From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Europe was to express, as the nineteenth century progressed, an idea of itself through its manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration; and this idea, which emerged from the American and French revolutions and which seemed to place the West in the avant-garde of progress, would be increasingly hard to refute. Already in 1798, a remarkably high degree of organization defined the post-revolutionary French state as well as the French people, who were coming together on the basis of an apparently common language, territory and history to constitute a separate and distinct ‘nation-state’.

  Faced with the evidence of Europe’s advantages, many Muslims were initially bemused and unable to assess it correctly. ‘The newly established republic in France’, the Ottoman historian Asim recognized in 1801, ‘is different from the other Frankish polities.’ But then he went on to say: ‘Its ultimate basis is an evil doctrine consisting of the abandonment of religion and the equality of rich and poor.’ As for parliamentary deliberations, they were ‘like the rumblings and crepitations of a queasy stomach’.7 Some of this cultural arrogance lingered in the eyewitness accounts of Napoleon’s conquest by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti. The cleric generally found French practices distasteful, even barbaric: ‘It is their custom’, he wrote, ‘not to bury their dead but to toss them on garbage heaps like the corpses of dogs and beasts, or to throw them into the sea.’8 ‘Their women do not veil themselves and have no modesty … They [the French] have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa.’9 Al-Jabarti also mocked French hats, the European habit of peeing in public, and the use of toilet paper. He contemptuously dismissed Napoleon’s claim to be a protector of Islam, laughing at the bad Arabic grammar of the Frenchman’s proclamations, and he sniggered when the French failed to launch a hot-air balloon at one of their demonstrations of European scientific prowess.

  Al-Jabarti’s limited experience of political institutions made him misunderstand French revolutionary ideals: ‘their term “liberty” means,’ he concluded too hastily, ‘that they are not slaves like the Mamluks’.10 He sensed the hostility to his own Islamic values in Napoleon’s claim that ‘all the people are equal in the eyes of God’. ‘This is a lie, and ignorance, and stupidity,’ he thundered. ‘How can this be when God has made some superior to others?’11

  Still, al-Jabarti, who had been educated at al-Azhar, couldn’t fail to be impressed when he visited the Institut d’Égypte, where the intellectuals in Napoleon’s entourage had a well-stocked library.

  Whoever wishes to look up something in a book asks for whatever volumes he wants and the librarian brings them to him … All the while they are quiet and no one disturbs his neighbor … among the things I saw there was a large book containing the Biography of the Prophet … The glorious Qur‘an is translated into their language! … I saw some of them who know chapters of the Qur’an by heart. They have a great interest in the sciences, mainly in mathematics and the knowledge of languages, and make great efforts to learn the Arabic language and the colloquial. 12

  Al-Jabarti was also struck by the efficiency and discipline of the French army, and he followed with great curiosity the electoral processes in the Divan that Napoleon had created, explaining to his Arab readers how members wrote their votes on strips of paper, and how majority opinion prevailed.

  Al-Jabarti was not entirely deaf to the lessons from Napoleon’s conquest: that the government in the world’s first modern nation-state did not merely collect taxes and tributes and maintain law and order; it could also raise a conscript army, equip well-trained personnel with modern weapons, and have democratic procedures in place to elect civilian leaders. Two centuries later, al-Jabarti seems to stand at the beginning of a long line of bewildered Asians: men accustomed to a divinely ordained dispensation, the mysterious workings of fate and the cyclical rise and fall of political fortunes, to whom the remarkable strength of small European nation-states would reveal that organized human energy and action, coupled with technology, amount to a power that could radically manipulate social and political environments. Resentfully dismissive at first of Europe, these men would eventually chafe at their own slothful and uncreative dynastic rulers and weak governments; and they would arrive at a similar conviction: that their societies needed to attain sufficient strength to meet the challenge of the West.

  THE SLOW BATTERING OF INDIA AND CHINA

  Napoleon’s occupation of a large country like Egypt was always tenuous. Despite his praise of Islam, the population remained hostile. Revolts erupted in the major towns, provoking the French into ugly reprisals, including the vandalism and drunken orgies at the al-Azhar mosque. The British navy finally made Napoleon’s position untenable by blockading Egypt, isolating him from France and his supply lines. By August 1799 when Napoleon left Egypt as surreptitiously as he had departed Paris, to begin his ascent to political supremacy in France, his Indian ally Tipu Sultan had also been overcome by the British. There were no more conquests for him to accomplish in Asia. He would now concentrate on Europe, striving, in the fearful words of the Turkish ambassador to Paris, ‘day and night like a fiercely biting dog to bring diverse mischiefs on the surrounding lands and to reduce all states to the same disorder as his own accursed nation’.13

  In retrospect, Napoleon had shot out of the starting blocks too early. By 1798, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the British had all secured crucial footholds in Asian territories. But the European conquest of Asia wouldn’t get fully under way until after Napoleon himself was comprehensively defeated in 1815. Exhausted by war, the five great European powers – Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria – would agree to maintain a balance of power in Europe. Their pugnacity at home restrained by treaties, Western nations would grow more aggressive in the East, no longer content with beachheads on the vast continent of Asia. In 1824 the British, ensconced in eastern India, began their long subjugation of Burma. In the same year an Anglo-Dutch treaty confirmed British control of Singapore and the Malay states of the Peninsula while demarcating the influence of the Netherlands over Java. Neither Britain nor the Dutch, in turn, stood in the way of French domination of Vietnam.

  By the time of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the British had conquered a third of India; they would soon be paramount over the rest, inaugurating a potent presence in mainland Asia that was to help them force open China to European traders, and turn the rest of Asia into a European dependency. The speed and audacity of the British conquests in India seem more astonishing given the low profile they had kept during their centuries-long presence in the subcontinent. Arriving at the brilliantly adorned Mughal court in Agra in 1616, Sir Thomas Roe, the first accredited English ambassador to India, had struggled to keep his national flag aloft. Roe’s ruler in England, James I, who wanted a formal trade treaty with the Mughal emperor Jahangir, had told him to be ‘careful of the preservation of our honour and dignity’14 and Roe managed to avoid the bowing and scraping expected of ambassadors at the Mughal court. But he felt acutely the shabbiness of the gifts he had brought from England for the aesthete Jahangir, and he could not entirely overcome the Mughal emperor’s scepticism about a supposedly great English king who concerned himself with such petty things as trade.

  As late as 1708, the British East India Company’s president felt it imperative to cringe while addressing the Mughal emperor, declaring himself as ‘the smallest particle of sand … with his forehead at command rubbed on the ground’.15 In 1750 when the Mughal Empire, weakened by endless wars and invasions, was imploding into a number of independent states, the only place where the British enjoyed territorial sovereignty was the then obscure fishing village of Bombay (Mumbai). Their luck finally turned in the next few years. In 1757, after a battle with Bengal’s Muslim viceroy, the East India Company found itself in possession of a territory three times larger than England. Less than a decade later, the Company had successfully deployed the same combination of political skulduggery and military force
to undermine the ruler of Awadh, the largest of the Mughal Empire’s provinces.

  The British subsequently controlled and ruthlessly exploited economically a large part of eastern India. ‘The world has never seen’, Bengal’s pioneering novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838 – 94) would write, ‘men as tyrannical and powerful as the people who first founded the Britannic empire in India … The English who came to India in those days were affected by an epidemic – stealing other people’s wealth. The word morality had disappeared from their vocabulary.’16 Chatterji worked for the British administration in Bengal and had to necessarily tone down his criticism. There was no such inhibition on the righteous rage of Edmund Burke, then a member of the British Parliament. ‘Young men (boys almost) govern there’, he wrote about Bengal in 1788,

  without society and without sympathy with the natives … Animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage.17

  The Muslim historian Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai (1727 – 1806), who also worked for the British in Bengal, concurred about the corruption and insularity of his bosses. ‘No love, and no coalition can take root’, he wrote in a history of India published in 1781, ‘between the conquerors and the conquered.’18 This hardly mattered to the British. As Haji Mustapha, a Creole convert to Islam who translated Tabatabai’s book into English in 1786, pointed out in his introduction: ‘The general turn of the English individuals in India seems to be a thorough contempt for the Indians (as a national body). It is taken to be no better than a dead stock that may be worked upon without much consideration, and at pleasure.’19 Increasingly powerful in India, the British could afford to be more aggressive in China, where European traders, confined to the port of Canton, had long fantasized about the potentially huge inland market for their goods. Since they occupied rich agricultural lands in eastern India, the British were particularly keen to find buyers for their produce, especially opium, and they chafed at the arbitrary and opaque nature of China’s imperial authority. Emboldened by their successes in India, the British travelled a much shorter distance between awe and contempt in confronting the rulers of China.

  Though less extensive than the land of Islam, a unitary Chinese empire persisting over two millennia had made for a high degree of self-absorption. Tribute-bearing foreigners from places as far away as Burma allowed the Chinese to think of themselves as inhabitants of the ‘Middle Kingdom’. Indeed, not even Islam could parallel the extraordinary longevity and vitality of Chinese Confucianism, which regulated everything from familial relations to political and ethical problems and had eager imitators in Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

  In 1793, the British envoy Lord Macartney led a diplomatic mission to Beijing (Peking) with a letter from King George III asking Emperor Qianlong for a commerce treaty, more ports for British traders and ambassadorial presence at his court. Like Sir Thomas Roe before him, Macartney faced many threats to his dignity. His retinue was made to travel under a banner that said, in Chinese, ‘Ambassador bearing tribute from the country of England’. Macartney also had to engage in a long and delicate diplomatic dance to avoid prostrating himself full-length in the ceremonial kowtow before the emperor. He bent one knee instead in the emperor’s presence, and handed over various presents attesting to Britain’s advanced technical and manufacturing skills, such as brass howitzers and astronomical instruments. The Chinese emperor, then a fit eighty-year-old, graciously asked after King George’s health and offered Macartney some rice wine during a ‘sumptuous’ banquet, which struck the Englishman as possessing a ‘calm dignity, that sober pomp of Asiatic greatness, which European refinements have not yet attained’.20

  The British delegation was treated with bland courtesy for a few more days before being abruptly ushered out of the country with a reply from the Celestial Emperor that stated unequivocally that he had ‘never valued ingenious articles’ and had not ‘the slightest need of England’s manufactures’. It was right that ‘men of the Western Ocean’ should admire and want to study the culture of his empire. But he could not countenance an English ambassador who spoke and dressed so differently fitting into the ‘Empire’s ceremonial system’. And, the emperor added, it would be good if the English king could ‘simply act in conformity with our wishes by strengthening your loyalty and swearing perpetual obedience’.21

  The letter had been drafted well before Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing. The condescending tone reflected the Chinese elite’s exalted sense of their country’s pre-eminence, and their determination to protect the old political system in which rich families and landowners supplied well-schooled officials for the administration, and trade was conducted over land and sea with neighbours. The Chinese also knew of the growing power of the ‘barbarians’ in Asia, where the Europeans had taken a lead in maritime trade, setting up military posts and trading stations across India’s coast and South-east Asia. ‘It is said’, Qianlong wrote to his Grand Minister, ‘that the English have robbed and exploited the merchant ships of the other western ocean states so that the foreigners along the western ocean are terrified of their brutality.’22 The emperor thought it best to keep such aggressive adventurers at bay.

  The British persisted, sending another, less expensive embassy to the Qing court in 1816. This time, the Chinese absolutely insisted on the kowtow, and did not let the ambassador enter Beijing when he refused to ritually abase himself before the Chinese emperor.

  But China’s bluff was about to be called. Lord Macartney, who had been governor of Madras (Chennai) in British India, had shrewdly noted during his travels in China that though the country, ‘an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war’, could ‘overawe’ her ‘neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance’, it was prone to drift and be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’.23 The nautical metaphors were apt. Explaining why China had dropped out of world history, Hegel had pointed to its indifference to maritime exploration. It would be from the sea that European powers would soon probe China’s weaknesses and scratch its wounds. And, like the Mughals and the Ottomans, the Manchus would know the bitter consequences of ignoring the West’s innovations of state-backed industry and commerce.

  As the Chinese would come to do again in more recent times, they exported much more to Europe and America – mostly tea, silks and porcelains – than they imported, creating a severe balance-of-payments problem for the West which found its precious silver disappearing into Chinese hands. The British East India Company hit upon an alternative mode of payment once it increased its stranglehold over the fertile agricultural lands of eastern India. It was opium, which grew luxuriantly and could be cheaply processed into smokable paste, speedily shipped to southern China and sold through middlemen at Canton to the Chinese masses.

  The export of opium exponentially increased revenues and quickly reduced Britain’s trade deficit with China; mass Chinese intoxication became central to British foreign policy. But the easy availability of the drug quickly created a problem of addiction in the country. In 1800, the Chinese forbade the import and production of opium; in 1813, they banned smoking altogether.

  Still, the British kept at it: by 1820, there was enough opium coming into China to keep a million people addicted, and the flow of silver had been reversed.24 In the 1830s Emperor Daoguang, faced with a growing scarcity of silver, considered legalizing opium. But he had to contend with a vociferous anti-opium lobby. According to one of the petitioners to the emperor, opium was a dangerous conspiracy organized by red-haired Westerners, which had already ‘seduced the nimble, warlike people of Java into the use of it, whereupon they were subdued, brought into subjection and their land taken possession of’. Another anti-opium campaigner claimed that ‘in introducing opium into this country, the English purpose has been to weaken and enfeeble the central empire. If not early aroused to a sense of our danger, we shall find ourselves
, before long, on the last step towards ruin.’25

  The anti-opium lobby suggested that smokers be deterred with the death penalty, but the sheer number of smokers raised the spectre of mass executions. In 1838, Daoguang decided to stop the trafficking and consumption of opium altogether. China’s war on drugs was conducted peacefully at first; Qing officials drew upon Confucian values of sobriety and obedience to persuade many addicts to renounce smoking, and Chinese middlemen to desist from the trade. The same moral appeal was also addressed to the Westerners, including a letter to Queen Victoria by Lin Zexu, the imperial commissioner at Canton.

  Lin, an exemplary official in the Confucian tradition, had acquired a reputation for probity and competence in previous posts as governor of provinces in central China. Addressing the British potentate, he expressed amazement that traders would come to China from as far off as Britain ‘for the purpose of making a great profit’.26 He assumed naively that the British government was not aware of the immoral smugglers in Canton and would uphold the moral principles of Confucius just as vigorously as the Chinese emperor had. ‘May you, O King,’ he wrote, ‘check your wicked and sift out your vicious people before they come to China.’27 He urged the British monarch to eradicate the opium plant in Madras, Bombay, Patna and Benares and replace it with millet, barley and wheat.

  With the Western traders, Lin took a tough line. When they resisted, their factories in Canton were blockaded until they yielded up their opium stocks, which were promptly flushed into the sea. Those who refused to sign bonds pledging not to indulge in opium trafficking were summarily expelled: it was then that a group of British traders first settled on the rocky island called Hong Kong.