Timeline of Events

• Central Idea: Timeline of Events

• Main Branches:

  • Historical Events

    • Ancient History

    • Medieval Period

    • Modern History

  • Personal Events

    • Birthdays

    • Anniversaries

    • Milestones

  • Project Events

    • Planning

    • Execution

    • Completion

  • World Events

    • Wars

    • Revolutions

    • Pandemics

• Sub-branches:

  • Ancient History

    • Egyptian Civilization

    • Roman Empire

    • Greek Civilization

  • Birthdays

    • Family

    • Friends

    • Colleagues

  • Planning

    • Research

    • Scheduling

    • Resource Allocation

  • Wars

    • World War I

    • World War II

    • Cold War

https://quizlet.com/922851041/hist-015h-final-flash-cards/

1500-1650 - LIVES ON RIVERS AND ROADS IN THE ERA OF SOVEREIGN RULERS

1500s - Sovereignty

• composite monarchies

• Many “empires” in this period were composite monarchies under a single ruler’s imperium

• African sovereigns welcomed at court

  • Portuguese court thus welcomed visitors from African states as emissaries

  • When Portuguese traders approached African rulers, they did so as visitors to a foreign court

Ming China

• Ming history often told as a distinct ethnicity, the Han people, absorbing non-Han to form a unified state

• But Ming emperors had to negotiate authority with local clans, and “Han” and ”non-Han” labels arose in this political process

• In other words, the ethnicities were invented to demarcate who did or didn’t accept the Ming state

• Today about 92% of Chinese identify as Han, indicating its socially constructed quality (and how modern nation-state theory gave ”race” and “ethnicity” new significance)

Period of 1500-1650

• most of humanity still lived highly localized lives (along rivers and roads)

• globe was still only loosely demarcated, and characterized politically by a vast number of small states

• political power was still viewed as exercised by rulers (not states), who might (or might not) bring multiple states under their empire, i.e., sovereignty

Animism (new animism)

• Mexica, the imperial people under Moctezuma who dominated the Valley of Mexico in 1500

• A way of being in the world, or in the continually generating essence that is the world

• Tim Ingold: animists are continuously open to the possibility that life extends richly outward from the human (rather than centered on a human interiority that is set off from the surrounding world)

• In animism, everything is an interconnected web + in perpetual flux

• Things are characterized by verbs/actions

• Humans, animals, grasses, the wind, stars, the moon, and the gods are creating a world continuously through their various interactions

• At no point is there a ready-made world but instead a continuously born or becoming world

• “logic of inversion” encourages us to see the essential makeup of things and persons as centered on their dynamic interiority, the animist places more emphasis on an outward realm of being that is itself characterized by change and uncertainty

• Mexica the hummingbird god was reborn out of the Earth as the Sun, triumphing over his siblings the Moon and the Stars

• Feasting and sacrificing for Huitzilopotchli, god of the warriors and sun, helped to legitimize this imperial people who were new to the Valley and whose conquests forced many of its communities to become tributaries

• Tezcatlipoca, god of the near and night

  • No god was more important to a Mexica ruler:

  • When Moctezuma became ruler, he waited on Tezcatlipoca’s “election.”

  • While Tezcatlipoca feasted, Moctezuma was specially adorned. He then fasted, drew his own blood, and sighed and wept to move the god to perform his duty of selecting him

  • The sacredness of Moctezuma’s ruling status as a tlatoani (Great Speaker) lay in the power that Tezcatlipoca gave him to command, reward, and punish

  • But this was a power that possessed him (rather than it being his possession)

Mexica

• Sedentary societies: permanent intensive agriculture, stable towns and villages, strong tribute mechanisms, dense populations

• Semisedentary: had agriculture and villages, but settlements shifted from site to site; hunting vital; tribute less institutionalized; population less dense

• Nonsedentary: possessed territory (so not nomadic) but migrated frequently in seasonal cycle of hunting and gathering; inhabited camps not villages; lived in areas inhospitable to settled agricultural lives

• Through conquest, the Mexica (Aztecs), Maya, and Incas had built composite states

• Local level: Communities (calpulli in Mexico) held arable land; same plots often remained in possession of individual families for generations

• Provincial level: city-state (altepetl in Mexico), officials oversaw multiple households in public works on rotating basis (coatequitl : Mexico, mita : Andes)

• Imperial level: dynastic ruler surrounded by a nobility; collected taxes/tribute from commoners and maintained metropolises and ceremonial centers

• Mexica and Inca: large empires that rested on highly localized modes of life

• Tenochtitlan was originally a small altepetl that was subordinate to the Tepanec, to whom they paid tribute

• In 1428, the Mexica secured their independence through the Aztec Triple Alliance with two other cities (Texcoco and Tlacopan), giving rise to the Mexica, or Aztec, Empire

• Bloodletting and the sacrifice of captives and slaves, violence directed by priests seizing property from townspeople, young warriors engaged in licensed fights in the streets, public executions for violating Moctezuma’s laws

Proximate Gods

• Violence in Mexica culture was linked to animistic beliefs, especially the idea that that the barriers between the human, natural, and supernatural realms are thin and need vigilant attention

• Mexica suffered from not the distance of the gods but their interminable presence – violence was part of a constant balancing act between opposing forces

ultimate gift: human sacrifice (debt)

• Mexica animism held that all humans are in debt to the gods for their provision of fruits of the earth

• To pay that debt required in the short-term, bloodletting; in the long-term, death – gods would dine on humans, as humans had dined on gods

• More often the victims were warrior captives, usually human but sometimes animals

• The Mexica were committed to war, not occasionally but chronically -- and warriors were at the center of Mexica culture

Divided World Cosmologies

• The so-called Abrahamic religions: products of a Mediterranean world of intense interconnection and conflict Rested on a shared belief in a created world that has become divided from its Creator

Shared beliefs

• Creation: a single god created the world and made humanity in his image

• Sin: Adam and Eve disobeyed their god by eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

• Humanity’s gradual return to its god through obedience, prayer, and faith

• Apocalypticism, Millenarianism: a messiah (in Judaism and Christianity) or “Mahdi” or “rightly guided one” (in Islam) will unveil hidden knowledge, start a new order, and begin the End Time (Day of Judgment)

Early Modern Christianity

• The Fall: curse from Original Sin

  • the heart of Christians’ divided world cosmology

  • Before Original Sin, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden in harmony and integration with their god and nature

  • The Fall: expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the terrible separation of the earth from heaven

• Heaven: the one place of constancy

• Earth: sinfulness, mortality, rebellion, inconstancy

• The slow return to divine obedience by fulfilling God’s will on Earth: that is, defeating Antichrist and converting the unconverted

• The Great Chain of Being: the cosmic hierarchy that aids in this slow return to virtue

• Eschatology: the timeline concerned with how the world will eventually be made whole again, from the Fall to the Eschaton (Second Coming)

Divided World Cosmologies is different from Animism because…

• Distance between a perfect god and an imperfect humanity, not shared presence of different life forces

• The created nature of the world, not continual state of creation (god specifically created world)

• The hierarchy necessary for a return to God: humanity under the angels, and the earth and its creatures subordinated to humanity

• Time as proceeding in a straight line toward a teleological end, not cyclical or random in an ever-unfolding uncertainty

• Monotheistic

• Animals were beneath humans, not viewed as warriors/equally respected

Columbus’s 1492 voyage

• King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela had viewed the voyage as a commercial venture, Columbus was a merchant

• conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453: an enhanced sense that Christian Europe was overshadowed by its Muslim rivals

Columbus’s millenarianism

• His apocalypticism might have been encouraged in part by the Spanish monarchs’ own aggressive military actions on the Iberian peninsula.

• The Spaniards’ conquest of the Islamic kingdom of Granada in 492 had whipped up apocalyptic rhetoric

• The forced conversion or expulsion of Spanish Jews by 1492 also spurred theories that the End Time was near

Columbus (Divided Worlds) vs. Taíno (animism) beliefs

• Columbus: Knowledge of and obedience to God were essential for bringing the world back to its original wholeness

• Taíno: Their caciques (chiefs) interacted with natural and supernatural forces, while behiques (priests) negotiated with angry gods or indifferent gods

• Columbus: Natural resources as worldly sources of wealth (though gold grew through God’s intercession)

• Taíno : Zemis, or spirits, were alive in their natural world, influencing for instance the growth of cassava

Millenarianism

• millenarianism contributed to an enhanced idea of sovereignty as a righteous power in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

• millenarianism, and the elevated idea of sovereignty it encouraged, fostered empire building in the Islamic and Christian worlds

Reconquista as a model for Spanish Conquest in America

• Spanish “reconquest” of Granada: hidalgos, settlement, distribution of spoils

• The Reconquista was a series of campaigns by Christian states to recapture territory from the Muslims (Moors) who had occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula since the early 8th century.

• It was primarily impactful in the region that now comprises modern Spain and Portugal. The Reconquista began in the early 8th century with the Battle of Covadonga and culminated in 1492 with the fall of Granada.

• The Reconquista is significant because it set the stage for Spanish and Portuguese exploration and colonization of the New World.

• The end of the Reconquista in 1492 coincided with Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas, symbolizing the extension of Christian dominion and the beginning of European global expansion.

• This period marked the rise of powerful sovereign states and the spread of Christianity

• Encomienda – an estate, maybe with land, maybe with mines, but crucially with the labor of a group of Indians; they remained the subjects of local caciques

Colonization in an era of sovereign rulers

• No centralized imperial governance in this pre-sovereign state era

• Council of the Indies (1524): counseled the king in the exercise of his sovereignty, didn’t administer

empire

• Relay-style occupation: A local official proposed a venture, the governor would approve it and maybe help organize it

• Successful conquest? Leader of expedition would write to the crown asking for a separate governorship

Hernán Cortés (1485-1547)

• Providentialism: Believed God favored the new king Charles V; Cortés was the “means” (medio) by which God was acting in bringing Christianity to Indians

Conquest of the Mexican Empire: Two phases

First phase (April 1519 – June 1520):

• March inland, securing allies, including Tlaxcala

• Uncontested entry into Tenochtitlan

• Seizing of Moctezuma, and uneasy rule through him for 6 months

• Arrival of much larger Spanish force from Cuba, fought off and incorporated

• Native uprising after Spaniards’ massacre of unarmed warriors dancing in a temple festival

• Expulsion of the Spanish forces, with great losses, and Moctezuma’s death, probably at

• Spanish hands, immediately before that expulsion

Second phase (June 1520 – Aug. 1521):

• Spaniards retreat to Tlaxcala to recover health and morale

• They renew the attack, recruiting allies sometimes by force, and placing Tenochtitlan under siege in May 1521

• The city fell to combined forces of Cortés and Indian “allies” in August 1521

Mutual Confusions:

Diplomacy and Gifts

Cortés presented himself as an ambassador, and Moctezuma seems to have seen him as such

• But Cortés broke Mexica protocol: he told Mexica ambassadors that he wanted to come to Tenochtitlan to “look upon Moctezuma’s face”

• To Cortés, Moctezuma’s lavish gifts were gestures of submission

• Mesoamerican rulers communicated through the splendor of their gifts

Rules and Religion

• Cortés assumed that capturing Moctezuma rendered him and his people vassals to the captor

• But Moctezuma’s failure to correctly identify the strangers’ intentions led the Mexica nobility to see his role as tlatoani (Great Speaker) as void

• Cortés vigorously destroyed idols and was appalled by human sacrifices and the consuming of human flesh

  • The Mexica viewed the idols as sacred, and spirits and humans as continually exchanging energies through consumption

Warfare

• For the Spaniards, war involved killing or subordinating adversaries and seizing territory

• The Mexica saw war as a sacred contest, the outcome unknown but preordained, revealing which city, which local tutelary deity, would dominate others

  • Battles as duels between evenly matched foes, taking prestigious captives prized over killing them

  • The ignobility when great men were picked off by crossbows and muskets from afar—or when warrior dancers were killed unprovoked

Horses

• The Spanish were convinced the Indians regarded horses as other-worldly beings; hence, Cortés’s theatrical display of a male horse kicking and snorting near a mare in estrus

• Mexica culture revered animals like eagles and jaguars as models for warriors to emulate

• Early in the march on Tenochtitlan, the Tlaxcalans made clear they viewed horses as animals, and worthy of respect in those terms

• They killed two horses, cut up the carcasses and distributed the pieces to other villages, and reserved the horseshoes “for their idols” (according to Bernal Díaz)

Siege and Time

• Sieges were quintessential European strategy: maximum pressure, minimum cost, which for Mexicans was the antithesis of war

• Time: for Europeans sieges are consequential because time proceeds sequentially

• For Mesoamericans, moments are discrete, without cumulative effect. Defeat occurs if preordained.

• Time is multidimensional and eternally recurrent (“bundles” of 52 years); sieges thus don’t lead to resolution, resistance continues

• The Mexica killed Spanish captives by beating in the backs of their heads, a punishment for criminals

Sovereignty

• In 1500, sovereignty had still referred mainly to a ruler’s ability to rule without an earthly superior

• By mid-16th and 17th centuries, Christian and Islamic rulers defined it in loftier terms, as an extraordinary power that the Divine gives to rulers who are His instruments on Earth

• In millenarian thought, sovereignty bridges the divided world, a portion of heavenly power to combat earthly sinfulness and ready the world for a returning Messiah

Spaniards’ theory of Universal Monarchy

• Columbus’s providential view of the “discovery” led him to see Ferdinand and Isabela as the prophesied Last Reforming Emperors

• The medieval writer Dante had argued that a Universal Monarch would emerge at the End Time to help order the world before Jesus’s Second Coming

• Charles V (r. 1516 – 1556), grandson to Ferdinand and Isabela, would embrace the idea of his Universal Monarchy, as would his son Philip II (r. 1556-1598)

Millenarianism in Safavid Iran

• The Safavid dynasty, an Islamic rival of the Ottoman Turks, had messianic hopes of Mahdi’s return.

• In 1501, the dynasty’s founder, Shah Isma’il, adopted the persona of a prophet, and rumors said he’d live eternally.

• His son, Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-76), believed the world’s salvation would center on his court

Millenarianism in Mughal India

• The Mughal Islamic ruler Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556-1605)

• He had led conquests of Gujarat, Bengal, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, and his followers argued he was the “Master of the Age” who would remove differences between the 72 Islamic sects and the Hindus

• Millenarian beliefs could appeal to Iranians and Indian Muslims as well as Hindu Rajputs and other non-Muslim peoples

Millenarianism of Dom Manuel I, King of Portugal

• Vasco da Gama returned from his voyage around Africa in 1499 with the theory that Calicut and other Indian kingdoms were Christian in character

• Dom Manuel hoped to recruit Indians, rally Christians in the legendary Prester John’s Ethiopia, seize the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, and take Jerusalem

Millenarianism and Sovereignty in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign

• Elizabeth’s father King Henry VIII had declared himself an “imperial” king, most prominently in the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1532), which ushered in the Protestant Reformation in England

• Doubts had arisen whether the British “imperial crown” really had divine sanction given that Henry was followed to the throne first by a sickly boy king (Edward VI), then by two female monarchs: Mary I and Elizabeth I

• These uncertainties swirled around the meetings that Elizabeth held with the magus John Dee in 1577 that led to her first colonizing charter, issued to Sir Humphrey Gilbert

1650-1800- THE ERA OF SOVEREIGN STATES

Xenophobia

• To Africans in the kingdom of Benin, the white skin of Portuguese explorers and their arrival on ships initially suggested their association with dead ancestors rising from a watery spirit world

• Later, when the slave trade picked up, Africans reassessed their view of Europeans and saw them as witch-like cannibals, a type of person they associated with the much-feared Imbangala and with greed and viciousness

Civility

• The era’s growing interconnections between peoples and across cultures encouraged a new fascination with civility and barbarism

• In Europe, humanists in this period placed civility and barbarism at the very heart of Renaissance culture, a distinction defined especially in relation to manner of life and especially religion

• Europeans developed a related fascination with their own animistic pasts, marveling that their ancestors treated the natural, human and spiritual spheres as seamlessly connected

New cross-currents of knowledge, new lines of civility/barbarism

• During the Ming dynasty in China (1368-1644), anyone living beyond the “Middle Kingdom” was deemed barbarous

• The Italian Jesuit priest and mapmaker Matteo Ricci lived in China from 1582 until his death in 1610

  • Ricci saw Chinese as near-Christians (through Confucianism) but also barbarians; Chinese just as firmly believed in Sinocentric world order, even in adopting some of Ricci’s cartography

• Xenophobia encouraged by ideas of civility and barbarism, increased travel caused people to view others as barbarians, differing cultures, regions, and religions caused people to be at odds with each other

• Borders + different lifestyle would increase xenophobia

• increase of cross-cultural contacts in the era of sovereign rulers encouraged xenophobia but also new cross currents of knowledge and new ways of thinking about civility

Skepticism

• Skepticism was a philosophy or outlook concerned with the limits of human knowledge, the limits of our capacity to know with absolute assuredness

• Li Zhi taught that what we view as right or true often results from little more than familiarity and convention, and he urged trust in the child-like mind, an intuitive common sense

• Skepticism’s great challenge to the theory of sovereign rulership –that is, the idea that some rulers enjoy a divinely ordained sovereignty

• Michel de Montaigne’s (French scholar + writer)(1533-1592) observation “nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know” had far-reaching implications

• How does one demonstrate such a divine gift plausibly to others?

• If one can’t demonstrate such a divine gift plausibly to others, then on what basis does authority rest?

Millenarianism: a double-edged sword

• heightened millenarian expectations of the era of sovereign rulers encouraged rebellions against the very states that had drawn strength from messianism

  • Messianism is the belief in the advent of a messiah who acts as the savior of a group of people.

• 16th and 17th century religious wars forced societies to find new foundations for order, a major spur toward sovereign state theory

• Worldly conquerors could wield messianism to build empires in a world still awaiting the End Time

• millenarianism also invites the mystics and the puritans to see the world as already reunited with its Maker

Messianism, Rebellion, and War in the 16th century Islamic World

• In Anatolia and other areas on the Ottoman periphery, major rebellions led by mystics and peasants

• Threats from within: Scholars in urban areas, like the Melami-Bayramis who were Sufis (Muslim mystics, ascetics) and whose search for the mahdi (messiah) led them to question whether the Ottoman sultan was the true mahdi

• Ottomans also threatened from the east by the Safavids: when the Ottomans upheld Sunni Islam against Safavid Shi’ism, they were arguing over who was the true messianic conqueror

A religiously divided Europe

• The heightened millenarianism of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had divided Europe

• The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that erupted in 1517 with Martin Luther’s attack on the Roman Catholic church’s worldliness (Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, or 95 Theses)

• The Catholic Counter-Reformation: formed against the Protestant “heretics” to reunite Christendom

• The stakes were high because accusations of “worldliness” (”popery”) or “heresy” (“puritanism”) in a divided world cosmology were serious ones

• Worldliness suggested a colossal abandonment of God’s will in favor of man’s will, while heresy suggested a dangerous presumptuousness

• The mutual accusations between Protestants and Catholics could make “truth,” “law,” and “goodness” feel suddenly up for grabs

Europe’s Wars of Religion

• Prolonged wars took place in which religion was a primary factor

• French Wars for Religion (1562 - 1598) might have left 2 million to 4 million persons dead from violence, famine, or disease

• The Eighty Years’ War (1566 – 1648) concerned the Spanish monarchy’s asserted rule over the Netherlands, but the war was also a contest between Protestants and Catholics

• The Thirty Years’ War (1618 - 1648) in Central Europe might have killed 4 million to 8 million persons

Peace of Westphalia, 1648

• Brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War and Eighty Years’ War

• Sometimes treated today as inaugurating a new definition of state sovereignty and bringing into being the European states system

• But the Peace of Westphalia still conceived of sovereignty as a quality of a ruler’s person and office, not yet of the state

• By anchoring sovereignty in the state, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) would depersonalize and desacralize sovereignty

• The Wars of Religion are significant because they highlight the devastating impact of religious conflicts on society and the shifting notions of state sovereignty.

• The conflicts highlight the religious divide present in Europe which was caused by millenarianism, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This divide which culminated in the Wars of Religion then made way for the concept of sovereignty.

• Peace of Westphalia brought a new definition of state sovereignty and gave way for the European states system.

• The Wars of Religion gave way for a shift in the concept of sovereignty from the person of the ruler to the state itself, depersonalizing and desacralizing political authority.

The Little Ice Age in 17th c. America

• Little Ice Age: a climate phenomenon that caused unusually cold temperatures and other weather anomalies in the 17th century

• the Little Ice Age, in combination with population growth and resulting pressure on local resources, contributed to the era’s instabilities—providing an additional spur to sovereign state theory

• Valley of Mexico, lack of rainfall in 1640, 1641, land 1642

• New England, 1642: lots of snow and rivers snowed over

• Perfect famine in Gujarat + China in 1603-2

Little Ice Age (1300-1850, but especially intense conditions in the 17th century)

• The Little Ice Age was the most pronounced climate anomaly of the past 8,000 years -- until contemporary global warming

• Global cooling caused by reduced sunspot and increased volcanic activity seems to have given rise to the phenomenon known as an El Niño

• In an El Niño, the monsoons that normally fall on Asia fall instead on America, causing floods.

• At same time, Ethiopia and northwest India experience droughts, and Europe experiences hard winters

Major Revolts and Revolutions, 1636-66: Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas

• More “long wars” than any other time in the last six centuries

• Peak during 17th

• River Thames Frost Fairs (1608-1814)

• London plagues: 1563 (over 20,000 dead), 1592-93 (over 26,000), 1603 (over 40,000), 1665-66 (over 100,000)

The English Civil War, 1642-1650

• King Charles I’s personal rule (1629-1640), coincided with Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648)

• Attempts to create an English Protestant church had brought out divisions between the “godly” (Puritan) and the “worldly” (Anglican)

• Puritan parliamentarians viewed Charles I and his Archbishop Laud as tyrants -- and thus not favored by God

• Anglican royalists accused Puritans of a zealotry that turned the world upside down

Regicide!

• 1649: public execution of Charles I (“enemy to the commonwealth”)

• For years afterward, royalists blamed the civil war on Puritan preachers (their fanciful view of God’s will had excused regicide)

Thomas Hobbes

• Influenced by European skepticism

• His philosophy was materialist. He arrived there from the skeptical position that there are limits to what the human mind can know with certainty

• Miracles and direct covenants with God occurred in world’s infancy, but they had ceased or become very rare until Judgment Day

• There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of Time; no arts; no letters; no society. And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

• Skeptical response to the conflicts of his age (how can we know God’s will?) He believed in the Eschaton, but he argued that the End Time lies in the indefinite future – until then, we are in compact only with our earthly sovereign

• Sought a foundation for power that didn’t rely on divine knowledge: hence, his materialist focus on human nature, and his insistence that power is merely the product of human desire for self-preservation

• Seeking to escape the state of nature in pursuit of their own protection, humans accept the sovereign’s will as their own

Hobbes’s sovereign and the new idea of a state “center”

• Sovereignty is a feature of the state, not the ruler; it’s based on “the mutual relation between Protection and Obedience”

• Sovereignty is that point in any state that the people have identified as the place of last appeal (its public judgment towers above private judgment)

• For Hobbes, sovereignty must be absolute and undivided—or it is not

• sovereignty.

• The state then must be unitary (not composite) because it is our collective will

• Hobbes’s theory favored state unity but that centralizing reforms rarely transformed composite states into truly unified ones, instead leaving plenty of room for negotiation between center and periphery

Centralization was an ideal but rarely the reality of the era of sovereign states

• Hobbes had argued that a state is unitary (the commonwealth and sovereign are one, not distinguishable), so the composite states of the era of sovereign rulers were now a problem

• Localities now recognized a metropolis (“center”), accepted their status as a periphery, and negotiated authority with the center—while still retaining a lot of autonomy (thus, federal states were the norm)

• the English colonies in America stopped calling themselves kingdoms; they were now provinces, or “parts” of England.

• But until the American Revolution (1776), they thought of themselves as ”states” or “countries” that oversaw their own internal affairs

From Composite States to Federal States

The (imperfect) centralizing of the British American Empire

• Thomas Povey, “Overtures touching the West Indies” (1657)

• The goal of reforms from England that touched the colonies like the Navigation Acts (1651) was that “hereafter they may be considered as one embodied Commonwealth whose head and centre is here.”

• Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (1689)

• ”Why should England grudge at the Prosperity and Wealth of the Plantations, since all that is ours she may account her own, not only because we are a part of England, (whatever we may be accounted) as it is taken, largely, but also because all comes to this Kingdom of England, properly so call’d, these two and fifty Shires. By a kind of Magnetick Force, England draws to it all that is good in the Plantations. It is the Centre, to which all things tend. To propose that print culture might have done more than centralizing reforms to bring about state unity

The Rise of Print Cultures

• Print was old:

  • woodblock printing from the 8th century

  • movable type in China and Korea in the Middle Ages

  • European movable type from 15th century

  • Commercial printing was new

    • arose from new urbanization

    • also spurred by state policies, like cadastral and cartographic surveying

    • public information: to a “public,” for the “public”

Seeing like a State:

• a Revolution in Outlook

• Print cultures encouraged new attitudes toward the world

  • Worldly phenomena are knowable through observation

  • They can be classified

  • They are thus coherent, or governed by predictable laws

  • Addressed in the vernacular, ordinary readers are entitled to what is known

• In making society visible to itself, print helps to construct “society” or the “public” or the “state”

Print Culture’s Focus on Unifying Wholes

• A change in scope:

  • Medieval era maps and writings: a focus on the discrete parts of a fragmented landscape, or knowledge of the particular

  • Early modern printed maps and writings: a new holism, a concern with universal wholes that are understandable through their parts

• Print culture’s holism exceeded the actual unity of early modern cultures or states

  • The era was still splintered by divisions (religious, political, etc.), and states were usually federal despite their centralizing efforts

  • But print helped to imagine unified wholes, even if they weren’t yet realized

Origins of the Japanese State

• state formation in seventeenth-century Japan, which began before the Little Ice Age and thus insulated the state from severe climate conditions in mid-century

Three political legacies shaped early modern Japan:

• Emperor (tenno), 7th - 8th centuries, based on T’ang Chinese Confucian model, drew also on Buddhism

• Shogun (military leader, “barbarian-subduing general,” bakufu), 12th – 13th centuries, emperors increasingly relied on samurai (professional fighters)

• Daimyo (literally, “great name”), regional baron, 14th – 16th centuries, as rural society grew, emperors and shoguns looked to local barons for support

• Most people had historically lived in villages in a largely non-urban world

A State Built on the Back of Civil War

• The early modern Japanese state emerged out of the Warring States (Sengoku) Period, 1460s - 1580s

  • Strongmen had carved Japan into petty dominions (the daimyo)

  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1580s began uniting the daimyo into a federal form of rule

• Neutralizing samurai and daimyo, centralizing the state

  • In 1590s, Hideyoshi removed samurai from villages to castle towns

  • His policy of requiring all daimyo to personally attend the shogun at the capital (Edo) would continue under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868)

- Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868), which emerged out of a period of prolonged civil war, had centralizing tendencies and yet took the form of a federal state (much like European sovereign states)

War as a Unifying Factor

• Massive armies of 300,000 were assembled for the first military campaigns fought by the Japanese state as a whole:

  • Two Japanese invasions of Korea (1590s), plus the final battles of the civil war that brought the Tokugawa dynasty to power (1600s)

• Massive dislocations and sweeping pacification:

  • the new samurai and daimyo policies encouraged mass urbanization:

    • castle towns (pop’n of thousands), 3 monster cities – Edo, Osaka, Kyoto (pop’n of hundreds of thousands)

  • disarmament of civilians

Post-War Unifying Policies

• Cadastral surveying:

  • Reflected that three-quarters of Japanese land (valued in koku) was ruled by about 250 daimyo

    • A record of resources (human and natural) needed for war and peace

    • empirical methods: each location treated as a “village” with a specific “assessed yield” (koku)

• Cartographic surveying:

  • suggested uniformity across the polity, with power

radiating out from daimyo castles, while wealth flowed in

• the message: in an ancient country founded on a sacred throne, a united company of shogun and daimyo ruled from great cities over rich villages

• “The state (kokka) is inherited from one’s ancestors and passed on to one’s descendants: it should not be administered selfishly.

• The people belong to the state: they should not be administered selfishly.

• The lord exists for the sake of the state and the people: the state and the people do not exist for the sake of the lord.”

Japan’s sovereign state

• Centralization:

  • Edo laws became the laws of Japan

• Insulation:

  • Banning of foreign (Portuguese) trade and clergymen

• Extirpation of Christianity

  • A state church and ideology:

• Required membership in Buddhist temples

  • Shrines in honor of the Tokugawa dynasty

  • A founding ideology: the dynasty’s

• “Mandate of Heaven” and the warrior code needed to preserve it

• Protection:

  • Apologists for the regime like the samurai- monk Suzuki Shōsan argued (like Hobbes, but in Buddhist-Confucian not materialist manner): obedience is owed in return for peace and justice

The Little Ice Age arrives in 17th century Japan

• First four decades saw many small village revolts

  • Landmark winter of 1641-2 and the Kan’ei famine

  • Shimbara revolt (Kyushu), 1637: sparked by local daimyo’s high taxes, when rice was scarce; 200 samurai joined 25,000 inhabitants (many of them ”hidden Christians”)

• Few revolts afterward

Seeing like a State: a Revolution in Outlook

• Print cultures encouraged new attitudes toward the world

  • Worldly phenomena are knowable through observation

  • They can be classified

  • They are thus coherent, or governed by predictable laws

  • Addressed in the vernacular, ordinary readers are entitled to what is known

• In making society visible to itself, print helps to construct “society” or the “public” or the “state

Print Culture’s Focus on Unifying Whole

• A change in scope:

  • Medieval era maps and writings: a focus on the discrete parts of a fragmented landscape, or knowledge of the particular

  • Early modern printed maps and writings: a new holism, a concern with universal wholes that are understandable through their parts

• Print culture’s holism exceeded the actual unity of early modern cultures or states

  • The era was still splintered by divisions (religious, political, etc.), and states were usually federal despite their centralizing efforts

  • But print helped to imagine unified wholes, even if they weren’t yet realized

Seeing like a State: a Revolution in Outlook

• Print cultures and maps encouraged new attitudes toward the world

• In making society visible to itself, print and cartography help to construct “society” or the “public” or the “state”

Print Culture’s Focus on Unifying Wholes

• A change in scope from the medieval era’s focus on the discrete parts of a fragmented landscape

  • Seventeenth-century maps’ emphasis on a new holism, a concern with universal wholes that are understandable through their parts

• Print culture’s holism exceeded the actual unity of early modern cultures or states; maps showed a federal state

Religious passions: how they were traditionally tamed

• Europe: Christian conformity/orthodoxy (Ten Commandments, liturgy, sacraments)

• Japan: Buddhism’s Five Precepts (karma, intentionality in following the Buddhist Path); and Confucianism's Middle way between Yin and Yang and the upkeep of li (ritual)

• Ottoman Empire: Islamic conformity, but also toleration of ahl al-dhimma (protected peoples)

• Millenarianism/apocalypticism and the ”heresy” fear

• Western Europe’s witch hunts, late 1400s-1630s

  • Malleus Maleficarum (1486)

• To Catholics, the Protestant “heresy” was an unlawful unleashing of passions

• religious passions, which sovereign rulers (in the 16th to early 17th centuries) had tried to harness to legitimize their rule, were one of the problems that the sovereign state (mid-17th to 18th centuries) sought to solve

Early modern states remained weak at the center (despite their insistence on absolute sovereignty)

• So, toleration (as modus vivendi) was the general rule

• Toleration as modus vivendi

  • Ottoman example: The ahl al-dhimma in their own enclaves, leaving Muslims’ peace of mind undisturbed

Contending with rival faiths

• A Japanese example: Shimbara revolt, 1637

• The Bakufu’s Council of Elders outlawed Portuguese visitors (1639) and executed a Portuguese embassy sent from Macao (1640)

A latitudinarian approach to faith to preserve stability

• In Japan: measures to prohibit disputations between Buddhist sects

• In Europe: “enthusiasm” had become a pejorative by end of seventeenth century

• In Ottoman Empire: Sunni sultans subordinated Shi’ites yet allowed them freedom over their own communities

• Latitudinarian refers to someone who has broad or tolerant views, usually in a religious manner.

  • Originated from the Church of England near the end of the seventeenth century when enthusiasm was no longer popular.

  • It can be linked to other nations as well, such as the Ottoman Empire and Japan

• Latitudinarianism happened due to several factors, such as religious conflicts and political stability.

• By the end of the seventeenth century there had been much religious conflict, so many wanted to reach a middle ground to settle on. This was basically religious tolerance.

• Being intolerant also created weak political structures due to their practice of noninclusion.

The non-Chinese origins of the Qing state

• A small nomadic Manchu confederacy in the steppes of central Asia, led by Nurhaci (1559-1626)

• By 1600, 15,000 warriors: Eight Banners (large military divisions) and Niru (literally “arrow,” small companies)

• Manchu martial values: horsemanship and archery, ancestors the Mongols (who had once ruled China), hairstyle of tonsure at front and queue at the back

Qing: An empire that combined China and Inner Asia

• Hong Taiji, Nurhaci’s father (aka Emperor Taizong) declared intent to build Qing empire in 1636; had already led two invasions of Joseon in Korea

• Eight years later (1644), invaded Beijing, established capital, and launched conquest of Ming China

• After 17th century conquests of China, turned in 18th century to Inner Asia: Mongolia, Tibet, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Turkestan

Vulnerability of the Ming dynasty

• Chinese emperors, bureaucracy of 15,000 highly educated elite males

• Late Ming emperors spent their entire lives isolated in the “Forbidden City” in Beijing, surrounded by tens of thousands of eunuchs

• The late Ming emperors alienated the bureaucrats by relying on palace eunuchs: diplomats, trade superintendents, tax inspectors, generals

Climate change

• Series of droughts (1610s - 1630s) paralyzed the Ming state and led to war with the Manchus (under Hong Taiji)

• In 1640-1641, China experienced its worst drought in the last five centuries.

• Massive drought, locusts, price of millet soared, corpses of starved lay in the street

The resulting torn social fabric

• Famine lead to an increase in banditry → demise of the Ming was due to banditry

• Alienated bureaucrats (no longer rewarded for civil service examination) ready to throw in their lot with the roving bandits

• Anarchy: Ming and Qing clash was really a fight over who would best contain the anarchy

The Qing state

• Bureaucrats welcomed back; eunuchs reduced in number

• Eight Banner System (Manchu, Mongol, Han), 34 “Tatar towns” for bannermen and their families

  • Banner System: military organization/tactic used in 17th c. Qing China

  • troops were divided into several groups, each with corresponding banner

  • upon victories, more troops were added to each banner group

  • also had administrative purposes (organized taxes, recruited troops)

• Qing Emperor turned a different face to different subjects: Confucian principles for Chinese, Tibetan Buddhism for Tibetans

• Tonsure decrees and foot binding decrees

• Qing China (1636-1912) arose as an effort to combine Inner Asia and China into a vast federal state

• the Qing empire weathered the climate crisis by drawing on Chinese traditions, thus inspiring a different route to peace than the Hobbesian sovereign state: bureaucracies, Confucian principles and rituals, empire-building through wars, public granaries

Ever-Normal Granaries

• granaries established by govt so it could control and stabilize prices under Qing Dynasty allowed farmers to get a fair price for their stock removed aristocratic practice of driving up prices and creating artificial scarcities

The Early Modern Mughal Empire

• Half the size of Europe, population of 100 million (same as all of Europe, second only to Ming China)

• A fertile crescent from the mouth of the Indus River, to the Ganges River valley, to the Bay of Bengal

• Mostly agrarian: three cities of 400,000 residents; nine cities of 100,000

Akbar’s seventeenth-century descendants

• Jahangir (r. 1605-27), Shah Jahan (r. 1627-1658), Aurangzeb (r. 1658- 1707)

• Retreated from Akbar’s millenarianism, though not from his view of governing by divine sanction

• Also, retained view of absolute earthly power: Jahangir (“conqueror of the world”), Shah Jahan (“king of the world”), Alamgir (Aurangzeb’s regnal name, “world conqueror”)

Theoretically: absolute power

In reality: weak center-strong periphery

• Circuits: one-third of reign spent on the move—never more than 800 miles from Delhi

• Mansabdars (“men who hold rank”), land in rotation (jagir, “holding place”) in return for soldiers; up to imperial princes and Rajput rulers

• Open-ended competition for succession, encouraged local alliance-building (Persian: Ya takht, ya tabut, “either the throne or the tomb”)

Little Ice Age

• Four monsoon failures in seventeenth century

  • 1613-15, 1630-2, 1658-60, 1685-7

• Widespread famine

• fever, pestilential diseases

• Production of cotton and indigo never recovered their previous levels

The Mughals’ response:

• welfare state

• Distribution of rupees and food

• Tax forgiveness

• After monsoons returned: Donation of ploughs, encouragement of exports, ship building in Gujarat

War

• Hindu forces in Deccan

• Portuguese in Bengal

• Sikhs led by Guru Hargobind

• Wars added to massive state revenues, partly through enslaving of thousands of Hindus sold into Central Asia

• The Mughals rarely overextended themselves territorially (except colossal failures in Afghanistan)

Mughal Pluralism

• Akbar (r. 1556-1605) sanctioned pluralism under the notion of sulh-i kull (“peace with all,” or “absolute civility”)

• a condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, sources of authority, etc., coexist.

“Absolute Civility” (sulh-i kull )

• Also influenced Mughal governance

• Participation by Hindus and other non-Muslims in administration

• Mughal nobles as patrons to non-Muslim literati and artists

• -"peace with all" / "absolute civility"

• -influenced Mughal governance: pluralism was sanctioned by ruler Akbar under this notion

The rise of other sovereign states: Hyderabad (f. 1720s)

• State building: Used local knowledge and military force, but also alliance-building (for example, recognition of the Hindu sovereign state of Maratha)

The rise of other sovereign states: Maratha (f. 1730s)

• Shivaji, Indian ruler, carved out new Hindu state through alliances and hostilities with Mughal state

• Initially a vassal to Mughal state; Aurangzeb had given him title of Rajah

• But Maratha’s sovereignty recognized through 1730s alliance with Hyderabad

Conclusion

• the rise of sovereign states in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal Empire, which took a federal and pluralistic form

• show that new sovereign states also arose following a similar model

  • examples: Hyderabad and Maratha

17th + 18th cent.s- mutual rise of commerce and sovereign states, especially on Western Europe and the phenomenon of entangled empires

• trade’s new importance to the state contributed to the rise of the African slave trade

English economic change, early 17th to early

• 18th centuries: 3 factors

1. Proto-industrialism

2. New ideas concerning trade and the state (“political arithmetic,” “political economy”)

3. Increasingly interconnected empire (in America and India) and growth of slave trade

Proto-industrialism in 17th century England

• 1600 → 1700: 23% drop of adult males in agriculture

Trade as a Matter of State

• Convoys as regular part of Atlantic trade; pirates are now enemies of the state

• Mercantilist policies, public accounting, and new sources of wealth (including colonies and slavery, code noir)

Charles Davenant on Political Arithmetic

• The sovereign “must know the laws, constitution, humor, and manners of his own country, with the numbers of its inhabitants, and its annual expense and income from land, with its product from trade, manufactures, and the other business of the kingdom”

• ”Mankind in the mass being much alike everywhere, from a knowledge of his own country, he may be able to form an idea, which shall prove right enough, concerning any other, not very distant, people.”

Increasingly interconnected British American Empire

• The American colonies grew more integrated with England in late-17th and 18th centuries

• Idealized as a common British community bound together by ties of commerce

• Benjamin Franklin (1764):

• Numerous as the people are in the several old provinces, they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons or armies, to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expense only of a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect, but an affection, for Great Britain, for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce

• relatively low cost of governing the colonies compared to other regions, highlighting the effectiveness of soft power and cultural influence in maintaining control. The colonies were governed with minimal military presence, relying instead on administrative measures such as paperwork and symbolic gestures. Despite being geographically distant, the colonies felt a sense of connection and loyalty to Great Britain, which was reinforced by shared legal systems, cultural norms, and even fashion trends. This sense of affinity contributed to the flourishing commerce between Britain and the colonies.

East India Company in India

• An example of how commerce led to increasingly entangled empires

• In 17th century, secured commercial treaty with Jahangir for factories in Surat and elsewhere

• Remained vassals of Aurangzeb (Mughal Empire), then after his 1707 death navigated the struggle for control among Mughals, Marathas (Hindu Kingdom), and Afghans

• Late 18th-early 19th c: series of Anglo-Maratha wars

The African Slave Trade and the Asiento

• Portugal’s alleged monopoly on African trade based on Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479)—won the Asiento

• Dutch republic created Dutch West India Company (1621), then went to war with Portugal in Brazil and West Africa— won the asiento through Peace of Münster (1648)

• French won the asiento in 1701 when childless Charles II of Spain died, leaving throne to King Louis XIV’s grandson

• English won the asiento through Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended several decades of European war over trade

• The Royal African Company: founded in London (1660) to build forts and factories in West Africa for gold and slaves

• In 1670s and 1680s, transported about 100,000 enslaved Africans, contributing to growth of London, Bristol, and Liverpool

• In Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, England won the Asiento, securing its dominance over the

African slave trade

• English government then granted asiento to the South Sea Company

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the era of commerce

• Discourse on Inequality (1755), response to prize competition at Academy of Dijon: “What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?”

• Rousseau’s position: society is the true state of war

• We (in society) create inequalities, including interest groups (parties) that oppose the ”general will”

• Nature favors equality, though it produces some people who are better than others, and they are the ideal law-givers

The unnatural warfare created by society—as exemplified by slavery

• Rousseau, Social Contract (1762): The slave master “is indeed so far from getting any authority over the slave in addition to his power over him, that the two are in a state of war with each other”

• Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781): “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”

Rousseau’s solution, in the Social Contract (1762)

• Distinguish between sovereignty (the general will) and government (ideally set up in a way to arrive at the general will, despite our social tendency toward division)

• “AS the particular will acts constantly in opposition to the general will, the Government continually exerts itself against the Sovereignty.”

• From Chapter 10. “The Abuse of Government and Its Tendency to Degenerate”—so governments must be well- structured

• His Legislators needed to be the best of the best, the kind of people able to steer the ship of state through the perils of the modern commercial world

Can the Leviathan Be Tamed? Part Two: Fiscal-Military Innovations

• some sovereign states in the late 17th and 18th centuries established new fiscal-military arrangements

• a major tension in the fiscal-military state lay in its reliance on public debt, which allowed for permanent armies but also tied the state to special interests

• Capitalist:

  • public debt relies on investors, so the state is dependent on these individuals

  • emerged from France, Holland, and England in late 18th c.

  • from term "capitation" or "subject to tax"

• South Sea Bubble

  • one of many financial bubbles

  • South Sea Company: a joint-stock company aimed to lower national debt (£9 million)

  • directors came from all over Europe

  • monopolized trade with South America thru asiento

  • highly speculative

  • shares skyrocketed in 1 year from £100 to £1000

  • boosting speculative buying (national debt = £50 million)

  • panicked sell-off left thousands bankrupted

State Protection in a Commercial Era

• The sovereign state’s main responsibility: to protect subjects from harm

• The rise of commerce allowed for new fiscal arrangements that enabled larger standing armies

• But a state that relies on investors and future wealth (in taxes) invites bubbles, inequality, and war

The rise of fiscal-military states

• Early in the 17th century, European states had kept small armies in peacetime

• Following the 17th century wars against the Dutch, England and France began keeping their armies largely intact during peacetime

• These armies grew considerably during France’s bid for trade dominance in the Nine Year’s War (1688-1697) and War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714)

• Glorious Revolution, 1688, enlarged powers of Parliament

• Expansion and professionalization of military, which William III in 1697 had decided not to disband in case of further war with France

• Creation of permanent funded debt, the basis for public credit Bank of England, 1694

• Sir Robert Walpole, Whig minister and head of treasury 1721-1742

  • Lowered taxes on landed estates, shifted tax burden to merchants/consumers through excise taxes and customs duties

  • Protective tariffs on wool, bounties for manufacturing

South Sea Bubble, 1720

• South Sea Company, 1711: a joint-stock company to consolidate and lower cost of national debt (then £9 million)

• Also, monopoly on right to trade with South America, and in 1713 the asiento contract

• Highly speculative, despite government’s promise to pay interest on shares

• Shares skyrocketed in one year from £100 to £1000, boosting speculative buying (by now national debt £50 million)

• A panicked sell-off, thousands of persons bankrupted

Bubbles!

• Increasingly integrated markets (entwined empires) meant South Sea Bubble was simply one of multiple financial bubbles

• South Sea Company: directors came from all over Europe

  • a German: shares in East India Company

  • a Dutch paper merchant, whose family was involved in French colonial administration

  • many members were invested in East India Company

• Mississippi Company bubble, entangled with Louisiana Company, involved in slave trading in French St. Domingue (Haiti)

Public Debt as Janus-faced

• On the one hand, public debt contributes to prosperity and encourages constitutional government

• On the other hand, public debt relies on people to invest in it, and so the state becomes unusually dependent on these ”capitalistes”

• Capitalist: a term that emerged in France, Holland, and England in late 18th c., based on the term “capitation” (subject to tax)

The Tricky Relationship Between the Public Debt + the State

• Hobbes’s definition of the sovereign state: “it signifieth not the concord, but the union of many men.”

• Union: The sovereign state is meant to be our collective, public will, what Rousseau called the “general will.” It is what allows for legitimate state power.

• Concord: Public credit rests on investments by banks or people with capital. These holders of government stock could be at home or abroad.

• Which prevails? “Union” or “concord”? That was the new dilemma introduced by the eighteenth-century fiscal-military state

Can the Leviathan Be Tamed? Part Three: Opinion and the Rage of Party

• the era of sovereign states gave rise to a fresh appreciation of government’s dependence on opinion

• how the boundaries of legitimate (public) expression and private (illicit) expression were negotiated, using Qing China, Joseon Korea, and Western Europe as examples

Sir William Temple, “An Essay Upon the Original and Nature of Government” (1672)

• How to explain why “vast numbers of men submit their lives and fortunes absolutely to the will of one”? It must be by the “force of custom, or opinion, the true ground and foundation of all government, and that which subjects power to authority. For power, arising from strength, is always in those that are governed, who are many: but authority, arising from opinion, is in those that govern, who are few.”

• Force of Custom: Even if the concentration of power in one individual seems illogical or unjust, it is accepted because it aligns with established customs.

• Force of Opinion: If people believe that a particular individual or group has the right to govern them, they are more likely to submit willingly to their rule.

• Difference between Power and Authority: The quote distinguishes between power, which arises from strength and is inherently possessed by the governed, and authority, which arises from opinion and is held by those who govern. While power can be wielded through coercion or physical force, authority relies on the consent and acceptance of the governed.

• Nature of Governance: Umately, governance is a complex interplay of power dynamics, social norms, and collective beliefs. ltiEven though those in power may be outnumbered by those they govern, their authority is sustained by the acquiescence and endorsement of the majority. As long as the governed perceive their rulers as legitimate, they are more likely to comply with their dictates, even if it means surrendering their autonomy and resources.

• the submission of vast numbers of men to the will of one is often explained by the force of custom and opinion, which shape perceptions of authority and legitimize the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government” (1758)

Nothing is more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but Opinion. ‘Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular

• Observation of Human Affairs: The majority is governed by a minority, and how willingly individuals surrender their own beliefs and passions to those in power.

• Force and Opinion: While force typically resides with the governed (the many), the governors (the few) rely solely on opinion to maintain their authority. This underscores the importance of perception and belief in upholding the structures of power.

• Foundation of Government: Regardless of whether the government is despotic and military or free and popular, its legitimacy ultimately rests on the acceptance and endorsement of the governed.

• Extension to Different Types of Government: Whether it's a despotic regime or a democratic system, the authority of the rulers is ultimately upheld by the opinions and perceptions of the people they govern.

• The foundation of government lies in the realm of perception and belief, rather than sheer force or inherent legitimacy. It speaks to the power of opinion in shaping political realities and maintaining the status quo, even in the face of apparent disparities in power.

Rousseau, Social Contract (1762)

• Most important laws in the state? Political? Civil? Criminal?

• No! The “most important of all is inscribed not on tablets of marble or brass but on the hearts of the citizens;

• forms the real constitution of the state;

• takes on new powers every day;

• restores or replaces other laws when they decay or die out, keeps a people in the spirit in which it was established, and gradually replaces authority by the force of habit

• As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only ONE WILL which is directed towards their common preservation and GENERAL WELL-BEING

Shifting boundaries of “official” and “public” in Qing China

• Guan: arena of “official” or bureaucratic engagement

• Gòng: “public; open to all” realm of interaction

  • Refers to the public or open realm of interaction in Qing China, where opinion played a crucial role in governance

• Si: “private, partial, unfair, secret”

Opinion/dissent in Qing China

• Literati as the public? Donglin Academy’s influence on Ming government seen as contributing to factionalism, so Manchus cracked down on private academies

• Under Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722): Chinese scholars were feted during the six imperial tours, but dissent was punished (e.g., Dai Mingshi)

• Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-1735): published Discourse on Parties and Cliques

• Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796): possessed the empire more extensively than any European absolute monarch; bureaucrats responded with delays and creative fixes

Opinion/dissent in Joseon Korea

• Private academies and petitions

Western Europe: Embodying the “public” in coffeeshops and salons; politeness as compensation to a gentry increasingly distanced from the commercial state

Demagogue

• A leader who gains popularity by exploiting emotions, prejudices, and ignorance among the common people, often seen in the context of party politics and public opinion manipulation.

  • discern between the genuine concerns and aspirations of the populace and the manipulative schemes of partisan interests. It underscores the importance of distinguishing between the authentic voice of the people, driven by a sincere desire for liberty, and the opportunistic maneuvers of factional leaders seeking to advance their own agendas. In times of national turmoil and when fundamental freedoms are perceived to be in jeopardy, such discernment becomes particularly crucial for both leaders and citizens alike.

Party Politics

• the "general will" in political philosophy, particularly as articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The "general will" represents the collective desire or common good of the entire community, rather than the interests of specific factions or groups within society.

• for the general will to be truly representative of the entire populace, it's crucial to avoid the presence of partial societies or factions within the state. Each citizen should be encouraged to think independently and prioritize the common good over individual interests. However, if such partial societies do exist, Rousseau proposes that it's preferable to have many of them and to ensure they remain relatively equal in influence. This prevents any one faction from dominating the political landscape and distorting the general will.

• if such partial societies do exist, Rousseau proposes that it's preferable to have many of them and to ensure they remain relatively equal in influence. This prevents any one faction from dominating the political landscape and distorting the general will.

International Orders in Chinese and Islamic Worlds

• Ming and Qing emperors insisted that the international order radiated out from China as its center

• Islamic states held all non-Islamic parts of the world to be dār al-harb (lands of war)

The Law of Nations according to Europeans

• Area of law concerned with the relations between states – trade, diplomacy, and war

• In 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans discovered the ancient Roman ius gentium (law of peoples)

• By 18th century, international law had been reimagined in relation to sovereign state theory

Emer de Vattel, Law of Nations (1758)

• States that are recognized in the international order are like Hobbes’s person once inside the commonwealth

• They are moral (civil) persons possessed of duties and rights and capable of doing right or wrong

• • How to be recognized? “Perfecting,” “Improvement”

• Vattel defined the international order in relation to Europe: suggesting that civility was centered there

Global Hierarchies in the Law of Nations

• Lines of amity: European treaties in the 16th through 19th centuries marked off Europe as a zone of law, other regions as a zone of disorder

• Peace preserved in Europe, but vigorous competition allowed elsewhere (“no peace beyond the line”)

• Beyond the line: an absence of gentility, sociability; thus, a state of war

• international law as a source of new global hierarchies; also, a limit on any state’s absolute freedom over its own destiny

The American Revolution, 1776

• Renewed fear after the Seven Years’ War (1756- 1763) about how American provincialism was seen in England

• Imperial reforms favored the fiscal-military state, with new insistence on Parliamentary sovereignty

• Colonial response: Vigorous claims that colonies were “sovereign states” centered on the king, not Parliament

• George III’s unwillingness to side with colonies over Parliament, and the new use of force: tyranny!

Declaration of Independence and international law

• When “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the

• Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

• Seeks to claim those powers “which Independent States may of right” exercise

• Accuses King George III of many crimes. Why did the Declaration accuse him especially of exciting “domestic insurrections” and “merciless Indian Savages”?

The Somerset Case, 1772

• This was the 1772 trial of James Somerset, a slave who was brought to England from Boston, and then was ordered by his master to return to work in Jamaica. He didn’t want to, so the case was judged in England. The English courts ruled that slavery was illegal in England, and therefore Somerset could not be forced by anyone.

• Lord Chief Justice Mansfield: Slavery was “odious” and had no place in English public law. Yet, it remained perfectly legal in the colonies, where it was “authorized by the laws and opinions of Virginia and Jamaica.”

• This case served as a way to distinguish between England and the American colonies. England was considered enlightened and refined, whereas the colonies were considered to be an unnatural, backward place.

• England embraced the idea that slavery was an unnatural struggle between the slave who didn’t want to submit to the authority of the master, who had to use force as power over him. Therefore, England ruled that slavery was illegal, but the colonies did not, meaning they did not adhere to the Law of Nations, and so could not be considered as a morally upright nation deserving of sovereignty and recognition by other states.

A Post-Revolutionary United States (plural) that fail to meet international standards

• The Treaty of Paris (1783) provisions: protect Loyalist property, honor debts to British creditors

• Reveling in their new popular sovereignty, American states disregarded the treaty obligations

• Articles of Confederation (1777) weren’t strong enough to make states treaty-worthy, or to win international recognition

The U.S. Constitution as a Bid for International Recognition

• The Philadelphia Convention (1787) produced a constitution that rests on popular sovereignty but limits popular passions in respect of the law of nations

• The Constitution centralized foreign affairs in the hands of the federal government – and gave it additional related powers (some examples):

  • power to tax and spend “for the common Defense and general Welfare”

  • Congress’s power to declare war and maintain the military

  • the President’s power, with consent of 2/3 of Senate, to make treaties

  • The Supremacy Clause is crucial for maintaining the unity and coherence of the federal legal system, ensuring consistency and uniformity in the application of law across the nation. It also helps to resolve conflicts between state and federal authority, clarifying that federal law prevails in such situations.

Native Sovereignty

• Vattel: “Every nation that governs itself, under what form soever, without dependence on any foreign power, is a sovereign state”\\

• Joseph Brant’s Mohawks claimed to be “a free and independent people,” so did the Creek Indians

• U.S. officials and Native leaders then negotiated over the meaning of that independence in relation to the U.S.: “protected” peoples, or equally ”sovereign” peoples

• the American Revolution and the U.S. Founding reflected a desire for civil recognition in Europe, a bid for legitimacy that also impacted Native Americans and enslaved Africans

19th-century rise of nation-states

The new idea of the nation

• Jean-Paul Rabaut, Project of National Education (1792): Education assumes “that man is capable of indefinite perfection . . . . We must, absolutely, renew the present generation, while forging the generation to come. We must make of the French a new people.”

• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): In my “observations on national education . . . I principally wish to enforce the necessity of educating the sexes together, to perfect both, and of making children [go] to school to mix with a number of equals, for only by the jostling of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.”

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1806): “The remedy [I am proposing after Napolean’s invasions] is an absolutely new system of German national education, such as has never existed in any other nation . . . the new education must be able surely and infallibly to mold . .. the real vital impulses and action of its pupils

The Nation. What Made It New?

• the new ideal of the “nation” emerged in the decades around 1800 as a solution to the worries that had begun to cling to the sovereign state

• There was nothing new in the idea of national sentiment or the view of a nation as a people with certain shared characteristics

• What was new: the view that a nation can, and must, be built, from the raw material of the people themselves

• The people as like moldable clay, capable of being formed into a unitary and endlessly perfectible entity

The state is human-made; can it be made more humane?

• The Enlightenment era had desacralized the state: yanking sovereignty down to Earth, embracing the potential to build governments according to natural laws

• But state power had also produced “unnatural” cruelties and new disorders

• The Romantic-era national ideal: if the people are perfectible, so are states

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784): a crisis in Enlightenment culture, rationalism and empiricism as insufficient

• German idealism (or idea-ism): what we perceive is the appearance of things, not what they are in themselves

• God as “moral perfection,” truth as noumenal: unknowable through the senses, graspable only through intuition

• Humans view world through limitations of sense and reason (phenomenal), see only parts of the world’s actual moral perfection

• the “nation-state” idea’s ties to emerging theories of education and to the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant’s moral theory of "self-culture”

Self-Reliance; or moral autonomy of the individual

• Society holds us back by encouraging conformity, false institutions, civil injustices

• Self-culture: deliberately developing one’s moral self – education, trust in one’s intuitive sense of what is Just

  • emphasizes relying on your own judgment rather than what books or preachers tell you is just and right

  • self-culture is reliant on the idea that it is everyone's duty, some could go so far as to say burden, to become “moral agents”

• Moral maturity involves making one’s Truths public by being a “scholar” (public-minded speaker of one’s Truths)

• The nation itself matures (escapes its moral “nonage”) through this elevation of our best selves.

Kant on the great responsibility of self- culture

• Each of us, individually, has an extraordinary freedom and burden – to cultivate ourselves as moral agents

• The nation: not only a mass of individuals, but also a community of scholars – people who actively engage in ”self-culture” for themselves and everyone around them

• Self-Culture acts as the foundation of the Nation State. Scholars at the time defined a nation state as a collection of individuals who engage in self culture for themselves and those around them. In some ways it borrows from Hobbes’ ideas about self-preservation but it is more rooted in education. This is made clear in the fact that the necessity of moral development inspired by self-culture created education movements throughout Europe and the Americas in the 19th century.

Education and the Nation-State

• The nation ideal’s emphasis on a people’s capacity for, and need of, moral development gave primacy to education

• National education movements sprang up throughout Europe and America in the early nineteenth century

• Additionally: theaters, festivals, public lectures (lyceum), newspapers

From Kindergarten to History

• American Romantics (aka the Transcendentalists): followed German idealism, embraced self-culture

• Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894): American kindergarten movement, 1860

• George Bancroft (1800-1891): drawn to German idealism (though not a Transcendentalist), wrote one of first ”national” histories of the United States in 1834

French Pre-Revolutionary Concerns about the Nation

• Eighteenth-century French had given the “nation” idea new significance after their defeat in the Seven Years War (1754- 1763)

• ”nation” talk in this period was largely negative, centering on: 1) France’s continuing disunity, 2) a fear of moral decline

National Disunity: Regional Diversity

• Juridical diversity: different legal rights and privileges in France’s historic provinces

• Language diversity: As late as 1870, half of the French population regarded French as a foreign language

• Disunity seen on the eve of the Revolution as departure from an idealized ancient unity

The French Revolution, 1789

• Government’s effort to finance public debt through a botched regressive tax system had heightened inequalities

• The French Revolution had two phases:

1. an attempt at constitutional reforms by the Estates-General

2. a period of violent unrest called the Reign of Terror (1793-94)

What qualifies as a Nation? The new emphasis on moral worth

• Robespierre: “Considering the depths to which the human race has been degraded by the vices of our former social system, I am convinced of the need to effect a complete regeneration, and to create a new people.”

• The patrie as requiring a worthy people, no matter what sacrifices are required

Haitian Revolution, 1791

• French colony at Saint Domingue: most lucrative colony in the world

• The colony’s white politicians sought constitutional reforms in the revolutionary Estates-General

• Free Black people, then enslaved Black people fought for freedom and unlike the unfair and corrupt rule provided by the French colony

• Toussaint Louverture declared Haiti a free Black republic; constitution abolished slavery and ended race-based citizenship

Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

• Originally a nationalist for his homeland Corsica

• First Consul of the French Republic (1799-1804), Emperor of the French (1804-1814)

• Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), 3 to 6 million dead

• Wars fed by nationalism, promoters of nationalism: the Congress of Vienna (1815)

Haitian Indemnity Controversy (1825)

• French king, the ultra-monarchist Charles X (1824-1830) sent warships to Haiti

• Forced Haiti to keep its ports open to all nations and to pay compensation for slaves lost in the Haitian Revolution

• In return, recognition as a nation-state

• The debt and the loans to pay it off crippled the Haitian economy for generations (paid 112 million franks over 7 decades, $560 million in today’s money)

Origin of the Spanish American Independence movements

• The Peninsular War, 1808-1814: Napoleon invaded Spain, forcing King Ferdinand VII to abdicate

• Popular (nationalist) uprising by Madrid against the French in May of 1808

• Creole elites in Spanish America feared they might be left out of representation in the new Cortes de Cádiz (Spanish National Assembly)

Spanish American creole elites

• Creoles (criollos): born in America (peninsulares born in Spain)

• They had identified with Spain and the king—thus associating the “nation” with the larger Spanish empire

• They resented peninsulares, who looked on creoles as racially inferior and uncivil provincials

Who Are the People? (i.e., Where Is Sovereignty?)

• In Spanish America, no tradition of local representation, or clear locus of the people

• Emotional attachments to a village, a dominant city, or maybe a Viceroyalty

• Creole elites established autonomous Juntas: sometimes distrusted, contributing to balkanization (the breakup of a larger country into smaller independent states which are often hostile to each other)

• Building a “nation” through civil war

• Contexts: the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and the Haitian Revolution

• Creole elites anxious about lower classes and non-white population

• Thus, not simple conflict between Creoles and Peninsulares

• Also, violence and a strong authoritarian streak in forcing the populace to pick sides

Simón Bolívar

• Born in 1783 in Caracas, Venezuela, into one of the wealthiest creole families in the Spanish Americas

• After his father died of tuberculosis, he and his siblings were raised by the family’s African slaves

• As a young man, he trained in the law and traveled several times through Europe

• Bonaparte had declared himself emperor of France and begun nation-building projects

• Simón Bolívar in Venezuela: that nation-building in Spanish America drew on German idealist ideas of freedom

Venezuela’s fragile revolutionary state(s)

• A weak coalition of 23 republics

• Small numbers of creole founders

• Aggrieved peninsulares, disenfranchised people of color, and hostile provinces -- all potentially “Royalists” because they distrusted the criollos.

• independence in Spanish America in 1808 – 1833; an example of colonial nation-building spilling over from European nationalist revolutions

Bolívar as nation-builder

• The “nation” in his numerous speeches and writings

• In 1813: the Venezuelan states were “once again free and independent, and raised once more to the rank of Nation.”

• In 1815, a nation still in the process of being built: “The opinion of America is still not settled; although all thinking people are for independence, the general mass still remains ignorant of its rights and interests.”

Moral nonage and Freedom

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Hegel: “freedom” by freely willing, morally responsible agents

• ”Freedom”: a transcendental reality, in the Kantian sense

  • Freedom in the Kantian sense as stated in the lecture slides is directed towards human morality and dignity. Freedom is usually seen as the ability to do whatever the heart desires through action, however in the Kantian sense, it is the free will to act however one feels based on their morals.

  • In order for there to be a genuine sense of this freedom, it must come from themselves. Freedom is not based on the state the citizens are forced to live in, but rather a mindset to make the most out of what their morale tells of them.

• Bolívar’s “Angostura Address” (1819): colonial condition led to “ignorance, tyranny, and vice”

Bolívar’s creole nationalism

• Patriotic pride, racial mixing as source of national unity, and soaring optimism about the potential for national progress

  • Our fathers [are] different in their origin and blood . . . And their skins differ visibly . . . The blood of our citizens varies; let us mix it in order to unite it.”

  • For a man of honor there can only be one patria – and that is where citizens’ rights are protected and the sacred character of humanity respected. Ours is the mother of all free and just men, without discrimination as to background or condition

Racial harmony as national myth—but with legal backing

• Cortes de Cádiz had disallowed people of African descent, included whites and Indians

• Creoles had rallied Black soldiers with reminders that “Spain . . . had completely denied [citizenship rights] to men of color” and invitations to “unite and give Europe an example of fraternity.”

• By end of independence wars in 1824, all Spanish-American national constitutions granted legal racial equality to free populations

Liberalism

• John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor as key theorists: On Liberty (1859)

• Society can practice a “tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression . . . penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

• Liberty as autonomy: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

• Autonomy of the self allows for autonomy of the nation

• Liberalism: arising in the late 18th/ early 19th centuries that prompted ideas of self-autonomy, limited government, and free-market principles. Because of its belief in self-autonomy, it also promoted the idea of democracy and a nation ruled by its people.

• came with many restrictive (and often racially motivated) provisions

• self-autonomy and freedoms had to be “earnt” through revolt and a want for such and was used to justify practices such as slavery.

Liberalism and Democracy

• Democracy enjoyed newfound respect, as the cumulative wisdom of all those morally autonomous, deliberately cultivated selves

• liberalism also stressed democratic limits: on tyranny of the majority, on runaway populism, on runaway reform

• having a balance between different political perspectives in order to maintain a healthy state of political life

• both conservative ("a party of order or stability") and progressive ("a party of progress or reform") viewpoints are necessary components of a functional society.

  • each perspective serves to check the excesses of the other, thereby ensuring that neither veers too far from the principles of reason and moderation

  • the expression and defense of diverse opinions are crucial for the proper functioning of democracy.

  • Without equal representation and advocacy for various ideologies, there's a risk that certain interests or values may dominate while others are marginalized.

Liberalism and Moral Worth

• If liberty is autonomy, then the will must be deserving—a virtue proved by vigorously

• maintaining freedom

• “Our old friend Samuel Adams used to say ‘nations were as free as they deserved to be’”— Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 1812

• Patrick Henry’s speech, reprinted in many 19th century schoolbooks: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains, and slavery? I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

• Mason Locke Weems’s biography of George Washington (1800): The colonies “rose up as one man . . . resolved like true-born sons of Britons to live free and happy, or, not to live at all.

Revolution Implications for slavery

• Once seen as an unnatural war that affected slaveowner and enslaved alike

• Newly (insidiously) defined as a morally deserved condition unless meaningfully resisted

• A popular schoolbook sold by Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey (with an endorsement by Thomas Jefferson):

• “Who lives, and is not weary of a life Expos’d to manacles, deserves them well.”

• What counted as resistance, when did a slave have agency? Two examples: the tragic story of Quashi, the Haitian Revolution

Abolitionism and Nationalism

• After the war, Britons fashioned a national myth of their “empire of liberty,” a model of antislavery for others:

  • Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns, Forge chains for others she herself disdains? Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nations know The liberty she tastes she will bestow

On -- from Hannah More, “Slavery: A Poem” (1788)

- Abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson: end of the slave trade in 1807 on the grounds that it was a national disgrace

Olaudah Equiano

• Igbo region of the Kingdom of Benin, father was an elder (justice): owned many slaves, sold some (prisoners of war or criminals) to the Oye-Eboe

• Kidnapped, first to Barbados, then Virginia, where he was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Pascal’s valet in the Seven Years’ War, attended school in Britain, where he converted to Christianity in 1759

• Purchased freedom in 1766, became British abolitionist, member of the Sons of Africa, and author of Interesting Narrative (1789)

The Nation in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789)

• A personal narrative that functions as a national one: Equiano’s experiences as a slave and then freeman, England at its worst and its bes

Frederick Douglass

• Escaped from slavery in 1838, same year of Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing’s “Self-Culture”

• Often on stage with white Transcendentalists, wrote alongside Black Romantic authors: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Harriet Wilson, and Hannah Craft.

• Autobiography (1845) and speeches and essays: a personal example of Romantic self-culture, defined by Channing as “the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfection of his nature.” “I-narrative,” the cultivated self in engagement with a world that was still in nonage.

• abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass used the nation ideal to argue that slavery was inconsistent with national moral progress

Emotions and Nations

• Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities (1993): “Why [do nations] command such profound emotional legitimacy?”

• Historians have thus explored how “nationalism harnesses, produces and feeds on emotions to pull ordinary people into its orbit”

• The focus is now on “everyday nationalism” or the “nation” in people’s lives

National Sentiment: the example of Finland

• Finland: since 16th century, a Grand Duchy under the King of Sweden; Swedish language as official

• The Russo-Swedish War of 1808-1809: absorbed

• Finland into the Russian Empire, spurring a Finnish nationalist movement

• Newspapers: a steady rise in references to “national sentiment,” in reaction to Russification campaigns

Loss as a National Sentiment

• Nostalgia, grief, shock, melancholy, shame, fear, anger, revenge

• Breakup of empires, diasporas, colonial powers, industrial revolution, new political forces

• Nationalist texts and songs often tallied up losses

A “nation” imagined into being at its dissolution: the example of Poland

• 16th and 17th century Europe, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: singularly large and populous

• 1760s: Catherine the Great came to see Poland as a protectorate of the Russian Empire

• 1795: Poland’s partition in three stages (by Russian Empire, Prussians, and Austrians) and complete dissolution (until 1918)

• 1797: Józef Wybicki wrote Polish national anthem, for a nation that was no longer on the map

Early Modern Russia before it invented itself as a nation

• 16th and 17th centuries: Tsardom of Russia (Rus’) gradually became a sovereign state (Muscovy), often at war with Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

• Muscovite Tsar, a powerful autocrat, claimed a status comparable to the Byzantine Emperor (as though Moscow were a ”third Rome”)

• Ukraine looked to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (not Russia) as the sovereign state to which Kyiv was obedient

Ukraine and the Russian nation

• 1648: Ukraine fell partially under Russian rule

• Eastern Ukrainians, seeking protection from the Poles, allied with Cossacks (a Turkic people who lived in the Russian steppes)

• Muscovite national mythology emerged: Russia’s Kyivan, rather than Mongol, national roots

• Russians called Ukraine “little Russia” – though the region’s Polish nobility might at any time revolt back to Poland

Nation-Building in nineteenth century Russia

• 1860s – 1890s: Russia experienced a phenomenon that had occurred earlier elsewhere: growth of urban commercial life and a literary marketplace

• Printed materials: the lubok (cheap prints) to illustrated weekly magazines

• These works: positive images of citizens – and derogatory portrayals of minorities, colonial subjects, and foreigners

Incorporating ”Little Russia” (Ukraine) into Greater Russia

• Ukraine was integrated into the idea of “Russia” in these images – as though the Ukrainian state were seamlessly part of the historical Russian nation

• These moves were made regardless of Ukrainian feelings on the matter

• Thus, a “nation” could encroach on a “sovereign state

• link between nineteenth- century nation-building and emotions, allowing “nations” to exist even when territorial claims were indefinite or nonexistent

Total War in the era of nations

• Civilian armies, and civilian populations as targets

• Not just wars of centralized states; low-intensity conflicts, local, ongoing, undecided, periodically genocidal, often with edges of terrorism

• Compared to the highly centralized power in wars of 1890-1950, nineteenth century wars were extremely decentered

Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)

• Extremely deadly—local fighting, ethnic group upheavals, millenarianism, local strongmen

• Proto-nationalists in South led by Hong Xiuquan (Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, ethnic Hakka, subgroup of Han)

• For a time, he had studied Bible with Issacher Roberts, a Tennessee Baptist minister

• Hong’s own Christianity: a blend of Confucianism, Taoism, and indigenous millenarianism

The “Unequal Treaties” (1842-1860)

• Imposed on China through force by Europeans, Russia, U.S.

• Required treaty ports, ceded lands, and payment of indemnities

• Not totally abrogated until 1943

The Late Qing (1860-1912)

• Reliance on tradition in China was not stultifying, as was believed by Georg Hegel and his admirers like Karl Marx

• Confucianism produced some highly reform-minded nation-building scholar

• Example: Kang Youwei, founder in the 1890s of the Society for the Study of National Strengthening

• Chinese economy grew faster than once thought (though industry was localized, little coal): mills, mines, ironworks, railroad, telegraph

Interacting with, and resisting, the West

• Shanghai and Hong Kong treaty ports as conduits of Western influence: merchants, missionaries, diplomats, military men

• Taiping Rebellion gave some Qing officials opportunities to observe Western technologies

• Li Hongzhang, leading figure in the Self-Strengthening Movement (c. 1860-1895),

• Reforms to “self-strengthen” China against the West through Western firearms, machines, and scientific knowledge

Qing Resistance to Change

• Classical Chinese language remained standard written medium

• Qing scholars and officials resisted anything Western except technology: “Chinese learning for the substance, Western learning for the function/practical application”

• A view of Westerners as greedy pursuers of material gain, too unsophisticated to follow Confucian rites

• The civil examination system remained highly traditional

• Little educational reform, or interest in Western art, literature, or social customs

• Little reform in military, banking, or tribute system

A Late-Century Surge of Chinese Nationalism and Reform

• The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895): laid bare China’s military weakness

• Imposition of an unequal treaty on China by the Japanese

• The result: a wave of reform

• Women reformers: anarcho-feminist He Zhen and Xue Shauhui, author of Biographies of Foreign Women (1906)

Reforms against the Conservative Tide

• Empress Dowager Cixi: coup d’état, rescinded reform edicts as violations of “ancestral institutions.”

• Antiforeigner rebellion by the traditionalist Boxers United in Righteousness

• Armies of the Eight Nation Alliance (Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the U.S., Italy, and Austria-Hungary) occupied Beijing in 1901

• The result: a wave of nationalist reforms that targeted the Manchus as “outsiders,” and the end of the Manchus’ Qing dynasty in 1912

Meiji Japan (1868- 1912)

• Unlike in Late Qing China, support for the Emperor in Meiji Japan was high

• He was able to lead a more thoroughgoing reform movement

• In the Meiji Restoration, revering the Emperor was a way of expelling the Western barbarians (bakufu)

• Reformers in Japan could also rely on the previous highly organized Tokugawa state

Inter-Asian Reformism

• The Japanese and Chinese reform movements influenced one another

• Kang Youwei’s writing in 1898 that sought to bring constitutional monarchy to China was titled On the Meiji Political Reforms.

• Chinese reformers drew on these materials selectively, usually blending them with Confucianism to form a kind of utopianism

• Sun Yat-sen, first president of the Republic of China, educated in American schools in Hawaii

• On the other hand, Zhang Bing-lin was a Confucian scholar, and other reformers were anarchists, calling for an end of all government in the name of the “nation”

Cosmopolitanism

• The nation had a corresponding concept: the ideal of the cosmopolis (world-city, or world-republic)

• Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795): Nations that become morally mature recognize the universal rights and common humanity of all “citizens of the world”

• Thus, 19th century national ideal gave rise to a concept of universal human rights

The Universality of Rights

• Nationally-based rights movements often adopted an international focus

  • Example: National Woman Suffrage Association, organized in the U.S. by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Also met in international bodies like the Congrès International des Droit des Femmes (Paris, 1878)

• Abolitionism similarly became an international movement with many national iterations

The Liberal Nation-State’s Moral Intrusiveness

• Abolitionism justified new imperial conquests in the name of “protection”

• Liberal principles: equality, freedom, civilization -- with antislavery serving as an especially potent leitmotif

• The British (after 1833), French (after 1848), and Dutch (after 1862) all tied full nation- state status to abolition

• So would the U.S. in the occupation of the Philippines in 1898

Abolitionism’s slow start in the Indian Ocean World

• nationalist cosmopolitanism in the context of the 19th century Indian Ocean World, an interconnected environment that increasingly was tied to other regions including Europe and America

• British Parliament voted in 1833 to abolish slavery in all British dominions

• Exception: territories (like India) governed by the East India Company, which “delegalized” it

• Britain’s abolitionism abroad: West Africa Squadron in 1818 -- initially six ships, had grown to thirty ships by the mid-1840s

• But Indian Ocean World saw growth in slavery

• Through new names (“indentured servitude”), new commodities (e.g., ivory, cloves)

• over 100,000 enslaved South Asians in Atlantic world over 1600-1900

Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean World

• Networks of cosmopolitan thought in 19th century Indian Ocean World: often centered on religious exchange

• Brahmo Samaj (f. 1828): Hindu reformist movement, Calcutta (Kolkata); preached rationalist monotheistic faith in the spirit of British Unitarians

• Rammohun Roy, its founder: a cosmopolitan who anticipated Mahatma Ghand

• Allowed for people to be firmly rooted in their own cultures while also leaving their doors wide open for the richness of human experiences

• cosmopolitanism, an aspect of 19th century nationalism that encouraged a new view of universal human rights

Spreading influence of Roy’s cosmopolitanism

• Roy to the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, 1832: mankind is “one great family of which numerous nations and tribes are only various branches.”

• “Hence enlightened men in all countries must feel a wish to encourage and facilitate human intercourse . . . By removing as far as possible all impediments to it in order to procure the reciprocal advantage and enjoyment of the whole human race.”

• Roy inspired later Indian cosmopolitans: Swami Vivekananda, who at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago welcomed his “Sisters and Brothers of America” to learn Hinduism and spread Vedanta and Yoga

• Another Roy acolyte: Indian feminist Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), who drew on universal rights themes

Egypt’s path to the end of slavery

• The Egyptian government, under British influence, hosted Anglo-Egyptian Conventions of 1877 and 1895

• Criminalized slave trading and permitted manumission but stopped short of abolishing slavery

• Slavery’s quick end owed more to Islamic abolitionism and Egyptian nationalism (despite resistance by mainstream Islamic clerics)

• Islamic reformers like Muhammad Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida: the Qur’an intended for the end of slavery

• Egyptian nationalism: equality among citizens, including women, and Egypt’s proper place alongside egalitarian Western democracies

Ending slavery in Zanzibar in East Africa

• Sultan Barghash, son of a slave woman, knew that clerics and Arab and Swahili notables resisted abolition

• Inspired by Egyptian reformers, he abolished slave market in 1873

• Ended slavery in 1909 with freedom for concubines (but at the cost of custody of their children)

• Barghash: a modernizer who desired to bring Zanzibar into the international club of nation-states

• Other reforms: post office, electricity, paved roads, and improved banking and shipping

Conclusions!

• Between 1500 and 1900, the world became a radically more interconnected place

• A major engine of this change: evolving definition of sovereignty

  • a quality possessed by individual rulers by divine ordination

  • a feature all states need in their secular obligation to protect citizens,

  • an aspect of a nation that reflects and underlies its capacity for moral progress