The Penguin History of the World

1 Qing China and Mughal India

In order to understand what made Europe different, it is essential to begin with changes in China and India. In the sixteenth century these were still, by far, the wealthiest parts of humankind, and there were few signs that they, by themselves, were entering into any kind of crisis. On the contrary, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a time of great unification in both countries, and saw the introduction of some kind of ‘modernity’ that was different from what had gone before. But these modernities were also very different from what was happening in western Europe, where history took off in a completely new direction. What hit India in the eighteenth century and China nearly a century later was an entirely new form of change, a self-perpetuating, boundless and unremitting form of expansion that had never existed before in human history.

While this was developing in Europe, India had been focused on another form of change. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the country was still divided among a number of autonomous or semi-autonomous territories. And yet again it was to be a prince from outside, Babur of Kabul, who would begin a process of unification. Babur was born in 1483 in the Ferghana valley in what is today Uzbekistan. On his father’s side he descended from Timur Lenk and on his mother’s from Chinghis, formidable advantages and a source of inspiration to a young man schooled in adversity. He quickly discovered he had to fight for his inheritance and there can have been few monarchs who, like Babur, conquered a city of the importance of Samarkand at the age of fourteen (albeit to lose it again almost at once).

Even when legend and anecdote are separated, he remains, in spite of cruelty and duplicity, one of the most attractive figures among great rulers: munificent, hardy, courageous, intelligent and sensitive. He left a remarkable autobiography, written from notes made throughout his life, which was to be treasured by his descendants as a source of inspiration and guidance. It reveals a ruler who did not think of himself as Mongol in culture but Turkish, in the tradition of those peoples long settled in the former eastern provinces of the Abbasid caliphate. His taste and culture were formed by the inheritance of the Timurid princes of Persia; his love of gardening and poetry came from that country and fitted easily into the setting of an Islamic India whose courts were already much influenced by Persian models. Babur was a bibliophile, another Timurid trait; it is reported that when he took Lahore he went at once to his defeated adversary’s library to choose texts from it to send as gifts to his sons. He himself wrote, among other things, a forty-page account of his conquests in Hindustan, noting its customs and caste structure and, even more minutely, its wildlife and flowers.

This young prince was called in to India by Afghan chiefs, but he had his own claims to make to the inheritance of the Timurid line in Hindustan. This was to prove the beginning of Mughal India; Mughal was the Persian word for Mongol, though it was not a word Babur applied to himself. Originally, those disputatious parties whose discontent and intrigue called him forward had only aroused in him the ambition of conquering the Punjab, but he was soon drawn further. In 1526 he took Delhi after the sultan had fallen in battle. Soon Babur was subduing those who had invited him to come to India, while at the same time conquering the infidel Hindu princes who had seized an opportunity to renew their own independence. The result was an empire which in 1530, the year of his death, stretched from Kabul to the borders of Bihar. Babur’s body, significantly, was taken as he had directed to Kabul, where it was buried in his favourite garden with no roof over his tomb, in the place he had always thought of as home.

The reign of Babur’s son, troubled by his own instability and inadequacy and by the presence of half-brothers anxious to exploit the Timurid tradition which, like the Frankish, prescribed the division of a royal inheritance, showed that the security and consolidation of Babur’s realm could not be taken for granted. For five years of his reign, the new ruler was driven from Delhi, though he returned there to die in 1555. His heir, Akbar, born during his father’s distressed wanderings (but enjoying the advantages of a very auspicious horoscope and the absence of rival brothers), thus came to the throne as a boy. He inherited at first only a small part of his grandfather’s domains, but was to build from them an empire recalling that of Ashoka, winning the awed respect of Europeans who called him ‘the Great Mughal’.

Akbar had many kingly qualities. He was brave to the point of folly – his most obvious weakness was that he was headstrong – enjoying as a boy riding his own fighting elephants and preferring hunting and hawking to lessons (one consequence was that, uniquely in Babur’s line, he was almost illiterate). He once killed a tiger with his sword in single combat and was proud of his marksmanship with a gun (Babur had introduced firearms to the Mughal army). Yet he was also, like his predecessors, an admirer of learning and all things beautiful. He collected books and in his reign Mughal architecture and painting came to their peak, a department of court painters being maintained at his expense. Above all, he was statesmanlike in his handling of the problems posed by religious difference among his subjects.

Akbar reigned for almost half a century, until 1605, thus just overlapping at each end the reign of his contemporary, Elizabeth I of England. Among his first acts on reaching maturity was to marry a Rajput princess who was, of course, a Hindu. Marriage always played an important part in Akbar’s diplomacy and strategy, and this lady (the mother of the next emperor) was the daughter of the greatest of the Rajput kings and therefore an important catch.

None the less, something more than policy may be seen in the marriage. Akbar had already permitted the Hindu ladies of his harem to practise the rites of their own religion within it, an unprecedented act for a Muslim ruler. Before long, he abolished the poll tax on non-Muslims; he was going to be the emperor of all religions, not a Muslim fanatic. Akbar even went on to listen to Christian teachers; he invited the Portuguese who had appeared on the west coast to send missionaries learned in their faith to his court, and three Jesuits duly arrived there in 1580. They disputed vigorously with Muslim divines before the emperor and received many marks of his favour, though they were disappointed in their long-indulged hope of his conversion. He seems, in fact, to have been a man of genuine religious feeling and eclectic mind; he went so far as to try to institute a new religion of his own, a sort of mishmash of Zoroastrianism, Islam and Hinduism. It had little success except among prudent courtiers and offended some.

However this is interpreted, it is evident that the appeasement of non-Muslims would ease the problems of government in India. Babur’s advice in his memoirs to conciliate defeated enemies pointed in this direction too, for Akbar launched himself on a career of conquest and added many new Hindu territories to his empire. He rebuilt the unity of northern India from Gujarat to Bengal and began the conquest of the Deccan. The empire was governed by a system of administration much of which lasted well into the era of the British Raj, though Akbar was less an innovator in government than the confirmer and establisher of institutions he inherited. Officials ruled in the emperor’s name and at his pleasure; they had the primary function of providing soldiers as needed and raising the land tax, now reassessed on an empire-wide and more flexible system devised by a Hindu finance minister. This seems to have had an almost unmatched success in that it actually led to increases in production, which raised the standard of living in Hindustan. Among other reforms, which were notable in intention if not in effect, was the discouragement of suttee, the self-immolation of widows on their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.

Above all, Akbar stabilized the regime. He was disappointed in his sons and quarrelled with them, yet the dynasty was solidly based when he died. There were revolts nevertheless. Some of them seem to have been encouraged by Muslim anger at Akbar’s apparent falling-away from the faith. Even in the ‘Turkish’ era the sharpness of the religious distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim had somewhat softened as invaders settled down in their new country and took up Indian ways. One earlier sign of assimilation was the appearance of a new language, Urdu, the tongue of the camp. It was the lingua franca of rulers and ruled, with a Hindi structure and a Persian and Turkish vocabulary.

Soon there were signs that the omnivorous power of Hinduism would perhaps even incorporate Islam; a new devotionalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had spread through popular hymns an abstract, almost monotheistic, cult of a God whose name might be Rama or Allah, but who offered love, justice and mercy to all men. Correspondingly, some Muslims even before Akbar’s reign had shown interest in and respect for Hindu ideas. There was some absorption of Hindu ritual practice. Soon it was noticeable that converts to Islam tended to revere the tombs of holy men: these became places of resort and pilgrimage which satisfied the scheme of a subordinate focus of devotion in a monotheistic religion and thus carried out the functions of the minor and local deities who had always found a place in Hinduism.

Another important development before the end of Akbar’s reign was the consolidation of India’s first direct relations with Atlantic Europe. Links with Mediterranean Europe may already have been made slightly easier by the coming of Islam; from the Levant to Delhi a common religion provided continuous, if distant, contact. European travellers had turned up from time to time in India and its rulers had been able to attract the occasional technical expert to their service, though they were few after the Ottoman conquests. But what was now about to happen was to go much further and would change India for ever. The Europeans who arrived would be followed by others in increasing numbers, and they would not go away.

The process had begun when a Portuguese admiral reached Malabar at the end of the fifteenth century. Within a few years his countrymen had installed themselves as traders – and behaved sometimes as pirates at Bombay (Mumbai) and on the coast of Gujarat. Attempts to dislodge them failed in the troubled years following Babur’s death and in the second half of the century the Portuguese moved around to found new trading posts in the Bay of Bengal. They made the running for Europeans in India for a long time. They were liable, none the less, to attract the hostility of good Muslims because they brought with them pictures and images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints, which smacked of idolatry. Protestants were to prove less irritating to religious feeling when they arrived.

The British age in India was still a long way off, but with rare historical neatness the first British East India Company was founded on 31 December 1600, the last day of the sixteenth century. Three years later, the Company’s first emissary arrived at Akbar’s court at Agra and by then Elizabeth I, who had given the merchants their charter of incorporation, was dead. Thus at the end of the reigns of two great rulers came the first contact between two countries whose historical destinies were to be entwined for so long and with such enormous effect for them both and for the world. At that moment no hint of such a future could have been sensed. The English then regarded trade in India as less interesting than that with other parts of Asia.

The contrast between the two realms, too, is fascinating. Akbar’s empire was one of the most powerful in the world, his court one of the most sumptuous, and he and his successors ruled over a civilization more glorious and spectacular than anything India had known since the Guptas; Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom, meanwhile, was barely a great power, even in European terms, was crippled by debt, and contained fewer people than modern Kolkata (Calcutta). Akbar’s successor was contemptuous of the presents sent to him by James I a few years later. Yet the future of India lay with the subjects of the queen.

The Mughal emperors continued in Babur’s line in direct descent, though not without interruption, until the middle of the nineteenth century. After Akbar, so great was the dynasty’s prestige that it became fashionable in India to claim Mongol descent. Only the first three rulers who followed Akbar matter here, for it was under Jahangir and Shah Jahan that the empire grew to its greatest extent in the first half of the seventeenth century, and under Aurangzeb that it began to decay in the second. The reign of Jahangir was not so glorious as his father’s, but the empire survived his cruelty and alcoholism – a considerable test of its administrative structure. The religious toleration established by Akbar also survived intact. For all his faults, though, Jahangir was a notable promoter of the arts, above all of painting. During his reign there becomes visible for the first time the impact of European culture in Asia, through artistic motifs drawn from imported pictures and prints. One of these motifs was the halo or nimbus given to Christian saints and, in Byzantium, to emperors. After Jahangir all Mughal emperors were painted with it.

Shah Jahan began the piecemeal acquisition of the Deccan sultanates, though he had little success in campaigns in the north-west and failed to drive the Persians from Kandahar. In domestic administration there was a weakening of the principle of religious toleration, though not sufficiently to place Hindus at a disadvantage in government service; administration remained multi-religious. Although the emperor decreed that all newly built Hindu temples should be pulled down, he patronized Hindu poets and musicians.

At Agra, Shah Jahan maintained a lavish and exquisite court life. It was there, too, that he built the most celebrated and best-known of all Indian buildings, the Taj Mahal, a tomb for his favourite wife; it is the only possible rival to the mosque of Córdoba for the title of the most beautiful building in the world. She had died soon after Shah Jahan’s accession and for over twenty years his builders were at work. It is the culmination of the work with arch and dome which is one of the most conspicuous Islamic legacies to Indian art and the greatest monument of Islam in India.

Below the level of the court, the picture of Mughal India is far less attractive. Local officials had to raise more and more money to support not only the household expenses and campaigns of Shah Jahan but also the social and military élites who were essentially parasitic on the producing economy. Without regard for local need or natural disaster, a rapacious tax-gathering machine may at times have been taking from the peasant producer as much as half his income. Virtually none of this was productively invested. The flight of peasants from the land and the rise of rural banditry are telling symptoms of the suffering and resistance these exactions provoked.

Yet even Shah Jahan’s demands probably did the empire less damage than the religious enthusiasm of his third son, Aurangzeb, who set aside three brothers and imprisoned his father to become emperor in 1658. He combined, disastrously, absolute power, distrust of his subordinates and a narrow religiosity. To have succeeded in reducing the expenses of his court is not much of an offsetting item in the account. New conquests were balanced by revolts against Mughal rule which were said to owe much to Aurangzeb’s attempt to prohibit the Hindu religion and destroy its temples and to his restoration of the poll tax on non-Muslims. The Hindu’s advancement in the service of the state was less and less likely; conversion became necessary for success. A century of religious toleration was cancelled and one result was the alienation of many subjects’ loyalties.

Among other results, this helped to make it impossible finally to conquer the Deccan, which has been termed the ulcer which ruined the Mughal empire. As under Ashoka, north and south India could not be united. The Marathas, the hillmen who were the core of Hindu opposition, constituted themselves under an independent ruler in 1674. They allied with the remains of the Muslim armies of the Deccan sultans to resist the Mughal armies in a long struggle which threw up a heroic figure who has become something of a paladin in the eyes of modern Hindu nationalists. This was Shivagi, who built from fragments a Maratha political identity which soon enabled him to exploit the tax-payer as ruthlessly as the Mughals had done. Aurangzeb was continuously campaigning against the Marathas down to his death in 1707. There followed a grave crisis for the regime, for his three sons disputed the succession. The empire almost at once began to break up and a much more formidable legatee than the Hindu or local prince was waiting in the wings – the Europeans.

Perhaps the negative responsibility for the eventual success of the Europeans in India is Akbar’s, for he did not scotch the serpent in the egg. Shah Jahan, on the other hand, destroyed the Portuguese station on the River Hooghly, though Christians were later tolerated at Agra. Strikingly, Mughal policy never seems to have envisaged the building of a navy, a weapon used formidably against the Mediterranean Europeans by the Ottomans. One consequence was already felt under Aurangzeb when coastal shipping, and even the pilgrim trade to Mecca, were in danger from the Europeans. On land, the Europeans had been allowed to establish their toeholds and bridgeheads. After beating a Portuguese squadron, the English won their first west-coast trading concession early in the seventeenth century. Then, in 1639, on the Bay of Bengal and with the permission of the local ruler, they founded at Madras (Chennai) the first settlement of British India, Fort St George. The English later fell foul of Aurangzeb, but got further stations at Bombay and Calcutta before the end of the century. Their ships had maintained the paramountcy in trade won from the Portuguese, but a new European rival was also in sight by 1700. A French East India Company had been founded in 1664 and soon established its own settlements.

A century of conflict lay ahead, but not only between the newcomers. Europeans already had to make nuanced political choices because of the uncertainties aroused when Mughal power was no longer as strong as it once had been. Relations had to be opened with his opponents as well as with the emperor, as the English in Bombay discovered, looking on helplessly while a Maratha squadron occupied one island in Bombay harbour and a Mughal admiral the one next to it. In 1677 an official sent back a significant warning to his employers in London: ‘the times now require you to manage your general commerce with your sword in your hands.’ By 1700 the English were well aware that much was at stake.

With that date we are into the era in which India is increasingly caught up in events not of her own making, the era of world history, in fact. Little things show it as well as great; in the sixteenth century the Portuguese had brought with them chilli, potatoes and tobacco from America. Indian diet and agriculture were already changing. Soon maize, pawpaws and pineapple were to follow. The story of Indian civilizations and rulers can be broken once this new connection with the larger world is achieved. Yet it was not the coming of the European which ended the great period of Mughal empire; that was merely coincidental, though it was important that newcomers were there to reap the advantages. The diversity of the subcontinent and the failure of its rulers to find ways to tap indigenous popular loyalty are probably the main explanation. India remained a continent of exploitative ruling élites and productive peasants upon whom they battened. The states had become, to a large degree, machinery for transferring resources from producers to parasites.

In spite of its political problems, India was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a very rich place. The agricultural economy was probably more productive than anywhere else, much helped by an overall benign climate. Manufactures were improving, both in quality and quantity, and found significant markets outside India’s own borders. In a place like Ahmadabad, in the north-western region of Gujarat, making textiles out of cotton was becoming a predominant source of employment, and in other cities the market economy was expanding too. Even though India was facing the greatest transformation in its modern history, some of the key building-blocks of its modernity were already in place. It was a very different region from what had been the case 200 years earlier, when the Mughal invasion began.

In China, change was also afoot. In the early seventeenth century the entire country was conquered by a new dynasty that called itself Qing, meaning ‘bright’ or ‘clear’. The Qing state was a political project, created by an alliance of groups with various ethnic backgrounds in north-east China. The leading families were Manchu, descendants of the Jurchen tribes that had played such an important role during the twelfth century. But there were also Mongols, Koreans and Chinese. They regarded the Ming state as degenerate and believed that they had been chosen to receive the mandate of Heaven and revive China. Their ideology was Confucian in the sense that they extolled ancient virtues and role-models. But compared to the direction Confucian thinking in China had taken since the twelfth century, Qing ideology was a vulgarized form of the views ascribed to Master Kong, centred on simple dichotomies and prescriptions for behaviour. In reality the Qing created an ideology of domination and conquest, with themselves in the central role as redeemers of China.

The Qing project was an unlikely one, and would (a bit like the Communists in the twentieth century) have had little chance of success if it had not been for the many weaknesses of the Ming dynasty towards the end of its reign. By 1600 the Ming were seen as inefficient, obdurate and venal, and while there is strong evidence of increasing problems for the common people, especially in agriculture – possibly caused by changes in climate that had made northern China colder and drier than before – there is little evidence of the Ming doing much to help. On the contrary; the court became increasingly inward-looking, dominated by courtiers and eunuchs who did not manage to see the larger picture of what was happening outside the confines of the Forbidden City in Beijing, where they lived. Outside Beijing, the civil service continued to function reasonably well. But there was a weakness at the centre, which enemies of the regime could exploit.

The end came swiftly. After increasing inner dissension within the Ming state, a general in the north rebelled, and moved on Beijing. The city fell in April 1644, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on Coal Hill, behind the Forbidden City, as rebel troops were entering the front gate. Having declared their alternative Qing dynasty in 1636, the Manchus were waiting in the north. As chaos spread in China, Qing forces under the command of Prince Dorgon and the Ming defector Wu Sangui entered the capital virtually unopposed in June 1644, claiming to be there to punish traitors and resurrect virtue. Instead they proclaimed the young Qing Shunzi emperor the ruler of all of China, and began an intensely brutal campaign to overcome Ming remnants elsewhere in the country. Soon their control was complete; the last Ming pretender was hauled back from Burma in 1662 and publicly executed as an enemy of the state.

The Qing pretended to resurrect tradition, but in reality their state was a modern invention, different from anything China had seen before. Multi-ethnic from the very beginning, the Qing leaders demanded absolute political loyalty to the centre and its institutions. China became centralized in a way it had never been before. Generals and administrators only served at the sufferance of the emperor, who had informants and spies in all corners of the empire. The emperors officiated at great public ceremonies in the capital, often with elements of many religions mixed in – the Qing emperor was head of all religions, but belonged to none. The concept of empire – rational, judicious and effective – was seen as universal; the Qing state did not belong exclusively to any group in China, and it aspired to rule any country in the world that had the good sense to submit to its glory.

When glory was not enough, power helped. The Qing state was highly militarized; one historian has referred to what she calls ‘a culture of war’ in early Qing China, and that is a good description. Its army was professional and organized into eight basic élite units, called ‘banners’ by the Qing, supplemented by general infantry troops. The officer corps was multi-ethnic, like the state itself, but with a significant preponderance of Manchus and Mongols. The troops were organized into smaller units, usually according to their ethnic background – the Qing held rigid views of the capabilities of the various nationalities over which they ruled. The bannermen were well equipped with the best kinds of weapons the age could offer – including, increasingly, European-developed cannons and rifles – but the chief weapon of the Qing was the swiftness and the deadly precision of its cavalry; the new regime applied centuries of Central Eurasian knowledge about mounted warfare to create cavalry units that truly terrified its enemies.

The Qing armies were intended for both conquest and intimidation. Most of Mongolia and Tibet were brought under direct control early in the dynasty’s history. The south-east (what is today Guangxi and Yunnan) was taken over as part of the hunt for Ming princes, and in part resettled by Qing bannermen. Taiwan was conquered in 1683. Korea and Vietnam accepted the suzerainty of the Qing, but without becoming part of the Qing state, and other coastal countries – from Burma to the Ryukyu islands – paid tribute (though often in ways that really masked sophisticated trade arrangements). Along its land-borders with Central Eurasia, the Qing pursued relentlessly expansionist aims. Its troops took control of all of the Asian Pacific coast up to north of Sakhalin island. In the west, it moved into what is today Xinjiang and beyond, against stiff resistance by the groups that lived there.

Qing expansionism in Central Eurasia brought it into contact with another expanding empire, Russia. The Qing emperors realized that they needed to neutralize this threat before they could make their final moves to bring the western parts of the region under their control. From the late seventeenth century onwards, China and Russia signed a number of agreements that were intended to divide the Central Eurasian region between them, and – finally – bring an end to the autonomy of the steppe peoples who had so greatly affected human history over the past 2,000 years. Free to move on their enemies, the Qing then started wars of attrition against the Mongolic and Turkic groups in the whole area between the Tarim Basin and the western shores of Lake Balkhash. These wars culminated in the 1750s, when the empire carried out a genocidal campaign against the defeated Zunghars, for ever destroying the western Mongols as a power in Central Eurasia. It ensured that in the future the region – ethnically speaking – would be dominated by Turkic Muslims, though the Qing attempted to settle their new territories with Chinese.

Part of the reason for the Qing’s success was the leadership provided by the Kangxi emperor (who ruled from 1661 to 1722) and his grandson Qianlong (1735–96). Kangxi was in many ways the founder of the modern Chinese ideal of an emperor. Although his upbringing had stressed martial values, he worked hard at acquiring Chinese culture and had a deep interest in learning about foreign countries, including faraway Europe. He invited learned men from all over Asia to his court, where they were joined by Muslim scholars from the Middle East and European Jesuits. The emperor made a habit of regular inspection tours of the provinces, where he ordered improvements in communications, administration or military affairs on the spot. He had a prodigious memory and worked hard, even though some of his initiatives were held back by his tendency towards what we would call micro-management – headstrong and impatient, Kangxi would tolerate no interference in his plans for China, and heads would fall if he sensed opposition.

First and foremost Kangxi was a military leader. He suppressed revolts in the outer provinces ruthlessly and began the expansion into Central Eurasia that his grandson would complete. Believing that the first duty of society was to support the army, Kangxi worked on military training issues, recruitment and logistics throughout his life, forming a military system that would remain intact until it was crushed by the European attacks in the late nineteenth century. More than any of his contemporaries in Europe or Asia, he also believed in education as a key to military preparedness, and was willing to spend huge sums on scholarly projects, including literary compilations and lexicographic studies. His great encyclopaedia, completed just before his death, ran to more than 5,000 volumes.

Kangxi’s grandson Qianlong belonged to a different age. The empire was more secure, the Manchus more Sinicized and the tasks at hand more obvious. Qianlong did not have his grandfather’s keen intelligence, but he was a hard-working man who did his best to understand the motives and desires that determined men’s actions in his vast empire. He learnt Tibetan and Mongol, in addition to Manchu and Chinese; he worshipped at all shrines and believed firmly that each of the population groups for whom he was the emperor should be ruled according to their special characteristics (though he admitted that it was sometimes hard to tell them all apart; he confessed to his diary that he could get the Mongols mixed up with the Tibetans, and vice versa).

Qianlong had not forgotten the martial predilections of his ancestors; during the first half of his reign he successfully quelled rebellions in the south and expanded the empire further into Central Eurasia. He also intervened in Tibet, bringing that country more firmly under Qing control, with the Dalai Lama as intermediary with the Tibetans. But his later military interventions were not equally successful, mainly because they did not have clear political aims. Military operations in Burma in the 1760s aimed at crushing Burma’s independent political power and using the country as a launch pad for extending Chinese control into the western parts of South-East Asia. But the mission came up against stiff Burmese resistance, assisted by the neighbouring countries. At the end of the decade the Qing had to withdraw, with only a promise of formal Burmese submission to show for their efforts. The Burmese king remained in place.

Things went even worse in Vietnam, where the Qianlong emperor intervened in the 1780s in order to put a favoured pretender on the throne. But while the massive Chinese army was able to occupy the northern parts of the country, it soon got bogged down in local warfare against battle-hardened Vietnamese rebel troops. Qianlong refused to let his soldiers withdraw, and when they finally were evacuated back to China after a devastating Vietnamese offensive in 1789, they had to bring their Vietnamese pretender with them. The Vietnamese celebrated the withdrawal as a victory, but – like the Burmese – were quick to ask the Qing for permission to re-enter into a tribute relationship with them as soon as the Chinese forces had withdrawn. In Vietnamese lore, though, the 1789 attacks – which were conducted around the lunar New Year festival (Tet, in Vietnamese) – would become a symbol of their nationhood, and a symbol of a similarly named offensive against American troops 179 years later.

With his foreign policy in disarray, the Qianlong emperor turned increasingly inward towards the end of his life, focusing on matters at court. He was an avid collector, including of European clocks, and a passionate poet and essayist – in his collected writings there are over 40,000 poems and 1,300 other texts. But the old emperor also made a series of unfortunate promotions of court favourites, including that of the young Manchu Hesen, who as de facto finance minister plundered the treasury for what it was worth. The corruption of the Qing court at the end of Qianlong’s reign ran very deep, and was similar – many Chinese thought – to the conditions that had presaged the fall of many other dynasties.

Chinese society in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth was marked by gradually increasing wealth and overall improvements in living standards, which – by 1800 – compared favourably with those anywhere else in the world. The best measure of this general prosperity was the increase in population; the number of inhabitants in the empire more than doubled during the early Qing era, with the total population by 1800 standing at around 380 million (against, for instance, 10 million in Britain). The population increase is accounted for by a long period of peace, but also by significant improvements in rice production and the arrival of crops from the New World, including maize and potatoes.

Society changed in other ways as well. There was a marked expansion of markets and an increased role for private merchants; it is estimated that around one-third of China’s agricultural output went into some form of market exchange immediately after 1800. With the expansion of handicrafts went significant urbanization: Beijing was the world’s largest city in the eighteenth century, but other cities grew too, including the new ports in the south through which a significant trade with foreign countries was carried out. Tea, silk and manufactures flowed out of China and silver (mainly from the Americas) flowed in as payment, showing the economic strength of Qianlong’s empire, but also creating inflation and thereby putting pressure on subsistence farmers. The Qing continued to believe that they governed the country’s economy through taxes, price controls and state procurement, but in reality private interests became more and more pronounced.

In contrast with what is often claimed, China (and India) changed a lot in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But Europe changed a lot more. Before we turn to Europe’s story, it is worth looking at what some historians call ‘the great divergence’ of the period from 1600 to 1800, when European advantages in some areas became more and more pronounced. At first the European advantage was clearest in military technology, shipbuilding and navigation, all essential to the exploration of the world. But by the late seventeenth century it was clear that a revolution in world view, which emphasized science, technology and the accumulation of capital, was underway in parts of Europe. This intellectual revolution would eventually lead to an industrial revolution, though the latter would not be fully noticeable in terms of its effects on the world until the nineteenth century.

While China, India and other parts of Asia also went through more intense domestic change after 1600 than at most other times in their history, change here was more contained and less multi-directional than the unique events in Europe. In many fields, growth was stable and living standards were able to keep up with increases in populations already massive in size. But both India and China were seeing diminishing returns on the incremental improvements in technology that they undertook, and the societal equilibrium they seemed to have reached could easily fragment from below as a result of natural disasters, inner dissension or outside pressure. Asia, in other words, continued in directions set through direct and distinctive navigation points in its past, even though its history, in some places at least, could be seen as speeding up. It was Europe, with its reinterpretation of its own heritage and of the world around it, which was becoming intensely and truly different.

At the end of his long reign, Qianlong was still convinced that his empire was the most powerful on earth, even though he knew that it needed reform both in foreign affairs and in domestic administration. Like the rulers that were to succeed him in the early nineteenth century, Qianlong wanted gradual reform, which neither endangered his own dynasty’s power nor upset China’s social equilibrium. The European missions that started arriving in Beijing in the final decade of his rule pleased him not. ‘If you assert that your reverence for our celestial dynasty fills you with a desire to acquire our civilization,’ he wrote to Britain’s King George III, ‘our ceremonies and code of laws differ so completely from your own that … you could not possibly transplant our manners and customs to your alien soil.’ The emperor of China could not imagine one world joined together. But his European visitors could.