Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (52 page)

The bigotry of the Portuguese Jesuits, who had introduced Christianity to Japan shortly after they first arrived, and the attraction to Christianity of separatist political groups, eventually provoked an extreme reaction. The civil war that racked Japan during the sixteenth century ended with the reunification of much of Japan by General
(shôgun)
Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590s.
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He decreed the suppression of Christianity in 1597 and ordered the Jesuit missionaries to leave, though he did not actually enforce his edict.
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However, the persistence of the missionaries, especially some newly arrived Spanish Franciscans, who were preaching in the imperial capital Kyoto itself, and the revelation of apparent designs on Japan by the Spanish government, led Hideyoshi to drastic measures. Twenty-six Christians, including Franciscans, Jesuits, and Japanese converts, were executed, and on February 5, 1597, Hideyoshi issued an edict proscribing Christianity in Japan.
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Upon his sudden death in 1598 during the Japanese-Korean-Chinese War (1592–1598),
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a succession struggle broke out that was finally won by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The continuing separatist movement, which had come to have a strong Christian element, finally led the Tokugawa to expel the Portuguese in 1639 and cut relations with all Catholic countries. After 1635, travel abroad by Japanese was punishable by death. Japan was effectively closed.
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Although Japan was then almost completely inaccessible to Europeans, one trading post operated by the Dutch, who were Protestants, was allowed to remain at Nagasaki—on an artificial island, Dejima, specially constructed for the purpose. Through this office some of the advances of European science and technology, and glimpses of the knowledge about the rest of the world that had been acquired by Europeans, slowly filtered into Japan.

The more than two-century-long isolation of Japan was broken when the Americans, exasperated by Japanese refusal to negotiate the return of American sailors shipwrecked in Japan, or even of Japanese sailors shipwrecked in America, sent a naval expedition under Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who reached Edo Bay in 1853. The Japanese were forced to sign a treaty in 1854 that effectively opened the country to American ships. Later in 1854 the British negotiated a similar treaty, and in 1855 so did the Russians.
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The resulting sudden introduction of European and American people, ideas, and technology triggered a revolutionary movement. A coup d’état in January 1868 overthrew the Shogunate and restored the imperial family to power. Edo, where the Tokugawa Shogunate had been based, became the imperial capital, renamed Tokyo.
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Under Emperor Meiji’s
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enlightened rule (r. 1866 [1868]-1912), Japan adopted European and American ways. In the incredibly short space of less than four decades, the Japanese modernized their industry and created a European-style army and navy, with which they astonished the Russians and the world by winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
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There are some important reasons why Japan “modernized” or “Westernized” so quickly and became the lone Asian power among the otherwise exclusively European and American group of nations ruling most of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As an island country, Japan was a Littoral zone culture familiar with ships, the sea, and maritime trade. Compared to the peoples of the continental Asian empires founded by Central Eurasians, there was not as much of a conceptual or practical gap for the Japanese to bridge in order to catch up with the European maritime powers. Japan also had an unusually high literacy rate, partly due to the “temple school” system. And finally, the country had not in reality been completely closed but had slowly assimilated some of the most important developments of European science via the “Dutch learning,” translations of books acquired through the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki harbor.

The Great Urban Shift to the Littoral

The European establishment of shipping routes directly to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia eventually bypassed Southwest Asia completely. At first, Persia and the rest of the Near East, which had profited from international trade for some two millennia, did not lose much, and under the early Safavids Persia was still fairly strong. Trade flourished for a time at the British and Dutch trading posts authorized by Shah ‘Abbâs at Bandar ‘Abbâs, the small Persian Gulf town that replaced Hormuz as the dominant Persian port after the British and Persians ousted the Portuguese there in 1622.
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For a number of reasons,
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however, the Persian trade was relatively unprofitable for the Europeans. The British, under pressure from the Dutch, moved their trading post to the deepwater port of Basra, located at the head of the Persian Gulf. Basra, founded by the Arabs in the seventh century, had been one of the most important western termini for the shipping of the old local Littoral route before the European discovery of the sea route around Africa. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch attacked and destroyed the British post in Basra and completely dominated the Persian Gulf, but their shipping to Persia subsequently decreased along with the decline of the Safavid Empire and growth of piracy in the region during the early eighteenth century.
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The Ottoman Empire and the Middle East in general had already been undergoing a long, slow cultural, political, and economic decline. The southern ports of the region were or became backwaters, local centers for the continuing traditional regional point-to-point trade between India, Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Egypt. The great new high-volume international commerce of the Littoral System increasingly bypassed the shrinking economy of the Middle East. By the late eighteenth century, Persia was in very poor economic condition: the British East India Company reported that “the comparison between the past and present state of Persia, in every respect, will be found truly deplorable.”
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Despite the continued regional importance of Basra, it never grew into a great Littoral city. Bandar ‘Abbâs once again became a sleepy little town, and no new Persian port ever rose up to take its place. Despite its long coastline, Persia remained a continental country completely oriented to the interior and determinedly reactionary in almost every respect.
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The contrast between the history of the Middle East and that of the Asian littoral to the east of Persia is striking. None of the eventual great port cities of Asia east of the Persian Gulf existed as such in the sixteenth century; those that existed at all were fishing villages or small towns. Even the major ports of the old Littoral trade route were quite small, and their rulers so unimportant that they were largely left to themselves by the imperial powers; Calicut and many others were all but independent. That changed completely over the course of the three centuries after the Portuguese conquest of the sea routes to the East. In virtually all instances, the great cities that developed along the Asian coast by the end of the nineteenth century were founded by Europeans or grew under their influence from villages into cities because of the rapid growth of maritime trade. While the inland cities focused increasingly on the past and became centers of conservative or reactionary movements, the new coastal cities were points of transfer for culture and technology and became the dominant political and economic centers in Asia.

INDIA

Delhi, the inland capital of the late Mughal Dynasty in North India, became a neglected, old-fashioned town, surpassed by Bombay, the early British East India Company capital, and by the later British colonial capital at Calcutta. Delhi began to recover only when the British moved their capital to the city in 1911.

The deepwater harbor of Bombay (now Mumbai), one of the few on the western coast of India, was largely unknown before the Portuguese acquired it from the sultan of Gujerat in 1534, along with most of the northwestern coast from Bombay to Diu. After the British received Bombay as part of the dowry of Charles II’s Portuguese bride Caterina according to the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1661,
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the new owners greatly encouraged commerce there and the city grew rapidly
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until it achieved unrivaled importance in the western Indian Ocean.

Calcutta (now Kolkata), located in the delta of the Ganges River, was founded by the British East India Company in 1690 and secured by the building of Fort William a decade later. Calcutta became the center of British commercial interests in eastern India. During the following centuries, the British gradually established their power over the entire Indian subcontinent. Calcutta was made the capital of the British colonies in India in 1772 and grew until it became the greatest city of India.

BURMA

The capitals of Burma before the British conquest, including Pagán (on the Irrawaddy River about ninety miles southwest of Mandalay, Ava (a few miles south of Mandalay, and Mandalay, were all located in the north, far away from the coast and its port towns. Rangoon, an old Mon settlement at the mouths of the Irrawaddy River, was occupied by the British during and after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826).
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When the British won the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885, they moved the capital of the country to Rangoon.
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Though it began as a small colonial city, Rangoon soon became the commercial and political center of Burma and an important metropolis.

THAILAND

Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country to escape colonization or political domination by Europeans, perhaps because the Thais recognized their danger in time and responded to the change in economic and political conditions. Ayutthaya (Ayodhya), about 100 kilometers from the sea (though actually accessible by river for small ships), was the Thai capital up to the Burmese invasion and destruction of the city in 1767.
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During the subsequent reconquest of the kingdom, the Thai king Taksin moved the capital to a port town on the Chao Phraya River, “Thonburi, which being only twenty kilometers from the sea was better suited for seaborne commerce.”
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Taksin was succeeded by Rama I (r. 1782–1809), who moved the capital across the river to Bangkok. It is possible that by moving the capital to the Littoral early enough, more than anything else, Taksin and Rama effectively saved Thailand from European colonization.
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Bangkok grew in population and wealth, while Ayutthaya became a rural town with the crumbling ruins of former Thai royal splendor.

MALAYA

Singapore was founded by the British agent Sir Thomas Raffles in 1819 on the site of a sleepy local port town that then had a population of about a thousand people.
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It is an ideal harbor, strategically situated at the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula and the southern edge of the South China Sea, at the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, the main shipping channel leading to the Indian Ocean in the west.
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As it was located midway between China and India on the busy European-dominated shipping routes, it soon eclipsed all other cities between India and China in commercial importance.

CHINA

By the late nineteenth century the position of the Ch’ing Dynasty capital at Peking (Beijing) as the leading cultural and commercial city of China had been lost to the burgeoning European trading ports along the coast. The adherents of a growing Chinese popular uprising against foreigners and the Manchu-Chinese government, the Boxer Rebellion, were brought to Peking and given imperial troops by the Empress Dowager. They attacked the foreign legations there, and many foreigners and Christian converts were killed. An international force consisting mainly of Russians, British, French, Americans, Italians, and Japanese defeated the Boxers and government forces in August 1900, destroying parts of Peking and other cities in the process.
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The international alliance imposed staggering indemnities on the Ch’ing Dynasty and also took further control of the country. The international port cities continued to grow, but Peking sank under the weight of bureaucratic corruption, inertia, and xenophobia. It still looked to the past and its roots in continental Central Eurasia.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the entire China coast was not only dominated by Europeans and Japanese, but was effectively ruled by one or another European power. In 1841 the British took possession of the island of Hong Kong,
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across the Pearl River estuary from Portuguese Macao. By the end of the century, dozens of cities on the China coast were open to foreigners, but by far the most important of them was the port of Shanghai, which had been opened to European colonists in 1843 and grew from “a small country town” to become “the metropolis of China” because of its location in the Yangtze delta on the China coast midway between Canton in the south and Tientsin and Japan in the north.
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It was divided into politically separate foreign “concessions,” which were outposts of the home countries’ cultures. With the decline of the Ch’ing Dynasty, Shanghai grew rapidly in size and influence, soon becoming the commercial and financial center of China and one of the largest cities in the world. The modern view held by Chinese and Sinologists alike that the shift of power to the Littoral was due to the Europeans is correct. Its cause, however, was not imperialistic colonization but international commerce, as some Chinese officials understood but were unable to convince their government to do anything about; the regime’s continental fixation was unshakable.
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