I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I think people shouldn’t underestimate the Mongol invasions had which China had to recover from and which the Islamic Golden Age was brought to an end. If it weren’t for the Mongols, capitalism would most likely have started in Southern Song instead of Western Europe. Southern Song already invented paper currency, and in general, was already transitioning away from feudalism through the Industrious Revolution. And keep in mind, this was China having to face the full onslaught of the Mongol invasion, which Western Europe was completely shielded from. Now imagine if China never had to suffer through massive depopulation and infrastructural damage. Likewise, the Black Death was also the catalysis that brought the downfall of feudalism in Western Europe. Massive amount of death gave labor more bargaining power since the supply of labor was greatly diminished. It also forced people to question feudalism as a political ideology.
In an alt-history where the Mongol invasions didn’t snowball like the way it did (maybe alt-history Genghis Khan was assassinated before he could unify the Mongols) and the Black Death never happened, Europe could very well just be a backwaters part of Asia still stuck with feudalism while China or India have a capitalist (or completely novel) mode of production which allows them to build colonial empires in Africa and the Americas (I think Chinese and Indian ships already were able to sail to those continents and this would certainly be true for alt-history Chinese and Indian ships).
even the most optimistic estimates for Song population were met and surpassed by the Ming. and the view that Mongols just came in and killed everybody & burned everything is bizarre. they conquered, but every dynastic transition in China was ultraviolent, the Song did it, the Tang did it, the Ming did it. afterward the Yuan proved just as capable of governance and maintenance of infrastructure as their predecessors. for all the talk about Southern Song’s pre-proto-industrialism no one ever seems to appreciate it was lashed to a decrepit state that couldn’t even control all of China. bully to your paper money, page me when you can defeat the Jin.
but also have you heard of the Qing? with your scapegoating of the Mongols the Qing defy explanation. oh yeah the developmentally disadvantaged-from-1200 chinese just accidentally conquered the largest ever chinese state, including the mongolian steppe, a military success unheard of since the Han dynasty?
Right, my point is Ming and Qing had surpassed Southern Song despite the Mongols. I wouldn’t say Yuan was some great Chinese dynasty on par with Han, Tang, Song, or Ming. It lasted less than a century, which is subpar for a Chinese dynasty. The lasting contribution of Yuan was the idea that you don’t have to be Han to be Chinese, which was further developed by the Qing since both Yuan and Qing were conquest dynasties.
And as a final note, capitalism could’ve also started in Mughal India instead of Western Europe or China. I don’t think it was destined for capitalism to first come out of Western Europe. There were various candidates (Western Europe, China, India) and various historical events would eventually tilt the weight in favor of one candidate.
You’re applying a Han-centric view of the Mongol conquests. The Mongol Conquests resulted in the complete extinction of the Tangut and Khitan in the North, as well as the complete loss of the Jurchen script. These were major cultures in pre-Yuan China. This is equivalent to say Koreans or Tibetans going extinct. No other dynastic change has resulted in the complete extinction of multiple cultures like this except maybe the conquest of Chu, but even then the Chu were broadly culturally similar to the other warring states.
now you’re gonna make me defend the Mongols? they didn’t extinct either people, the Khitan were already on the decline and subject under the Jin. and the Western Liao were literally a dozen families, that were taken over by the Naiman Kuchlug when Genghis went over there.
e: and i may have been thinking of the Jin’s Khitan contingent but i really thought there was also a Yuan Khitan guard unit too. besides, the Eastern Liao were a close ally and afterward vassal of the Mongols, i have no idea where you got the impression of a mongol effort to eliminate them. they were mongolic cousins and just assimilated
Tangut got fucked, but still were around after the fact, getting mentioned in mongol armies.
but the Jurchen script was just based on chinese and they switched it out for mongolian based i dont think thats a huge thing
It was an entirely different writing system based off of Chinese and Khitan. Its relationship with Chinese is more analogous to the Cherokee script’s relationship with the Latin alphabet. Plus I don’t think it’s “not a huge thing” considering imo this is why the Manchu language today is near extinct. Imagine how European history would’ve turned out if every major Germanic culture was suddenly wiped out or had all their writing destroyed.
we’re literally communicating in germanic rendered with the latin alphabet right now, not the alphabet the germans used. that’s all that happened with jurchen/manchu, its marginalization doesn’t have to do with its script (and it could be rendered in others if people were inclined) but the abandonment of it by the manchu themselves as the ruling caste of Qing, and also the reactionary anti-manchu policies of the early Republic
E: but yeah ‘chinese’ isn’t the appropriate term for that first jurchen writing system, it just shared the common ancestor of the chinese and khitan.
Well yeah. imagine if in the middle of the Renaissance, when Northern Europe finally approached the level of societal development as Southern Europe, a nomadic group of Germanics suddenly came and assimilated/killed off most Germanic cultures. All works written in the Latin alphabet are lost, no Shakespeare, Martin Luther or Chaucer. The Germanic languages that do survive now use a form of neo-hieroglyphic completely incompatible with the previous written corpus. It would be a tremendous loss of culture.
I admit this isn’t much of a material analysis. I’m just lamenting the loss of all these scripts. But changing writing systems isn’t a casual affair, especially in the premodern world where document preservation is difficult and you’re not going to have people sit down and transliterate every old book they come across. One contributing factor to the decline of the Manchu language is the lack of a corpus. Most texts were merely translations from Chinese. If the pre-mongol Jurchen corpus had survived I doubt the Qing nobility would’ve abandoned Manchu as readily.
Well not really. The Khitan Large script was explicitly created in the Liao dynasty based off the principles of Chinese (which at this point was already identical to modern day Chinese), a second semi-phonetic Small script was then created based off of that and old Uyghur, while the Jurchens used a script based off borrowings from both Chinese, the Khitan Large scrript, and possibly the Khitan small script.
okay mongolian used sogdian, a very successful and not unsophisticated system. i’m not of the opinion writing systems inherently advantage/disadvantage a language on their own. prominence of languages is political.
i mean no problem with that, but i don’t see how the Jurchens are that special or how whatever documents might’ve burned in Zhongdu couldve saved the manchu language 8 centuries afterward
I’m not arguing that modern Mongolic/Manchu script is inferior to Jurchen script because that would be chauvinistic. I’m saying any switch to a completely different writing system, especially one working on completely different principles basically renders all previous text inaccessible. We can see this basically any time a culture transitions to drastically different writing systems in the pre-modern era its accompanied by a complete abandonment of the previous written corpus even if you ignore the specific mechanics of the writing systems involved. We literally have no Jurchen documents written in paper, despite the fact that all Song sources point to the fact that the Jurchens were a relatively literate people who had access to printing for four centuries at that point. If that corpus survived then yeah the Manchu language would probably be like the Zhuang or Yi languages today, which never had the political prestige of Manchu/Jurchen, yet still persist and have relatively good access to their literary canon despite attempts at modern reforms.
Friend your citation is to a book chapter which mentions the author’s previous work on the industrious revolution…in the early modern (i.e. Ming) period. It does not say what you want it to say.
Large, centralised, powerful states inhibit the expansion of mercantile power. Historically (cf. Aglietta & Bai China’s Development: Capitalism and Empire) the Chinese states would break up concentrations of merchant power.
Also to add to what Dolores said about Qing, I wanna point out that it (and Ming, etc) had superior famine relief and general peasant living standards. To quote Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: “In Europe’s Age of Reason [c.1700] the “starving masses” were French, Irish and Calabrian, not Chinese”.
Capitalism’s development is things going wrong. What we have today is the result of class struggle (paricularly around the mediterranean) ending in “common ruin of the contending classes”(Manifesto p.1) at best, triumph of the oppressing class at worst, repeatedly, for millennia. It is not a system that develops when a society is healthy or flourishing.
This whole idea that a Chinese Empire would engage in European style colonial policies is absurd, because we have historical examples of what Chinese expansion looks like; generally a slower (but still bad, brutal etc) encroching process with tribute taken as personal gifts for the emperor / court (here I am drawing primarily on Ye’s The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan and Walker’s The Conquest of Ainu Land). Native autonomy maintained often by military action from above against local officials. That the tribute is generally restricted to articles for use rather than exchange means “no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise” (Kapital p.345), hence no boundless, rapacious growth. This sorta tribute (and de jure acknowledgement of Chinese supremacy) came from places as distant as Southeast Asia, East Africa and Hokkaido.
The two big waves of (again, still brutal, traumatic etc) migration of mainland Chinese to Taiwan during imperial era was during one of the medieval dynasty transitions, when the loser fled to Taiwan, and in the mid 1800s, when China was trying to prove that it was being a “real” empire and “civilizing” the area.
Definitely making a note of those books I’ve been reading about the tributary mode of production outside & predating european feudalism
The difference between Western and Chinese territorial expansionism isn’t that different, especially when you compare the complete conquest and destruction of the Dzungar Khanate wrought by the Qing. Fundamentally, the territories of feudal polities were constrained by how long it would take to travel from the frontier to the central government. There’s no reason to think that a feudal polity wouldn’t further expand if they had less constraints such as the adoption of faster transportation. Yes, the tributary system existed, but the empire proper also saw overall expansion and incorporation of tributary relationships and de jure rule into de facto rule as well. You can see this with Nanzhong/Dali where it oscillated between being a frontier of the empire with almost no de facto rule and a tributary state before being incorporated into the empire proper during the Yuan. Chinese expansionism also wasn’t just through the Asian interior either since Kublai Khan tried but failed to conquer Indonesia and Japan. Now, if you’re talking about settler-colonialism where European powers conspired to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population in the Americas in order to steal their land and replace their population with European settlers not indigenous to the land, then yes, I don’t see even alt-history China doing that.
Overall, my initial comment in this thread is pushing back the idea that:
Capitalism was destined to develop in Western Europe when there were multiple candidates. The two candidates I could see were China and India. Perhaps there were others as well.
Capitalism was passively developed through material conditions which saw its birth as inevitable and not brought forth into existence through human activity. It was developed through human activity, and I don’t just mean things like primitive accumulation, but that the preconditions of capitalism’s arrival themselves were also brought forth through human activity.
Combining the two would mean that beyond just pointing out the advantageous material conditions of Western Europe, you would have to point to key historical events which pushed the origins of capitalism in Western Europe’s favor. Now if you want to argue that the Industrious Revolution as experienced in China and India would lead to a completely new mode of production that was neither feudalism nor capitalism (nor socialism), that’s fair. But you would have to show how this new mode of production is distinct from capitalism.
To explore your tangent a little more, I’d say that Western and Chinese territorial expansionism is more different than alike, precisely for the examples you’ve cited.
Viewing cultures in reductive civilizational cliches is not a rigorous mode of analysis, but it is worth drawing a few points from. The Qing and Yuan phases of expansion are in direct contrast with the remarkable lack of relative expansion under the so-called “Han Chinese” dynasties. Those two dynasties were established under conquest and actively contextualized their reign as one of triumphal subjugation over the general population and majority culture. Operating under that mode of cultural belief allows a more assertive geopolitical posture compared to the more passive foreign policy philosophies of the “traditional” dynasties.
The example of the Imjin War between Ming China and Korea vs Japan is a good example, because it establishes the stakes involved in clarifying this. Some scholars in South Korea (though not the consensus view, as far as I’m aware) who operate from an adversarial basis towards the entire Chinese presence in Korean history see the war as a fight for Korea’s independence against not just Japan, but also Korea’s Ming ally, who “actually wanted to annex Korea while they were there supporting Korea.” Thus, Korea fought off not just Japan’s hard takeover but also the Ming “soft takeover.” K.M Swope’s “A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598” shows how this view is completely unfactual. The Ming were certainly frustrated at the military inefficiency of lacking direct control in Korea while conducting the defence against Japan, but they were never interested in annexing Korea as a result of this.
The real reason for this allegation is that those scholars simply aren’t capable, through their Hobbesian cynicism, of conceiving a foreign policy relationship that isn’t based on an agenda of conquest and eventual annexation in the style of European imperialism. As such, they see shadows of European settler-colonialism everywhere in history, even when the evidence isn’t there. By this, their motive is to essentially whitewash the genocidal European mentality that brought about the past 500 years of global trauma by saying that “Europe just simply got to it first, everyone else would have done it as well in the same position.”
I call this the “You would have been a Holocaust supporter if you lived in Nazi Germany” cultural relativism-fetishist argument you used to see all the time on Reddit, which forgets through its assumption that, no, not everyone is a hetero-normative White Christian and most people in the world would have been thrown into the camps if they were somehow transported to Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, a rejection of that mode of conduct is how China historically behaved by-and-large under the “traditional” dynasties and how modern China aims to be.
I would add that through this, the parallels between the “Ming takeover” allegation and the modern propaganda against China’s BRI could not be more plain. The argumentation is basically the same. “Sure, those countries may be right to resist the Western/IMF neocolonialist ‘hard takeovers,’ but they also have to watch out for China’s aid ‘soft takeovers’ too.”