global early modernity

Question 1

Move beyond European centrism of early modern

Answer 1

o Conrad Totman’s Tokugawa Japan (1990) – traces patterns of European modernity in Japan (urbanization, state building etc); this still takes Europe as a starting point yet demonstrates such features are perhaps not so European.

Question 2

emergence of global history

Answer 2

o Emergence linked to the contemporary supremacy of Asian economies – China, Japan, India]
o Within this context regional historians attempt to reclaim narrative of modernity and prove that societies were already advanced before Europeans bulldozed through everything

Question 3

connective history

Answer 3

eg Subrahmanyam

explain broader events/change

• How what is happening in any one place is caused by a web of interactions that exist beyond it. Decentering the nation state and larger regional visions- 17th century Netherlands is understood by 3 continents not just Europe.
• • Connective history will look at how many people across the world are swept up into messianic fervour eg Charles 5th Hasburg empire and Ottoman Suleyman both make messianic claims at the same time and wondering if they influence each other.

Question 4

comparative history

Answer 4

• why does one part of the world fall as another rises? How does climate effect human history? Takes independent examples and tries to isolate them to find what’s most important
• take 2 distinct examples eg Portugal and Mughals – are there any internal conditions for millenarianism to take over/ is politically resonant, might accept they are influencing each other but more bothered about what internally is going on that means that influence is successful. Can also be unconnected societies.

Question 5

California schools

Answer 5

• parts of India, and particularly China, were just as advanced in economic terms as the dynamic parts of Europe by 1800.
• these societies were working just as intensively, people were being paid the same sorts of wages, luxuries were being consumed, people were congregating in cities, produce and goods were firmly tied to markets. The economy was growing just as fast.
• It’s one way of saying modernity existed outside of Europe.

Question 6

early modernity as the watershed moments of 1450-1800

Answer 6

o Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans (1453)
o Voyages of Columbus (1492-landed on the Americas) and Vasco da Gama (1498- connected Europe to Asia via cape of good hope)
o Rise of the Safavids (1501)
o Ascendancy of the Mughals under Akbar (1556-1605)
o Conquest of the Ming by the Qing 1644

Question 7

features taken of an early modern society

Answer 7

o Plugged into a global trade network.
o Bureaucracy and meritocracy
o Standing armies, gunpowder, weaponry; infantry overtakes cavalry in importance
o Cultural cohesion – one language, one identity
o Secular intellectual culture
o Urbanisation

Question 8

difference between modern and early modern international commerce

Answer 8

▪ Early modern international commerce differed fundamentally from modern configurations. Premodern commerce remained polycentric; that is, a plurality of overlapping but distinct economic spheres coexisted alongside one another. For example, fluctuations in sugar pro- duction in the Caribbean or tobacco yields along the Atlantic seaboard had little effect on consumption in southeast Asia.

Question 9

connectivity and early modernity - America’s

Answer 9

Americas completely isolated until arrival of Portuguese
▪ From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards then, the idea of an integrated global history based on the existence of worldwide networks of trade, exchange, conquest and circulation can be thought to have at least partly become a reality. American plants, birds and even some animals now reached the Indian Ocean not only via the Atlantic and Europe, but directly through the Pacific. The so-called ‘Manila Galleon’, which linked together the Mexican port of Acapulco and the Philippines
The Atlantic ocean for the first time became an important route of economic activity.

Question 10

connectivity and early modernity - Africas

Answer 10

o Africa disconnected until arrival of Portuguese

▪ Africa at the close of the early modern period had become more connected to global economic networks and more incorporated into universal religious systems.

The northern half of the continent experienced intense Islamization and moderate Arabization as a result of jihadist campaigns and trading connections to the Middle East.

The Atlantic commercial economy, centered around the slave trade, drew in the western coast and some central regions, giving rise to new states and destroying others ….

Interior kingdoms prospered from connections to maritime commerce in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. European settlements remained small and confined to the western coastline

Question 11

connectivity of China

Answer 11

o Within China, the rebuilding of the Grand Canal to link northern and southern China, the expansion of cotton farming in the north and cotton spinning and weaving in the south, and of rice production up the Yangzi river basin and silk production in the delta, tied China together into a great continental trading system

Question 12

• The importance of the Iberian voyages:

Answer 12

o Eliminates Aztec and Incan empires
o Connecting the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans
o Bringing different states in Africa into contact for the first time (eg kingdoms of Benin and Congo, east and west coasts of Africa)
o Connecting the globe – through the Spanish Japan is now in direct communication with Mexico.

Question 13

which years are integral to connectivity of global early modernity

Answer 13

1492 and 1498 have to be central to any defence of the idea of a Global Early Modernity based on connectivity. It is only with the creation of sea-lanes that joined up the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans for the first time that truly global interconnections were established.

Question 14

Chinese seaborne expansion

Answer 14

▪ appeal to the extraordinary feats of Chinese seaborne exploration under the leadership of Zheng He in the first decades of the fifteenth century: do these signal the opening of an Asian-initiated Early Modernity, or a characteristic flourish of the Middle Ages???

Question 15

cultural connectivity

Answer 15

o Cultural exchange – eg introduction of letters to the Aztecs who used codices/hieroglyphics, and the Incans, who used knots on ropes

Question 16

defining the period as cross-cultural interactions in an age before the nation state

Answer 16

o Bentley defines early modernity by processes rather than specific traits
o Development of global sea lanes, exchange of biological species (animals, plants, disease – the importance of livestock to the development of America and chili peppers to SE Asia) and creation of early capitalist economy (trade, merchants, silver)

o Strathern - If, outside Asia, Iberian oceanic sea-lanes created new connections within macro regions, it is the fact that all such regions were now brought into sustained conversation with each other that is truly significant.
▪ It is from this basis that many early modernists argue that such developments are not just noteworthy or interesting but definitive of their period

Question 17

demographic shift in early modern period

Answer 17

o Near-elimination of Amerindians
o Transportation of slaves

Question 18

silver and discovery in early modern period

Answer 18

the discovery of mines in S. America:
o Monetisation – end to the barter system, although many Asian societies had already been using money
o Leads to capital accumulation, investment, financial systems, wage labour, borrowing, facilitation of taxation

Question 19

rule and civilisation as early modern - diversity and imperial cult

Answer 19

o Muslim leaders- In each of these imperial projects, the claim was that of introducing a form of universal peace (what the Mughal called sulh-i kull), permitting diverse communities to coexist and prosper. Significantly, both these rulers promoted the writing of powerful ideological texts that tried to sustain their arguments, drawing both on theology and on other sources, including secular histories. Key amongst them were the Ottoman ruler Süleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520 to 1566), and the Mughal emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556 to 1605)

Question 20

early modernity and state building - land tenure

Answer 20

unique system of land tenure,—all three empires display a high degree of cohesiveness… the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids: legal title to the land, the right to collect rent and the right to actually use the land were intentionally kept separate. Agricultural organisation provided a lot of central government control and agricultural revenue became the key financing of soldiers, staff and imperial infrastructure. It always ensured that the richest land holdings reverted back to the state

▪ top layer- The state reserved many categories of land, however it meant that they were unable to sell such land.

At the bottom layer were the peasants who occupied the land, however they had most rights to do as they pleased with the soil and pass the land on to their descendants (but they couldn’t buy or sell it ).

▪ In the middle was the rent collectors, while higher than the peasants they had more tenuous claims to landed property. They collected a pre-established surplus from their land, yet their land did not provide them with titles or property and their renting claims were not inheritable or permanent – if the sovereign had awarded lifetime claims to a rent collector and then were to die, the new sovereign had to reaffirm the rights of that rent collector
▪ By the seventeenth century, for example, it became standard practice in the Ottoman Empire to simply auction off timars as tax farms, and then to use the proceeds of these auctions to pay soldiers and other state servants directly in cash.

Question 21

state building and early modernity - loyalty and domination Ottomans

Answer 21

Ottoman administrators began to classify all members of the “military class” (composed, by this time, predominantly of native Muslims) as “slaves” (kul) simply by virtue of their service to the state… his enabled the formation of a new, hereditary and self-reproducing class of free-born Muslims who came to monopolize the Ottoman bureaucratic and military establishment, but who, in exchange for these privileges, became subject to confiscation and to summary execution at the Sultan’s will.

Question 22

state building and early modernity - loyalty and domination - Mughals

Answer 22

▪ service to the state being used in almost exactly the same way to justify the dispossession and summary execution of jagirdars(land holders- A grant of land which could be used instead of cash) and other members of the elite in the contemporary Mughal Empire. in the Mughal case, it was equally common for elites to celebrate their devotion and total subjection to the ruler in terms of “slavery,”

Question 23

state building and early modernity - loyalty and domination - Safavids

Answer 23

▪ Ismail I of Safavid dynasty- hailed by followers as the Mahdi or “rightly guided one,” a messianic figure sent by God to restore justice and, through his divinely inspired rule, usher in a new and everlasting age of peace and prosperity.
▪ the Safavids forced all of its Muslim population to convert to Shi’ism or die. When the empire expanded to Iraq and Azerbaijan, these areas were enjoined to adopt Shi’ism as well.

Question 24

Importance of gunpowder- Tondibi

Answer 24

o In March 1591, a great battle took place at Tondibi.On one side of the battlefield stood the rested and well-provisioned army of the Songhay ruler Askia Ishaq II, who had assembled a force of at least 10,000 troops—to defend his kingdom from foreign invasion. On the opposing side was a Moroccan expeditionary force of no more than 2,500 men.- Moroccan invaders won. They had the advantage of gunpowder, weapons, muskets, mortars and a battery of English artillery as well as European slave soldiers- Portuguese and Spanish ranks and lower English soldiers versus an army with arrows and poisoned javelins

Question 25

Ottomans and gunpowder

Answer 25

Ottomans’ systematic adoption of siege artillery in the decades that followed, allowing them not only to breach the walls of Constantinople in 1453, but of dozens of other fortresses throughout the Balkans and Anatolia theretofore considered “impregnable.” By the turn of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had also added field artillery to their arsenal, using it to devastating effect in their victory over the Safavids at Çaldiran (1514) and their subsequent conquest of Mamluk Egypt (1517).

Question 26

Polyphonic

Answer 26

o Polyphonic - acknowledges and embraces the existence of multiple, diverse voices, perspectives, and narratives within the historical record. Rather than presenting history as a monolithic or singular narrative, polyphonic history recognizes the complexity and diversity of human experiences, beliefs, and interpretations throughout time. Historical events and phenomena can be interpreted in multiple ways, depending on one’s perspective,

Question 27

• Subrahmanyam- view of early modernity

Answer 27

o Sees Early Modernity through the lens of connectivity rather than through a template of checklist features.

o Early modernity - It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena: the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora, the “globalization of microbes.”
o Cannot be written from a single centre.

Question 28

Subrahmanyam - teleologism

Answer 28

o Fight teleologism – can’t view C19 imperialism as inevitable; global early modernity concept presents states as dynamic and vibrant.

▪ the teleological view of empires giving birth to nation-states has seemed irresistible. The fall of the Soviet Union then gave currency to another brand of rhetoric, that of globalization: the end of nation-states as an international regime was expected by eschatologists as a step toward the “end of history.” However, the idea that the market would replace politics has had a distressingly short life. but, instead of a borderless world driven solely by market forces, there has been a resurgence of nostalgia for empire, albeit in the form of a single hegemonic empire dominating global affairs.

o Empire building a natural impulse of mankind rather than a feature of nationalism.

Question 29

Subrahmanyam and comparative history

Answer 29

beneath the surface you can also see comparative desire.

For though Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs were rivals who possessed some characteristics in common, they were also, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, quite different from one another, and continue to differ in the longer-term trajectories of the political institutions that they produced.
▪ Ottomans- most important was the practice of the devshirme, the “levy of boys from the Christian rural population for services at the palace or the divisions of the standing army at the Porte,”. The Mughals steered clear.

Question 30

the protected zone

Answer 30

Lieberman’s Strange Parallels
o Protected zones are Europe and mainland SE Asia because they aren’t subjected to the Eurasian empires and are thus broken down into smaller political units
vs the - ‘exposed zone’ – those areas vulnerable to conquest by horse-born military elites)

▪ Protected Zone - Japan, Mainland Southeast Asia and Western Europe
▪ Exposed Zone - South Asia, China, and Southeast Asian Islands
▪ Protected Zone was relatively isolated from the invasions/occupations of Central Asian groups like the Mongols and Europeans (‘White central Europeans’).

Question 31

Lieberman - importance of 1400

Answer 31

Lieberman

1400 onwards - a new recentralizing period beginning in the mid-1400, shifts await from old ‘charter capital’ model in terms of administrative and cultural:
▪ Territorial consolidation - A new consolidation starting in the later 1400s focussed on ‘renewed agricultural reclamation, expanding long-distance trade, movements of religious reform, and introduction of Chinese and more especially European-style firearms’.
▪ Administrative centralisation
▪ Cultural integration

Question 32

Lieberman’s approach to early modernity

Answer 32

Lieberman adopts a comparative approach to early modernity, examining developments in Europe and Southeast Asia side by side. He argues that both regions experienced profound transformations during this period, including state-building, commercialization, urbanization, and cultural change.

While acknowledging the differences between Europe and Southeast Asia, Lieberman identifies striking parallels in the patterns of historical development in both regions. Europe and Southeast Asia underwent similar processes of societal change during the early modern period.

Question 33

Lieberman and features of early modernity

Answer 33

challenges the Eurocentric notion that early modernity was characterized by the rise of strong, centralized nation-states in Europe. Instead, he argues that both Europe and Southeast Asia saw the emergence of diverse forms of statehood, including city-states, maritime empires, and decentralized polities.

o Compares France and Russia in the West with Japan and Southeast Asian Islands in the East- All had similar historical developments, characterised by the existence of ‘charter states’, post-charter ruptures, renewed integration, shelter against outside invaders, increased and more efficient bureaucracy, and increased centralisation as a product of state formation.
o Turns to China and Indian subcontinent - striking parallels but also notable differences (charter states in existence for millennia beforehand, vulnerability to invasion etc)

Question 34

why have historians of Asia engaged with Early Modernity

Answer 34

Strathern -
the pay-off is an innovative reconsideration of the dynamic potential of nonwestern societies in the period immediately before the arrival of full-blown European imperialism in the nineteenth century threw them off course by imposing its own brand of modernity.

o Early Modernity is not so much as a form of Eurocentric cognitive tyranny as a means of ambushing a Eurocentric version of grand narrative
o Ex. Mughal Empire seen as v successful in Early Modern period, developing political mechanisms that allowed it to claim sovereignty over a vast area with a population greater than that of Europe, and an economy that made it Eurasia’s centre of textile production as late as the nineteenth century.
o European settlement of other regions does begin in this period, but if this is hugely significant in the Americas, it is far less so elsewhere. To the east, in particular, it is Asian empire-building that catches the eye

Question 35

Asian power vs Europe in this time period according to Strathern

Answer 35

o In 1500, the population of Asia was approximately three times that of Europe; by 1700, it was three and a half times as large. Real wages of urban workers in Beijing and Constantinople were virtually the same as those in Paris or Florence. There was nothing obvious to indicate that in a century and a half, Europeans would humiliate China and take over India

Question 36

Strethern’s criticism of the Eurocentrism of early modernity

Answer 36

o Despite its (the term ‘early modern’) European pedigree, this periodization does not impute western characteristics across the globe or make Euro- centric judgments about non-western lands. In fact, “early modern” implies just the opposite. For when applied to world history, the term connotes a set of global processes, described by the historian John Richards, as the creation of global sea passages, the emergence of a world economy, the growth of centralized states, the rise of world populations, the intensification of agriculture, and the spread of new tech- nology.

Question 37

Modernization theory contestable

Answer 37

o Economically dynamic Asian societies of today have not converged on a single set of ‘modern’ characteristics

Question 38

how early modern works with the medieval

Answer 38

‘Early modern’ needs to be defined against the medieval as much as it does the present in order to explain divergence’

Question 39

modernity as a product of our lived present

Answer 39

critique of early modernity

omodernity can’t just be explored to confirm contemporary self-importance. Applying present-day standards of modernity to historical societies risks imposing anachronistic judgments and overlooking the specific contexts, values, and priorities of the past.
o Eg Sir Jadinaath Sakar’s 1930s history of the Mughals – criticises them for rejecting the European knowledge (languages, printing press etc) that he thought essential to modern Indian nation; he sees the roots of administrative rationality in Mughal India which is why he finds them and their incompetent rulers frustrating

Rather than viewing modernity as a fixed and linear trajectory, it suggests that different societies and historical periods may have pursued alternative paths to modernity based on their unique circumstances, values, and priorities.

Question 40

modernity is what we think it’s not

Answer 40

o The very word ‘modern’ inextricable from Eurocentric ideas and Enlightenment thinking
o 1980s Subaltern Studies in India – peasant remains a feature and dynamic force of the modern state; no clear delineation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’

Question 41

issue of periodisation - cannot be separated from the past

Answer 41

▪ The Muslim empires (Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal) that came to power in central and south Asia grew directly in response to weak Mongol-Timurid regimes. Mongol incursions in central Asia pushed the Ottomans into Anatolia where they found a home on the borders of the Byzantine empire, a Greek and Christian realm centered at Constantinople … Likewise, the decentralized character of the Timurid dynasty in Iran enabled the Safavid dynasty, a Shi’ite Muslim clan in Ajerbaijan, to rally war- riors to take control of the region. The Ottoman and Safavid regimes, therefore, formed successor states to Mongol-Timurid rule.

Question 42

idea of periodisation of early modernity

Answer 42

assume similarity and comparability?

Question 43

issue of periodisation - arbitrary limits

Answer 43

▪ Russia does not become modern until after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917
▪ the end of Ottoman power occurs only after World War I, with the secularizing Kemalist Revolution of 1923

Question 44

Korean civil service exams

Answer 44

▪ By the 1400s, for example, applicants’ answers in the Korean civil ser- vice examinations passed through the hands of collection officers, registra- tion officers, recording officials, collating officers, and readers, whose tasks were to see to it that candidates’ names were concealed from their examin- ers; that their answers were recopied in other people’s handwriting before examiners saw them; and that many examiners, not one, evaluated the candidates’ performances.

Question 45

issue of periodisation - elements of unmodernity in early modern period

Answer 45

Woodisde- the mandarinates’ monarchies were palpably unmodern in many ways, not least in the parasitism of their royal families, especially in China. (The Ming grand secretary Xu Guangqi calculated in the early 1600s that there were about eighty thousand living relatives of the Ming royal house that had ruled China since 1368; all of them were entitled to government stipends.)- the economic burden this placed on the state. Moreover, this parasitic behavior bred resentment among civil servants who lacked similar privileges and felt a sense of injustice compared to the royal family’s ability to mobilize resources.

Question 46

Goldstone’s critique of term early modern- elements of modernity

Answer 46

“individual elements of “modernity” may appear in a scattering of places, but such individual elements in isolation do not necessarily make a society “modern,” or even “early modern.”

▪ Lieberman’s discussions are interesting but have nothing to do with modernity. The real watershed is the industrial revolution and that’s when history took a turn – cities grow faster, populations wealthier, economic growth. What’s modern about bureaucracy eg existed in Rome, limits on their development by muscle power/ wind/water generating all energy.\
o There are no modern societies pre C19 industrialised Britain, only ‘advanced organic societies’ – no fossil fuels = no modernity

Question 47

examples of Goldstone’s critique- elements of modernity

Answer 47

in Chinese history some of the major turning points in this millennia were the expulsion of the Mongols in 1368, the overthrow of the native Ming dynasty by the Manchus in 1644, and the overthrow of the Manchus in 1911, while the years around 1850 see the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the intrusion of the Western powers, none of these events has anywhere near the significance of the overturning of millennia of Confucian patterns of rule and culture in 1911 and the following decades. – it is negligible to simply take a time period and characterise that as the early modern period. it does not fit into the usual characterisation of EM as 1500-1850

Question 48

Goldstone - early modernity as whiggish

Answer 48

Argument by Goldstone

▪ Elements of modernity can be found worldwide in a multitude of periods, from business practises in 1900 BC Anatolia up to the period in question
▪ Song period in China (960-1279) has gunpowder, mechanical clocks, printing, compasses, civil service, coal production – wtf is early modernity for them, then?
▪ If ‘early modern’ is defined by production and trade for profit the historian risks finding elements of modernity everywhere and nowhere – Whiggish

Question 49

Goldstone issue of early modern period not setting up for modernity

Answer 49

o no one can seriously deny that methods of production, the basis of government authority, and the dominance of religion in daily life changed dramatically in the West following the Revolution of 1789 in France and the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, and that such changes have been spreading around the globe ever since

o the great divergence- Pomrance says to understand why England were the first country to undergo Industrial revolution, you need to take a comparative approach. He takes a region in China and compares it to Britain and these 2 were fairly equivalent to each other as regions in terms of economic dynamism. Until about 1800 their GDP per head were level and in terms of Smithian growth (specialised trade which is focused on certain regions which increases productivity), China was equal had the same levels of market orientated productivity

Question 50

Lieberman - overemphasis on early modernity and features of centralisation and Bureaucracy etc.

Answer 50

these patterns are evident as far back as the Roman empire

Question 51

disagreement over modernity

Answer 51

As Goldstone versus Strathern show for example - there is no definition for what modernity means so the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ to reflect the plurality of the term ?

o Does that then make the use of the term ‘modernity’ completely useless?
o Does ‘modern’ just mean ‘what societies are today’?

Question 52

theoretical issue with the term global

Answer 52

Strathern:
● Demands of linguistic expertise
● Mountains of Secondary Literature
● Weight of professionalisation and specialisation

Question 53

early modern period as age of empires

Answer 53

the history of the Safavid Empire began with the enthronement of the teenaged Shah Ismail in 1501. Just three years later, the Mughal state was born with Babur’s conquest of Kabul in 1504. Still further afield, the Shaybanid Khanate of Central Asia, the Sa‘adi dynasty in Morocco, the Sultanate of Aceh in insular Southeast Asia, and even the remote but formidable Kanem-Bornu Sultanate in Africa’s Lake Chad region all owe their genesis to the same handful of decades clustered around the year 1500. Only the Ottoman state has a somewhat older history, tracing its origins to the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Question 54

size of Muslim empires

Answer 54

• 3 main Muslim Empires expanded most greatly in this period but differences in size- Mughal had 100 mill (1/5 of world’s population)- on a par with Ming China. The Ottoman Empire had similar geographical area but only 25-30 mill inhabitants. The Safavid Iran had far smaller territorial claims and only 5-7 million people and was more comparable to the Moroccan Empire than the Mughal

Question 55

issue with focus on the Muslim empires

Answer 55

o Problem of neglecting all those early modern empires that are not the Mughal, ottoman or Safavids when talking about Islamic Empires- we risk oversimplifying a story that is in fact a good deal more geographically extensive, culturally diverse and politically dynamic than might otherwise be imagined. Second, by defining these three empires as first and foremost “Islamic,” we risk exaggerating the extent to which they should be considered, in certain fundamental or predictable ways, distinct from other early modern empires that were not Islamic.- The Moroccan example proves that we should not focus on just 3

Question 56

issue of focus on the watershed moments of the early modern period

Answer 56

• Is it Eurocentric to assume that Portuguese create a new era of global connectivity when huge connected zones already exist before they arrive?
  o Portuguese simply appropriate pre-existing trade links and redirect them to Europe
  o Eurasia was host to 2 vast zones of interaction (the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean) for centuries before European arrival.
  o Buddhism stretched from Hiamalyas to Sri Lanka and Japan by 1000, Islam from West Africa to Southeast Asia by the end of the period.
  o Strathern - Therefore the significance of Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and entry into the Indian Ocean in 1498 may appear to be simply Europe finally breaking out of its relative isolation in order to gate-crash a party that was already rocking

Question 57

maybe the watershed moments are not just Eurocentric

Answer 57

Tezcan argued that from 1580 there was a ‘Second Ottoman Empire’ characterized by the development of a kind of public sphere in which proto-democratic and modernizing forces acted upon government amidst deepening commercialization.

■ Historians of Japan describing political unification in a period of rapidly adopted firearms, the crushing of independent religious institutions and reformist salvific movements under the heel of a determinedly centralizing government, the transformation of the samurai class into a class of bureaucrats

Question 58

areas of connectivity which exist before the early modern period

Answer 58

o The Silk Road, Middle East to China (roughly Lieberman’s ‘exposed zone’ – those areas vulnerable to conquest by horse-born military elites)
o Indian Ocean – the South China Sea, Red Sea, East Africa
▪ Both were trading networks of goods/people and great engines of cultural transference.

Not only did societies in almost every corner of the globe engage in trade across considerable distances, but commercial networks in Africa, Asia, and Europe also overlapped at key geographical points. The port city trade in the Indian Ocean, the overland routes in central Asia, the intra-European circuits, and the north African zone fed into one another at various points along the Mediterranean coast

By 1400, transcontinental trade had led to increasing integration of large portions of Africa, Asia, and Europe, an important precondition for the formation of a global commercial economy in the early modern period.

Question 59

connectivity of interaction pre early modernity

Answer 59

o Arab, Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Turkish peoples joined travelers like Ibn Battuta (a well-known Moroccan explorer) on the Silk Roads; on the Muslim Hajj, the obligatory pil- grimage to Mecca; and on ships in the Indian Ocean. As a result, Indians and Africans in Calicut had already discovered European peoples before Vasco Da Gama arrived at the end of the fifteenth century.

Question 60

period was not consistent or cohesive - military issues

Answer 60

o By the 1590s- The difficulties of states in paying their militaries led to desertions, and deserters with guns usually became bandits. In China and the Ottoman Empire, banditry grew to such a scale that leaders emerged to head armies recruited from bandits and attack government forces. In China, one such bandit army reached Beijing, where defeat led the last Ming emperor to hang himself as his capital fell

Question 61

period was not consistent or cohesive- decline and rise of Ottoman Empire

Answer 61

o Decline of Ottoman empire in the early seventeenth century; Sultan Ibrahim strangled in 1648 and women of the harem exercising influence over sultans who were often minors. But in the second half of the seventeenth century the empire made a significant recovery. the army and navy were strengthened and tax collections greatly increased by selling tax-farming rights to local notables. During this period, the Ottomans were self-sufficient in manufacturing a wide variety of firearms and cannon of quality equal to those of other European powers

Question 62

can we apply early modernity cohesively globally - Safavids

Answer 62

o the Safavids entered a terminal decline after 1666, and were destroyed by Afghan forces in 1722. The island states of Southeast Asia fell to the Dutch; and the remnants of Mongol Hordes were suppressed by Russia and China. Nonetheless, the world map of 1700, like that of 1600, was dominated by large empires

Question 63

Do histories need ‘representation’?

Answer 63

are all histories equal even if the historiography makes them appear so?
o Are we simply ‘conceding’ modernity to other places in the world rather than properly attacking modernization theory?

Question 64

Chinese exams - civil service

Answer 64

▪ Woodside - The examination sites themselves became public spectacles. In China in the 1700s the Jiangnan examination site—a walled complex of brick huts to which individual candidates were assigned—accommodated more than sixteen thousand students. The sites reminded people of the importance of the competitive measurement of administrative talent, roughly in the way our big football stadiums remind us now of the excitement of athletic competition. - it was the Tang dynasty that made success or failure in the struggle for Chinese government positions theoretically dependent upon the scrutiny of candidates’ talent, by means of public competitions held at fixed periods. And it was the Tang dynasty that allowed civil service office- seekers to make their own applications for advancement through examinations, rather than requiring them to get the recommendations of aristocratic patrons or high court officials

618 to 907 AD.

Question 65

Emperor Qianlong and communication

Answer 65

Woodisde - the weakness of communications between “high” and “low,” or rulers and ruled- the monarchs of the mandarinates largely governed through texts composed for them by mandarins, rather than by more personal (and perhaps more feudal) means of persuasive human contact

The central problem described is the disconnect between rulers and the ruled, often exacerbated by bureaucratic practices. In this case, the ruling class, represented by the monarchs, relied heavily on written communication composed by bureaucrats (mandarins) rather than direct, interpersonal communication. This reliance on written texts, which were often in the dominant language of the ruling class (such as Chinese), created barriers to effective communication with diverse ethnic groups within the empire. Even when rulers attempted to adopt a more personal or feudal style of governance, as seen with Emperor Qianlong, the influence of bureaucratic culture persisted, leading to challenges in conveying messages accurately to different ethnic elites

Question 66

Qianlong - issue of communication with nobles in empire

Answer 66

Qianlong complained that he personally had to correct edicts written in Beijing by his Mongol and Manchu translators because the Mongol and Manchu nobles for whom they were intended could not understand them. The breakdown was the fault of court translators, who were not Chinese themselves but had nonetheless grown up in Beijing and been influenced by Chinese examination prose mannerisms,

Question 67

Woodside- comparative history: The habsburgs

Answer 67

Europe’s most significant multiethnic empire in the 1700s, that of the Habsburgs in Vienna. In Vienna there was no monoculture of civil service examinations. Magyar and Czech and Croat clerks were not so eager to Germanize themselves linguistically that they took up a stilted style that threatened the Habsburgs’ ability to communicate with minority nobilities on their frontiers.

Question 68

Woodside point of comparison between Habsburgs and Qing

Answer 68

both multiethnic

Question 69

Goldstone’s modernity criteria

Answer 69

): If ‘modern’ means religious freedom, mechanical industry, and constitutional government, does the early modern period even deserve its label?”

he proposes industrialisation, capitalism, formation of nation states, urbanisation, secularisation

Question 70

charter states

Answer 70

Charter states were an important feature of Southeast Asian societies, particularly during the premodern period. These were territories or regions granted special privileges or autonomy by a higher authority, often in exchange for loyalty, tribute, or military service. Charter states typically had their own rulers or aristocracies who governed locally under the overarching authority of a more powerful state or empire

Question 71

Wolfe

Answer 71

“colonialism’s centrality to the global industrial order . . . means that the expropriated Aboriginal, enslaved African American, or indentured Asian is as thoroughly modern as the factory worker, bureaucrat, or flaneur of the metropolitan center.”

Question 72

STarn

Answer 72

early modernity was made up in US
o to rescue the precolonial centuries in the Indian subcontinent from the stigma of being labeled “premodern.” This involved acknowledging the complexity, dynamism, and achievements of precolonial societies, challenging the notion that they were inherently inferior or backward. Secondly, these historians aimed to deny the colonial period any exclusive claims on modernity. By highlighting advancements, innovations, and sophisticated systems of governance in precolonial India, they sought to challenge the colonial narrative that portrayed colonial rule as a civilizing mission that brought modernity to a supposedly backward society.

Question 73

Bayley on modernity as perception

Answer 73

● “In the first place,” he writes, “this book accepts the idea that an essential part of being modern is thinking you are modern

Question 74

Richards’ modernity

Answer 74

the period from 1500 to 1800, characterized by several worldwide processes of change. These include the rise of a global world economy, growth of large states and organizations, doubling of the world population, intensified use of land, and diffusion of new technologies like New World crops, gunpowder, and printing. These developments signify modernization.

Question 75

Chakrabarty - modernity is not thinking you are

Answer 75

○ Chakrabarty disagrees with the former point, saying One’s sense of being modern did not always follow the chronology of modernization. Most anticolonial nationalist modernizers experienced European colonial rule as actually skimping and not delivering on the promise of modernization- Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, 1972), 25: “at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them;

Question 76

Chakrabarty - issue with representation of history

Answer 76

o Chakrabarty, ‘Muddle of Modernity’ article (2011): idea that non-Western histories need ‘representing’ admirable, but are all histories equal even if the historiography makes them appear so?- names and labels used to organize historical facts and narratives are not inherently objective but reflect the judgments of historians. Eg colonialists think they are modern, anticolonialists are not

Question 77

Bayley - early modernity is all perception by historians

Answer 77

Sarkar (1870– 1958), who pioneered detailed research in the late Mughal period and who regarded the acquisition of “European knowledge” as fundamental to his vision of a “modern” India, believed the Mughal ‘cultural resistance’ to adopt the European printing press was symptomatic of what was “rotten” at the “core” of the Mughal regime. He lamented the fact that in the Mughal court “no attempt was made by any Indian noble or scholar to learn European languages

historians can ask such questions only if they clarify to themselves and their readers what is at stake for them in debates about modernity. The word is not very useful if it is treated merely as a synonym for institutional or infrastructural change over time— that is to say, for modernization

Question 78

Strathern - correct way of looking at modernity

Answer 78

■ But early modern historians aren’t trying to say their period heralded the arrival of modernity per se - but that the period is distinctive precisely because it ‘looks both ways’
■ Nor are hard economic criteria such as price convergence typically seen as the definitive means of assessing the significance of connectivity, but rather imperial expansion, the exchange of disease, or the flow of religious ideas

Question 79

Strathern - significance of Iberian voyages

Answer 79

It’s conventional to use the nascent globalization stimulated by the Iberian voyages of the 1490s as a periodization marker
This is not tantamount to identifying the entire early modern period with European agency

the historiography now acknowledges the capacity of Asian and African societies to respond to and benefit from the new global context. For instance, the rapid adoption and improvement of gunpowder weapons in Japan after their introduction by the Portuguese illustrates how non-European societies adapted and innovated within this changing landscape.

Question 80

Starthern -issue of periodisation

Answer 80

Yet some forms of comparative history (seeking to answer specific questions about how certain phenomena tend to work by watching how they function and evolve in diverse settings) arguably do not require periodisation at all.
For example:
● If one wants to conceptualise what kind of empire the Aztecs created and where one might situate it within a spectrum of political centralization, then why not consider it in light of the literature on ancient Rome?
● If it is orality than one wants to understand then the richest source of comparisons may be found in modern anthropological work in non-literate societies.
● Sheldon Pollock, amongst others, has commented on the problems of assuming that periodization by itself magically produces similarity or comparability: if this is the case for the early modern period, it is all more so for the Middle Ages.

Question 81

Lieberman - consistency of modernity

Answer 81

o cyclical nature Successive periods of fragmentation/decline and decay followed by resurgence, in terms of structural consolidation this seems to be a logical step, since much of the administrative elements already exist (don’t have to reinvent weaponry etc)

Question 82

Lieberman as unique

Answer 82

• Lieberman is the first to compare under structural criteria mainland Southeast Asia with Russia and France and Japan, then with China and South Asia, and finally with “the Islands,” i.e., island South.
• Yet no scholar has considered the central questions of this volume: Why during at least a thousand years did regions on the far reaches of Eurasia, with distinctive social and economic systems and little or no contact, experience parallel consolidations?

Question 83

lieberman as a global historian

Answer 83

• By acknowledging the similarities in historical developments between the states of Southeast Asia and Europe, we not only lose some of the European exceptionalism that has been under fire for some time now,

Question 84

lieberman as a comparative historian

Answer 84

• Lieberman addresses the question of why both zones share a common historical trajectory, if in some cases they had no real contact until at least early modern times
  o Compares France and Russia in the West with Japan and Southeast Asian Islands in the East- All had similar historical developments, characterised by the existence of ‘charter states’, post-charter ruptures, renewed integration, shelter against outside invaders, increased and more efficient bureaucracy, and increased centralisation as a product of state formation.
  o Turns to China and Indian subcontinent - striking parallels but also notable differences (charter states in existence for millennia beforehand, vulnerability to invasion etc)

Question 85

Lieberman - simialrities of protected and exposed zones

Answer 85

• In every case across Eurasia, the intervals of disintegration became ever shorter until the formation of states became the norm in the early modern period. Especially pronounced in China and India as charter states were in existence for so long.
• All areas saw a strengthening of the centre at the expense of the periphery, usually facilitated by a dominant ethnicity and religious tradition, whether indigenous or imported.
• Metropole’s dominance also facilitated by rise of efficient bureaucracy centred at the capital and drawing from the provinces (although regional differences existed, such as the social-status based exams in Tokugawa Japan, caste/ethnicity based in Mughal and British India vs the meritocratic civil service ones in China

Question 86

Lieberman - 4 phonemonon which led to modernity

Answer 86

o Expansion of material resources, intensifying interstate competition, new cultural currents and diverse state interventions.

Question 87

Jan da vries

Answer 87

Although we have global trade networks, they’re so expensive to use – sheer amount and time of sailing trips, losses encountered, trade only In face of imperial mean prices are different across the globe
Big difference in price you buy pepper and price you sell it at – different prices for goods in different places of the world . mass mechanised trade – efficient and in bulk post industrial rev. that’s when prices converge.
Trade in Americas is not firmly dependent on Asia.

Question 88

Lieberman’s similarities

Answer 88

he notes that both Europe and Southeast Asia saw the emergence of centralized states with increasingly bureaucratic administrations during the early modern period. These similar developments can be driven by comparable challenges and opportunities, such as the need to manage larger populations, defend against external threats, and exploit new economic opportunities

Question 89

Lieberman’s differences

Answer 89

The economic structures in Europe and Southeast Asia diverged significantly. Europe experienced a move towards capitalist economies with early forms of industrialization, while Southeast Asia’s economies remained more agrarian and trade-based, although trade was sophisticated and integral to their economies.