ASIAN REVOLUTIONS · Asian Revolutions in European Public Discourse 1644-1800

Final Activity Report Summary - ASIAN REVOLUTIONS (Asian Revolutions in European Public Discourse 1644-1800)

The project examined European reactions to political upheavals in Asia from 1644 to 1747, focusing on the Manchurian conquest of China (1644), the execution of the Greek minister Phaulcon in Siam (from 1680 to 1688) and the rise and fall of Nadir Shah in Persia (from 1736 to 1747). It was an important contribution to the study of the intellectual and political history of Europe and Asia relations because it investigated the origins and ideological purposes of European attitudes to a major part of the world. Until recently, many parts of Asia were understood and represented in the West as largely static politically. This model of an unchanging East not only totalised a vast territory, but also served the interest of positioning the West as politically progressive and dynamic, while its counterpart remained inert and unable to advance without foreign assistance or intervention. This project demonstrated that some inherited European representations of Asia will inhibit our ability to identify the salient political and social histories of a region that is increasingly becoming the focus of world events. The research of this project disclosed something of the different experiences occurring in the Asian regions under concern, as well as Europe's understanding of its own political culture and history. Understanding non-Western civilisations in their full dynamism and heterogeneity was a critical step toward the renewal of the twentieth-century social theories that were built upon and impaired by the Orientalist knowledge accumulated in the previous centuries. In the case of Siam, European and Thai history became increasingly entangled from the sixteenth century onwards. Research on the impact of Western firearms on Siamese warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on a field of Thai history that was immediately relevant to matters of 'revolution'. At another level of inquiry, the project identified some common mechanisms that constituted a European public but has also scrutinised differences in representation and rhetoric that surfaced within distinctive European cultural and political traditions as well as colonial interests. In a book chapter on 17th and early 18th century European representations of the Ming/Q'ing cataclysm of 1644, Sven Trakulhun considered the different media that channelled and shaped European representations of China in the European public sphere. The narrative of the Chinese Revolution circulated among European literati was adopted for the theatre and the visual arts and became instrumental for various different scholarly, religious and aesthetic purposes. This contribution was highly original as it covered a range of hitherto neglected sources. The image of China as a dynamic empire with a long and vibrant history became contested at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time a new and systematic understanding of man evolved in Europe which linked synchronic insights into human nature, derived from comparative study of travel literature, to the idea of a diachronic evolution of human cultural levels, derived from history. This central intellectual operation proved crucial to the development of a gradual scheme of history that prevailed in Western political thought from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. Trakulhun demonstrated this change of interpretation in an article dealing with English and French historical and popular literature on Nadir Shah published from the 1740s to the early 19th century. A look at other 18th century discourses on Asia and the overseas world revealed a diversity of different strands of political and philosophical thought that was more complex than some critics of the Enlightenment are ready to admit. In a study of German Enlightenment philosophy, Trakulhun discussed postcolonial readings of the German Enlightenment and inquired into the ambiguous relation between the idea of universal humanity and cultural diversity in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and some of his German contemporaries. A monograph on Asian Revolutions in European Discourse based on these pilot studies and on additional material was in preparation by the project completion.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union