European spoken languages and Islamic‐ and European‐derived writing systems can be seen everywhere in Asia. English dominates the intellectual and mercantile communities, while the languages of non‐Asian colonial overlords retain regional significance. Non‐Asian political, technological, educational, artistic, gastronomic, and assorted popular cultural influences continue to impact the Asian world.
Most of the seeds of these contemporary foreign influences on Asia got planted centuries ago, and for different reasons and at different times in India and China, the major generators of Asian cultural norms. In the early thirteenth century Afghans under the banner of Islam invaded, defeated, and ruled a politically weak India. With their Persian and Arab allies, these Delhi sultans and later the Mughal emperors created a climate that produced the emergence of a large native Indian Muslim population. And much of Southeast Asia, an ongoing consumer of Indian cultural thought and behavior, soon began to appropriate India’s newest cultural item: Islam. While most would agree that India absorbed Islam and preserved the essence of its traditional ways, the same cannot be said of Indonesia and Malaysia. In both nations the vestiges of Indian culture continue, but the dominant influence in both is today clearly Islamic.
When the Chinese threw out the Mongol invaders in 1368, a crisis of cultural confidence remained as the Ming Dynasty turned inward, the early considerable voyages of Admiral Zheng He to Southeast Asia, India, East Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula in the early fifteenth century notwithstanding. The government initially handled the arrival of the West in the early sixteenth century chiefly through the tribute system, a highly ritualized process of tightly controlled Chinese–foreign interaction known to Westerners as the Guangzhou or Canton System. Until the early nineteenth century, the Chinese found little in the West worthy of embracing, the chief exceptions being Galilean astronomy and new crops from the Americas. The West, by contrast, desired many Chinese products—silk and tea, for example—paid for principally by the gold and silver from the Spanish empire in the Americas. However, major changes in European scientific thought and economic and political practice propelled the West past China and the rest of Asia in terms of wealth and power. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Western nations had well‐established colonial regimes across the Asian continent. However, what had been largely commercial enterprises—East Indian companies chartered by European rulers—had often grown to become de facto government administrations with bureaucrats, armies, and educators in place to orchestrate an array of political, economic, social, and religious interactions with local leaders and subjects. Informal economic empire would soon become formal political empire directed by the industrial nations of the world.
The means by which Europeans came to dominate not only most of Asia but also most of the globe forced Asia’s elite to question their cultural traditions. Eventually these elites and ultimately the common people opted to modify much of their cultural past and adopt much of the current Western cultural present. Defending the nation began to trump protecting the culture.
People in Asia, as well as people in the West and elsewhere, are still grappling with the problems associated with becoming and then being modern.
1 Cultures and the Development of Core Asian Civilizations
…social development is the bundle of technological, subsistence, organizational, and cultural accomplishments through which people feed, clothe, house, and reproduce themselves, explain the world around them, resolve disputes within their communities, extend their power at the expense of other communities, and defend themselves against others’ attempts to extend power. 1
What Is Asia?
This book will explore Asia chiefly from historical, social, and economic angles. Historically it will attempt to put into context the long course of events generated by numerous social and economic entities, ranging organizationally from tribes to nation‐states and chronologically from Paleolithic times to the early twenty‐first century. This will involve a good deal of political history, the container within which domestic and international activities can most easily be examined. Because there is no physically discrete Asia but instead a Eurasian landmass, and since “the division between Europe and Asia is entirely arbitrary,” we will focus on terrain, including India, Afghanistan, and Central Asia eastward and Japan and New Guinea westward. The northern frontier will include Mongolia and the Russian Far East and extend southward to Indonesia. These territorial frontiers contain the civilizations that have most influenced what most scholars consider to be Asia.2 Clearly the expansion of Islam and Western nations into Asia also greatly contributed to Asia’s development, but India’s and China’s thought and institutions still constitute the cultural foundations, albeit reinforced by non‐Asian sources, upon which contemporary Asian nations build their societies.
Asia in the early twenty‐first century.
Source: From https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the‐world‐factbook/graphics/ref_maps/political/jpg/asia.jpg. Central Intelligence Agency. Public Domain.
What Is Culture?
The word culture suggests several possible subjects. It can refer to microorganisms in a Petri dish, to people with good “taste” who enjoy haute cuisine and classical music, to the literate elite (high culture) as opposed to the “great unwashed” (i.e., the masses), or to modern nations compared to the developing world. In this study of Asia through the centuries, culture indicates human culture, which includes the innumerable ideas and practices the people of the continent have created over the millennia to meet their needs, both real and apparent. Thus culture encompasses—but is not limited to—such things as religious rituals, political institutions, economic arrangements, marriage customs, artistic creations, linguistic conventions, eating habits, and so forth.
Cultures evolve, interact with other cultures or remain isolated, expand or disappear. Since culture includes all behavior, different societies emerged, reflecting diverse approaches to social relationships in communities of shared values. Societies have ranged in size from small bands of several dozen to tribes, clans, or lineages of several hundreds or thousands; to villages of quite a few hundred to many thousands; to cities of more than a few thousand to several million; to regions of tens of millions; to nations of scores to hundreds of millions; or to entities such as “the West,” “Confucian Civilization,” “the Islamic World,” and “Hindustan,” each with at least hundreds of millions of inhabitants. Of course, differences will exist even among members of any culture, but one culture’s common beliefs, behaviors, and organizational techniques typically distinguish it as a separate society and set it off from others.
Societies have also reflected, as they do at present, a range of geographical and climatological settings. Thus, landlocked communities of the past did not likely engage in seafaring activities, while today’s natural‐resource‐poor nations need to rely on other assets in order to survive or prosper. Consequently, peoples across Asia (and around the world) created somewhat varied or even radically heterodox measures to cope with different physical circumstances. The practices of some cultures produced successful material results, such as peace and prosperity, while the ways of life in other cultures brought about psychological and spiritual comfort, while at the same time still other cultures achieved both material and emotional success, even as others failed in both material and psychological respects.
Timeline: Cultures and the Development of Core Asian Civilizations
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