After Tamerlane (32 page)

Of course, we should not discount altogether the ability of Muslim societies to reorganize their defences against European intrusion, or to adopt new ideas. In 1826, at the height of the Greek revolt, the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II liquidated the janissaries, the traditional corps whose alliance with the
ulama
had destroyed his predecessor. A series of reforms was then set in motion with the acquiescence if not the blessing of the most senior
ulama
, including the banning of the turban in favour of the fez. But before 1840 the impetus behind cultural and intellectual change was comparatively small – perhaps because of the lag in perceiving the radical challenge that Europe now posed. Nor should we imagine that Islam itself was in general retreat. In West Africa, for example, the late eighteenth century was an age of triumphant advance. Muslim warlords and Sufi brotherhoods extended the frontier of rule and religion. The timing was crucial. When Uthman dan Fodio founded his jihad state of Sokoto (in modern Nigeria) between 1786 and 1817, he and his counterparts in western Sudan (modern Mali) built a barrier against the Christian missionaries that were soon to arrive, and the Western colonialism that followed on later.
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The cultural worlds of China and the Islamic lands, for all their differences, had several features in common. They were not static or ‘decadent'. Scholars debated. Architects designed. Artists drew. Poets mused. Townspeople sought entertainment. Students sought knowledge. Lawyers and doctors were trained. The rich desired objects of conspicuous consumption. Changes in social or economic fortune stirred moral or religious anxiety. Divine revelations or millenarian prophecy challenged intellectual orthodoxy. The worlds in which Sufism, Wahhabism or the White Lotus movement could flourish were not stagnant. But three great constants seemed to frame this scene. Firstly, in both the Islamic world and China, classical, literary civilizations were dominant. Conformity with their aesthetic and ethical precepts remained the basis of cultural life. Explaining how knowledge of the natural world confirmed their metaphysical truths was the real test of intellectual ingenuity. Secondly, in both of them cultural and intellectual authority was heavily concentrated in scribal elites, whose privileged status was effectively underwritten by political power. Open dissent from intellectual or religious orthodoxy was correspondingly limited. Thirdly, with certain trivial exceptions, both were largely indifferent to Europe (and each other) and not much interested in the Outer World beyond Eurasia.

Europe's distinctiveness should not be exaggerated. Europeans, too, were culturally introverted and heavily preoccupied with their own religious and intellectual concerns. They remained for the most part in thrall to their religious beliefs, and deeply intolerant of the beliefs of others. Clerical corporations (Churches) commanded great wealth and controlled education. Church and State were like Siamese twins. To most Europeans it seemed perfectly obvious that neither could survive without the other. The sacred elites governed with the secular, and monarchs were legitimized by the incantations of clerics. Nor were science and religion yet the sworn enemies that they seemed to become by the twentieth century. Isaac Newton, whose physics had swept the intellectual board, thought that the natural world was regulated by God, whose interventions adjusted the imperfections of nature. For most European thinkers, the natural order was fixed: adaptation (in Charles Darwin's sense) was unimaginable or unneeded. Much the same went for the socio-economic regime. The
impact of technological and industrial change registered only faintly with the great minds of the Enlightenment. They were just as inclined to believe in a cyclical process of advance and decay as in the march of progress. They lived, after all, in a world in which serfdom still prevailed over large parts of Europe, in which political rights were closely restricted, and in which the wealthiest states were the most ardent practitioners of the slave trade and slavery.

Nevertheless, by the 1750s Europe was launched on a cultural trajectory that was sharply different from that in other parts of Eurasia. Within the intellectual elite, religious doubt could be openly voiced. The ‘corrosive scepticism' of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
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and the ridicule heaped by David Hume on Christian belief in miracles had little effect upon popular attitudes. Adherence to Christianity (in its various versions) remained a condition of social acceptance. But religious belief was gradually becoming a matter of opinion, to be sustained by argument not imposed by rule. After 1750, a flood of publications revealed the seriousness with which the challenge of unbelief was taken by churchmen. Ninety books were published in France in a single year (1770) to defend Christianity.
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This tolerance of scepticism reflected a deeper change in cultural assumptions. The huge intellectual influence of John Locke's
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
(1690) in Western Europe signalled the appeal of his individualistic psychology and philosophy. Famously, Locke rejected the notion that men understood the natural world by means of ‘innate ideas' implanted by God. They relied instead on ‘sense impressions' to build a picture of the world, and on reason to sort their impressions into a coherent pattern.
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It was men's duty, said Locke, to withhold consent from truths that conflicted with reason and experience – an intellectual habit that education should foster.
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They should not take on trust beliefs handed down from the past, and they could discover new truths by experience and experiment. Indeed, Locke was convinced of the value of ‘rational and regular experiments', the practice to which the intellectual milieu in which he spent much of his life was deeply committed. By the mid eighteenth century this practice had become a central activity in European culture. Close observation of the natural world to test empirically the ‘laws of nature' became an intellectual habit, a fashionable hobby
among the educated. This was not to say that religious accounts of creation had lost all force. Much scientific inquiry was predicated on the role of a divine creator and the need to unravel the providential plan. But even creationist theories required constant updating to square with the results of observation. The oracular status of ‘classical' knowledge had been demolished for good.

To scepticism and experiment we can add a third peculiarity: the European attitude towards space and time. Intense curiosity about the rest of the world had been a well-developed feature of European culture since the late Middle Ages. It may have derived from the pervasive sense that Europe lay at the edge of the world and not at its centre. Oceanic travel after 1400, and the reports it brought back, brought a huge expansion in literature reflecting this curiosity. The practical interests of merchants and colonizers swelled the demand for geographical data, while commercial controversy (for example, over the wisdom of exporting gold and silver) gave hard information on Asian and African trade a topical value. Maps and map-making assumed a growing importance, intellectually, commercially and also strategically. By the mid eighteenth century the systematic collection of geographical knowledge was a major preoccupation of European thought. ‘Scientific' travel, with the careful observation of human and natural phenomena, acquired enormous prestige. The sensation caused by Cook's reports of the South Pacific, the founding of the African Institution (in 1788) to promote the exploration of the continent, the lavish scale of Napoleon's project for the ‘Description of Egypt' (in 1798) and the intellectual impact of von Humboldt's account of his South American travels (1799–1804) showed how deeply the making of a ‘global' world picture had become embedded in the European imagination. As we will see in a moment, this fascination with space may have helped to produce a new view of time.

A ‘great divergence' between European culture and the culture of most of the rest of Eurasia was thus in the making by the mid eighteenth century. What is often called the European ‘Enlightenment' was an intellectual movement whose roots have been traced deep into the seventeenth century.
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Its crucial feature was the progressive collapse of the scholastic monopoly of ‘classical' knowledge that remained so immensely powerful in Islamic and Confucian culture.
Why this should have happened in Europe is a historical puzzle of a thousand pieces. Europe's division into sovereign states, the rise of printed vernacular languages, persistent religious schism, the ‘late' arrival of the European Renaissance, and the growth of a ‘reading public' (itself a product in part of religious debate) may have created conditions in which the intellectual dominance of a unified scribal elite became impossible. To these we might add the other great difference in European history. Europeans alone acquired a ‘New World'. How far this changed the direction of Europe's economic development remains debatable. But the impact of the Americas on the European mind is surely hard to exaggerate. They presented a huge intellectual challenge. It was not simply a matter of acquiring and organizing a vast bank of knowledge as the precondition of commerce and rule. It was in the Americas that Europeans discovered their capacity to impose radical change upon other societies – through enslavement, expropriation, conversion, migration and economic exploitation. It was there that they saw the devastating effects that one culture or people could have on another – an impact without parallel elsewhere in Eurasia. It was there, above all, that they found peoples who were living in what seemed an earlier age, following modes of life that, conjecture suggested, might once have prevailed in Europe. ‘In the beginning,' said Locke, ‘all the world was America.'
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The result was a great backward extension of the historical past (far beyond the limits of biblical creation) and a new mode of speculative inquiry into the stages through which European society must have passed to reach its contemporary form.
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America revolutionized the European sense of time. It encouraged Europeans to devise a historical framework into which they could fit the states and peoples of the rest of the world. It helped to promote a conjectural history of progress in which Europe had reached the highest stage. In the later eighteenth century this sense of Europe's premier place in a global order was reinforced by three hugely influential ideas. The first was the virtue of commerce as a civilizing agent, on which Hume and the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment insisted.
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In
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), Adam Smith pressed the case for commercial freedom as the surest route to material progress, and the idea of unfettered trade as a means to global harmony was taken up
by Immanuel Kant in his
Perpetu al Peace
(1798).
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It was a short step to argue (like the Victorian free-traders) that Europe should lead the rest of world into universal free trade, and to see the world itself as a vast single market. The second was the extraordinary confidence displayed by Enlightenment thinkers that human institutions and even human behaviour could be reconstructed along ‘rational' lines. No one carried this further than the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian calculus (the greatest happiness for the greatest number) supplied a measure against which laws and institutions anywhere in the world could be tested.
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Armed with the calculus, the enlightened legislator (from Europe) could frame better laws than benighted locals mired in superstition and antiquated prejudices. To his follower James Mill, the history of India revealed that ‘the manners, institutions and attainments of the Hindus have been stationary for many years' (since about 30
BC
he suggested),
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a savage indictment he extended to China.
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Europe's Promethean touch offered the only hope for a resumption of progress. The third proposition was just as startling. It was the growing conviction by the end of the century that there rested on the Christian societies of Europe an urgent obligation to carry their gospel throughout the world. What was especially significant was the force of this evangelizing urge in Protestant Britain, the richest and strongest of the European maritime states, and by 1815 the dominant sea power throughout Southern Asia.

The second half of the eighteenth century thus saw the crystallization of a new and remarkable view of Europe's place in the world. The sense of the limits and peculiarities of European civilization characteristic of the Age of Equilibrium had been replaced by a conviction that Europe's beliefs and institutions had a universal validity. This confident claim drew strength from the expansion of dominion, trade and influence, strikingly symbolized in the conquest of India. It rested on the conviction that European thought had explained the stages of history, and that European science could provide – systematically – all the data that were needed to understand the globe as a whole. The vital ingredients for a new mentality of global preponderance had now been assembled.

We can now take the measure of the Eurasian Revolution in its three dimensions. We can see that it set in motion the great reordering in the relations of states that led eventually to the age of empires on which the sun never set and an apparently invincible European hegemony. That had yet to happen by 1830. But the huge new bridgeheads that Europeans and neo-Europeans had pushed out, and the unpredictable pattern of their conflicts and conquests, had already produced two important results. The first was the blasting open of the North American interior, whose rapid occupation by (neo-) Europeans and their slaves brought a colossal extension of the European economy by the mid nineteenth century. The second arose from the closely linked outcome of the wars in Europe and the wars in South Asia. The effect was to shatter the old system of mercantile empires that had raised the costs and flattened the growth of Europe's trade with Asia. Once the British commanded the sea road to India, South East Asia and China, closing the long phase of maritime struggle in the Indian Ocean, a swarm of new hopefuls arrived to try their luck at promoting commerce, Christianity and colonization in the world east of Suez. The era of ‘free trade' was about to begin.