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The Lords of Human Kind

European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age

Zed Books Ltd

INTRODUCTION

The Oldest Europe and its Neighbours

Man's most ancient ancestors have left their bones on three continents, and civilization seems to have begun where Asia and Africa meet, between the river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt, with Europe, Asia's extension, close by. Its outward mark was a society divided into classes and ruled by higher classes sometimes for the collective benefit, always for their own benefit. Several such societies were crowded fairly close together, learning from each other but also frequently at war, again for the benefit of their ruling groups; a feature that was to characterize most civilizations through most of history, and Europe's most of all.

During the first millennium BC three new civilizations were taking shape, which among them came to rule or influence most of Asia, and which through many changes have lived on to our own day – the Persian, Indian and Chinese. They borrowed from the older ones, in India from the Mohenjodaro or Indus Valley culture, that may have been in its prime about 2000 BC. They differed from them in being much larger, and in general further apart, which allowed each to feel itself, like every human being, the hub and centre of all things: China especially, the remotest, as Mohenjodaro had been earlier. Greece was also appearing, the first 'Europe' with which we can connect ourselves, although the earliest European settlements with some title to be called civilized now appear to go back much further than was thought until very lately. Greece lay scattered in small units from Asia Minor to the western Mediterranean – a distance about as great as from India's north to south tip. It floated on the sea, the others belonged to dry land. The permanence of these four, with least continuity in Europe and most in China, has been as striking as the failure since then of any radically new civilization to grow up, except in Central and South America and, by synthesis of older with new elements in the Islamic world.

Linguistically Europe, Persia and northern India all belonged to an 'Aryan' or 'Inda-European' family that had spread out by migration or conquest, probably from southern Russia. Geographically Europe, western Asia and northern India form a continuum, separated from farther Asia by desert, mountain or sea. But linguistic affinities and whatever vaguer racial affinities may have gone with them counted for less than other factors. Persia was the least stable of the regions because it was in the middle, interacting with all the rest, and it was drawn (along with limited parts of Europe, India and China) into Islam, though it kept its distinct character. India too was subjected to recurrent interference, and defended itself passively by developing a uniquely tenacious social structure, caste cemented by religion, which is only being slowly eroded today. China, left more to itself except by barbarian assailants, evolved towards a more flexible society divided into classes, often racked by class conflict, but with a political structure as firm as India's social structure. In this and various other significant points the far west and far east of the Euro-Asian land-mass have had and still have more in common than either of them with any lands in between.

Europe has undergone far more change, particularly in the way of internal evolution, than any of the others, yet in each of its incarnations much has remained from earlier ones. Greece itself, moored close by the earliest civilization as Japan was moored off the coast of China, learned a great deal from Egypt, partly by way of Crete, and from Babylon. It had, however, a personality of its own, which its latest heirs or mortgagees like to sum up in the word 'freedom'. This is a word easier made into a parrot-cry than defined, and Westerners boast now of being free very much as not long ago they boasted of being white. Greeks, who invented democracy, were slave-owners when they could get hold of any slaves. Nevertheless their little republics, unlike the great empires and kingdoms of Asia, did harbour an independence of spirit, a right of individuals or groups to be heard, that elsewhere existed only at the lowly level of village or clan. This spirit was to recur throughout European history in a multiplicity of forms, and helped to impart to it a restless changefulness. Europe's towns, the cradles of its civilization, began as separate city-states, and never ceased to be wholly or partially self-governing, small but complex political entities of a kind virtually unknown anywhere else in the world.

Greece grew conscious of itself by contact and contrast with Asia. Its citizens called everyone but themselves 'barbarians', as the Chinese also learned to do, but in a different spirit. They could not pretend to more wealth, knowledge, or refinement of living than the old civilizations of the East, towering like pyramids above their heads; but they could make a virtue of their own narrower means, untainted by corrupting luxury or extravagant pomp, and more positively of their civic institutions and the rationality and the disciplined courage in war that were both fostered by them. We still think of restraint, moderation, balance, as well as fortitude and patriotism, as qualities essentially Hellenic, and modern Europe in contact with Asia has given itself credit for the same virtues. Then, as at every later stage, Europe cultivated its warlike prowess in conflict with Asia, as well as with itself. Greece beat off the Persian empire's attempt to swallow it up; Greeks employed by the Persians and Egyptians became their best soldiers; finally under Alexander Greece conquered both Persia and Egypt, and founded the Hellenistic kingdoms that stretched into central Asia and northern India. Striking experiments took place there in the fusion of diverse cultures, and it was only very slowly that they melted away into their Asian environment. We still often look at Asia through the eyes of those Greeks, or fancy we are doing so while really making them look through ours. In the nineteenth century triumphant Europe saw Alexander's army, carrying Western civilization into Asia, as its vanguard. Governors and generals went out east with their heads stuffed with the classics, determined to find Asian rulers of the same breed as Xenophon's slippery satraps.

Rome built out eastward, as far as the head of the Persian Gulf, on Hellenistic foundations. It is within the ghostly frontiers of the Roman empire that a European still in a sense grows up and has his being – the empire, as Robert Louis Stevenson remembered it nostalgically far away in the Pacific, 'under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us'. In political structure it was a European power, ruling wide regions of Asia and Africa as well; it shared with and partly borrowed from its Greek teachers a conviction of representing civilization against barbarism, whether this barbarism was Gothic and primitive or Oriental and decadent. Rome like Greece grew through conflict with the non-European world and in resistance to it first displayed its strongest qualities. The great challenger in the early days was Carthage; from the heroic struggle against Hannibal the poet of the empire and its mission, Horace, later drew his conception of Roman valour and virtue. He was indignant at the soldiers of his own epoch captured by the Parthians, now masters of Persia, who, when Crassus was defeated in 53 BC, settled down there, married 'barbarian' wives, served in the Persian army. He was indignant with them, in a modern phrase, for deserting their country and 'going native'.

Later on something like this befell Rome itself. Eastern trade and the wealth of the eastern provinces, as well as the death of the republic, drew the empire's centre of gravity too far eastward. There was trading with India, and through Arab and other intermediaries with China; Rome discovered, as Europe was to go on doing down to the late nineteenth century, that it had little to offer except its scarce silver for the goods of farther Asia, principally silk, that it coveted. In the end the western half of the empire was left to fade into the backwardness of northern and western Europe; the eastern half, as the Byzantine empire, continued for another thousand years, but half-orientalized – 'barbarized' in the opposite sense – not distinctively 'European' as Greece and Rome at their best had been.

The West was left to make a new start, largely on new foundations and from a low cultural level. In the long run this shake-up proved an advantage, which China never experienced and Persia and India, through Muslim conquest, only in a restricted way. It ended a long era of technical stagnation, such as all these civilizations were liable to fall into through their own complexity and inertia. Rome lived on, its memory officially recognized in the 'Holy Roman Empire' started by Charlemagne in 800 and terminated by Napoleon in 1806. It lived on in some of the components of medieval feudalism, in vague but therefore plastic and potent memories of senators, legions, glories, and in the Christian religion it had adopted before its fall. Christianity represented another blending of Europe and Asia, as Hellenistic culture, in some devious ways its ancestor, had done, but it was becoming practically a monopoly of Europe, and part of Europe's essence.

This region as it took shape again in the Middle Ages was of convenient size, big enough for diversity, small enough for armies, traders and ideas to move about it. Byzantium was a separate sphere, straddling Europe and Asia, with a separate Greek Orthodox Church to which nascent Russia was linked. The Levantine and north African fringes of the Mediterranean, and for a long time Sicily and nearly all Iberia, were detached after the seventh century by Islam. The Europe thus shifted away north and west had an extreme breadth of less than two thousand miles, rather less than India from north to south, about the same as China from north-east to south-west. It was a big peninsula jutting out from Asia, broken up and nearly surrounded by seas. It had no huge cavernous interior like Asia's or Africa's, and always in one way or another looked outward.

More than any of the other civilizations this one was growing as a congeries of separate political units, mostly quite small, states that were also growing into nations. In Islam any national concept was completely overlaid by religious cosmopolitanism; Persia held out, adopting a heretical Muslim creed of its own, but was oftener than not under alien rule – Arab, Turk, Mongol. China was in a sense a nation as well as an empire, but because of its size only inertly; the smaller countries within its radius, especially Japan, were also acquiring a kind of nationhood. Europe had besides a peculiar social structure, with a unique variant of feudalism in the countryside, and with towns independent as in antiquity or at least autonomous. It was held together and given a dim but pervasive sense of unity by a common religion, organized thanks to its historic origins in a Church of unique form (the very word 'Church' is hard to translate into any non-Christian language): this, like urban life, had its own autonomy, and collisions between Church and State were frequent. This encouraged the growth of other permanent institutions, and of representative bodies – Estates, parliaments, city councils – that had scarcely any analogy in the rest of the world. The obverse of this freedom of privileged classes or corporations was the reduction of the rural masses to serfdom, which left them with less freedom than almost any peasantry in Asia or Africa. Republicanism in ancient Europe had leaned similarly on slavery, and the freedom of modern Europe was to rest on a dispossessed proletariat.

Periodically Europe, like Greece and Rome, was menaced by Asia. One danger lay in attacks by tribal hordes like the Huns and Avars. Some of these were repulsed, some absorbed like the Magyars settling in the ninth century in what was now Hungary. Early in the thirteenth century the biggest of all upheavals in inner Asia brought Mongol armies flooding through the Islamic countries into eastern Europe; one mass, the Golden Horde, stayed on the lower Volga and from there dominated Russia for two centuries. 'Hun' and 'Mongol' are still names that make flesh creep, and have been used in the twentieth century by Europeans as terms of abuse for one another. Still, the short-lived Mongol empire opened the route across Asia that Marco Polo and his fellow-merchants, and Franciscan missionaries, followed; the West caught a brief glimpse of farther Asia, after which China, or Cathay, faded into a dream.

The other danger, more permanent and closer at hand, was the organized pressure of Islam. This last great religion and last new civilization of the Old World replaced Persia from the seventh to the nineteenth century as Europe's archenemy, the anti-Europe. These adversaries were worthy of each other's steel, and sharpened their steel, and occasionally their wits, on each other. No other religions have been so fanatical as Christianity and Islam, in their different ways, have been, and no other large societies so much addicted to war. They were next of kin, as well as neighbours; Islam had drawn on Christianity as well as Judaism and other sources, and its philosophy, military technique and material culture were Hellenistic or Byzantine as well as Persian.

They exchanged blows mostly at long range, across the dwindling Byzantine barrier; exchange of ideas was easiest in Arab Spain, a transplantation of Asia on to European soil comparable with that of Europe in the time of the Hellenistic kingdoms on to Asian soil. Muslim Spain was a non-national, made up of distinct races and communities rather than classes. Jews mediated between Muslims and ians, and all western Europe learned much from the resulting brilliant culture. Most of what it learned belonged to its own past, however: ideas of Plato and Aristotle that the Arabs had preserved; Europe cared less for truly Islamic ideas or arts. Astrology and alchemy probably drew its attention most. If countries and civilizations were ready to accept one another's best, mankind would have got on more quickly.

In the Muslim world less civilized peoples came to the front, Moors or Berbers supplanting Arabs in Spain, Turks in Asia. The Turkish horsemen who poured out of central Asia to conquer first India and then Asia Minori and finally south-east Europe and north Africa, were a remarkable stock, militarily and politically; but culturally, compared with either Arabs or Persians, they were philistines. Their advent paralleled that of the Normans in western Europe while the sophisticated Byzantines sank into decay. On each side the old strife of Asia and Europe was helping to bring the rude man of action to the front. To the Muslims the true Europe was still Rome, or Byzantium: Erzerum came by its name – Arz-iRum, the Roman land – because it once lay on the Byzantine frontier in the east. The barbarous Europe farther west, because of the prominence of French or French-speaking Norman knights in the Crusades, was 'Firangistan', or Frankland. To this day 'Firangi' is a hostile term for European to Muslims as far off as India. Western Europe called itself in its vulgarized Latin lingua franca 'Christianitas', Christendom, and its enemies 'Pagani', paynim – a term that expressed its blank ignorance of their religion. It could not feel equal in splendour and wealth, and in fighting power not better than equal, to the East, so Christianity had to be made the most of as a badge of superiority. Later it began to use two 'national' names, and speak of Asiatic Muslims as Turks, or as Tartars: T'a-t'a, the Chinese name for Mongols (some of whom had become Muslim), turned into 'Tartar' by association with 'Tartarean', or hellish. Some atrocity stories that originated in Crusading days went on knocking about Europe and did duty again in the propaganda of the Great War.

The Late Middle Ages : Contraction and Expansion

In 1099 the Crusaders stormed and sacked Jerusalem; in 1453 the Turks stormed and sacked Constantinople, and turned it into Stamboul and Agia Sofia into a mosque. Islam had entered on a second great age of expansion, and seemed at last to have devised a military machine capable of crushing Europe. Not only had the Turks taken with enthusiasm to artillery, but for a while they revived the talent for naval war that the Arabs lost when they turned away from the sea into inner Asia. The Ottoman empire was organized for conquest, and pressed on north-west up the Danube valley until finally stopped before Vienna, and westward along the Mediterranean until stopped at Malta. Meanwhile the Turks continued to learn, though not quickly enough to keep up with the West. By moving their capital to Constantinople they partially westernized their empire, as the Romans had orientalized theirs by the same manoeuvre; it was, in a lesser degree, like the removal of the Russian government later from Moscow to St Petersburg. But Turkey's direct contacts were with areas of Europe not in the van of progress, first with decadent Byzantium, then with the Russian and Hapsburg realms. Organized as the Turks were, their ability to originate new methods was limited; beyond a certain point they depended on borrowing. They had the accumulated resources of western Asia's past to live on, but western Europe after its long, obscure travail of the Middle Ages was ready now to move forward on its own, in a fashion the Turks were too far away to grasp.

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Excerpted from The Lords of Human Kind by Victor Kiernan. Copyright © 2015 Heather Kiernan. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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