Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (55 page)
The mysterious disappearance of the Silk Road coincided with the appearance of the new Littoral System, so it was natural for historians to attempt to find a causal connection between the rise and fall of what seemed to be two distinct commercial systems. In reality, deprived of its independence and its commercially minded local rulers, Central Eurasia suffered from the most severe, long-lasting economic depression in world history. It declined into oblivion, while the coastal regions of Eurasia, nurtured by the commercially minded European navies, prospered as they never had before.
1
see endnote 89. Their conscious choice of a new ethnonym with Buddhist significance is strikingly similar to the *Taghbač (T’o-pa) experience (q.v. Beckwith 2005b).
2
Perdue (2005: 140).
3
Perdue (2005: 140–141).
4
Perdue (2005: 148–149), Bergholz (1993: 260–261, 267–269).
5
Perdue (2005: 150).
6
Perdue (2005: 138, 161–171).
7
Perdue (2005: 151). “The original Ch’ing banners had been composed of companies of 300 men supported by imperial stipends and grants of land” (Liu and Smith 1980: 202).
8
He announced that the Dalai Lama was in deep meditation.
9
Perdue (2005: 151).
10
Spence (2002: 154).
11
Perdue (2005: 152–159) says that both sides worked on outmaneuvering each other in this period, but it does not seem that the Junghars did anything in particular to this effect.
12
Spence (2002: 155). His son was captured by the local ruler of Hami and turned over to the Manchus.
13
Perdue (2005: 202). He appears to have been poisoned (Perdue 2005: 202–203). According to Ahmad (1970: 322), he committed suicide on June 3, 1697, but this date must be a mistake for the arrival of the news of Galdan’s death at the Manchu-Chinese imperial camp (Perdue 2005: 202).
14
Perdue (2005: 178).
15
Perdue (2005: 192).
16
Hoffmann (1961).
17
There are numerous translations of the love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama.
18
Certainly Galdan Khan had felt that way and responded angrily to what the Junghars felt was insubordination by the chief Eastern Mongol incarnate lama, the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, and the latter’s disrespect for the Dalai Lama.
19
Perdue (2005: 234–235).
20
Perdue (2005: 234–235), Hoffmann (1961: 178–181).
21
However, Tibet proper was never incorporated into the Manchu-Chinese Empire or the Ch’ing Dynasty realm, unlike the Kokonor region. Tibet remained a “protectorate” right down to the fall of the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1911. It was an independent country with a resident
Manchu
protector (and his personal guard, consisting of a few Manchu-Chinese troops), who exercised the oversight of a suzerain but no formal sovereignty or de facto control over the Tibetans’ administration of their country. The casual opinions of contemporaries are irrelevant.
22
Perdue (2005: 263–264).
23
Perdue (2005: 265). A tael or Chinese ounce was equivalent to slightly less than forty grams, or a little more than a troy ounce.
24
Perdue (2005: 392–393).
25
Cf. Millward (2007: 92–94).
26
Perdue (2005: 256–265), Millward (2007: 94–95).
27
Perdue (2005: 275–288).
28
Perdue (2005: 291).
29
Perdue (2005: 32), Millward (2007: 97).
30
Perdue (2005: 392–393), Millward (2007: 103, 116).
31
Although the British in India still wanted to trade with Central Eurasia, they had insufficient patience with Asian politicians. In 1904 the British invaded Tibet, defeated the Tibetan forces opposing them, and imposed their own terms.
32
Perdue (2005: 161).
33
Certainly it did not entirely disappear. Virtually nothing ever
entirely
disappears, and caravans of one sort or another have continued down to our own day. But that does not mean the Silk Road economy continued its former importance right down to modern times, as has been claimed by some—for example, Millward (2007: 76–77), who, however, actually provides many explicit examples that demonstrate the exact opposite: trade in Central Eurasia actually declined precipitously after the destruction of the Junghar Empire. It is difficult not to see that Central Eurasia, including Central Asia, the heart of the Silk Road economy, became impoverished and strikingly backward technologically (as well as intellectually and artistically) long before the twentieth century.
34
Pearson (1987: 26–27).
35
Millward (2007) notes that although some Manchu-Chinese officials advocated turning to the littoral instead of the interior, tradition and strategic worries kept the Ch’ing government focused on Central Eurasia. It seems likely that the strategic worries expressed in the sources were not real, contemporary threats but traditional ones.
36
Elisonas (1991: 302).
37
Hall (1991: 4). This was the Momoyama Period, in which the
shôgun’s
capital was still in the Kansai region, at Hideyoshi’s castle in Osaka.
38
Elisonas (1991: 360–363).
39
Elisonas (1991: 363–364).
40
Asao (1991: 70–73).
41
Elisonas (1991: 369).
42
Beasley (1989: 270–271).
43
Tôkyô
‘Eastern Capital’ was thus contrasted with the old imperial capital
Kyôto
‘the Capital’.
44
Actually, Meiji is the name of his reign period, so he should properly be called “the Meiji emperor,” along the lines now traditional for Manchu-Chinese emperors of China.
45
They had earlier won the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. The most significant Japanese territorial gains from the latter were Korea and Taiwan.
46
Savory (1995: 772), Matthee (1999: 105–106).
47
Partly, Safavid government control over commerce and industry; see above.
48
Savory (1995: 772–773).
49
Savory (1995: 774), quoting Issawi (1971: 86).
50
It is remarkable that even the opening of the Suez Canal—a European project from start to finish—did not succeed in resuscitating commerce in the Middle East itself, not to speak of intellectual and artistic life. Since the decline of the Safavids, the only significant (though short-lived) exception to this turn into darkness in Persia was the Pahlavi Dynasty in the mid-twentieth century. The fate of that regime sums up the problem of the Middle East to this day.
51
Newitt (2005: 258, 245).
52
Conlon (1985).
53
Thant Myint-U (2001: 18–20).
54
Becka (1995: 217).
55
Wyatt (2003: 122). “When the Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, they immediately sent a mission to Ayutthaya … [;] in 1518 a third mission confirmed the peace pact concluded in 1511…. Siamese international commerce must have kept up with the steady growth in seaborne trade that followed,
doubling
between about 1500 and 1560” (Wyatt 2003: 74, emphasis added).
56
Wyatt (2003: 124).
57
On early European commercial and political relations with Ayutthaya, see Wyatt (2003: 95–104).
58
Joo-Jock (1991: 6).
59
Joo-Jock (1991:12).
60
Hsu (1980: 118–125).
61
Wakeman (1978: 199–201).
62
Fairbank (1978: 224, 237 et seq.).
63
Millward (2007: 126–127). He notes quite rightly that to a great degree the fixation continues down to the present day.
64
Frédéric (2002: 624); cf. Jansen (1989).
65
GSE
(14: 380). St. Petersburg was the imperial capital from 1712 to 1728 and from 1732 to 1918.
66
GSE
(19: 116).
67
The Russians sold Alaska to the Americans shortly afterward, in 1867, ending their direct participation in the European conquest of the Americas.
68
GSE
(5: 539).
69
This is true even for Antiquity.
70
However, in the Early Middle Ages the capital of the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Mercia, was solidly inland.
71
Oddly, all Scandinavian countries have ports as their capital cities, but none of these countries were prominent during the Age of Exploration and in the establishment of the Littoral System. On the other hand, Lisbon, the capital and leading city of Portugal, though not historically a great metropolis, was and is a port and figured prominently in the pioneering explorations and conquests of the Portuguese, who are ultimately responsible for the establishment of European power in the Asian Littoral.
72
Lattimore (1998: 6) translates: “As for cities, those built later in a time of increased seafaring and with more abundant wealth were fortified establishments right on the coast and occupied the isthmuses for trade as well as defense against their neighbors. The old cities, however, on account of the long survival of piracy, were usually built away from the sea, whether on the islands or the mainland (for the pirates raided both one another and the nonseafaring populations of the coast), and are inland settlements to this day.”
73
Tokugawa Ieyasu moved to Edo, in the Kanto region, as part of a trade made with his then ally Tokugawa Hideyoshi. The town became the de facto capital when he became sole ruler of Japan in 1600. Edo, the future Tokyo, was at the time still just a local port, though it was famous for horses, an important resource for the army. Even today several prominent locales in central Tokyo have names connected to horse rearing.
74
Some of the larger Southeast Asian realms, notably Srivijaya, have been said to be thalassocracies, but not perhaps in the sense intended here.
75
The closest to a genuine thalassocracy seems to have been the ancient Athenian “empire.”
76
Some of their descendants—notably the Carthaginians—did, but this was a long time after the heyday of the Phoenicians proper.
77
It is sometimes thought that most of the truly international trade was conducted by Sogdians, Jews, and other “third party” merchant nations because they could cross borders, and it was in these merchants’ best interests to maintain distinctive neutral national identities that were easily recognizable and known not to be overtly connected to any political entity, but this appears not to be accurate, at least with respect to the Sogdians, the Turks, and the Vikings. See de la Vaissière (2005a) and the papers in de la Vaissière and Trombert (2005).
78
This is suggested, usually backhandedly, by many, for example, Millward (2007: 93–94): “Thus the Zunghars provide a good and well documented example of the importance of the caravan trade to the nomadic states of Inner Asia.”
79
It may be objected that the Arab conquest did not result in an economic recession in Central Asia. That is apparently true, but there seem to be good reasons for it. Arabia belonged to the old Littoral zone economy, the Arabs were strongly pro-commercial throughout their history, and there was an important nomadic element in Arabia. The Arab conquests during the time of their empire (up to the collapse of direct caliphal authority in the early ninth century) also paralleled the steppe nomadic conquests in many respects.
80
This might be thought to suggest an explanation for the collapse of the Tibetan Empire and the failure of later Tibetans to once again form a large state. But it is a historical fact that Tibet was subjugated by the Mongols (or, to be precise, surrendered to them) and was thus incorporated into the larger Mongol Empire. With the partial exception of brief interregnum periods, Tibet continued to be largely unified under the rule of one or another Mongol state down to the defeat of the Junghars by the Manchu-Chinese—under whose protectorate Tibet remained a largely unified state. Tibet is therefore no exception to the rule. A state-based national history of Tibet remains to be written.
81
See the epilogue.
82
On recent arguments that the Silk Road did not really decline, see the discussion in endnote
90
.
83
This is not what David Christian (1998) means by his newly coined terms “Outer Eurasia” versus “Inner Eurasia.” I cannot agree with this usage, especially in view of the existing terminological confusion in Central Eurasian studies. He later refers to the “Afro-Eurasian region” (Christian 2000: 2).
84
One can probably include the Trojan realm as well as that of the Hittites, though the latter was based in Central Anatolia.
85
Millward (2007: 79–80).
86
Millward (2007: 156).
87
Millward (2007: 102–103).
88
Millward (2007: 121).
89
Millward (2007: 158).
90
Millward (2007: 130–137). Despite his argument that China (what is traditionally often referred to as “China proper”) and the other parts of the Ch’ing Empire except for Tibet all had essentially the same political status, this was not really the case. The status of Mongolia was different from that of East Turkistan, and both were different from that of Tibet. The official change of Sinkiang (Xinjiang) into a full-fledged province was a deliberate political move. Though it might not at first have had much significance for the ordinary people living there, its impact over time has been enormous. Cf. the comments of East Turkistanis mentioned by him (Millward 2007: 158), and see the following note.
