictions imposed by the seasons and their patterns of winds. What their owners could do, however, was discover how to navigate the “great waters” of the world over very long distances, for very long times, out of sight of the land.
Several different Eurasian empires showed an interest in precisely such maritime exploration during the 1400s–1500s. Ming China under the Yongle Emperor, for example, commissioned Admiral Zheng He to undertake a series of “treasure voyages” with a massive fleet from the South China Sea to the east coast of Africa between 1405 and 1433. After a spectacular beginning, however, the Ming state abruptly lost interest in such voyages and returned to a deliberate policy of avoiding maritime entanglements. The Ottomans, similarly, engaged in ambitious voyages of exploration during the 1500s that took their fleets from the Atlantic to the Straits of Malacca. The dynasty even seems to have contemplated the creation of a sea-borne “soft world empire” that would have stretched from Gibraltar to Sumatra, before official interest in these schemes waned over the course of the 1600s.3 By default, the great globe-girdling voyages of reconnaissance that did so much to drive globalization and world history would come instead from Western Europe. It bears emphasizing, however, that if such voyages of exploration were launched mostly from European ports, they were aimed primarily at reaching Asian shores as European states sought to overcome the distances that divided them from the storied wealth of the Indies and China. Two very different types of European projection of power into Asian space thus evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the slow but methodical expansion of Russia by land and by river across Siberia and the more dramatic, seaborne empire-building of the maritime powers of Western Europe at scattered points throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeastern Asia.
Europeans thus must form an inevitable part of the larger story of “Empire in Asia,” even before the formation of large European-ruled empires in the region. The role of Europeans in the imperial history of Asia during this period was, however, much more modest and circumscribed than the usual stereotypes of Western imperialism would lead us to expect. Expansion into Asia connected Europeans to a larger and more dynamic world, not the other way around. European traders and explorers thus relied on already existing local networks and on Chinggisid, Ottoman, and Timurid empire-building for the physical connections that enabled sustained intercourse. Upon arrival, Europeans had for a long time to tread softly in Asian spaces that were governed by polities often stronger and wealthier than those they came from. Until the late 1700s, Westerners were in no position to reorder the politics of the regions they operated in, but rather had to learn to adapt to local expectations. When Westerners transgressed the bounds set by their hosts or lost favor with a local ruler, they suffered wholesale expulsion as happened repeatedly to all European representatives operating in the East, such as the Portuguese in Japan (1639), the British in Java (1682), the French in Siam (1688), and in many other cases.
As the chapter on the Iberian empires demonstrates, one of the great accomplishments of the Portuguese and Spanish was that they managed to overcome these limitations to build modest, but far-flung empires in Asia that would have a lasting impact on the region and the world. In particular, the Iberians forged what was perhaps the first truly sustained global economy, which connected the export of silver mined in the New World of the Americas with Asian trade and commerce as they expanded in East, Southeast, and South Asia. In the process, the Iberians created a network of sea routes, ports, forts, and commercial links that other European powers like Britain, Holland, and France would later appropriate by force and use to build up a far more substantial presence in the region. The successes of the Iberian powers also introduced a novel concept to Asian states: that the sea itself could be both a means and an object of empire-building.
The final chapter of Volume One points us toward a more general shift of approach in the second volume of this series, by following the rise of a peculiar new method for informal empire-building: the chartered company. This chapter underlines the important point that although the various East India companies were conceived and headquartered in Europe, they were fundamentally joint ventures that fused European ambitions and innovations with Asian networks, business practices, resources, and political interests. The resulting chartered companies did not always evolve into overtly imperial structures, but the largest and most important—those belonging to the British, Dutch, and French companies—certainly did so and would ultimately pave the way for European imperial projects of truly grand dimensions in Asia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Notes
1On the Early Modern period as “proto-globalization,” see: Anthony G. Hopkins, “Introduction: Globalization—An Agenda for Historians,” and Chris A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750–1850,” both in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 5–6, 47–73.
2Victor Liebermann, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: University Press, 2003, 2009), vol. 2, pp. 85–6, 92–122.
3See Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 149–51.