1774:

The Scottish Enlightenment Meets the

Tibetan Enlightenment

Gordon T. Stewart
Michigan State University
Journal of World History : Volume 22, Number 3, September 2011
Abstract
The mee ng in 1774 between Lobsang Palden Yeshes (1738-1780), the
Third Panchen Lama, and George Bogle (1746-1781), an agent of the
East India Company, was the first encounter between Britain and Tibet.
This remarkable moment in world history brought the Sco sh
Enlightenment into contact with Tibetan Lamaist Buddhism. The
commentaries wri en during this episode are used to test the widely
held view that Enlightenment thinking led to European imperialism. The
evidence from this encounter shows that Enlightenment-era mentali es
could be both suppor ve of and an pathe c to imperialism. The ar cle
ends by glancing briefly at Tibetan imperialism in an earlier period to
suggest that both Buddhism and the Enlightenment were some mes
implicated in the crea on of empires but that neither can be viewed as
the root cause of imperialism.

The concept of "enlightenment" has become problema c in world

history. The old-fashioned view that there was a single phenomenon
called "the Enlightenment" that shaped ideas and poli cs in Western
Europe and colonial North America in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries has been discarded by scholars. Respected
authori es now refer to mul ple enlightenments o en at odds with
each other. As J. G. A. Pocock, arguably the leading scholar on how
Enlightenment era thinking shaped European understandings of the rest
of the world, authorita vely sums up, there was not one single
Enlightenment but "a plurality of Enlightenments which cannot be
appropriately grouped together and unified by the employment of the
definite ar cle." 1 In spite of that well-known shi in scholarly
understanding, something called "the Enlightenment project" s ll has a
pervasive impact in world history. In this usage, the Western world is
charged with using its scien fic approach to knowledge, and its claims
to a unique ra onality, as a protean means of asser ng Western
superiority over other cultures encountered round the world during the
peak phase of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. A clear and concise example of this usage is presented in
Shelley Walia's account of Edward Said's influence on the wri ng of
history. "The Enlightenment project," Walia bluntly states, "emphasized
Reason and Progress which could only issue forth from the Western
mind. Said shows that the Enlightenment ideals of Reason and Progress
had a hidden agenda: that of crea ng a successful imperial prac ce." 2

There has been a fierce debate about this key issue for the past forty
years or so. In opposi on to the conven onal wisdom displayed in
Walia's book on Edward Said, other scholars have raised basic objec ons
to the easy connec on made between Enlightenment and imperialism.
Sankar Muthu, for example, has drawn a en on to major
Enlightenment-era figures such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and
Johann Herder, who "a acked the very founda ons of imperialism." And
in her study of the transi on from Enlightenment to empire in France
and Britain, Jennifer Pi s has made the point that several key
intellectual figures in the late eighteenth century, such as Adam Smith
and Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet, launched "a cri cal challenge to
European conquest and rule." In a recent ar cle in the American
Historical Review, Karen O'Brien has neatly summed up this current
defense of Enlightenment methods of inquiry in the face of the powerful
post-colonial cri que that has shaped representa ons of the
Enlightenment over the past forty years. 3 So the Enlightenment has
been a source of controversy when it comes to assessing European
encounters with the rest of the world.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world there had been another kind
of enlightenment at work. The Buddhist path to enlightenment has
shaped cultures and socie es in South, East, and Southeast Asia, and
much of Central Asia, over the course of more than two thousand years.
Beginning with Siddartha Guatama (566-486 B.C.E.), and with the
subsequent development of various Buddhist schools and tradi ons,
Buddhism "devoted itself to the improvement and eventual
enlightenment of people." 4 This Buddhist "enlightenment" has
defini onal problems even more complicated than those related to the
European Enlightenment. In the la er case there is a discrete me
period of about 150 years and a limited geographical area where
something we now call the "Enlightenment" had its major impact. In the
case of Buddhism we are talking about two thousand years and a vast
mul cultural se ng throughout Asia. There are many tradi ons and
schools of thought within Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism is no
excep on with its own range of sects and rival interpreta ons making
claims for superior legi macy. The use by Europeans of the term
"enlightenment" to sum up the core idea of Buddhism obscures many of
these significant varia ons. While we use the word "enlightenment" in
both these European and Asian contexts, we are dealing with two quite
different phenomena in world history, each with its own set of
challenging epistemological issues. They do have one thing in common
however—both are ambi ous efforts to understand the nature of the
universe and of humanity's place in that universe.

These seem to be two u erly different a empts at reaching such an

enlightened understanding of the human predicament. One dis nc ve
feature of the European version was the valuing of secular and scien fic
knowledge; the Buddhist approach is conven onally viewed as primarily
spiritual and philosophical in nature. The serendipity of world history
brought these two enlightenments into contact with each other in 1774.
In that year George Bogle (1746-1781), an emissary from Warren
Has ngs (1732-1818), the governor-general of the East India Company's
possessions in India, met Lobsang Palden Yeshes (1738-1780), the then-
current Panchen Lama, at Tashilhunpo monastery near Shigatse [Xigaze]
in Tibet. Looking at how these two men dealt with each other in this
remarkable encounter may help us be er understand what we mean
when we use the term "enlightenment."

When the mee ng took place, the Panchen Lama was a powerful figure
in Tibetan poli cs and society. The then Dalai Lama, Jampal Gyatso
(1758-1804) was s ll a minor, and a regency council ruled at Lhasa. The
Panchen Lama informed Has ngs that "the Dalai Lama rules this country
with unlimited sway but on account of his being in his minority, the
charge of the government and administra on for the present is
commi ed to me." 5 This was too simplified a version of the religious
and poli cal structure in Tibet, but there is no doubt that Lobsang
Palden Yeshes was in an excep onally strong posi on at this me. One
sign of his preeminence was his journey to the imperial court in Peking
in 1781 to consult with the Qianlong Emperor. 6

In addi on to managing rela ons with the Dalai Lama's officials and the
Chinese Ambans at Lhasa, the Panchen Lama had extensive
administra ve tasks in his own region around Shigatse and along the
border with Nepal, Bhutan, and India. It was these administra ve
responsibili es that brought him into contact with the East India
Company, which by this me was the ruling power in Bengal. Units of
the company's army had been sent to push back Bhutanese forces that
had invaded the small state of Cooch Behar in northern Bengal. The very
name of Bhutan—meaning "the end of Tibet"—showed it had long been
within the Tibetan cultural sphere. 7 Although the Bhutanese had
fought for their autonomy, the Tibetans s ll claimed an influence in
Bhutanese affairs. In his le er to Has ngs, the Panchen Lama asserted
that "the said Deb Rajah [the current ruler of Bhutan] is dependent
upon the Dalai Lama." 8 Beyond those historical connec ons that linked
Bhutan to Tibet, the aggressive warfare of the company's army along
Tibet's southern flanks was an obvious cause of concern. It was these
factors that led the Panchen Lama to intervene as a peacemaker
between Bhutan and the company.

In his le er to Has ngs, the Panchen Lama took pains to mollify this
new player on the Indian scene with abundant fla ery about the
company's achievements, but he also took the opportunity to educate
this European intruder about the Buddhist values he represented:

Having been informed by travellers from your quarter of your exalted

fame and reputa on, my heart, like the blossom of spring, abounds with
gaiety, gladness and joy; praise that the star of your fortune is in
ascension; praise that happiness and ease are the surrounding
a endants of myself and family. Neither to molest or persecute is my
aim; it is even the characteris c of my sect to deprive ourselves of the
necessary refinements of sleep, should an injury be done to a single
individual. But in jus ce and humanity I am informed you far surpass us.
May you ever adorn the seat of jus ce and power, that mankind may,
under the shadow of your bosom enjoy the blessings of happiness and
ease. 9

This message nicely shows how the Panchen Lama's many

responsibili es led him into a mode of discourse that easily combined
religion and poli cs (and how his ritualized phrasing was shaped by Qing
diploma c conven ons). This diploma c overture from across the
Himalayas was seized upon by Has ngs to send Bogle as a company
emissary with the goal of expanding trade between Bengal and Tibet
(and perhaps even gaining backdoor access to the China market). 10
On top of his administra ve and poli cal du es in Tibet, and in
connec on with the complex religio-poli cal rela ons between Tibet
and China, the Panchen Lama was a major spiritual figure in Tibetan and
Central Asian Buddhism. He was the Panchen Rimpoche—the precious
gem of wisdom—the incarna on of the Dhyani Buddha, Amitabha. 11
One of the dis nc ve features of this version of Tibetan Buddhism is its
belief in the spiritually pure land of Shambala (which in Western
readings of Tibetan Buddhism became the enchanted land of Shangri
La). 12 In 1775 the Panchen Lama wrote a trea se on this subject tled
An Explana on of Shambhala together with a Narra ve of the Holy
Land. According to Edwin Bernbaum, this version of the journey to
Shambhala became the most respected of all Tibetan texts on the
subject. It remains even today "the most popular and widely read
guidebook . . . When speaking about the journey to the hidden
kingdom, Tibetans usually refer to this text which has tended to
supersede all others." 13

In the Kalacakra tradi on of Tibetan Buddhism, within which Lobsang

Palden Yeshes was working, Shambhala is both an ideal and an actual
place. As Donald Lopez vividly explains,

in the texts associated with the Kalacakra Tantra the kingdom of

Shambhala is said to be located north of the Himalayan range. It is a
land devoted to the prac ce of the Kalacakra Tantra which the Buddha
himself had entrusted to Shambhala's king. Shambhala is shaped like a
giant lotus and is filled with sandalwood forests and lotus lakes, all
encircled by a great range of snowy peaks. In the center of the kingdom
is the capital of Kalapa, where the luster of the palaces, made [End Page
459] from gold, silver, and jewels, outshines the moon; the walls of the
palaces are plated with mirrors that reflect a light so bright that night is
like day. In the very center of the city is the mandala of the Buddha
Kalacakra. The inhabitants of the 960 million villages of Shambhala are
ruled by a beneficent ruler, called the Kalkin. The laypeople are all
beau ful and wealthy, free of sickness and poverty; the monks maintain
their vows without the slightest infrac on. They are all naturally
intelligent and virtuous, devoted to the prac ce of the Vajrayana,
although all authen c forms of Indian Buddhism are preserved. The
majority of those reborn there a ain buddhahood during their life me
in Shambhala. 14

Those who are devotees of this tradi on within Tibetan Buddhism

"believe there are various ways of going to Shambhala . . . The prevalent
belief in these degenerate mes is that it can only be achieved through
death and rebirth because it is no longer possible to develop the
superhuman powers needed to follow the guidebooks, but a number of
Tibetans s ll believe it is possible to make the journey in this life me.
There are stories of yogis or lamas with excep onal powers who have
taken the journey; some tell of actually going there in their physical
bodies." 15 But some prac oners also speak in terms of "dream
journeys which are some mes difficult to dis nguish from the visionary
journeys of medita on." 16

By whatever means the journey is made, it requires a highly advanced

level of theological and mythological knowledge if it is to be completed
successfully. The Panchen Lama's guidebook was wri en to help seekers
who wished to reach the spiritually pure land a ain the necessary level
of cosmological knowledge and self-discipline. 17 Insofar as there is a
no onal geographical loca on for the land of Shambhala, it is situated
somewhere north of the Himalayan mountains. It is extremely difficult
to reach, and "the journey is fraught with dangers, both natural and
supernatural: the traveller must cross vast deserts, forests full of wild
beasts, mountains inhabited by beau ful goddesses, demons, flesh
eaters, and hungry ghosts. Only those who are neither tempted nor
terrified may reach the perfect land of Shambhala." 18
The Panchen Lama devoted the first half of his book to the geography
and history of India, the birthplace of Siddartha Gautama, the historical
Buddha, and hence "the holy land" in the tle. In wri ng his account of
India he drew on material provided by various informants; one of those
informants was none other than George Bogle. In his journal Bogle
men oned a moment during their conversa ons when the Panchen
Lama quizzed him about Bengal and "desired me to inquire par cularly
about the situa on of a town called Shambul about which he said the
pundits of Bengal would be able to inform me." 19 As Albert Grunwedel,
the German scholar who first translated the Panchen Lama's text from
Tibetan in 1915, explained in his introduc on, "the book was wri en in
1775 . . . In the winter of 1774-75 the English envoy George Bogle was at
his court . . . What the Panchen Lama wrote about India comes from the
conversa ons with Bogle Sahib." 20

Grunwedel's comment, with its implica on that the Panchen Lama had
to rely en rely on a European traveler to acquire knowledge of
contemporary India, reflects a complacent, imperial-era belief in
European centrality (the locu on of "Bogle Sahib" is telling). But, as we
have noted, the Panchen Lama was a worldly as well as a spiritual figure
with extensive knowledge of surrounding countries. He could easily gain
fresh informa on about India from the numerous merchants who made
regular visits to Shigatse—such as Purangir Gosain, who guided Bogle on
his journey. When he arrived at Shigatse, Bogle noted that there were as
many as 150 Indian merchants in town. There were also agents of Indian
states posted to Shigatse, such as the vakil of Chait Singh, the current
Raja of Benares. These sources could be tapped by the Panchen Lama
and his officials, but the Panchen Lama made a deliberate decision,
when comple ng his magnum opus, to privilege Bogle's observa ons
about India.
The Panchen Lama directly incorporated Bogle's favorable account of
the East India Company's role into his descrip on of the Indian holy
land. The Mughal emperor had given the company "a merchant house
at the place called Kalikata [Calcu a]." At first things had gone well, but
as the Mughal state "through internal discord began to disintegrate, the
Company had to make arrangements for its own protec on...No longer
protected by the Mughal peace, and under threat of being killed, the
Company brought soldiers out of their own land. From Varendra and
Bengal they took everything up to Varanasi and brought it under their
protec on." 21 Contemporary Bengal appears briefly in the narra ve
and is described just as Bogle said it was. The English king lived on an
island across the sea; the English merchants were murderously a acked
when living peacefully in Calcu a. 22 If the Panchen Lama had relied on
Indian sources alone he would not have given such a benevolent
account of the company's history in India; he accepted Bogle's benign
presenta on of this recent Indian history.

In this manner Bogle made his way into the most popular Tibetan
guidebook for the journey to Shambhala. Such surprising borrowing of
informa on evokes a wonderful moment of encounter between Tibetan
and Bri sh cultures as each man brought to their convivial mee ngs a
thirst for knowledge. Bogle and Lobsang Palden Yeshes liked each other
enormously. 23 They talked at length about poli cs, diplomacy,
geography, maps, and trade. The Panchen Lama, in view of the trea se
on Shambhala he was wri ng, ques oned Bogle about condi ons in the
holy land of India so that his forthcoming guide would be as up-to-date
as possible. They also shared ideas on astrology and the nature of the
universe. In the Panchen Lama's case he was a emp ng to make sense
of the human condi on using concepts from the Kalacakra tradi on
within Buddhism. This par cular Buddhist system, based on an early
eleventh-century esoteric tantra, became popular in Tibet but, as David
Snellgrove notes, "it appears to remain more closely a ached to
recognizable Hindu terminology than other tantras." 24 Vesna Wallace
has described the "prominent syncre s c character [of the
Kalacakratantra, and its] self-conscious absorp on, or appropria on, of
the modes of expression that are characteris c of the rival religious
systems of India." 25 It may have been that feature of the Panchen
Lama's Buddhism that impelled him to pay so much a en on to the
Indian holy land—and which enabled Bogle to follow along with his
rudimentary understanding of the "Hinduism" he had seen in Bengal.

As with the numerous gods and goddesses within Hinduism there "are a
bewildering variety of Buddha names" within tantric Buddhism. In the
same way as many ordinary Hindu believers worship their par cular
gods, so "the simple Tibetan believers" treat these many
representa ons of the Buddha as the gods. But a true adept recognizes
that these representa ons are "mere expressions of absolute
buddhahood," just as sophis cated Hindus see all their gods and
goddesses merely as ways to help believers approach the ul mate
mysteries of the unknowable crea ve force of Brahma. For the highly
trained believer within Tibetan Buddhism, "all these divine forms are
absorbed by him into the luminous state of the Void, and it is out of the
Void that they are duly summoned by medita ve prac ce." 26

The main texts in the Kalacakratantra "contain sermons delivered by

the Buddha in which he describes Shambhala and the role it will play in
history." As Bernbaum sums up this version of Buddhism:

All three parts of the Kalacakra Tantra come together in the principal of
a Primordial Buddha who underlies everything covered by their separate
teachings—the external world, body and mind, and the realm of the
dei es. Although he comes close to monotheis c concep ons of God,
he does not create the universe as a creator dis nct from his crea on
but is, instead, the very essence of it. All things and beings, from stones
to Buddhas, are his manifesta ons. Each in its true nature is the
Primordial Buddha. Beyond form and emp ness, he lies somewhere in
the unity of the two. According to the Kalacakra, he is ul mate reality,
empty even of emp ness. 27

The challenging complexity of the Kalacakra texts stems from their

a empt "to embrace all phenomena, from the workings of the mind to
the layout of the universe, in one all-encompassing system of
knowledge and prac ce." 28

This Panchen Lama was clearly a major poli cal and religious figure at
the me of the Bogle mission, and he has retained his high status as an
authority on Shambhala right into our own mes. It seems reasonable
to view him as a significant representa ve of this major tradi on within
Tibetan Buddhist thinking about the natural world and the human
condi on. As Vesna Wallace puts it, the Kalacakratantra presents a
theory "of the cosmos's nature and [its] rela on to the individual." 29
The desire to achieve such a comprehensive understanding of the
natural and human worlds was also at the core of the European
Enlightenment. Both these human a empts at enlightenment had an
ambi ous universal agenda. George Bogle was not an equivalent major
figure in the Enlightenment movement in Europe as the Panchen Lama
was within Tibetan Buddhism, but he can be viewed as representa ve of
the culture of that era in European history. He was not an intellectual,
but he was shaped by Enlightenment culture. From the books he had in
his Calcu a library and from references he made in his le ers and
journals, it is evident he had at least a par al knowledge of some of the
major writers of the era. He knew something of Charles-Louis de
Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755) on methods of cultural comparison,
and of the ideas of Hugo Gro us (1583-1645) and Samuel Pufendorf
(1632-1694) on interna onal law. He had some acquaintance with
Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon's (1708-1788) Histoire naturelle on the
history of the earth and geographical explana ons for the varia on of
species in nature, and he had read William Robertson's (1721-1793)
History of the Reign of Charles V and History of America, with their
influen al analysis of the impact of the Spanish empire in the Americas
and of the nature of historical change. 30

While Bogle was not a significant thinker he can be viewed as an

ordinary representa ve figure of Enlightenment era culture. He had
studied one year at the University of Edinburgh. He had become
thoroughly familiar with the new commercial knowledge of the age at
Enfield and as the result of his business experiences in London and
Calcu a. In the polite and commercial world of eighteenth-century
England such new knowledge was held in some esteem. In the first
edi on of the Encyclopedia Bri annica, published in 1771 by "a Society
of Gentlemen in Scotland," the entry on "Bookkeeping" was longer than
the entry on "Botany." 31 In Calcu a Bogle gave serious a en on to
learning Persian and the languages of northern India. By the mid 1770s
he had acquired a substan al collec on of books. When he died in 1781,
his library was inventoried prior to being sold off under the supervision
of Claud Alexander and David Anderson, the administrators of Bogle's
estate. The library contained most of the standard works that we
associate with Enlightenment Europe. The inventory list begins with
"Bacon's works, 5 vols. Compleat" and includes such entries as "Vatell's
Law of Na ons (two volumes)," "William Robertson's History of Scotland
and History of the Reign of Charles V, four volumes," "Machiavelli's
works," "Herodotus' History of the Persian Wars in four volumes," and
"Spectator Complt 8 vols." 32

We do not know the extent to which Bogle read the books in his library.
He may have picked them up in a sale in the same way as other servants
of the company bought his books a er he died. There is no sustained
engagement with the major philosophers of the Enlightenment in
Bogle's journals or the le ers. He cannot be presented as a major
thinker, but his le ers and journals do show him to be a minor example
of Enlightenment views in ac on. He men oned, at apposite moments
in his travels, Montesquieu, Buffon, Gro us, Pufendorf, and Robertson.
33 His approach to understanding varia on in human socie es, and to
topics like sa and polyandry, was informed by the wri ngs of
Montesquieu and Buffon. Perhaps the very limita ons of his reading and
understanding make him more typical of the age than the great
intellectual figures whose works now define the Enlightenment in
encyclopedias and scholarly debates.

As he traveled across the Himalayan passes and into Tibet, Bogle's

comments were full of sympathe c observa on. As Bogle's party moved
into more se led agricultural areas of Tibet once they were beyond the
border fort of Gyantse, Bogle was impressed by the neatness and
efficiency of the villages and farms. "The valley to the north of
Penamdzong," he noted, "was by far the most populous I had yet seen.
The villages stand very thick. A small town called Ghadong is built on the
side of one of the hills, and the houses being all whitened make a good
appearance." The previous day he had noted how the Tibetan farmers
prepared feed for their stock: "I met here also a machine for cu ng
straw for ca le, but it is not worthy of descrip on. As I remember what
a great discovery the cu ng of straw was considered in England, I
men on it only to show that na ons undervalued by Europeans can,
without the assistance of Royal Socie es, find out the useful arts of life,
and for the rest, whether they be of advantage to mankind or otherwise
is a ques on above my reach." 34 Bogle is poking fun here at the
contemporary Bri sh scene during the intense period of agricultural
transforma on when animal breeding and crop management [End Page
465] were regarded as ma ers of na onal importance—when "Farmer
George" was on the throne and methods for improving prac ces in the
field or farmyard were the topic of learned papers at Royal Society
mee ngs. By drawing a en on to the Tibetan farming prac ces he is,
even through the heavy irony, recognizing that Tibetan farmers had skills
and talent similar to their Bri sh counterparts. Tibetan farmers were
equally adept in these "useful arts of life."

Bogle had his first mee ng with the Panchen Lama on the a ernoon of 9
November 1774. As the Panchen Lama sat cross-legged on his
cushioned throne, Bogle "laid the Governor's presents before him,
delivering the le er and pearl necklace into his own hands, together
with a white pelong handkerchief on my own part, according to the
custom of the country." 35 Bogle took an immediate liking to the
Panchen Lama. His descrip ons of their conversa ons are full of respect
and admira on. Over the course of the next four months, a deep
affec on developed between the two men. At their first ceremonial
mee ng, Bogle reported that the Panchen Lama "received me in a most
engaging manner." Therea er, the Panchen Lama met with Bogle
frequently "without any ceremony." The two men were able to talk
together in Hindustani without translators. They covered a wide range
of topics from current events in Tibet, India, and China to philosophy,
religion, cosmology, and history. Bogle described how the Panchen Lama
"would walk with me about the room, explain to me the pictures, make
remarks on the colour of my eyes etc. For although venerated as God's
Viceregent through all the eastern countries of Asia, endowed with a
por on of omniscience, and with many other divine a ributes, he
throws aside, in conversa on, all the awful part of his character,
accommodates himself to the weakness of mortals, endeavours to make
himself loved rather than feared, and behaves with the greatest
affability to everybody, par cularly to strangers." 36

The placing of Tibetan and European customs on a foo ng of equality

was a sustained posture of Bogle's during his me in Tibet. His
experiences at Tibetan ceremonies, along with the informa ve
conversa ons with the Panchen Lama, helped him gain some distance
from his own familiar cultural bearings. He began to understand the
universal human tendency to make crude formula ons about others
who are unknown or strange. This awareness was apparent during an
exchange with the Panchen Lama on the subject of religion. The
conversa on began with the Panchen Lama inquiring about Bogle's
religion as he "desired to know the name of my great priest or guru."
Bogle replied that "as the language of my country was en rely different
from his, he could not understand our names." The Panchen Lama
pressed the issue, asking if Bogle and the Bri sh "worshiped the Criss;
making a cross with his fingers, and adding that there were formerly [at
Lhasa] some Fringy [European] padres who worshiped the Criss, but
they bred disturbances, and were turned out of the country." 37

This turn in the conversa on, with its reference to the Capuchin
missionaries who had been expelled from Lhasa in 1745, forced Bogle to
think how the Panchen Lama was viewing Chris an Europe. Jesuit
missionaries had reached Tibet in the 1600s. Antonio de Andrade had
made two journeys from Goa in 1624 and 1625, and in 1661 J. Grueber
and A. d'Orville had stayed in Lhasa on their overland journey from
Peking to India. The Jesuits had been followed by the Capuchins, who
set up their mission in Lhasa in the 1720s. The Panchen Lama's
knowledge of Chris anity came from what he knew of these Roman
Catholic orders and their teachings. He was also seeing it from the
outside, from the perspec ve of his own religion—just as Bogle
struggled to understand the religion of the Lamas from his Chris an
perspec ve. For Bogle, the difference between a Capuchin monk and a
Sco sh Presbyterian was an important piece of cultural knowledge, but
for the Panchen Lama the difference ma ered li le, for they were all
Chris ans.

As they conversed about such ma ers, Bogle suddenly thought he

understood the core problem in these a empts at cross-cultural
understanding. He tried to convey his insight in what for him was clearly
a noteworthy moment in the conversa on.

I replied that the Chinese and the people of Hindustan, and of his
country, gave the name Fringistan to all the lands on the west side of
the world, which are divided into fi een or twenty separate kingdoms,
of different languages and religions, governed by their respec ve
princes, and independent of one another. In the same manner the
people of my country comprehended under the name of Asia, China,
Bengal, Surat, Tibet, and many other states, with which he was
unacquainted; but he well knew that China and Bengal were at an
immense distance, unconnected and almost opposite to one another in
almost every par cular. 38

Bogle had been taken aback by the Panchen Lama's uniform view of
Europe. He was jolted into an awareness that Europeans had similarly
simplified views of Asia. This conversa on with the Panchen Lama
enabled Bogle to see how both East and West, Asia and Europe, viewed
each other in oversimplified ways. The fact that Bogle was able, in the
course of an informal conversa on, to tenta vely iden fy what we now
describe as Orientalism (stereotypes of the East) and Occidentalism
(stereotypes of the West) was a remarkable instance of the rela ve
objec vity he possessed as the result of his educa on and reading.

A similar a en veness to other cultural perspec ves was evident in

Bogle's comments on polyandry, which was common in the region of
Tibet he traveled through. Bogle's references to the prac ce of one wife
with several husbands were invariably sympathe c. In October and
November 1774, two days outside Gyantse, Bogle arrived at Dudukpai, a
village under the jurisdic on of the Panchen Lama. Bogle lodged at a
household where a woman was married to two men. "The people were
all busy building and stacking their straw, and were singing at their work.
Our landlord's family seemed to be one of the happiest in Tibet. The
house belongs to two brothers, who are married to a very handsome
wife, and have three of the pre est children I ever saw. They all came
to drink tea and eat sugar-candy. A er night came on, the whole family
assembled in a room to dance to their own singing, and spent two hours
in this manner with abundance of mirth and glee." 39

About one month later, when he was se led at the Panchen Lama's
country residence at Dechenrubje with more me on his hands to think
about the new customs he was encountering, he s ll gave a warm
endorsement of polyandry. In a memorandum for his superiors in
Calcu a tled "An Account of Tibet," he drew a en on to "the two
customs [in Tibet] that appear most singular" to Europeans. The first
was the prac ce of air burial, by which the dead body is carried to a high
spot, dismembered, and "le to be devoured by wild beasts." Bogle
noted that "as there is li le wood in the country, they cannot afford to
burn their dead; but they take an equally effectual way of destroying
[End Page 468] them." 40 Far from being bizarre, the prac ce was a
perfectly reasonable method of dealing with corpses in high, treeless
terrain.

The Tibetan marriage prac ces he encountered on his journey were

more challenging to comprehend than corpse disposal prac ces, but
they too could be seen to have a reasonable basis. Bogle wrote that he
was "at a loss to name the other custom, unless I call it polyandry." He
was struck by how well the custom seemed to work in the part of Tibet
he traveled through. His own observa ons, and his reading of
Montesquieu on a related subject, convinced him that the system was
beneficial to women, especially when contrasted to polygamic systems
of marriage:

In most Eastern countries polygamy is allowed. The advocates for it

compare mankind to the deer; its enemies liken them to turtle doves.
Montesquieu and other poli cal writers insist that it is destruc ve of
popula on; and the women cry that it is unjust and unreasonable that
so many of their sex should be subjected to the pleasures of one man.
But in this country they have their revenge. The elder brother marries a
woman, and she becomes the wife of the whole family. They club
together in matrimony as merchants do in trade. Nor is this joint
concern o en produc ve of jealousy among the partners. They are li le
addicted to jealousy. Disputes do indeed some mes arise about the
children of the marriage; but they are se led either by a comparison of
the features of the child with those of its several fathers, or le to the
determina on of the mother. 41

Here again Bogle places polyandry in a favorable light, even going so far
as to compare its benefits to those gained by astute merchants in the
commercial society of England who pooled their combined resources
together in joint-stock companies.

The cultural rela vism evident in this surprising comparison was

characteris c of the approach taken by Sco sh thinkers in the
eighteenth century. Bogle paid a en on to ordinary economic and
social ac vi es—farming prac ces, women's work, marriage customs,
and so forth. In doing so he reflected his Sco sh educa on. Nicholas
Phillipson has a empted to sum up this dis nc ve feature of the
Sco sh Enlightenment: "in the hands of David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord
Kames, John Millar and Adam Ferguson, conjectural history had
developed a natural history of man. It was generally held that the
principles of human nature could best be understood by observing
human behaviour or 'manners' in all its forms in different states of
society. The Scots wanted to discover how human beings had acquired
the cogni ve skills, the metaphysical, moral, poli cal, religious, and
aesthe c ideas that are needed to live sociably in primi ve and
advanced states of society." 42 When Bogle, for example, tried to figure
out the different a tudes toward the treatment of widows in Bhutan
and Bengal he looked at the daily work done by women as a key factor.
The sight of Bhutanese women laboring up steep mountain tracks with
large loads on their backs was a significant piece of evidence for Bogle,
confirming as it did (for him) their more visible public role in Bhutanese
society. He thought women in Bhutan were "bred up with the greatest
liberty" compared to women in Bengal, who were generally kept from
public view by the tradi on of purdah. 43 It was a shaky comparison
because Bogle was thinking of upper-caste women in Calcu a, but it
does show how Bogle's mind worked.

In thinking in such ways, Bogle was following Sco sh Enlightenment

writers who looked to these day-to-day economic ac vi es and social
manners to explain how socie es cohered and were successful. This
a en on to the infinite variety of everyday prac ces across world
socie es contrasts with the approach taken by Montesquieu, who
placed his emphasis on the general physical environments within which
each society was situated. The compara ve, detailed observa on of
ordinary human ac vi es "refuted Montesquieu's environmental
determinism and confirmed the fundamental principle of Sco sh
conjectural history: that the form of any society is ul mately
determined by its means of subsistence." 44 Bogle broached none of
these differing philosophical approaches in any of his journals or le ers.
As we have emphasized, he was not an intellectual—and he always
viewed himself during his Tibet journey as primarily engaged in
company business. In all his commentaries, however, Bogle paid close
a en on to "the manners peculiar to each country," and he readily
accepted that each society he encountered had its own integrity. In
doing so he showed that he had absorbed aspects of the cultural
rela vism posture adopted by major figures of the Sco sh
Enlightenment. 45
Bogle's engagement with his Tibetan friends, his sustained efforts to
enter into Tibetan perspec ves about the world, show how far he had
traveled from his own home background in Scotland. Bogle's father
represented the narrow Calvinist culture that s ll shaped life for most
Sco sh people in the eighteenth century. When his father wrote to him
about the Tibet journey from the family estate at Daldowie he
expressed mild interest in his son's travels, but he tended to be
dismissive of the en re enterprise. He was blinkered to the possibility of
learning anything from other cultures. He complained that the trip had
prevented Bogle wri ng home o en enough. "Your long Journey to, and
abode with the Grand Lama of Tibet, is one sufficient reason for the
Irregularity of your correspondence for some me past. But I fla er
myself that that Irksome Journey, tho' otherwise Honourable Embassy,
is now at an end." 46 His father's approach to non-Bri sh cultures was
already evident in a le er he had wri en to Bogle shortly a er his son
had arrived in Bengal. He was convinced that "the original na ves in
that part of the Country where you reside have only the light of the
religion of nature, corrupted by gross supers on and blind Idolatry in a
degree en rely ignorant of the Sublime Apprehensions of the infinite
Perfec ons of the Deity whom the Chris ans worship and adore, and I
suppose they are s ll more Ignorant of the method of Grace and
Salva on published and made known to us here in the Scriptures of
Truth, and of that life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel of
Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth and the Life." 47 Bogle's father
was en rely confined within his own culture and saw no possibility that
there could be any merit in non-Chris an socie es.

Bogle's father was by no means ignorant. He had been an eminent

member of the merchant community in Glasgow and like many such
merchants had taken an ac ve role in the intellectual and cultural life of
the city, even serving as Lord Rector of Glasgow University. When young
George was studying at Edinburgh his father had expressed the hope
that his son would pay "close a en on [to] Montesquieu whose Spirit of
the Laws you are probably reading." 48 When George went out to
Bengal his father thought that his reading in history and philosophy
made him stand out from the other young company servants. "You, my
dear George," he wrote, "have gone out in the East India Company's
service with many superior advantages to numbers employed in the
same manner of Business, blessed with a good natural disposi on, with
a fine liberal Educa on." 49 As Bogle's le ers from Bhutan and Tibet
began reaching Daldowie, Bogle's father became very proud of his son's
accomplishments:

Your le ers Containing an Accurate Account of your Journey to Thibet

Together with ample descrip ons you give of the manners, police,
Religion, dress etc. of the Different Countrys and dominions you went
through, together with the strength of reason and arguments you was
oblidged to make use of to Oppose their entering into any trade with
Bengal or even allowing free Access to and thro their respec ve
Countrys and Dominions, All those and other Difficultys you had to
Encounter and to Subdue Show, my Dear George when I consider your
Success, Show I affirm, the Strength of genius, Address and Penetra on
which few, very few, of your age and Experience are capable of. 50

The empha c repe on of words and phrases reveal the depth of pride
in the son's achievements. But as the quota on on religion in Bengal
suggests, Bogle's father could never escape his own Calvinist
Presbyterian framing of the world. Bogle had come a long distance from
the parochial views of his father. The journey from Calcu a to
Tashilhunpo was remarkable, but so too was the intellectual distance
Bogle had traveled from the family estate in Scotland.

Warren Has ngs hoped that Bogle's journal, if published, might rival the
narra ves of eighteenth-century European explorers in the Pacific. Many
scholars who have studied those accounts have argued that the act of
narra on itself was but one aspect of the destruc ve impact of
Europeans on Pacific Islanders. A typical approach of the first genera on
of scholars who theorized about such encounters was to propose that
"whatever the inten ons of captains, missionaries, and scien sts,
knowing and 'collec ng' the 'other' invariably led to the advantage of
the knower and the massive dispossession and transforma on of the
'na ve.'" 51 This formula on does not capture the outcome with Bogle
and Has ngs in Bhutan and Tibet. On the contrary, they felt somewhat
chastened by the encounter. They had been well and truly
outmaneuvered by Tibetan and Bhutanese officials. Yet they were not
disheartened by their failure. They also thought they had learned a
great deal of useful informa on from these (for the Bri sh) hitherto
unknown places. Has ngs even suggested to Bogle that such new
knowledge about humanity would be of more las ng value than
knowledge about wars and territorial conquests: "There are thousands
of Men in England whose good will is worth seeking, and who will listen
to the story of such enterprises in search of knowledge with ten mes
more avidity than they would read Accounts that brought Crores [the
Indian term for 100,000] to the Na onal Credit, or descrip ons of
Victories that slaughtered thousands of the Na onal Enemies." 52 Nor
were there any signs of Bogle thinking in terms of the o -cited binaries
of imperial mentali es in the Victorian and Edwardian eras—savage/
civilized, inferior/superior, primi ve/advanced—that were to be so
amply demonstrated during the 1904 Younghusband military expedi on
to Lhasa. 53 Bogle even no ced, during that revealing moment in his
conversa ons with the Panchen Lama, that Europeans and Asians were
just the same in holding simplis c views of each other.

Bogle gave full recogni on to the integrity of the cultures he met on his
travels. He noted that the Panchen Lama, as he welcomed Muslim and
Hindu as well as Buddhist pilgrims at Shigatse, was "free from those
narrow prejudices which, next to ambi on and avarice, have opened the
most copious source of human misery." 54 Intolerance over religion was
repugnant to Bogle. He was quite willing to acknowledge that the
religious tolera on he valued was not an exclusively European inven on
but was perfectly well exhibited as an intrinsic feature of the Himalayan
cultures he encountered during his mission. He witnessed this tolerant
a tude not only at the court of the Panchen Lama but in the
ecumenical religious ceremony to the mountain gods at the foot of
Chomolhari mountain where Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan met. He also
noted the same tolerant outlook during his discussions with Tibetan and
Bengali companions like Padma and Purangir Gosain, who accompanied
him on his journey through the mountains. 55 Bogle preferred open
minds to closed minds; he recognized and respected similar outlooks in
other cultures.

To bring out the full significance of this enlightened a tude it is

instruc ve to compare Bogle's views with those of the Jesuit Ippolito
Desideri, who had spent six years in Tibet between 1715 and 1721.
Desideri is o en described as the founder of Tibetan studies in the West
because of his detailed commentaries on Tibetan culture but, as Trent
Pomplun has pointed out, "for Desideri the loss of the Tibetan mission
was a loss for the Society of Jesus, but what is more important, also
meant the eternal perdi on of countless Tibetans." 56 So this
prominent Roman Catholic missionary and Bogle's Presbyterian father
both shared the view that Tibetans were des ned for hell and
damna on unless they accepted their par cular version of Chris anity.
There was no such blindness in Bogle. His commentaries on his journey
to Bhutan and Tibet appear to be an exemplary Enlightenment
narra ve.

Most of the evidence for the mutually respec ul encounter between

Bogle and the Panchen Lama comes from Bogle's own wri ngs, but
there are other pieces of evidence that suggest he was not
misrepresen ng what happened. On the Tibetan side there are only
three sources that provide informa on on the 1774 mission: the official
biographies of the Third and Fourth Panchen Lamas, and a slightly less
formal life history of the Third Panchen Lama. Unfortunately, the
informa on in these sources is meager. That is a great pity. It would
have been deeply sa sfying if historians of Tibet could have found
extensive commentaries on this first Bri sh encounter with Tibet. "What
we can find in the biographies of the Tashi-Lamas," explains the Italian
scholar Luciano Petech, who has inves gated all the possible sources on
the Tibetan side, "is a bare record of formal audiences." 57 Because the
biographies served as court diaries, the descrip ons of the missions are
brief and businesslike, no ng when the Panchen Lama met Bogle and
the ceremonies that took place at those mee ngs. The "autobiography"
of the Third Panchen Lama described how his diploma c efforts had led
to peace between Bhutan and the company: "the lord of Bhangala
[Bengal] listened with respect to my word. He gave back the districts of
Bhutan, and on both sides they remained without figh ng." Bogle's first
mee ng with the Panchen Lama at Dechenrubje is men oned in brief,
formal terms: "Acarya Bho-gol with his a endants offered presents of
glass bo les etc. and took their appointed places for the distribu on of
ceremonial tea; they made conversa on in the Nagara language
(Hindustani)."

Since many of Bogle's mee ngs with the Panchen were private affairs,
there is no reference to them in the official biography, but there are
enough fragments to suggest that Bogle's characteriza on of the
rela onship was accurate. For example, there is an entry for the
mee ng on 23 December that reads: "On this day [the Panchen Lama]
gave to Bho-gol Sa-heb and his a endants a joyful midday feast (gun-
ston) at his side; his order was exactly carried out." 58 In these Tibetan
texts Has ngs is referred to as "the Bha-ra Saheb (Bara Saheb, the Great
Lord, governor general) ruler of Bhan-gha-la in India" and "the Bha-ra
Sa-heb of the Inka-ral-ce (English), lord of Ka-la-ka-dha (Calcu a)." 59
The Bri sh envoys to Shigatse were men oned in the same way as the
other envoys to the Panchen Lamas from various states in north India
and Central Asia. Bogle was simply another diploma c visitor, and his
presence was not marked by unusual or extensive entries in the official
records. Luciano Petech could find no later references.

There is addi onal evidence on the Bogle mission from another Bri sh
source. A er the Panchen Lama died during his stay at the imperial
court in Peking, Has ngs sent another emissary, Samuel Turner, to
Shigatse to acknowledge the new incarna on and con nue the
diploma c rela onship opened up by Bogle. Turner published an
account of this 1783 mission and in it made extensive references to the
fond memories of Bogle's 1774 visit among Tibetans. Turner generously
a ributed the warmth of his own recep on at Tashilhunpo to the
impact of Bogle: "That the effect produced [by Bogle] on the mind of the
Lama, by a disposi on of manners perfectly congenial with his own, was
so great and powerful, cannot excite our surprise. Indeed, toward
whatever object it was directed, the pa ent and laborious exercise of
the powers of a strong mind in my predecessor Mr. Bogle was also
accompanied by a most engaging mildness and benevolence which
marked every part of his character. I am thoroughly aware of the very
favourable impression which these amicable quali es le behind them
in the court of the Teshoo Lama." 60 Both the Tibetan and Bri sh
sources that remain available to us confirm Bogle's account of an
extraordinarily congenial rela onship between these two men—one a
high-status exemplar of Tibetan Buddhism, the other an ordinary
representa ve of Enlightenment-era Britain.

So far the way in which the narra ve of this 1774 encounter between
East and West has been presented seems to clear the Enlightenment
from allega ons of being a handmaiden to imperialism. In Bogle's case
there appeared to be a genuine respect for other peoples and cultures,
an open-minded curiosity about non-European ways, and a recogni on
that certain core values of the European Enlightenment (for example,
religious tolera on) could also be an integral part of other cultures in
other parts of the world. Some cri cs might reply, however, that this
was done with an air of European privilege about it all, in the sense that
Bogle set himself up as a superior observer who had the right and the
unique capacity to make such cultural comparisons because he was
from Europe. The very act of categorizing other peoples implied a
European a ribute of superior objec vity that en tled advanced
Europeans to make comparisons between other, more backward,
cultures.

The fact that Bogle relied so much on scien fic knowledge about

geographical and environmental circumstances to make his cultural
comparisons, an approach widely adopted by Enlightenment era
philosophers, suggests that European thinkers could not avoid this
intellectual pi all. The very act of classifica on was based on an
assump on of an elevated cogni ve status. European travelers like
Bogle assumed that they had the right to do such things and that they
had a technical-scien fic capability to be able to undertake such
intellectual exercises. These ways of thinking also tended to remove any
agency from the cultures being categorized. While they were inflected
with the Sco sh Enlightenment's a en on to daily economic ac vi es
and social manners, Bogle's observa ons were ul mately based on the
view that geography and environment shaped Tibetan culture.
Presumably, all human socie es were shaped by environments, but
European socie es had somehow transcended their geographical
condi ons whereas Tibetans were s ll molded by geography. To some
extent, this way of thinking was the outcome of the Enlightenment's
stadial theory of history. Hun ng and gathering humans were u erly
dependent on the natural resources available to them in the
environments in which they lived; the commercial society of 1700s
Britain, while s ll influenced by Britain's island loca on close to the
con nent and open to the Atlan c, was no longer subject to limita ons
imposed by geography. Britain had advanced beyond that stage. Bogle's
en re approach assumed that the socie es he was encountering, even
though they had passed through the early stages of human
development, had not yet escaped their geography in the ways that
Europeans had done.

The allega on of assumed superiority, evident in categorizing of others,

is o en made by proponents of "the Enlightenment project" and its
shaping of European imperialism. But in Bogle's case there is some
evidence that raises doubts about whether things are as cut and dried
as this familiar allega on assumes. Rather than seeing the Bhutanese
and Tibetans as inert specimens for his European curiosity, Bogle
realized that he was a subject for their curiosity. As Bogle put it, they
viewed him as "a Specimen of my Countrymen" and thought they could
make generaliza ons about England based on their observa on of his
behavior. 61 Bogle can be made to look narrow and culture-bound, but
perhaps all humans are subject to such limita ons when faced with new
situa ons. For example, the Panchen Lama was immensely well
informed about Tibet, China, Central Asia, and India, and he even knew
something of Russia, yet when querying Bogle about England, a place
u erly strange to him, he too showed he could think in crude
categories. When asking whether England was near Russia, what
religion was prac ced and so on, the Panchen Lama also "enquired if it
were near the country of the cannibals"—thus hin ng at some of his
credulous no ons of far-off places near Fringistan, the home of the
Europeans. 62 The Panchen Lama also seemed to share some of Bogle's
nega ve views on Indians. A er Bogle had reported a conversa on that
he had held with Chauduri, one of the Indian representa ves at
Tashilhunpo, the Panchen Lama "made no observa on, except that the
Hindus were fond of appearing of consequence, and scrupled not to tell
falsehoods." 63 In a similar vein, Bogle claimed that the Hindu "fakirs" of
whom he had such a low opinion were also "universally disliked by the
Tibetans." 64

The Panchen Lama also used derogatory language about the Bhutanese
in his first le er to the Has ngs, which began the Bri sh engagement
with Tibet. He wrote of "the Deb Rajah's own criminal conduct in
commi ng ravages and other outrages on your fron ers . . . as he is of a
rude and ignorant race (past mes are not des tute of instances of like
misconduct) which his own avarice tempted him to commit." 65 The
Panchen Lama no doubt chose such condemnatory phrases to seem
friendly to Has ngs, "the lord of Bengal," even though he was s ll giving
some support to the Deb Rajah at this me. As Bogle reported a er he
learned of a legal debate at Phari about whether to send some
Bhutanese prisoners back to Bhutan, Tibetan officials were reluctant to
return supporters of the Deb Rajah for punishment. 66 But that such a
descrip on of the Bhutanese as "a rude and ignorant race" could appear
in this le er shows a context in which other people can be categorized
to suit the intended audience. Or perhaps the Panchen Lama actually
did think that the Bhutanese in general were a rough lot, not quite up to
more civilized Tibetan standards.

In spite of their shared religious culture, Tibet and Bhutan had o en

been at odds. One of the forts along their border is named Drugyel
Dzong, which means "the fortress of the Drukpa Victory," and it was
built "to commemorate one of several Bhutanese victories over the
Tibetans" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 67
There had been frequent invasions of Bhutan from Tibet. 68 So Tibetans
and Bhutanese did indeed have reasons at mes to hold antagonis c
views of each other. These Tibetan comments on Bhutan in Bri sh
sources are but snippets of evidence, but even if they are only an
approxima on of what the Panchen Lama intended to convey, they
suggest that we should not be too quick to condemn all of Bogle's
cri cal comments about Indians as evidence that only Europeans
displayed colonialist mentali es.

Even a er laying out all these a rac ve, enlightened quali es in Bogle's
commentaries on Tibet, we cannot avoid the fact that he was also an
ac ve agent of Bri sh imperialism in Asia. His main mo ve in going to
India was to get rich. In this he was just like every other servant of the
East India Company. The outlook of Bogle and other young men who
gained posi ons, through family and business patronage, in the
company was well illustrated in the case of David Anderson, one of
Bogle's closest friends and associates during his me in the Bengal
service. Shortly a er his arrival in Calcu a in 1767 Anderson received a
le er from a friend who remained behind in Scotland. The le er
sketched out the prospects that lay in store for Anderson: "It is now a
considerable me since you se out from this [country], bound on a
voyage to the Golden Territories of the East, a Nabob hun ng, or in
other terms, to procure a fortune, which the Miserable situa on of
Trade in our Country deny us; wherein I hope you will succeed to the
utmost of your wishes." 69 This reference to poor economic condi ons
in Scotland is a reminder that many Scots turned to India as a way of
making or repairing their family fortunes, as young George tried to do
by helping with debt burdening his father's Daldowie estate. Anderson
himself wrote of his hopes of making enough money to set himself up as
gentleman "on a small estate in a pleasant part of Scotland." 70 Claud
Alexander, who, along with Anderson, helped se le Bogle's estate in
1781-1782, le Bengal in 1785 with enough of a competence to build a
co on mill and found a new manufacturing town at Catrine in Ayrshire
in Scotland. 71
Bogle was very much part of this moneymaking enterprise. While s ll
working in London, there was a discussion between Bogle and his
brothers about what the most lucra ve overseas posi on might be.
They scouted the possibility of seeking an East India Company post in
China at Canton but decided that Bengal would be a be er prospect
because of the possibili es of engaging in local trade and because of the
be er contacts the family already had there. In 1769 Bogle wrote to his
father, telling him of the decision and outlining the en cing prospects:
"we have now fixed on Bengal where I shall have a great many
Advantages which I could not expect in China. I shall be able to procure
Le ers, and very strong ones, to many of the Principal People in the
Se lement, and as the field is much larger I hope the Business I have
seen in London, and the Experience I have had, may be more Service to
me there than it could possibly be in China." 72 He assured his father
that "the Chance or rather Prospect of gaining an Independence is great,
and I go out with every Advantage I could wish for." 73

Once in Bengal Bogle was soon using his company posi on to trade in oil
and rice in the markets between Patna and Calcu a. 74 When he was
appointed collector at Rangpur in northern Bengal in 1779 Bogle's
prospects became even brighter because he was now able to drain off
his cut from the revenue-raising system run by the company. His
appointment to Rangpur made eminent sense in terms of the ongoing
efforts to open trade between Bengal and Tibet—Bogle had played a
major role in that endeavor and he might be able to advance the cause
from Rangpur. The pos ng also enabled Bogle to engage more fully in
trade on his own behalf. In addi on to its strategic si ng for cross-
border trade into Bhutan and Tibet, the district itself had a popula on
of about 720,000. 75 The impact on Bogle's earning power was
immediate. His le ers were full of renewed energy, and the remi ances
to Scotland rose substan ally. There is an unsigned note in the Bogle
papers in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow dated "Bengal 21 Novr. 1779"
that marked the new possibili es: "Mr, George Bogle is appointed
Resident and Collector of the province of Rangpoor, about 6 or 700
miles from this near the Borders of Bhutan and Thibet. His Appointment
is a very good one and it is thought he may make a fortune in a few
years." 76 In January 1780 Bogle reported the good news to his father. "I
was appointed to this Province which is bounded on the north by the
Bootan Mountains, and is not less agreeable to me on that Account." 77
Two weeks later he explained to his brother Robin that he was not sorry
to have quit Calcu a. He was delighted to be back in the north, near the
Bhutanese hills "which you know is my Hobby Horse...I have Schemes
and Projects for introducing new Ar cles of Commerce through their
Country, and of Perfec ng what has already cost me so much Trouble."
78 In March 1780 he summed up his promising new circumstances: "The
situa on that I have at present is as good as I had any Reason to
expect." 79

As early as August 1780 Bogle was able to send a remi ance of £1,000
back to Scotland. He told Robin that he would send another £1,500
before the year was out, and, in a turn of phrase that revealed his deep
commitment to this family project, he added that "the money that I
have sent home to save Daldowie is sacred to that Purpose." 80 These
large amounts eventually met the debt burden on the family estate.
Bogle's father wrote gratefully from Daldowie, thanking his son for the
"substan al favour you lay me under in your Clearing off the debt
affec ng my Estate of Daldowie by which it may be con nued in the
family." 81 His father an cipated that such rapid moneymaking at
Rangpur would enable Bogle to return home sooner than expected. He
was pleased, and he told his son, "to find you sa sfied with your
residentship at Ranpoor and hope the Climate will agree with your
Cons tu on, and answer in its being a Lucra ve Situa on which may
shorten your remaining at so great a Distance from your friends and
many worthy rela ons." 82 So for Bogle, as for many Scots in the
eighteenth century, a career in India was a way to make money to build
or recoup family and personal fortunes. 83

Bogle also did not hesitate to use force on behalf of the company's
trading and revenue ac vi es in India. One of his first tasks a er being
appointed to Rangpur was to carry out orders from the Council in
Calcu a to use company troops to imprison tardy taxpayers. He was
ordered "to carry into Execu on our general Orders of 14 October 1777
for the Confinement of Zamindars as shall fail to pay their monthly kists
a er the Expira on of fi een days of the ensuing Month; and if a er
that term they shall s ll remain in arrears, you will keep them in
Confinement un l they have paid the Arrears." 84

Throughout his career in Bengal Bogle was a en ve to the use of

military power to extend the company's reach. When he entered the
first pass at Buxaduar that led from the Bengal plains into the Bhutan hill
country, he cast an appraising eye of the Bhutanese defense works at
this strategic point. He knew about the victories of the company armies
at Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764, which had led to the take-over in
Bengal. He was a member of the Calcu a mili a and took part in
military drills on the maidan in front of Fort William. He also knew that
his mission to Tibet had been prompted in part by the closing of the
Nepal trade routes to Tibet because of the recent Gurkha conquest of
the Kathmandu Valley. And of course the immediate cause of the
mission to Tibet had been the Bhutanese incursion into Cooch Behar.
Bogle understood that armies and wars shaped the company's fortunes
in India. During his stay at Tashichodzong in Bhutan on his way to Tibet
he set down a series of observa ons on military op ons available to the
company in these India-Tibet borderlands.
Military considera ons had entered his mind as soon as he crossed the
northern border of Bengal. Toiling up the mountain trail, with a
Bhutanese fort at the height of the pass, he began to no ce features
from a soldier's perspec ve. "The Ascent was at first easy, the way
through a wood with some fine groves of first-rate trees," he noted in
his journal. "It grew steep, a narrow path zigzagging up the hill. What a
road for troops!" 85 Bogle actually thought that he was being led by his
Bhutanese guides on a high-level circuitous route as a deliberate
a empt to conceal from him an easier valley road and so make him
think (and report) that the company could not possibly send troops into
Bhutan. If this was the case, the Bhutanese were correct in an cipa ng
that Bogle would indeed be interested in scou ng out poten al invasion
routes.

In his journals he described the difficult terrain at the foot of the hills
that the company troops had operated in as they forced the Bhutanese
out of Cooch Behar. "The scene of our military opera ons against the
Bhutanese," he reminded his superiors, [was] almost impenetrable
jungles" that led to debilita ng disease for the troops in such "low and
unhealthy country." In view of these condi ons, Bogle advised that if
the Bhutanese were to be engaged again, the company army should go
on the offensive and take the campaign into the hills. "For these
reasons, ac ng offensively is to be preferred. There are two ways this
may be done; either by penetra ng into their country at once, or else by
seizing and garrisoning the passes at Chichako a, Buxaduar and
Repuduar; for although they reckon eighteen passes, these are the
principal ones." 86 Bogle had already noted that the fron er post at
Buxaduar was picturesque but in poor condi on for defending the pass
—"a 3 feet wall of loose stones about it; a fine old banyan tree; that's
all." 87
In the final analysis, however, Bogle argued that such an "expedi on
into Bhutan" would not serve the company's interests. He reasoned that
the present strategic situa on—"possession of [Cooch] Behar and quiet
from the Bhutanese"—was the best the company could hope for. An
a empted conquest of Bhutan would drag the company into a long
series of costly campaigns in tortuous mountain terrain. "A emp ng it
[the takeover of Bhutan] by force will never answer. The difficul es are
insurmountable, at least without a force and expense much greater than
the object is worth." He hastened to add that it was not the military
capacity of the Bhutanese that was the issue but the nature of the
country. "This does not arise from the power of the Bhutanese. Two
ba alions, I think, would reduce their country, but two brigades would
not keep the communica ons open, and if that is cut off the conquest
could be of no use." 88

Bogle broadened his commentary on company military op ons in these

northern borderlands to include Nepal and Tibet. "The objec ons I have
made against an expedi on into Bhutan hold good with respect to Nepal
and Lhasa," he con nued, "for this sole reason, that communica on
cannot be kept open, and should our troops march into these countries,
they must consider all communica on with the low country out of the
ques on un l they return." The company strategy should be to mount
quick, puni ve strikes to force treaty nego a ons. "I am no advocate for
an expedi on into these countries unless the people should commence
hos li es, and then it should be done only with a view to reduce them
to peace on such terms as should appear reasonable and advantageous
to the Company; and this would be easily effected by ac ng vigorously
for one season." 89

His thinking on the rela onship between trade, territorial expansion,

and military power was even more explicit in his commentary on
Bengal's neighbor to the northeast. The state of Assam, with a
popula on of about 2.5 million people, also bordered Bhutan, and ran
along the Brahmaputra valley to the east of Cooch Behar up to the hills
of Burma (Myanmar). The crucial contrast with Bhutan was that in the
case of Assam, river communica ons could be kept open. Bogle
proceeded to describe this temp ng case for expansion. "Assam itself is
an open country of great extent, and by all accounts well-cul vated and
inhabited; the road into it either by land or the Brahmaputra lies open.
The communica on can always be preserved." Assam was also a
worthwhile economic target. The country "yields many valuable ar cles
for exporta on—including gold, and teak mber of great size." The
poten al value of the trade involved, and the agricultural richness of the
main river valley, would ensure that "in a few months a er our entering
Assam, the troops might be paid and provisioned without making any
demands on the Company's treasury." Bogle advocated conquest in this
case: "The advantages of a river navigable the whole year, whether
considered with regard to commerce or war, are obvious, as the great
objec on to our entering Nepal etc. arises from the difficulty of keeping
open the communica ons; so, on the other hand, the easy access to
Assam, whether by land or water, invites us to the a empt." 90

These "Sugges ons Respec ng Bhutan and Assam" reveal Bogle in full
imperial mode. In spite of his misgivings about the behavior of some
company servants, and his privately expressed disapproval of the
company's earlier record in Bengal, he was quite prepared to see its
troops invade Assam to extend its trade—and territorial control—in that
part of India. Even though he argued against the same treatment for
Bhutan, it was only because of the difficulty of the terrain. Our
Enlightenment man Bogle advocated military conquest if it could be
easily accomplished.

In expressing such views, Bogle was clearly looking at the world through
imperial eyes. He assumed that Britain, through the company, had every
right to use its military power to extend its territory and trade on the
subcon nent. His imperial outlook also came through in his descrip ons
of Indians. There is a sharp difference between Bogle's tolerant views of
Tibetans and his cri cal views of Indians. As we have seen, Bogle was
inquisi ve and open-minded in his responses to the people and scenes
he encountered in Tibet. On Indians he was dis nctly dismissive. While
he was in Shigatse he had crossed paths with the representa ve of Chait
Singh, the Rajah of Benares, who had dared (Bogle thought) to make
some cri cisms of the company's aggressive, expansionist tendencies in
the Ganges valley. Bogle reprimanded the agent and reported, with
evident contempt, back to Calcu a that the representa ve's speech was
"concluded with the rote of Hindustanis, that I was his master, a great
man etc." 91

There are other such examples of stereotyping generaliza ons about

Indian people in Bogle's correspondence. He even offers an early
example of what became in the 1800s the conven onal Bri sh
representa on of the weak Bengali. The flat country of Bengal, cut
through with creeks and rivers, combined with the hot weather, meant
that "the na ves of Bengal, weak and thin-skinned, are ill suited to bear
fa gue or cold." 92 While he spoke respec ully of the lamas he met in
Bhutan and Tibet, Bogle had no pa ence with the Hindu holy men he
encountered on his travels. "The Gentoo [Hindu] fakirs, as far as I can
judge, are in general a very worthless set of people, devoid of principle,
and being separated by their profession from all those es of kindred
and family which serve to bind the rest of mankind, they have no object
but their own interest, and, covered with the cloak of religion, are
regardless of their caste, of their character, and of everything else which
is held sacred among the Hindus." 93

Bogle was not describing priests who tended Hindu temples but the
i nerant sanyassis who o en caused disturbances in the northern
Bengal countryside in the a ermath of the famine and the general
disrup on caused by the company's presence. Bogle chose language
that made a dis nc on between these wandering bands of sanyassis
and ordinary Hindu believers, and he was not being as prejudiced as this
remark appears to make him. A genuine sanyassi is a man who has
reached the stage of life when he frees himself from family and other
material a achments, to wander the land seeking final libera on for his
soul. But in the late 1700s as poli cal and economic instability took hold
in parts of northern India, the sanyassi phenomenon became
troublesome. Migrant bands of sanyassis o en in midated and robbed
villagers and traders. 94 An older genera on of scholars, wri ng in the
colonial period and using colonial construc ons, have used phrases such
as "sanyassi raiders" to describe the threatening nature of many of
these wandering communi es. 95 The sanyassi phenomenon was more
complex than the Bri sh allowed. Sugata Bose points out that in the
a ermath of the Bengal famine of 1770 "poverty stricken peasants
swelled the ranks" of these wandering bands, and that the targets
chosen were o en factories or revenue offices of the East India
Company in the Bengal countryside. 96 But even if the movement is
now be er understood, it remains true that large bands of wandering
asce cs did cause disturbances in se led communi es in the 1770s and
1780s. So Bogle and his Tibetan friends had some grounds for their
fearful views, and we noted earlier that Bogle paid homage to "the
humane maxims of the Hindus." Even with this cri que in front of us, it
is therefore worth observing that Bogle did not condemn Hinduism as a
general category. S ll, the intensity of the outburst conveys the
impa ence of an outsider with some of what he saw as excessive
manifesta ons of Hindu religiosity.

His impa ence with Bengalis also came through when he and his
servants were making their way across inhospitable terrain toward Guru
(the site of the massacre during the 1904 invasion).
We arrived at Tuna, our next stage, about three o'clock. Some of my
servants who walked were so red that they were brought home on
peasants' backs, as I had not been able to find horses for them all. I next
day got cow-tailed bullocks, but the Hindus would not ride on them
because if any accident should happen to the beast while they were on
him, they would be obliged, they said, according to the tenets of the
Shaster [Sastra or Shastra, Hindu sacred books, e.g., laws of Manu], to
beg their bread during twelve years as an expa a on for the crime.
Memo: inconvenient carrying Hindu servants into foreign parts. 97

These comments, revealing his frustra on with what he viewed as

Hindu stubbornness and a supers ous commitment to the literal
interpreta on of their holy texts, contrast with Bogle's depic on of
Tibetans as adaptable and willing to be skep cal. Padma, for example,
was opposed to hun ng on religious grounds but agreed that it would
be acceptable if Bogle hunted in areas out of sound and sight of
se lements and holy sites. Bogle also noted that the Panchen Lama
welcomed pilgrims from all over Central Asia, even Muslim ones, thus
demonstra ng that he "was free from those narrow prejudices which,
next to ambi on and avarice, have opened the most copious source of
human misery." 98 It is unfair to compare the exhausted Bengali
servants (who walked while Bogle rode across the barren Tibetan
highlands in the first cold of winter) with a highly trained theologian like
the Panchen Lama. But when put alongside Bogle's other observa ons,
this one too shows him in more judgmental mode with respect to
Bengalis than he was with Tibetans.

What accounts for this difference in Bogle's a tude toward Indians and
Tibetans? It may have had something to do with Bogle's Sco shness.
His mercan le lowland family had no fellow-feeling for the feudal
Highland clans when the clans were disturbing the stability of the
kingdom, but a er their defeat at Culloden in 1746 a tudes began to
change. The cruel harrying of the Highland clans by "Butcher"
Cumberland and government legisla on to suppress clan culture
created widespread sympathy. As the clans ceased to be a military
threat, a nostalgia for a disappearing way of life began to take hold. The
roman cizing of the Highland clans was already shaping public views in
the 1760s with such popular publica ons as James Macpherson's Ossian
(1765), two (invented) epic poems imagining a legendary age of Gaelic
heroes, accompanied by a learned commentary by Hugh Blair, professor
of rhetoric and belles-le res at the University of Edinburgh. Bogle died
before the full force of this sen mentalizing of the Sco sh Highlands
had taken hold in Bri sh culture, propelled by the pro-Jacobite poems of
Robert Burns in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and culmina ng in the
lyrical evoca on of a dying clan culture in the historical novels of Walter
Sco early in the 1800s, but the cultural transforma on was under way
in the 1760s and 1770s during his me in Edinburgh and London. While
he was in Bhutan, he drew a humorous but affec onate parallel
between Bhutanese and Sco sh Highlanders. In a le er to Anderson,
he suggested playfully that the le ers he had received from Bhutanese
correspondents might well contain "all that Lo iness and Sublimity of
Style used by Ossian, or any other hilly Writer." 99 Bogle was clearly
more sympathe c to the Bhutanese and Tibetan "highlanders" than he
was with the plains-dwelling Bengalis. When he was posted to Rangpur
in 1779, he wrote to his sister Anne about his pleasure in being near
mountain country again—"although not in the Bootan hills, I am within
sight of them." 100

But there was a broader cultural force at work than possible

sen mentality toward highland peoples. The difference can also be
understood in terms of power and empire. Stuart Schwartz has noted
that "many of the contacts between Europeans and other peoples were
forged in a context of unequal power and subordina on, but not all of
them." 101 Here we have a perfect illustra on of that observa on.
Bogle's views on Tibet were formed in a situa on in which the Bri sh
had very li le power; but in Bengal the East India Company by this me
did have power. Schwartz provides a powerful insight when he suggests
that there is a pa ern—where power was absent Europeans could use
cultural observa on "as a means of self-knowledge," but where power
was present cultural observa on could become "an element in imperial
strategy." 102

The growing presence of Bri sh power in India meant that Indians had
to respond. If they chose not to contest the Bri sh advance across India,
then they had to accommodate themselves to the authority of the
company if they wanted to trade with it, or work for it, or avoid its
imposi ons. It was an awareness of the company's powerful posi on
that explains why Chait Singh's vakil hastened to show deference and
respect to Bogle when they encountered each other at Tashilhunpo.
Whenever new writers arrived in Calcu a they were besieged by
suppliant Bengalis anxious to be their translators or commercial agents
or general factotums. 103 The company men could do no business
without the help of such intermediaries, but when they spoke of these
essen al men it was usually in language that kept them in their
subordinate places. For example, Bogle explained to Anderson in April
1772 that he could not get hold of some bonds because his servants
were not available. "I shall look out for a Company Bond for you as you
men on," Bogle explained to Anderson. "We have the Gentoo fes vals
at present on our Hands, and none of my Black Geniuses are about."
104

Bogle and Anderson depended on their Indian banians to conduct their

business. For their part though, the Indian men with such exper se had
to plead for employment. The balance of power in the colonial se ng
led to this type of rela onship. In the daily bilateral exchanges that took
place under these condi ons, the company servants interpreted the
ingra a ng behaviors as an inherent characteris c of Indian people,
exemplified by Bogle's comment that Chait Singh's representa ve
behaved with "the rote of Hindustanis." Bogle judged [End Page 488]
such outwardly servile demeanor to be the product of Indian culture
rather than the expedient response to a newly threatening colonial
intrusion. The way in which Bogle used the term "Gentoo" for Hindus is
also revealing. The word was derived from the Portuguese "gen o"
(gen le) meaning "heathen" or "infidel." Bogle did not think twice about
such a word because it had become common usage among Europeans
in India. His language and outlook were shaped by the European
imperial presence in India.

Tibet was untouched by Bri sh power, and Bogle thought it would

remain untouched—if for no other reason than its geographical
inaccessibility. He also thought it would be too difficult to take over
Nepal or Bhutan. In those three cases he saw li le likelihood of the
Bri sh exercising power. When he did see such possibili es, as in Assam,
he did not hesitate to recommend military conquest. In Bengal the
company was already exercising power. When the company was in a
posi on of power over local popula ons, Bogle's a tude was less
sympathe c than when power was absent (thus confirming Stuart
Schwartz's seminal observa on).

What does this 1774 encounter tell us about the European

Enlightenment and its rela onship to imperialism? Case studies like this
cannot provide final answers but they can illuminate the issues at stake.
Bogle's contras ng responses to Tibet and India suggest that a complete
spectrum of possibili es lay within Enlightenment thinking. His
Enlightenment thinking enabled him to treat Tibetan culture as equally
valid as Bri sh culture (and even as superior in some respects) but that
same mode of thinking also led him to denigrate Bengalis and other
Indians as inept na ves who deserved to be under "modern" East India
Company rule. The Enlightenment did contribute to imperialism
because some of its proposi ons were used to jus fy state violence in
the name of progress, as we can see with Bogle's ra onal military
recommenda ons with respect to Assam. But Enlightenment thinking
could also lead to cri ques of empire. As Jennifer Pi s has observed,
"While Europeans in the late eighteenth century undoubtedly were
becoming increasingly secure in their sense of superiority—intellectual,
moral, poli cal, economic, and technological—over the rest of the
world, we find among a number of eighteenth century thinkers a
con nued sense of fragility about their civiliza on's achievements,
persistent doubts about the jus ce of European poli cal and social
orders, and respect for the achievements and ra onality of other
socie es." 105 We can see these paradoxical intellectual orienta ons in
Bogle's respect for Tibet and his disdain for India. They were opposing
impulses, but they lay alongside each other in Bogle's mental map of the
world. So this case study suggests that the Enlightenment contained
opposites within itself—in much the same way as Hindu and Buddhist
cultures see opposites in their gods and buddhas.

Since this case study is situated in Tibet and has touched on Buddhist
enlightenment too, it is illumina ng to end with an Asian perspec ve.
Buddhism too has been implicated in imperialism. A rich example was
Tibet itself. Tibet had its own moment of imperial expansion when it
sent conquering armies into western China and Central Asia in the
eighth and ninth centuries (and, as we have noted, Tibetan forces were
s ll harrying northern Bhutan in the early eighteenth century). 106 "The
assump on that Buddhism and imperium might be incompa ble is one
that would not have occurred to these Buddhists," notes Ma hew
Kapstein, "and, indeed, it is one that few serious students of Buddhist
history would countenance today." 107 The Tibetans "converted to
Buddhism in the very process of their warlike ac vi es." 108 As Hugh
Richardson has drily observed, "the outburst of religion with the
building of monasteries, the ordina on of monks and the transla on of
religious texts, did nothing to abate the military ardour of the Tibetans.
Their armies were steadily conquering a wide expanse of Chinese
territory in the northeast right up to and including the fortress ci es of
the Silk Road, and well into the border provinces of China itself. There
they established a well-organized, efficient colonial government with
administra ve centres in strategic places complete with a large
hierarchy of military and civil officials including some local Chinese." 109
An early form of Tibetan Buddhism came in the wake of those conquests
and formed the "dominant high culture of northern Eurasia" for the
ensuing millennium, as the ancient Tibetan manuscripts in the
Dunhuang caves s ll tes fy to this day. 110 Ma hew Kapstein points out
that in this Tibetan empire "religion became a means for the
representa on of poli cal difference." 111

The point here is not to equate Tibetan imperialism in the eighth and
ninth centuries with Bri sh imperialism in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries but simply, in the spirit of compara ve specula on
that world history encourages, to open up large ques ons about
empires in general. It would surely be reduc onist to conclude from this
Tibetan history that Buddhism led to imperialism. A more reasonable
conclusion is that people shaped by a par cular culture will use aspects
of that culture to jus fy their seizing of territory, their expansion of
trade, and their claims of superiority. The commentaries provided by
Alex McKay in his History of Tibet volumes help us work our way through
to an understanding of the dynamics behind these Asian examples
where religion was inextricably intertwined with imperialism:

It is characteris c of these developed Asian forms of religio-poli cal

theory that they were explicitly expansionist to an unlimited degree...
Tibetan understandings of their polity as a divine realm, and Chinese
understandings of the emperor as the centre of the world were not
bounded by the fixed borders of the European na on state concept.
Rather they allowed for the en re world to be envisaged as within a
poten al sphere of control, whether in secular or divine guise. In this
sense they may be be er equated to Western doctrines such as
imperialism and even Chris anity than those of na onalism and the
na on state. These elite expansionist ideologies—Asian and European—
shared an implicit aspect: they embodied and jus fied state violence.
112

In similar ways to these Asian examples where religion was used to

legi mize expansion, Europeans used the Enlightenment to jus fy their
colonial projects round the world. That does not mean the
Enlightenment was the taproot of European imperialism any more than
Buddhism was the taproot of Tibetan imperialism, but simply that some
of the tenets of the Enlightenment provided ideological legi macy
during par cular phases of expansion. To reach the core of the
conceptual issue at stake here, it is useful to borrow the no on of the
primordial Buddha and apply that mode of thinking to empires. There is
a primordial empire, as it were, that informs all of world history. Since
the earliest period of recorded history humans have forged empires. The
forces that create empires have been broadly similar in all epochs.
Empires have been driven by the human desire for riches, the lure of
new territory, the instability of borders, the pressures of climate change,
the en cement to deploy stronger military power, the belief that your
own culture is superior to others, and the longing to achieve some sort
of las ng place in history.

Buddhism and the Enlightenment have both been adapted for imperial
purposes, but those adapta ons can be separated from their basic
epistemologies. The fundamental principle of Buddhism, that the
material world is an illusion that obscures the ul mate spiritual nature
of existence, was not destroyed because some regimes have used
Buddhism to jus fy their very real empires. A fundamental feature of
the Enlightenment, that fairly reliable knowledge about the natural and
human worlds can be gained through deployment of evidence and
reason, was not destroyed because the Enlightenment was used to
jus fy empire. In this context it is worth bearing in mind the observa on
made by Dipesh Chakrabarty at the end of his case that we need to
remove Europe from its domina ng place in world history.
"Provincializing Europe," he warns, "cannot ever be a project for
shunning European thought. For at the end of European imperialism,
European thought is a gi to us all." So too, we might add, is Tibetan.
113

One of the most frui ul approaches in world history is to examine

encounters between peoples and cultures. This case study of the first
formal contact between Tibet and Britain shows the rich possibili es in
moments of encounter. It enables us to open up big ques ons about the
paradoxical nature of cultural interac ons, about the nature of empires
and their jus ficatory ideologies, and about mutual mispercep ons
between East and West. One lesson to be drawn is that simplis c
interpreta ons, whether of Buddhism or the Enlightenment, are always
unhelpful. The Enlightenment did forward the cause of European
imperialism, but its ways of thinking could also be an the cal to
imperialism. Those opposite characteris cs were both present in Bogle's
commentaries on Tibet and India. The second lesson from this case
study is about the poten al of world history to li our sights. The
strange mee ng between the Panchen Lama and George Bogle was a
flee ng episode in world history, but it showed that mutual respect and
understanding across u erly different cultures could take place. The
convivial 1774 encounter at Tashilhunpo monastery between the
Sco sh and Tibetan enlightenments was a moment of grace in world
history.

Footnotes
1. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of
Edward Gibbon 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 138. Karen O'Brien, Narra ves of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan
History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997) provides an insigh ul and readable account of how world history
was approached by Enlightenment era writers.

2. Shelley Walia, Edward Said and the Wri ng of History (Duxford,

Cambridge: Ion Books, 2001), p. 36.

3. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 258; Jennifer Pi s, A Turn to
Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 1. Karen O'Brien, "The Return
of the Enlightenment," American Historical Review 115 (December
2010): 1426-1435.

4. Phillip Wigham, "Buddhism," in The Berkshire Encyclopedia of World

History, vol. 1, ed. William McNeill (Great Barrington, Mass.: Berkshire
Publishing Group), p. 267.

5. Le er from the Panchen Lama to Warren Has ngs (received in

Calcu a 29 March 1774), in Alastair Lamb, ed., Bhutan and Tibet: The
Travels of George Bogle and Alexander Hamilton 1774-1777, vol. 1,
Bogle and Hamilton Le ers, Journals and Memoranda (Roxford Books,
2002), pp. 37-38 (herea er cited as Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet).

6. Gray Tu le, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 19-21 describes the role of
Tibetan intermediaries at the Qingcourt; Hugh Richardson, Tibet: Its
History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp.43-60 sketches out
the growth of Chinese influence in Lhasa in these middle decades of the
eighteenth century; see too Laurent Deshayes, Histoire du Tibet (Paris:
Fayard, 1997), pp. 165-188.
7. Nirmala Das, The Dragon Country: The General History of Bhutan
(Calcu a: Orient Longman, 1974), p. 1.

8. Panchen Lama to Warren Has ngs [29 March 1774], in Lamb, Bhutan
and Tibet, pp. 37-38.

9. Ibid., p. 37.

10. Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen
Lama and the First Bri sh Expedi on to Tibet (London: Bloomsbury,
2006).

11. Fosco Maraini, Secret Tibet (1951; London: Harvill Press, 1998), pp.
398-399; Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, pp. 38, 39. Giovanni Tucci, The
Religions of Tibet (London, 1980), p. 42.

12. Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and

the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

13. Edwin Bernbaum, The Way to Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical
Kingdom beyond the Himalayas (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1980),
p. 182.

14. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, p. 182.

15. Bernbaum, Way to Shambhala, p. 157.

16. Ibid., pp. 159, 161.

17. Ibid.

18. Teltscher, High Road to China, p. 140.

19. Bogle's Journal, Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama at Tashilhunpo,
December 1774- April 1775, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 268.

20. Albert Grunwedel, "Der Weg nach Shambhala des dri en Gross-
Lama von bKra sis lhun p bzan dPal Idan Yeses, aus dem be schen
Original ubersetzt und mit dem Texte herausgegeben," in Abhandlungen
der Koniglich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenscha en, Philosophisch-
philologische und historische Klasse 29 (Munich, 1915), p. 5 (herea er
cited as Grunwedel, Der Weg nach Shambhala).

21. Ibid., p. 44.

22. Ibid., pp. 44, 45.

23. Gordon T. Stewart, Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism,

and the Bri sh Encounter with Tibet 1774-1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), pp. 34-35.

24. David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and

Their Tibetan Successors (London: Shambhala, 1987), p. 264. Vesna
Wallace, The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the
Individual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.

25. Wallace, Inner Kalacakratantra, p. 31.

26. Ibid., p. 206.

27. Bernbaum, Way to Shambhala, p. 127.

28. Ibid., p. 122.

29. Wallace, Inner Kalacakratantra, p. 56.

30. Stewart, Journeys to Empire, pp. 18-19, 54-57.

31. Encyclopedia Britannica or A Dic onary of Arts and Sciences

Compiled upon a New Plan (Edinburgh, 1771) 1:582-560, 627-653.

32. Account Sales of the following Effects belonging to the Estate of the
late George Bogle Esq. deceased, sold at public auc on the 18th. 19th.
and 20th September last by orders of Claud Alexander and David
Anderson Esq. The Administrators, Bogle Papers, Folder: George Bogle
[marked 9], Mitchell Library.

33. Stewart, Journeys to Empire, pp. 15-21, 28-34, 54-57, 191-196.

34. Bogle's Journals, October-November 1774, The Journey to Tibet,

Pharidzong to Dechenrubje, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, pp. 145, 146.

35. Bogle's Journals, November 1774-December 1774, Dechenrubje and

the return to Tashilhunpo, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 150.

36. Ibid., p. 151.

37. Bogle's Memorandum on Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama,

November 1774, Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 215. The term "Fringies"
for Europeans (and hence "Fringistan" for Europe) had come through
Arabic and Persian words for "Franks," a convenient omnibus term for
the French and other Europeans who had come to East Asia as soldiers
and traders during the Crusades.

38. Bogle's Memorandum on Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama,

November 1774, Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 215.

39. Ibid., p. 143.

40. Bogle's Journals, An Account of Tibet, Dechenrubje, December

1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 167.

41. Ibid.

42. William Robertson, The History of Scotland, with an introduc on by

Nicholas Phillipson (1759; Edinburgh: Routledge, 1996), p. xli.

43. Bogle's Journals, Tashichodzong, July 1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and

Tibet, p. 73; Stewart, Journeys to Empire, p. 42.

44. Robertson, History of Scotland, p. liii.

45. Bogle's Journals, Tashichodzong, July 1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and
Tibet, pp. 72-73; Stewart, Journeys to Empire, p. 40.

46. George Bogle (father) to Bogle, Daldowie, 19 February 1776, Bogle

Papers, Box:1770-1781 and Estate Lists [marked 48], folder 3, Mitchell
Library.

47. George Bogle (father) to Bogle, Daldowie, 21 January 1771, Bogle

Papers, Box: India and Tibet [marked 37], folder 3, Mitchell Library.

48. George Bogle (father) to Bogle, Daldowie, 19 September 1761, Bogle

Papers, Box:India and Tibet, Folder George Bogle 1762-1769 [marked
45], Mitchell Library.

49. George Bogle (father) to Bogle, Daldowie, 16 April 1771, Bogle

Papers, Folder:Bogle 1771 [marked 120], Mitchell Library.

50. George Bogle (father) to Bogle, Daldowie, 23 November 1776, Bogle

Papers, Folder:George Bogle 1776 [marked 48], Mitchell Library.

51. Greg Dening, "The Theatricality of Observing and being Observed.

Eighteenth Century Europe discovers the Pacific," in Implicit
Understandings: Observing, Repor ng and Reflec ng on the Encounters
between Europeans and other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Stuart
Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 451-483,
and Schwartz's comments (ibid., p. 17) summarizing the arguments of
Dening and other scholars.

52. Warren Has ngs to George Bogle, Fort William, 8 September 1774,
Warren Has ngs Papers, Add. 29117, f.63, Bri sh Library.

53. Stewart, Journeys to Empire, pp. 154-163, 208-211, 220-231.

54. Bogle's Journal, At Dechenrubje and the Return to Tashilhunpo,

November 1774-December 1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 154.
55. Stewart, Journeys to Empire, p. 31.

56. Trent Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's
Mission to Eighteenth Century Tibet (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), p. 196. Other scholars, such as Donald Lopez, have cri cized
Desideri for being one of "the first perpetuators of the 'myth of Tibet' in
the West." For a brief discussion of Desideri's reputa on and impact see
ibid., p. 5.

57. Luciano Petech, "The Missions of Bogle and Turner according to the
Tibetan Texts," T'oung pao 39 (1950): 331.

58. Ibid., pp. 340-342.

59. Ibid., p. 344.

60. Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo

Lama (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1800), p. 339.

61. Bogle's Remarks on His Mission to Bhutan and Tibet [Calcu a 1774,
made when submi ng his accounts to the Council], Has ngs Collec on,
Add. 29233, f.388, BL.

62. Bogle's Memorandum on Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama, in

Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 211.

63. Bogle's Journal, Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama at Tashilhunpo,
December 1774-April 1775, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 268.

64. Bogle's Journal, At Dechenrubje and the Return to Tashilhunpo,

November 1774-December 1775, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 154.

65. Le er from the Tashi Lama to Warren Has ngs (received in Calcu a
29 March 1774), in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 38.

66. Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 123 n. 13.

67. Michael Aris, The Raven Crown: The Origins of the Buddhist
Monarchy of Bhutan (London: Serindia Publica ons, 1994), p. 31.

68. Das, Dragon Country, p. 19.

69. John Brown to David Anderson, Edinburgh, 6 July 1769, Anderson

Papers, Add.45429, f.18, BL.

70. P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The Bri sh in Bengal in the

Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 216.

71. Ibid., p. 215.

72. George Bogle to his father, London, 1 December 1769, Bogle Papers,
Folder George Bogle 1762-1769 [marked 45], Mitchell Library.

73. Ibid.

74. Stewart, Journeys to Empire, pp. 108-116.

75. E. G. Glazier, Officia ng Magistrate and Collector Rungpore, Further

Notes on the Rungpore Records (Calcu a, 1876), 2:41, BL.

76. "Mr George Bogle is Appointed Resident and Collector of the

Province of Rangpoor about 6 or 700 Miles from this Near the borders
of Bhoutan and Thibet," Bengal, 21 November 1779, Bogle Papers,
Folder George Bogle 1779 [marked 30], Mitchell Library.

77. George Bogle to his father, Rungpoor, 2 January 1780, Bogle Papers,
Folder George Bogle 1780-1781 [marked 54], Mitchell Library.

78. George Bogle to Robin Bogle, Rungpoor, 17 January 1780, ibid.

79. George Bogle to Robin Bogle, Rungpoor, 1 March 1780, ibid.

80. George Bogle to Robin Bogle, Rungpoor, 4 August 1780, ibid.

81. George Bogle (Father) to George Bogle, Daldowie, 5 September
1780, ibid.

82. George Bogle (Father) to George Bogle, Daldowie, 8 September

1780, ibid.

83. Alex M. Cain, The Cornchest for Scotland: Scots in India (Edinburgh:
Na onal Library of Scotland, 1986).

84. W. K. Firminger, ed., Bengal District Records: Rangpur, vol. 2, 1779-

1782 (Calcu a, 1914), p. 12, Bri sh Library.

85. Bogle's Journals, From Cooch Behar to Tashichodzong, May-August

1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 61.

86. Bogle's Sugges ons respec ng Bhutan and Assam (wri en before
his arrival in Tibet), in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 106.

87. Bogle's Journals, From Cooch Behar to Tashichodzong, May-August

1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 61.

88. Bogle's Sugges ons respec ng Bhutan and Assam, in Lamb, Bhutan
and Tibet, p. 107.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid., pp. 108-109.

91. Bogle's Memorandum on Nego a ons with the Tashi Lama, in

Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 217.

92. Bogle's Journal, From Cooch Behar to Tashichodzong, May-August

1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 63.

93. Bogle's Journal, At Dechenrubje and the Return to Tashilhunpo,

November 1774-December 1775, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 154.
94. P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The Bri sh Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740-
1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 96.

95. J. M. Ghosh, Sanyassi and Fakir Raiders in Bengal (Calcu a, 1930).

96. Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal
since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 144.

97. Bogle's Journal, Tashichodzong to Dechenrubje, October-November

1774, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 141.

98. Bogle's Journal, At Dechenrubje and the Return to Tashilhunpo,

November 1774-December 1775, in Lamb, Bhutan and Tibet, p. 154.

99. George Bogle to David Anderson, 20 June 1774, Anderson Papers,

Add. 45421, f.30, BL.

100. George Bogle to Anne Bogle, Rungpoor, 22 November 1779, Bogle

Papers, Folder George Bogle 1779 [marked 30], Mitchell Library.

101. Stuart Schwartz, Implicit Understandings: Observing, Repor ng

and Reflec ng on Encounters between Europeans and other Peoples in
the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.
6.

102. Ibid., p. 7.

103. Marshall, Bengal: The Bri sh Bridgehead, pp. 100, 101.

104. George Bogle to David Anderson, Calcu a, 11 April 1772, Anderson

Papers, Add. 45421, f.14, BL.

105. Pi s, A Turn to Empire, pp. 1, 3, 14.

106. Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A

History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs,
and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1987); Deshayes, Histoire du Tibet, pp. 49-76.

107. Ma hew Kapstein, "Plague, Power and Reason: The Royal

Conversion to Buddhism Reconsidered" in The History of Tibet, 3 vols.,
ed. Alex McKay (London: Routledge and Curzon, 2003), 1:403.

108. Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, p. 328.

109. Hugh Richardson, "Poli cal Aspects of the Snga-Dar, the first
Diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet" in McKay, History of Tibet, 1:302.

110. McKay, History of Tibet, 1:25.

111. Kapstein, "Plague, Power and Reason," in McKay, History of Tibet,

1:403.

112. McKay, History of Tibet, 1:18.

113. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought

and Historical Difference (2002; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2008), p. 255
A Victorian Ecological Disaster:
Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-
Percha

John Tully

Victoria University, Melbourne

Abstract

Un l the inven on of the electric telegraph, messages sent across the

vast colonial empires of the nineteenth century took many months to
arrive. By 1907, some 200,000 nau cal miles of cable criss-crossed the
ocean floors. Insula on of the cables from seawater relied on gu a-
percha, a natural plas c related to rubber. Gu a-percha is all but
forgo en today, but during the Victorian era it was a household word.
Ironically, the high-tech Victorian telegraph industry was served by a
primi ve co age industry. The gum was extracted by killing wild trees in
the forests of Southeast Asia, and the scale of demand ensured that
many millions of trees were destroyed. This industry brought about a
Victorian ecological disaster that presaged the greater destruc on of
tropical rain forests occurring today.

The poli cal unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther
than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condi on of its
regenera on. That unity, imposed by the Bri sh sword, will now be
strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.

—Karl Marx, 1853 1

When in Singapore my heart has o en ached when I have fallen across

clearings for pepper, gambier, and the like, to see with what
recklessness mighty monarchs of the forest are cut, or as a rule, burnt
down in all direc ons, the unused ro ng on the ground. Thus a fair spot
cos ng nature centuries to fill with her handiwork looks like a charnel
house.

— James Collins, 1878 2

The nineteenth century saw the crea on of the largest empires the
world has ever seen, and the first on a global scale. Between them, a
handful of European powers—joined later by the United States and
Japan—carved up much of the globe into direct colonies and spheres of
influence. The carve-up was accomplished by the sword—or the threat
of it—but as Marx realized, it was consolidated by other means. If, as
the old adage insists, “necessity is the mother of inven on,” then the
administra on and economic exploita on of such sprawling domains
begged the crea on of new communica ons technology to bind them
efficiently together. It could take over six months by ship for messages
to reach the imperial capital from the colonies. The problem was solved
by the inven on of the electric telegraph, which could put the least
significant Bri sh, Belgian, German, or French colonial outpost into
almost instantaneous contact with Whitehall, the rue de Brederode, the
Reichskolonialamt, or the Quai d’Orsay. The crea on of the telegraph
network—later superseded by the wireless—was a huge industrial
undertaking and involved the manufacture and installa on of hundreds
of thousands of miles of cable, much of it laid across the deep ocean
beds. The key to the success of the new system was a natural plas c,
gu a-percha (almost forgo en today), which proved indispensable as
insula on for the submarine cables. However, as this ar cle will show,
the “gum” was obtained by profligate, inefficient, and ul mately
unsustainable methods of extrac on, which killed the trees in the
process. The imperial authori es and the telegraph companies gave
li le thought to the future of a precious finite resource: it was merely
one more tropical commodity to be ruthlessly exploited. So great was
the demand for the gum that the wild trees that provided it were almost
ex nct by the late nineteenth century, causing a flu er of panic in an
industry that had taken it for granted. This ecological disaster
adumbrated the galloping destruc on of tropical rainforests so
depressingly familiar to us today.

For most of human history, the speed of communica on was largely

restricted to the pace of physical transporta on. This had important
social, poli cal, and economic implica ons, for although imperial armies
were able to conquer surprisingly vast areas of land rela vely quickly,
maintaining the unity of empires against centrifugal forces was a
constant ba le: the barbarians lurked constantly, if not at the gates,
then at the outskirts of the realm. Communica ons were necessarily
slow. Should an enemy threaten to breach the outer defenses or a
subjugated people rise in revolt, the news might take weeks, months, or
even years to percolate back to the imperial capital. Put simply, the
“tyranny of distance” was a constant threat to the integrity of empires:
an addi onal “stretch” to the economic problems postulated by Paul
Kennedy. 3 It was only during the era of “high imperialism” of the
nineteenth century that the nexus between communica on and physical
transport was broken, above all by the development of the electric
telegraph, a quantum leap that put the imperial metropolis into almost
direct, “real me” communica on with the remotest outposts of
empire.

Un l the nineteenth century, messages traveled with o en excrucia ng

slowness. A fleet-footed messenger might cover ten miles in an hour,
depending on the terrain and weather, and a horse might reach speeds
of more than thirty miles an hour or more for short distances. In the
eighteenth century, it took the best part of a whole summer’s day on
level, dry terrain to deliver a message one hundred miles on horseback
— and that by relay. Sea transport, which depended on the vagaries of
the wind or on the muscles of galley slaves, was notoriously slow in
speed, lucky to achieve four or five knots. As children once chanted in
school, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” but we tend to
forget that it took his li le fleet 97 days to sail from Cadiz to Hispaniola.
By the eighteenth century it took 32 days to cross the ocean between
London and New York. The First Fleet to Australia le England on 13
May 1787 and arrived at Botany Bay on 18 January of the following year.
The new colonists who huddled on the alien Australian coast would
have learned of the fall of the Bas lle nine months a er it occurred, at
the earliest. By the nineteenth century, a fast clipper ship took around
100 days to sail via the Cape of Good Hope from London to Hong Kong.
The passage from New York to Rio de Janeiro took 55 days, and a voyage
to San Francisco took 187 days on average. Times were cut a er
Lieutenant Ma hew Maury of the U.S. Navy published his ocean wind
and de charts, but the la er two voyages s ll took 23 and 136 days,
respec vely. 4 Even today, a fast ocean liner takes 5 days to steam
between London and New York; clearly the modern economy could not
func on if it depended on shipping for the transmission of informa on.

The crea on and maintenance of the sprawling empires of the European

powers from the late eighteenth century was a spur to revolu onary
improvements in communica ons technology. Governments needed to
stay in contact with the colonies for poli cal and military purposes—the
Dutch government could not know of the need to send reinforcements
to Java to suppress the Dipanegara revolt for many months a er it broke
out in 1825, for example, and this contributed to the protracted nature
of the Java War. In contrast, during the Acehnese revolts on Sumatra at
the end of the century, Dutch military commanders had the advantage
of swi communica ons with Batavia and The Hague. An quated
communica ons systems too were a barrier to the expansion of the
burgeoning industrial economies of northwest Europe. “The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe,” observed Marx and Engels in
1848. “It must nestle everywhere, se le everywhere, establish
connec ons everywhere.” 5 With the crea on of an increasingly
integrated world market in what some may see as an earlier phase of
globaliza on, the captains of the new industries could not base their
calcula ons of profit and loss and the crea on of new factories and
markets on long-distance communica ons technology that had changed
li le in essence since ancient mes.

The early nineteenth century saw some increases in the speed of

communica ons over medium distances with the development of
op cal telegraph and semaphore systems, which were capable of
delivering messages over medium distances much more quickly than the
fastest land or sea transport. As an example, in 1833, at the very edges
of empire in Van Diemen’s Land, the Bri sh authori es built a line of ten
semaphore sta ons between the penal colony at Port Arthur and the
capital of Hobart Town; a distance by road today of approximately one
hundred kilometers or slightly more than sixty-two miles. Each sta on
had a mast with moveable arms and flags to relay numerically coded
messages, which could be relayed in ten minutes from one end of the
line to the other. The drawback of this system—as with more
sophis cated op cal telegraphy—was that it could not be used in bad
weather or at night. In those circumstances, should the need arise the
authori es depended on an altogether more primi ve “auditory
telegraph” capable of relaying only the most basic of messages:

Should it occur that a signal cannot pass from the badness of the
weather, or should prisoners abscond during the night much me may
be gained by a soldier or constable being dispatched to the head of the
railroad, and discharging two shots, one quickly succeeding the other,
which will be passed on in a similar manner, that is by firing a double
shot from sta on to sta on, un l it arrives at Eaglehawk Neck, when the
sen nel on the je y will answer it in the same manner, and immediately
report the circumstances. 6

By this me, however, the world was on the brink of a revolu on in

communica ons technology that was to render the semaphore
obsolete. Taken for granted today and superseded even in the late
nineteenth century by the wireless, the electric telegraph nevertheless
was a quantum leap in human communica ons every bit as important
as the development of the Internet in a later era. As Daniel Headrick has
observed in The Tentacles of Progress, “Like other inven ons, [the
telegraph] . . . was also an instrument of power, so it is not surprising to
find it intertwined with the power struggles of the me: private
enterprise and governments; the domina on of the Western na ons
over the non-Western world; and, as the nineteenth century gave over
to the twen eth, the growing rivalries between the na ons of the West
which led to two world wars.” 7

The new inven on involved sending electrical impulses over insulated

copper wires; the current switched on and off according to coded
pa erns developed by the American Samuel Morse in 1847. For the first
me in human history, the dependence on physical forms of
transporta on courtesy of the weather and light to transit messages
was broken, and within a few decades the farthest outposts of empires
were connected to the imperial metropolis by a worldwide girdle of
wires. Apart from the metal for the wires, the new system depended on
reliable insula on from the elements, and the most suitable substance
for this purpose was a gum—gu a-percha—from the forests of
Southeast Asia. By a neat coincidence, the substance that proved
indispensable to “strengthen and perpetuate” 8 imperial rule in the
colonies was found only in the Dutch, Bri sh, and French colonies in the
Far East.
And yet, today gu a-percha is largely forgo en. If a Cockney from
London’s East End in the heyday of Queen Victoria’s empire were to find
himself in the same city today, there would be much that he would find
strange. But, as a “modern,” he would recognize much of the cityscape
and the materials with which it is built and that clothe, feed, transport,
and house its inhabitants: natural fabrics, leather, coal, concrete, rubber,
wood, bricks and mortar, iron, and steel, for instance. “But where,” he
might ask, gazing anxiously for familiar landmarks near the Thames in
what is now the pos ndustrial wastelands of Silvertown, “are the gu a-
percha works?” Unless he was asking a den st, a botanist, a geographer,
an imperial historian, or a very old person, the chances are that his
ques on would be met with a blank stare. It is difficult to think of
another once-ubiquitous industrial and domes c commodity that has
been so comprehensively forgo en as this rainforest gum. (As a rough
gauge of modern familiarity with gu a-percha, I asked my
undergraduate students if any of them had heard of it. Unsurprisingly,
none had.) Yet during the Victorian era it was almost a household word,
so much so that in the 1860s calling someone an “old gu a-percha”
entered New England regional speech for a me as “an epithet of
empha c disparagement.” 9 The gu a-percha manufacturing center of
Britain— and the world—was the East End of London. The rubber
entrepreneur Thomas Hancock 10 set up his West Ham Gu a Percha
Company in 1862 to produce an enormous array of everyday products.
One observer wrote in 1862 that,

Almost every species of toy is made from this gum; the furniture, the
decora ons, and even the covering of our houses are constructed from
it; and we make of it soles for our boots and shoes, and linings for our
water cisterns. It is used for pipes, alike for the conveyance of water and
sound. Ear-trumpets, of various sizes and forms, are made of it; we also
now frequently find gu a percha tubes carried from the door of the
medical man to his bedside; we also, as o en, meet with the Domes c
Telegraph—a gu a percha pipe passing from one room to another by
which messages can be carried to all parts of the house; and when a
pew in church is occupied by a deaf owner, a similar pipe ensures the
afflicted worshipper to hear the word of God . . . . 11

(emphasis in the original)

Gu a-percha—the name derives from a Malay word for “gum” or

“resin” 12 —is a natural plas c, the sap or gum of certain trees from
Southeast Asia, especially those known to the Malays as the taban.
Chemically, the gum is a stereoisomer of rubber, sharing a similar
chemical composi on—polyisoprene—but with a different atomic
arrangement and strikingly different physical quali es. 13 From the mid
nineteenth century on, it was widely used in domes c, medical, and
industrial applica ons, but as the contemporary observer cited above
noted, “a s ll more wonderful applica on of gu a percha is its
employment, since the discovery of the electric telegraph, as a covering
for the electro-galvanic wire,” 14 par cularly in the insula on of the
newly invented undersea cables. The world’s foremost cable factory was
the Silvertown Works, a sprawling industrial complex si ng alongside
the Thames with its own wharf and its own oceangoing cable-laying ship
— the SS Silvertown—the first purpose-built vessel of its kind. 15
Originally set up by Charles Silver in 1852 for the manufacture of
waterproof clothing, especially for the army, the firm merged with
Hancock’s West Ham Works, 16 and then turned to cable making in
1867 un l its closure in 1930. 17

In the winter of 1889–1890, the Silvertown works was shut down by a

bi er twelve-week strike — or more correctly, lockout—of almost two
thousand workers, with mass pickets at every gate and fierce clashes
between strikers and the police. Strikers paraded with red flags and
brass bands, and huge mass mee ngs of the workers and their
numerous supporters were addressed by such well-known radical trade
unionists as Tom Mann of the London Trades Council. 18 In such
circumstances, there could be few Londoners, whether pro- or an -
union, who had not heard of the famous gum, even if they paid li le
a en on to the soles of their boots. It was revealed later that although
the locked-out workers lost £20,000 in wages during the dispute, the
Silvertown Company did not suffer a loss because it filled all orders at its
French plant. 19 Given the looming “famine” of raw gu a-percha at the
me, perhaps it is arguable that the company deliberately engineered
the dispute—or at least did not try to se le it—as a way of temporarily
shu ng down the Silvertown works and thus avoiding a loss of profits.

Gu a-percha first came to the a en on of Europeans in 1656, when the

English traveler John Tradescant brought samples back to London from
Southeast Asia. 20 Unlike tobacco, chili peppers, maize, tea, coffee, and
many other overseas vegetable products brought to Europe in that
period, it long remained a curiosity. Regarded as simply a hard, inert
substance that in some ways resembled rubber but without the bounce
and elas city, “only its defects were seen,” as one writer put it. In 1832,
so the story goes, a Sco sh physician, William Montgomerie, learned of
its extraordinary quali es from a Malay laborer who showed him how it
became pliable when immersed in hot water and hardened as it cooled.
Tradescant had earlier described it as a “pliable mazer wood” that could
be worked if warmed in hot water. 21 For this reason, it had long been
fashioned into canes and handles for whips, knives, daggers, and a
variety of tools throughout the Malay world. Montgomerie was
impressed and informed the medical board at Calcu a of his belief that
for certain surgical applica ons, gu a-percha might prove superior to
India rubber. 22

The anonymous Malay gardener cannot have had any inkling of the
future economic and military-strategic importance of gu a-percha for
the European colonial powers. Within a few years of Montgomerie’s
report, demand had grown for a raw material well suited for a variety of
ornamental and u litarian purposes for which we use plas c and similar
synthe cs today, including boats, furniture, soles of boots and shoes,
upholstery, and surgical appliances. Edwin Truman first used it for dental
fillings in 1847, and it is s ll used today in orthodon cs. It was much in
demand by ha ers and fuse makers. It was acid- and waterresistant and
was coveted by chemical factories and photographic and other
laboratories. 23 One Bri sh company even used it to make roof les, 24
although one suspects they were suitable only for temperate climates.

The gum itself was extracted from similar tropical rainforest trees
growing within a restricted geographical region comprising Bri sh
Malaya and Sarawak; Dutch Java, Sumatra, and Borneo; Siam;
Cambodia; the Mekong delta region of Vietnam in French Indochina;
and the southern Philippines, un l 1898 a Spanish colony. The trees
clustered together in stands of two hundred to five hundred individuals,
usually in light loamy soils at the foots of hills, and at some distance
from the sea, surrounded and o en overshadowed by dipterocarp
forests. Eight species of trees yielded gu a-type latex. 25 The best
quality came from the taban, Isonandra gu a or Palaquium gu a
(named by Sir Joseph Hooker, the eminent botanist who directed the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London 26 ); the Dichopsis
oblongifolium, which grew mainly in Borneo; and the Dichopsis selendit.
Another tree that produced good-quality latex was the Dichopsis
pustulatum, na ve to Perak in Malaya and later cul vated on Ceylon.
Although not the most magnificent of the rain forest trees, the
isonandra was impressive enough, growing to between sixty and eighty
feet in height, with a diameter of between two and five feet and with
great bu ress root systems rising to up to fi een feet off the ground. 27
The unique poten al of gu a-percha became apparent in 1847 when
the German engineer Werner von Siemens used it as an insulator for an
electric telegraph cable running parallel to a railway line and invented a
special die to coat the cable in the process, 28 although the family of
the Danish engineer F. H. Danchell disputed the la er claim. 29 In the
years following, Britain was criss-crossed with a network of
aboveground and underground telegraphic wires, which were first
insulated with tarred co on or hemp, and then with the much superior
gu a-percha, 30 with ordinary rubber as the best alterna ve. The gum
also proved perfect for underwater telegraph wires, which began with
cross-Channel cables linking England and France in the early 1850s. As
Marx understood, the new technology also bound India closely to the
Bri sh Empire. Swi communica ons were part of the system of
colonial power; as Headrick notes, the near panic engendered by the
Indian Mu ny of 1857 led to a chorus of calls for the expansion of the
telegraph system. 31 In the year of the Mu ny, Bri sh India boasted
4,555 miles of telegraph wire, and by 1859 the authori es endorsed
plans to link the subcon nent with London. 32

Gradually, the discrete na onal networks were connected together by

interna onal trunk lines, largely laid on the seabed. In 1859, Valen a in
Ireland was successfully linked with Newfoundland by telegraph cables
spooled out across the Atlan c seafloor from Isambard Kingdom
Brunel’s mighty steamship, the Great Eastern. 33 In 1865, Karachi in
India was in almost instantaneous communica on with London, the
Morse code signals flying over the wires, and although the first cables
were plagued with technical difficul es, these had been largely
overcome by 1870. Malta was connected to Alexandria in 1868; France
to Newfoundland in 1869; India, Hong Kong, China, and Japan by 1870;
Australia to the outside world in 1871; and South America by 1874. By
the same me, some 650,000 miles of telegraph wire had been laid or
strung across land, and by 1880 there were 100,000 miles of undersea
cable, 34 increasing to 115,000 miles at the end of the decade. 35 By
1907, this had grown to 200,000 nau cal miles at a cost of between
£150 and £200 per mile 36 or a total of between £97.5 and £130 million.
This was an astronomical sum for the me and compares roughly to
between £7 billion and £9.5 billion in today’s values using the retail
price index as a guide, and much higher values using tables based on
propor on of GDP. 37

Although originally designed for private use—and developed ini ally by

private capital 38 —the military and strategic value of the system soon
became apparent to governments, which heavily subsidized it as a result
and ensured its constant expansion. The Bri sh government guaranteed
a dividend of 4.5 percent or £36,000 per year for fi y years for the Red
Sea and India Telegraph Company, which operated the trunk line to
India. 39 Some mes long-distance submarine lines could be built and
operated only with permanent subsidies; following the Zulu War of
1879, the Bri sh government agreed to subsidize the Eastern and
Southern Africa Telegraph Company to the tune of £55,000 per year to
connect Durban and Zanzibar to the main trunk line at Aden. 40 The
strategic impera ve also meant that the Bri sh were keen to ensure the
development of what was known at the me as an “all red line” to
connect the outposts of their far-flung empire without it ever passing
over foreign soil. 41 Without this immense girdle of telegraph wires
radia ng from London, the administra on and defense of the “Empire
on which the sun never sets” would have been problema c and
“imperial overstretch” a dis nct possibility: if London were the brain of
the Empire, the telegraph cables were its nerves, connected to
thousands of sensi ve eyes and ears.
The “nerves” were a triumph of Victorian engineering design. The cable
that first linked Valen a in Ireland with Newfoundland 1,852 miles away
was composed of seven three-eighths-inch copper wires twisted ghtly
together, each wire individually coated with three layers of refined
gu a-percha and minutely inspected for faults to make the insula on
and protec on from seawater as perfect as possible. The twisted cables
were then sheathed in tarred hemp, itself wound round ghtly with iron
wire to protect it from sharp rocks and other submarine hazards. The
cable was spun in hundred-mile lengths, which when completed were
laid in a close zigzag pa ern on the floor of a canal adjacent to the
Gu a-Percha Company’s works alongside the Thames at Greenwich and
Silvertown in East London. Next, the cables were wound onto huge
spools for transshipment aboard the cable-laying ships, with the
hundred-mile lengths spliced together on the high seas. Special
grappling equipment was on hand in case a cable snapped and needed
to be retrieved from the sea floor two miles below. An ingenious braking
system prevented the heavy wire from running off the drum faster than
it could be laid. 42 The path of the cable was itself minutely surveyed to
avoid as much as possible deep ocean floor canyons and mountain
ranges and other hazards. When the first transatlan c cable was laid—
confounding the skep cs who maintained the idea was preposterous
arrogance—people celebrated on both sides of the ocean in much the
same way as later genera ons did when Sputnik orbited Earth and men
set foot on the moon. It was a major step down the road of what we
today call globaliza on.

Gu a-percha was the sine qua non of the success of the undersea
telegraph project. William T. Brannt considered that “It may be said
without exaggera on that if gu a percha and its proper es had not
been known, submarine telegraph lines would perhaps never have been
successful.” 43 Although synthe c plas cs eventually replaced the gu a-
percha, and it was to some degree displaced by wireless technology,
there would have been a long delay before a successful submarine cable
network could be built using it, and ordinary natural rubber from the
Hevea brasiliensis and other South American trees was much less
suitable, being prone to rapid deteriora on in salt water. Yet the use of
gu a-percha rested on a paradox. By the standards of the me, electric
telegraphy was a high-tech industry, yet it depended on the most
primi ve extrac ve industry for the gu a-percha that was its essen al
raw material. In contrast, the copper for the wires and the iron for the
outer casing came from large-scale industrial undertakings staffed by
disciplined armies of miners and factory workers.

The method of extrac on of gu a-percha had not changed since the

days before its use spread beyond Southeast Asia. A group of Chinese,
Dayak, or Malay woodsmen equipped with axelike billiongs and
machetelike parangs would enter the jungle in search of a grove of
Isonandra trees—an o en hazardous and unpleasant journey. Elderly
Sumatran former collectors interviewed by the American writer John F.
McCarthy recalled the giant leeches, sharp ra an barbs, s nging insects,
and their terror of gers and the green pit-vipers, a deadly ground snake
that would not flee human presence. 44 A er choosing a suitable
“vic m,” the woodsmen would build a primi ve wooden stage that
reached just below the level where the bu ress ended and the smooth
bole of the tree began, perhaps fourteen to sixteen feet above the
ground. Although the task of chopping down the trees was made less
laborious by the rela ve so ness of Isonandra wood, mber felling is
always perilous work, and there must have been numerous deaths and
injuries.

When the tree crashed to the forest floor, the branches would be
lopped off to prevent the latex from being drawn into the leaves by
osmo c force. The latex is found in narrow reservoirs running as black
lines through the heartwood, and the woodsmen would make incisions
into the trunk to drain these into bamboo bowls, coconut shells, or even
holes in the ground. This was a me-consuming process, because the
thick latex flows very slowly and coagulates quickly into a solid mass
upon exposure to air. Following collec on, the latex would be roughly
but painstakingly washed several mes and rubbed before being rolled
into sheets and folded into blocks. It was unusual to find en re blocks of
gum from the same species of tree; generally superior and inferior
grades were mixed together. Even a er cleaning, the latex was very
dirty. 45 It was o en further adulterated by unscrupulous Singapore
merchants, according to some accounts, and arrived on the docks of the
metropolitan countries in a filthy state, bulked out with sago flour,
sawdust, clay, and stones, 46 and it needed considerable refinement.
The felled trees were le to rot on the jungle floor, with most of the
latex untapped within them.

Basically, therefore, Victorian telegraph technology was dependent on a

co age industry. Worse s ll, it was an extremely profligate and
inefficient trade—especially with the spiraling growth of demand for
industrial and domes c purposes in the metropolitan countries. While
the method of extrac on was unchanged, the rate of exploita on had
been increased immeasurably. A magnificent tree rising sixty feet or
more toward the forest canopy yielded on average no more than eleven
ounces (312 grams) of latex, although greater quan es remained
inside the tree and could not be drained off. Even the very largest trees
yielded less than three pounds (1.36 kilograms), and while there was a
claim of one tree in Johor providing five and a half pounds and another
over thirteen pounds, these were excep onal cases. The French expert
Eugène Sérullas lamented that “The method adopted by the na ves for
collec ng the gums is far more disastrous for the good varie es of trees
than those of inferior quality.” The reason for this was that the good
quality gums coagulated almost immediately upon exposure to the air,
whereas the gums from inferior types hardened so slowly that it was
possible to harvest them without killing the trees. 47 (The experts,
including Sérullas, agreed that the yield was greater during the
monsoon, but much was s ll wasted.) Although some authors claimed
higher average yields than eleven ounces, the mean yield was very
small, and the relentless pressure of the market for more gum meant a
constant search for more trees to supply the demand. Brannt warned
that “with the irra onal manner in which the juice is collected, the trees
s ll in existence will become more and more decimated, and . . . there is
a danger of a decrease in the exporta on and finally of the en re
exhaus on of the sources.” 48

Ex nc on was a real possibility in many parts of the peninsula and

archipelago. Twenty-two years before Brannt published his
comprehensive book on rubber and gu a-percha, the Sco sh botanist
James Collins reported that the Isonandra tree, which had once
flourished at Singapore, was prac cally ex nct on the island as a result
of gu a-percha exports to Europe, which had begun in 1844. 49
Between 1845 and 1847 alone, according to Collins, 69,180 trees were
cut down on Singapore Island and the pressure therea er was
inexorable. With the heyday of the telegraph, Collins observed, the
demand for gu a-percha soared, and the extent of the destruc on of
the trees was “almost incredible.” In 1875, 19,686 hundredweight
(1,000,088 kilograms) of gu a-percha was imported into Britain; 21,558
hundredweight in the following year; and 26,359 in 1877. This translates
into a huge number of trees slaughtered. (While this might seem like
emo ve language, Hevea planters called unsustainable rates of
exploita on of their trees “slaughter tapping.”) In Collins’s es ma on,
some three million gu a-percha trees were exterminated in one region
of Sarawak alone
Figure 1.

Tapping a gu a-percha tree in Java. (University of Akron)

between 1854 and 1875. 50 According to Eugène Sérullas, the tree had
disappeared from Singapore by 1857, from Malacca and Selangor by no
later than 1875, and from Perak by 1884. In 1883 the Bri sh authori es
in the Straits Se lements banned further exploita on, but by then “it
was too late, indeed, to preserve the existence of the trees.” 51 Nor was
the cu ng of the trees to harvest gum the only problem facing the
trees. Sérullas decried the reckless clearing and burning of forests for
gambier and coffee planta ons on Borneo and Sumatra, and the
depreda ons of n miners in Malaya. (Gambier is the Malay name for
Terra-japonica. O en used as an ingredient of betel, and rich in tannin, it
was grown on planta ons and exported in large quan es to Europe in
the nineteenth century as a dyeing and tanning agent. 52 ) He also
noted that while the stumps of the taban trees quickly sprouted leaves
and shoots, the trees never regrew if the forest had been burned, as it
customarily was for planta ons. 53
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, a crisis “dread with reason
by manufacturers of submarine telegraph cables” was at hand, warned
M. Sérullas. 54 A mee ng of the Liverpool sec on of the Society of the
Chemical Industry was informed that unless dras c steps were taken,
the trees would be u erly exhausted within a few years. 55 The
seriousness of the situa on was illustrated when two French cable
companies were “compelled to abstain from compe ng for cables
between France and the north coast of Africa, recently offered to tender
by the French Government, owing to the scarcity of gu a-percha of a
suitable quality.” 56 In 1902, an American diplomat told the New York
Times that the tree was no longer found growing wild in the Dutch
Indies, or that “at least one would seek for it in vain in the explored
parts of the archipelago.” 57 By way of comparison, imagine that some
material crucial to the expansion and opera on of the Internet was
running out with li le prospect of a subs tute being found.

The huge demand had been unsustainable. The first transatlan c

telegraph cable, laid in 1857, was 1,852 miles long and weighed 2,000
tons, one-eighth of which, or 250 tons, was gu a-percha. 58 By the
early 1890s, according to an expert es mate, the cable industry was
consuming four million pounds of gum per year. 59 By the early
twen eth century, there were some 200,000 nau cal miles of
submarine cable around the world. A very rough calcula on indicates
that the gu a-percha in these cables must have totaled around 27,000
tons. On the basis of an average yield of eleven ounces of latex per tree,
almost 88 million gu a-percha trees must have been sacrificed to make
this possible. The years 1898 and 1899 saw projects that were
par cularly demanding for gu a-percha, with submarine cables laid
between Vancouver and Australia and between the far-flung outposts of
the German empire in Africa and Oceania. Although the annual exports
of gu a-percha from Singapore averaged between six million and nine
million pounds, these two years saw exports of ten million and sixteen
million pounds. By a rough calcula on, this meant that more than
fourteen and a half million trees were chopped down for the 1898
exports, and more than twenty-three and a quarter million in 1898. 60
Even if for the sake of argument we halve these figures and halve them
again, it is clear that this was an unsustainable onslaught on a finite
resource that took up to twenty-eight years to mature, even though the
Isonandra is rela vely fast growing compared with other rainforest
trees. These figures do not include the trees that provided direct
exports of gu a-percha from the Netherlands East Indies, French
Indochina, or the new American dominion of the Philippines. Even if
some of the total came from planta on trees, it is clear that the vast
bulk came from the rainforests. Lesley Po er es mated that by 1900, at
least one million gu a-percha trees had been cut down on Dutch
Borneo, and possibly as many as twenty-six million, although he
considered the la er figure might be an exaggera on. 61 Eugène
Sérullas es mated that the number of Isonandra trees cut down or
otherwise destroyed on Borneo alone during 1879 was a staggering five
million, 62 so we might conclude that Po er’s guess is very
conserva ve.

Where contemporary observers such as Sérullas err, however, is their

tendency to blame the latex collectors for the near-ex nc on of the
trees. While it is certainly true that the woodmen’s methods were
primi ve and wasteful, they had probably been sustainable before the
huge surge of demand created by European industry vastly increased
pressure on the forests. The same was true of the exploita on of the
Cas lloa trees of Central America, which were also cut down in order to
supply a variety of common rubber latex for Western industry. So long
as the supply of rubber and gu a-percha latex was uninterrupted,
European governments, consumers, and manufacturers were content to
turn a blind eye to the circumstances of its provenance. For be er or for
worse, it was colonialism that recast the visage of Southeast Asia,
stripping away the forests and raising up new ci es such as Singapore in
the process. The color of the hands that wielded the axe and parang
was immaterial as far as this goes. We can at least be thankful, however,
that it was not judged necessary to subject the Malay bumiputra to the
kind of slavery and violence that accompanied the exploita on of wild
rubber trees and vines in the so-called Congo Free State under Leopold
of the Belgians 63 and on the Putumayo River in Peru. 64

To his credit, the botanist James Collins appears to have viewed tropical
forests as ecosystems worthy of a respect that transcended mere
considera ons of financial gain. Alarmed by what he observed firsthand,
Collins advocated what we today would call sustainable extrac on of
gu a-percha: for every tree cut down, he argued, the colonial
governments involved should ensure that three or four more were
planted. He was less sure about whether the Isonandra and other gu a-
percha trees could be tapped in the manner of Hevea trees because of
the sluggish nature of the latex compared to that of rubber trees.
Nevertheless, he argued that the solu on was to create “well-regulated
planta ons” 65 and seek scien fic solu ons to overcome the problem of
latex flow. The dis nguished chemist E. Jungfleisch was also cri cal of
the wasteful mode of extrac on. While he advocated the injec on of
toluene to greatly increase the amount of latex extracted from the
trees, 66 this would only slow down and not stop the slaughter.
Although efforts were made to develop subs tutes, none of these
proved sa sfactory. One of these, patented by the Thomas Christy firm
in London’s East End, consisted of a bandage infused with animal glue
and glycerin and treated with other chemicals; it appears to have sunk
without trace, 67 as did another concoc on called “purcellite” a er its
inventor. 68 (Although Purcell Taylor claimed that purcellite was a
suitable and cheap alterna ve— one-tenth of the cost of gu a-percha—
the India Rubber Journal was rightly skep cal.) Yet another would-be
subs tute was developed in Germany by a Herr Siebert and this appears
to have suffered the same fate. 69

In 1890 or 1891, on Jungfleisch’s sugges on, Eugène Sérullas developed

a method of extrac ng the gum from the leaves and twigs of the trees.
These were chopped up mechanically and then treated with acid, which
was “the main secret of the inven on.” This process produced a reddish-
brown liquor, which was steamed for between twenty and thirty
minutes to evaporate the acid and concentrate the gum. This process
opened the way to the orderly cul va on and harves ng of Isonandra
bushes and trees on planta ons. 70 At the same me, the colonial
authori es a empted to restrict the number of trees felled, although
they claimed that quotas were difficult to police because of porous
borders and thinly stretched customs services. Iner a, myopia,
expediency, and greed prevailed, and thirty years a er Collins made his
recommenda ons Hubert Terry asserted that “Compara vely li le has
been done in the way of gu a-percha planta ons, and the results so far
achieved go to show that the cul va on is not only hedged around with
difficul es but also that, compared with rubber, a much longer me
must elapse before any return is obtained from invested capital.” 71 This
was not completely the case. The Dutch had, from necessity, begun to
farm gu a-percha bushes on planta ons on Sumatra and Java from the
1880s, 72 and estates were set up in Malaya from the turn of the
century. But the soaring prices fetched during the boom years of the
late nineteenth and early twen eth centuries had taken a terrible toll on
the wild trees. When prices fell during later decades, the villagers were
reluctant to brave the perils of the forest for small recompense, and the
wild gum industry fell into decline. This was accelerated by the
development of the wireless and again a er World War II when
synthe c alterna ves became widely available: John McCarthy observed
that few of the Sumatran villagers he spoke with around the twen eth
century’s end ventured from the kampung into the jungle and that the
extrac on of wild gu a-percha had long since ceased. 73

By then, the Southeast Asian rainforests were threatened on a much

vaster scale by the ac vi es of logging companies and other industries.
In the twenty years before 1990, it is probable that one-third of the
forests of Sarawak disappeared and the process con nues apace across
the region. John McCarthy’s gloomy words about northern Sumatra sum
up what has happened in many places across Southeast Asia: “especially
alongside the highway, clear felling has occurred. The forest lies supine,
like some vision of the holocaust. In other places the desola on has
already been converted into neat rows of oil-palm trees, industrial and
uninteres ng worker trees that supply the prosperous oil palm
industry.” 74 While the earlier slaughter of the wild taban trees was on a
smaller scale, it nevertheless amounted to a Victorian ecological
disaster. It was a premoni on of the much greater recent assault on the
world’s tropical rainforests—some mes called with jus fica on the
lungs of the world—an onslaught for which there is perhaps less excuse
this me, although the reasons for it are much the same. James Collins’s
despairing words about the “charnel houses” created by the industry,
wri en in 1878, have a familiar ring. If the “taproot” of imperialism 75
burrowed deep into the colonial soil to extract nourishment for the
economies of the metropolitan countries, then it was supported by vast
networks of telegraphic roots that bound the far-flung colonies to the
imperial heartlands. Again, it is ironic that those roots were made
possible at that me only by the discovery of a unique vegetable
commodity na ve only in the colonial world. It is a further sad irony that
the telegraph industry destroyed the very trees that made its existence
possible.

Footnotes
1.
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of Bri sh Rule in India,” in Karl Marx on
Colonialism and Moderniza on: His Despatches and Other Wri ngs on
China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Shlomo
Averini (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 133.

2.
James Collins, “Report on the Gu a Percha of Commerce” (London:
Geo. Allen, 1878). Pages not numbered. This is a report rather than a
book, and there is a copy in the Royal Botanic Gardens Archives at Kew,
London: MR Malaya Rubber, Misc. 1852–1908 f205.

3.
Paul Kennedy’s well-known thesis was that wealth was necessary to
protect wealth and that there comes a me when more wealth is
expended defending an empire than it can itself produce. Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). The term
“tyranny of distance” was perhaps coined by Geoffrey Blainey, The
Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History
(Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968).

4.
Richard D. Knowles, “Transport Shaping Space: Differen al Collapse in
Time-Space,” Journal of Transport Geography 14, no. 6 (2006): 407–425,
h p://ntlsearch.bts.gov/tris/record/tris/01041310.html
(accessed 1 August 2008).

5.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Selected
Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 38.

6.
“Tasmanian Code of Signals: Compiled for the Penal Se lement of
Tasman’s Peninsula: Instruc ons” (usually known as “Booth’s Code
Book”). Royal Society of Tasmania Archives, University of Tasmania
Library Special Collec on, RS 31/2. The book is handwri en by Charles
O’Hara Booth, who was commandant at the Port Arthur penal colony
from 1833 to 1844. It consists of eleven pages of detailed instruc ons
and diagrams on how to send signals via the semaphore system through
a series of coded numbers. The rest of the book details 4,467 numbers
and what words, phrases, or sentences these mean. Numbers up to
2,905 are recorded in alphabe cal order for single words and the
remainder are grouped into specialist areas such as military, shipping,
absconding prisoners, and so forth, and are phrases or longer sentences.
I am indebted to Mike Nash, the heritage officer of the Tasmanian
Na onal Parks and Wildlife Service, for loca ng the original document.

7.
Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the
Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),
p. 98.

8.
See n. 1.

9.
Grace P. Smith, “Slang Waifs and Strays,” American Speech 13, no. 4
(1938): 317.

10.
Thomas Hancock was a partner of Charles Macintosh, the rubber
raincoat king, and is credited with discovering the vulcaniza on process
for rubber independently of Charles Goodyear.

11.
Cited in Alvaro de Miranda, “Crea ve East London in Historical
Perspec ve” (occasional paper, University of East London, 2007),
h p://www.uel.ac.uk/risingeast/archive07/academic/miranda.pdf
(accessed 16 July 2008).

12.
Charles Payson Gurley Sco , “The Malayan Words in English,” Journal of
the American Oriental Society 18 (1887): 54.

13.
Jonathan Thornton, “A Brief History of the Early Prac ce and Materials
of Gap-Filling in the West,” Journal of the American Ins tute for
Conserva on 37, no. 1 (1998).

14.
De Miranda, “Crea ve East London,” p. 19.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Ibid, p. 18.

17.
Ibid. See also “Royal Docks—A Short History,”
h p://www.royaldockstrust.org.uk/rdhist.htm
(accessed 16 July 2008).

18.
The strike is detailed in edi ons of the India Rubber and Gu a Percha
and Electrical Trades Journal: A Record of the Caoutchouc, Gu a Percha,
Asbestos and Allied Industries, London, in late 1889 and early 1890:
“The Strike at Silvertown,” 6, no. 3 (October 8, 1889): 71; “The
Silvertown Strike,” and correspondence, 6, no. 4 (November 8, 1889):
102–104; “The Silvertown Strike,” 6, no. 5 (December 9, 1889): 127;
“End of the Silvertown Strike,” 6, no. 6 (January 8, 1890): 146. The name
of this publica on is abbreviated hereina er to India Rubber Journal.
19.
India Rubber Journal 7, no. 1 (August 8, 1890).

20.
Hubert L. Terry, India-Rubber and Its Manufacture, with Chapters on
Gu a-Percha and Balata (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), p. 271.

21.
Collins, “Report on the Gu a Percha.”

22.
William T. Brannt, India Rubber, Gu a Percha and Balata (London:
Sampson Low, Marston, 1900), p. 225. James Collins gives the date of
Montgomerie’s findings as 1822.

23.
Brannt, India Rubber, p. 227; Terry, India-Rubber, p. 277.

24.
“Gu a-Percha Leaves as Roof Tiles,” India Rubber Journal 5, no. 2
(1888): 39.

25.
The different types of gum exported from Sarawak included gu a-
percha, gu a-jangkar, and gu a-jetulong. See Amarjit Kaur, “A History of
Forestry in Sarawak,” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 124.

26.
Lucile Brockway has drawn a en on to the key role of the scien fic
experts of the Bri sh and Dutch Botanic Gardens in the development of
colonial planta on agriculture. See Lucile H. Brockway, “Science and
Colonial Expansion: The Role of the Bri sh Royal Botanic Gardens,”
American Ethnologist 6 (1979): 449–465.
27.
Brannt, India Rubber, pp. 228–230.

28.
Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Werner von Siemens: Erfinder und
Interna onaler (Berlin: Siemens Ak engesellscha , 1992).

29.
A number of pages in various edi ons of the India Rubber Journal are
devoted to claims and counterclaims by friends and family members of
the two engineers. See, for instance, “The Inventor of Gu a-Percha
Covered Wire,” India Rubber Journal 9, no. 7 (1892).

30.
Bruce J. Hunt, “The Ohm Is Where the Art Is: Bri sh Telegraph Engineers
and the Development of Electrical Standards,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 9,
Instruments (1994): 49.

31.
Headrick, Tentacles of Progress, p. 99.

32.
Chris na Phelps Harris, “The Persian Gulf Submarine Telegraph of 1864,”
Geographical Journal 135, no. 2 (1969): 169–170.

33.
W. H. Russell (illustrated by Roger Dudley), The Atlan c Telegraph
(London: Day and Sons, ca. 1865). See also Bern Dibner, The Atlan c
Cable (Norwalk, Conn.: Burndy Library, 1999), and Tom Standage, The
Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (London: Phoenix, 1999), pp. 96–
97.

34.
Standage, Victorian Internet, pp. 96– 97.
35.
“Ocean Cable Service,” India Rubber Journal 5, no. 6 (1889): 126.

36.
Terry, India-Rubber, p. 278.

37.
Calculated using tables from MeasuringWorth.com,
h p://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/
(accessed 18 March 2008).

38.
Of the eight cables laid across the Atlan c between Europe and America
by 1889, four were owned by the Anglo-American Cable Company and
two by Western Union: “Ocean Cable Service,” India Rubber Journal 5,
no. 6 (1889): 126.

39.
Headrick, Tentacles of Progress, p. 100.

40.
Ibid., p. 107.

41.
George Johnson, ed., The All Red Line: The Annals and Aims of the
Pacific Cable Project (O awa: James Hope, 1903). See also P. H.
Kennedy, “Imperial Cable Communica ons and Strategy, 1870–1914,”
English Historical Review 86, no. 341 (1971): 728–752.

42.
See Russell, Atlan c Telegraph; Dibner, Atlan c Cable; and Standage,
Victorian Internet.

43.
Brannt, India Rubber, p. 270.
44.
John F. McCarthy, The Fourth Circle: A Poli cal Economy of Sumatra’s
Rainforest Fron er (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p.
2.

45.
Brannt, India Rubber, pp. 230–232.

46.
Ibid., p. 236.

47.
“M. Sérullas on Gu a-Percha” (con nued), India Rubber Journal 7, no. 9
(1891): 280–281.

48.
Brannt, India Rubber, p. 233.

49.
Collins, “Report on the Gu a Percha.”

50.
Ibid.

51.
“M. Sérullas on Gu a-Percha,” India Rubber Journal 7, no. 6 (1891):
112–113.

52.
See John Crawfurd, A Descrip ve Dic onary of the Indian Islands and
Adjacent Countries (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856), p. 142.

53.
“M. Sérullas on Gu a-Percha,” (con nued).
54.
Ibid. and “A Paper Read before the Société d’Encouragement by M.
Sérullas,” India Rubber Journal 8, no. 11 (1892): 329–330.

55.
“Exhaus on of Gu a-Percha,” India Rubber Journal 9, no. 5 (1892): 137.

56.
“M. Sérullas on Gu a-Percha” (con nued), India Rubber Journal 7, no. 6
(1891): 162–163.

57.
“Trade in Gu a Percha,” New York Times, 24 May 1902.

58.
John R. Issac, “History of the Atlan c Cable & Submarine Telegraphy,”
2007, h p://www.atlan c-cable.com/Books/1857Isaac/index.htm
(accessed 30 April 2008).

59.
India Rubber Journal 8, no. 3 (1891).

60.
Author’s calcula ons based on figures from Terry, India-Rubber, p. 280.

61.
Lesley Po er, “Community and Environment in Colonial Borneo:
Economic Value, Forest Conversions and Concern for Conserva on,
1870–1940,” in Histories of the Borneo Environment: Economic, Poli cal
and Social Dimensions of Change and Community, ed. Reed L. Wadley
(Leiden: Verhandelingen van Het Koninklijk Ins tuut voor Taal, Landen
Volkenkunde, 2005), p. 116.

62.
“M. Sérullas on Gu a-Percha” (con nued).
63.
A number of books deal with the crimes of King Leopold II in the Congo.
Roger Casement’s friend and fellow ac vist E. D. Morel wrote a number
of books, including Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade
Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906, 2nd ed. (London: T.
Fisher Unwin, 1907). More recent works include Roger Anstey, King
Leopold’s Legacy: The Congo under Belgian Rule (London: Oxford
University Press, 1966), and Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated:
Leopold the Second and the Congo, new ed. (London: Granta, 1999).
Leopold used his ill-go en gains to publish a number of rebu als but
these were of very low caliber. Many of the most serious allega ons
against the so-called Congo Free State were found to be true by a
commission of inquiry set up by Leopold himself. See Archives des
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Brussels: Papiers Janssens, III, Rapport
de la Commission d’enquête, Bulle n Officiel de l’Etat Indépendent du
Congo, nos. 9 and 10. Rapport au Roi-Souverain. 30 October 1905.

64.
See, for instance, Richard Collier, The River That God Forgot: The Story of
the Amazon Rubber Boom (London: Collins, 1968) or W. E. Hardenburg,
ed., with an introduc on by C. Reginald Enock, The Putumayo: The
Devil’s Paradise: Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account
of the Atroci es Commi ed upon the Indians Therein (London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1912). The findings of the Bri sh parliament on the Putumayo
scandal are contained in a House of Commons Select Commi ee report
of 1913; House of Commons Paper 148 XIV.

65.
Collins, “Report on the Gu a Percha.”

66.
Brannt, India Rubber, p. 234.
67.
“A New Material,” India Rubber Journal 5, no. 2 (1891): 107.

68.
“Ar ficial Gu a-Percha,” India Rubber Journal, 6, no. 10 (1890): 260.

69.
India Rubber Journal 4, no. 11 (1888): 244.

70.
“New process for recovering loss of Gu a-Percha,” India Rubber Journal,
8, no. 3 (1892): 90. Reprinted from the Kew Bulle n. Also “A Gu a-
Percha Revolu on,” India Rubber Journal, 8, no. 11 (June 8, 1892): 337–
338.

71.
Terry, India-Rubber, pp. 273–274.

72.
The New York Times, 24 May 1902.

73.
McCarthy, Fourth Circle, p. 30.

74.
Ibid., p. 2.

75.
J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, rev. ed. (London: Constable, 1905).

Copyright © 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press

Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in
the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth
Centuries

Anand A. Yang
University of Washington

Journal of World History 24.2 (2003) 179-208

Convicts transported from South Asia to Southeast Asia in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were part of a global system
of forced migra on. Along with the convicts sent to Australia from
Britain and Ireland, they were, as scholars of transporta on have rightly
insisted,

part of a larger interna onal and intercon nental flow of forced

migra on including . . . French, Spanish and Russian convicts, and
"bonded" Indian and Melanesian contract labour. A er 1820 a quarter
of a million convicts were shipped across the world's oceans to colonise
Australia, New Caledonia, Singapore and French Guiana, and to meet
labour demand in Gibraltar, Bermuda, Penang, Malacca and Mauri us. .
. . Transporta on, like the recrui ng of slaves and the contrac ng of
bonded workers, was complementary to the interna onal migra on of
free European peoples before 1914. Convic sm was a labour system
exis ng in many countries of the world in the nineteenth century. 1
Indeed, the history of transported convicts can be located "within the
compara ve literature of interna onal 'unfree' labour migra on" and
ed to
such "mainstream" topics as: the slave-trade from Atlan c and Indian
Ocean Africa; the Trans-Saharan slave-trade; the interna onal migra on
of indentured labourers from South and East Asia; the large-scale
mobiliza on of various kinds of 'unfree' migrant labour within colonial
Africa and South Asia; the migra on of indentured servants from Britain
to North America and the Caribbean; and the uses made of all this vast
and varied flow of humanity on the one hand and its own historical
agency, lived experience and cultural history on the other, in
des na ons around the world. 2
The flows of convict workers between 1787 and 1920 involved
significant numbers, especially to Australia. The traffic from Britain—
extensively studied because of its centrality in the peopling of Australia
—involved as many as 80,000 to New South Wales between 1788 and
1840; 67,000 to 69,000 to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) between 1801
and 1852; and two smaller cohorts of 3,000 and 9,700 people during the
1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. These forced migra ons followed on the heels
of the transporta on of some 50,000 convicted felons from Britain to
North America, principally to Maryland and Virginia, in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Smaller in scale and far less known are the
movements of convicts from South Asia to Southeast Asia. India
dispatched 4,000-6,000 convicts to Bengkulen between 1787 and 1825
and 15,000 to the Straits Se lements between 1790 and 1860. Another
1,000-1,500 were transported from Ceylon to Malacca in the Straits
Se lements between 1849 and 1873, and several thousand more were
sent to Burma and to areas outside of Southeast Asia, principally
Mauri us between 1815 and 1837 and the Andaman Islands a er 1857.
3

This paper tracks the history of convicts from South Asia to their
Southeast Asian penal des na ons in order to assess their roles as
"convict workers." That is, it examines their roles as members of a labor
force that was recruited and organized to service the projects of the
emerging Bri sh Empire in the region in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.

My use of the term "convict workers," derived from the revisionist

scholarship on Australian convict history, is deliberate. As in that
literature, so too here it is intended to underscore their roles as
produc ve laborers and to shi a en on away from their criminal
pasts, which previously misled considera ons of their poten al and
effec veness as workers. Nor did the earlier genera on of wri ngs in
Australian history apparently plumb deeply enough into the criminal
and personal backgrounds of the offenders. Instead it wrongly assumed
that the convicts were "professional and habitual criminals" whose
character and criminality des ned them to become inefficient workers.
The no on of "convict workers" therefore lts against "the received
interpreta on. . . [that] has emphasised male convicts as hardened and
professional criminals, females as pros tutes and convic sm as a brutal
and inefficient system of forced labour." 4

The new emphasis on convicts as workers is also directed at reloca ng

the scholarship on convict transporta on within the compara ve
literature of "'unfree' labor migra on." Such a global perspec ve moves
away from the earlier insistence on viewing the phenomenon of
transporta on solely within na onal histories and toward understanding
its comparability with other forms of forced migra ons and its direct
connec ons to these other flows, as this account of their experiences in
Southeast Asia will indicate.

Although the discussion here is centered on Indian convicts, it

recognizes that they were part of a larger traffic pa ern in South and
Southeast Asia that transported different peoples in different direc ons
across these regions. "[N]a ves of the Malay countries" were
transferred to India, Chinese from Singapore and Hong Kong were exiled
to India and from Hong Kong also briefly to the Straits Se lements, and
convicts from Ceylon and Burma were dispatched to these venues as
well. 5 In 1853 the convicts lodged in the Straits were described as of a
"most heterogeneous nature, comprising individuals not only of all the
tribes of Asia from the Punjaub to Ceylon, but also men from many of
the provinces of China, Jews, Parsees[,] Seedi Caffers and Malays, and
the House of Correc on . . . held of late not a few Europeans . . ." 6

Indian convict transporta on to Southeast Asia provided much needed

labor in the rising outposts of the Bri sh Empire in Southeast Asia in the
late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Important in this
historical context is an understanding of the condi ons and
circumstances that generated a pressing need for their labor as well as
of the roles these convicts played—literally and figura vely—in
establishing and consolida ng the founda ons of colonial rule.
Significant also to this study is the larger framework of labor in all its
more coerced and less forced varie es ranging from slavery and
serfdom that "have generally been permanent condi ons" to "unfree
labor" that is essen ally temporary. Convict labor falls into the la er
category, as does "indenture, military service, debt peonage, and
appren ceship, as well as the systems used to enforce types of
agricultural and mining labor in various parts of the world." Slavery, by
contrast, is generally not "limited in dura on" and o en en tles "the
rulers having the right and ability to exploit labor and to control not only
the serf or slave, but also their offspring." 7 Labor in Southeast Asia
tended to be organized by slavery, bondage, and dependency. In the
words of one scholar, "the labour system of Southeast Asia through
most of its recorded history . . . [was] based on the obliga on to labour
for a creditor, master or lord." 8

Although the prevailing Southeast Asian labor system decisively shaped

the colonial framework in which Indian convict labor became
impera ve, it was rarely factored into the Bri sh discourse about labor.
Official discourse, in fact, shied away from highligh ng the es that
bound together the different systems of coerced labor, almost as if
colonial administrators were fearful of their advocacy of convict labor
eroding the high moral ground that they had claimed by advoca ng the
aboli on of slavery in the region. The two forms of labor were
nonetheless closely interrelated: the closing down of the slave trade
(banned in theory by the Bri sh parliament in 1807) and the subsequent
aboli on of slavery in many areas of the region exacerbated labor
shortages. So did local labor systems by virtue of their networks of
bondage and obliga on that discouraged the growth of a labor market.
"Southeast Asians," notes one writer, "themselves appear to have
con nued to regard wage labour as alien and demeaning." 9

Implicit here but not developed in any detail is my larger argument

made elsewhere about convicts characterizing themselves as Company
ke naukar (servants of the company). Indian convicts, in other words,
opted to define themselves as workers, as men who were engaged in
the service of the East India Company rather than as bandwars
(prisoners, literally means those locked up). The idea of naukar or
retainer, an offshoot of the term naukari or service, stemmed from the
precolonial concept of "honourable service in the warband, the
retainership of the lord's companion, hence employment." Whereas
today it implies menial service, it meant something quite different in the
colonial era when it alluded primarily to "long distance service as a
retainer, for instance in the Bri sh East India Company's army" or as
migrant labor. 10

Whether the no on of the transporta on experience as naukari or

service arose exclusively out of the convict roles as workers overseas or
grew out of the labor regimens that some prisoners in some prisons in
India followed prior to the development of transporta on cannot be
clearly ascertained. However, it is highly unlikely that the term sprang
up on Indian soil in conjunc on with the incarcera on experience
because prisons were a rela vely new phenomenon in the late
eighteenth century, and rela vely newer was even the possibility of
employing prisoners to engage in manual labor. Indeed, the prac ce of
organizing prisoners to perform manual labor did not become a
systema c or widespread prac ce un l the beginning of the nineteenth
century. By then, the term naukars (or retainers or servants), which
convicts applied to themselves, was already in usage. The use of the
term naukari may have also emerged as an apposite self-designa on
because long-distance service was central to the transporta on
experience. 11

Convicts, furthermore, increasingly defined themselves as part of an

"Indian" community that emerged in these outposts of empire as a
result of the mixing and melding of different groups of people from the
South Asian subcon nent. This community consisted of transportees
and sepoys (soldiers), as well as a number of other groups, including
indentured laborers who began to trickle in toward the middle of the
nineteenth century and then stream in much greater numbers later that
century. Convicts developed a more encompassing iden ty through
their shared experiences as laborers, subject posi ons that enabled
people drawn from different regions of the Indian subcon nent and
from different socioeconomic backgrounds to forge a sense of a wider
Indian community. 12

The iden es of Indian convict workers were also shaped by their

encounters with other ethnic groups. For instance, in Bengkulen in the
late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century,
they lived and labored alongside the East India Company's other major
coerced labor group, African slaves who had been brought in primarily
from Madagascar. Indian convicts and "kaffirs"—as African slaves were
called in this region—worked so closely together that they were jointly
supervised by an officer designated the superintendent of "convicts and
coffrees [kaffirs]." Work and residen al associa ons also issued out of
and resulted in their teaming up sexually and permanently,
arrangements that typically involved Indian convicts who were
overwhelmingly male pairing up with African slaves who were
predominantly female. In addi on, Indian convicts were involved in
liaisons with Malay women. All these rela onships were further
complicated by the fact that Malay women also consorted with Indian
soldiers, thus further consolida ng the social and personal es that
o en formed among all the different groups of Indians who were
thrown together in the foreign lands across the black waters. In some
locali es Indian convict workers also labored side by side with imported
Chinese workers and some local Malay men. 13

Indian convict workers forged es to Indian indentured workers as well

and to the rest of the Indian community by adap ng to a variety of
roles, both when they served in the capacity of unfree labor and when
they stayed on as free labor in the penal colonies. My argument about
the development of an "Indian" community also entails extending the
connec ons between slavery and bondage on the one hand and forced
convict labor on the other hand to encompass indentured labor. My
conten on is not that indentured labor represented "a new system of
slavery" or was, by contrast, a labor migra on of opportunity. Rather it
insists on linking the two, on establishing the connec ons between the
earlier forced migra on of convicts and the later streams of Indian
migrant labor that gained in size and momentum by the 1840s. By the
1880s Indian indentured laborers numbered over 10,000 a year. 14

I will focus first on highligh ng the dynamics that led Indian convicts to
become part of a global system of forced migra on and part of a
produc ve labor force in the enclaves of the rising Bri sh Empire in
Southeast Asia. Part of the discussion here is centered on unraveling the
contradictory policy impulses of the colonial authori es in South and
Southeast Asia. The Indian government was primarily concerned with
the penal aspects of transporta on while the administra on in the la er
sites were principally interested in the labor u lity of the able-bodied
men they had acquired. My discussion will then shi a en on to the
convict workers themselves and their ac vi es in the Southeast Asian
penal colonies. Their story ends in the late nineteenth century, when
the major penal sites in the Straits Se lements, specifically Singapore,
refused to accept any more convicts from South Asia.

Developing out of the medieval punishment of banishment,

transporta on had been in existence in England since the sixteenth
century, and it became more widely used in the late seventeenth
century when North America was opened up to receiving convict traffic.
In the eighteenth century it was by "far the most important of all . . .
secondary punishments . . . in which minor criminals or those reprieved
from the death sentence were banished to foreign lands as indentured
labour. Transporta on overseas was a feature unique to Bri sh penal
culture." 15

Transplanted to India in the late eighteenth century, transporta on took

root in the emerging colonial penal culture of the early nineteenth
century and flourished because colonial administrators viewed it as an
especially suitable technology of punishment for Indian society and
culture. In India, as in England, it was aimed at a aining the penal
objec ves of removing criminals from their local socie es, of deterring
others from commi ng crimes, and of reforming the convicts. 16 And in
India it was believed to have the added virtue of being a transgressive
punishment, that is, it transgressed indigenous no ons about the
religious and cultural dangers of crossing the kala pani or the "black
waters."
Thus, Bri sh officials considered transporta on to be "a weapon of
tremendous power. The horror with which the people regard
transporta on is a feeling born with them, and the ques ons whether it
be a wise or a foolish feeling, whether it be a just deduc on from true
premises or the result of ignorance and supers on, are nothing to the
purpose." 17 In other words, transporta on was said to pack an extra
puni ve punch because of its nega ve cultural and religious
implica ons. Furthermore, because of the peculiarly Indian cultural
currency of this punishment, it was to be appraised differently in India
than in England. Therefore the objec ons of the "many persons of very
high authority . . . who have made themselves masters of the science of
criminal-discipline" (presumably among them the law reformer Jeremy
Bentham) and who raised doubts about its merits were not per nent to
the Indian penal scene. 18

Transporta on, as u lized by the colonial regime, had li le precedence

in Indian history. Although banishment existed as a punishment for
certain crimes in ancient India, its scope appears to have been limited.
According to the Manusmr (the code of law associated with Manu) and
to other ancient texts, it was a subs tute punishment for Brahmins
whose transgressions otherwise merited the death penalty or branding.
It was also levied on offenders for crimes ranging from adultery to not
rendering assistance when a village was being plundered, and on
undesirable characters such as gamblers and here cs that the
authori es wanted to expel from their kingdom. Li le evidence exists as
to the specific areas to which people were banished. Apparently, the
prac ce simply was to ensure that offenders le the state or the
kingdom that banished them. 19

The Bri sh interest in u lizing this "weapon of tremendous power" was

enhanced by their preoccupa on with the deployment of punishments
that inflicted a "just measure of pain." Ironically, this emphasis meshed
uncomfortably with their rhetoric that sought a moral high ground by
espousing the replacement of harsh Islamic laws with the civilized and
civilizing regime of colonial discipline and punishment. Indeed, colonial
law increasingly replaced or revised Islamic law in the ini al century of
the Raj, discarding par cularly those punishments the Bri sh considered
repugnant such as mu la on—a trend that conformed with the
European tendency to shi away from torture in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. But this represented one trend at a me
when the overall emphasis was on ensuring that the severity of
punishments was not undermined and that appropriate punishments
existed to facilitate the maintenance and enhancement of law and
order.

Jorg Fisch's study of the Bri sh transforma on of the Bengal criminal

law between 1769 and 1817 has judiciously extricated the seemingly
"humanitarian" strands of legal changes from the larger fabric with its
clear-cut sanguinary design.

Punishments more or less familiar from Europe were hardly ever

ques oned, flogging included, while capital offences were much more
frequent in English than in Islamic law. . . . Crime had to be fought in the
interests of the state and of society. This led to deterrence and
preven on as the most important means. Almost every measure was
jus fied if it contributed to them. . . .
Bri sh administrators . . . did not want to revenge, to retaliate or to
impose suffering for its own sake. The ul mate goal of the punishment
was not the body of the criminal but rather the impact on society and
the future behaviour of the offender. Within this framework, mu la on
was of doub ul use. It caused much and long suffering, while its
deterrent effect was limited, and it encouraged rather than prevent the
commission of further crimes by the punished person. Capital
punishment, on the other hand, excellently fi ed in with the Bri sh
needs: it could be administered with compara vely li le physical
suffering, but with much deterrent effect, and its preven ve value was
absolute. Transporta on was seen in a similar manner . . . 20
Central to the colonial preoccupa on with transporta on was the Bri sh
belief in the unusual "power" that it exerted over indigenous minds. And
many colonial administrators con nued to repose their faith in the
"horror" of the punishment, even in the face of growing evidence to the
contrary over the course of the nineteenth century. Such convic on
grew out of the long-standing belief that Indians regarded the
punishment with dread and out of the rising colonial state's desire for
balancing and even vi a ng "humanitarian" reform by perfec ng a
suitable technology of punishment for India and Indians. This framework
guided colonial administrators from the very outset of their a empts at
"reforming" Indian laws and punishments. Consider the responses of
magistrates to the inquiry ins tuted by Governor-General Cornwallis
into the criminal jus ce system in 1789 and 1790. An underlying tone in
these delibera ons was a concern about the lack of severity in
punishments applied by the new colonial legal system. Several
administrators therefore urged the establishment of more sanguinary
punishments, including public hangings; some recommended the
imposi on of transporta on. 21

Much the same tenor is discernible in the responses that Governor-

General Wellesley elicited from his subordinate officers when he sought
out their views on the prevailing judicial and penal systems. In fact, the
official voices were even more insistent on this occasion that
transporta on be deployed as the "weapon" of choice against certain
kinds of criminals. Once again the accent was on the "horror" that the
punishment evoked among Indians. The three judges of the Provincial
Courts of Appeal and Circuit in Calcu a, for instance, reported that
transporta on was "considered by many as more severe than death."
The judge of Bakarganj chimed in that "na ves in general dread it more
than hanging; and persons under that sentence have repeatedly
requested me to get their sentences changed to death in preference."
The judge and magistrate of Hughli lamented that it was not u lized
more extensively because it was "held in such terror." 22

The 1838 report of the Commi ee on Prison-Discipline, which became

the textual primer for the emerging "scien fic" discourse on penology in
colonial India, echoed these sen ments. Charged with designing a
"good machinery for the inflic on of punishment" 23 —a machinery
that was to work in tandem with the new penal code that the Law
Commission was formula ng—the commi ee found transporta on to
its liking because of its "horror" and "terror" poten al. Although
imprisonment received the most extensive coverage in the report
because it was considered the primary punishment, transporta on was
singled out as the second most important form of punishment. A
"dis nct" sec on of the report highlighted the "system under which that
punishment is now inflicted, with a few recommenda ons of
improvements . . . and our plan of a new system under which we
recommend the future inflic on of that punishment." 24

Transporta on, to use the words of the Commi ee on Prison-Discipline

report, was "a branch of prison-discipline," its value as a punishment
measurable largely in terms of its effec veness in rela on to
imprisonment. Whereas the commi ee acknowledged that "the
temporary discipline of a peniten ary has great advantages over the
temporary discipline of a penal se lement," it was decidedly in favor of
transporta on for life, which it considered a highly reliable form of
"criminal discipline." The subject of capital punishment it chose not to
broach, at least not to consider extending its use. However, it did weigh
the merits of "whether death or transporta on were [sic] the most
awful to the people" and found "that transporta on for life would
generally, in India, have a greater deterring effect than this most
grievous inflic on." Transporta on, according to the commi ee report,
was also the tougher punishment in the eyes of those people "who do
not consider imprisonment for life, in solitude and without occupa on,
a punishment absolutely unjus fiable." From this line of reasoning
followed the conclusion that "at present imprisonment for life is
universally considered as the milder, and transporta on for life as the
severer punishment. In fact the permanence of the effect in both
punishments is equal, and the intensity of the effect of the la er in
India, is incalculably greater than that of the former." 25

Transporta on was intensely feared by the people in India, the

commi ee maintained. Unmistakable proof of this a tude was its
finding "that even under the present very lax treatment of transported
convicts, out of those who are actually experiencing the tedium of
perpetual confinement in Allipore Gaol, to whom if to any na ve the
idea of novelty and release from the walls of a prison would be
agreeable, few compara vely have pe oned to have their sentences
commuted to transporta on." 26 The superintendent of this Calcu a jail
offered his support for this belief when he urged that the "desperate
characters" held in his facility be banished overseas, "a plan" that he
considered "more consonant with the principle of punishment, and
more suitable to the condi on of such heinous offenders." 27

From the outset transporta on was also developed as a punishment in

India—as it had been in England—to serve economic objec ves as well.
The la er inten on was clearly spelled out in the Transporta on Act of
1717, specifically in its wording that "in many of His Majesty's colonies
and planta ons in America, there was a great want of servants, who by
their labour and industry might be the means of improving and making
the said colonies and planta ons more useful to this na on." 28 In
short, this punishment had the added advantage of supplying "servants"
to labor-deficit areas that were vital to the project of the Bri sh Empire.
From the outset, the colonial decision to extend transporta on to India
was made with an eye to realizing both the penal and economic
objec ves. Certainly well aware of these dual goals was the
superintendent of the Andamans, the first systema c major penal
se lement for convicts from South Asia. Wri ng in 1795, he insisted
that "in all cases of transporta on two points must be established[:] the
one that there is strong local a achment from habit, possession of fixed
property; es of consanguinity or affec on, the dissolving of which with
condemna on to hard labour cons tutes the exemplary punishment,
the other that the country chosen for the place of banishment is to
derive benefit . . ." He added that this advantage was a ained "by the
acquisi on of even such bad subjects as was formerly the case in the
transporta on of convicts from Great Britain to its colonies in North
America and at this me to Botany Bay." Furthermore, he emphasized
that European convicts were not be added to the "na ve labourers"
because they were incapable of working and surviving "in such a
climate." 29

In the ini al years of transporta on of convicts from South Asia to

Southeast Asia, a few Europeans were transported along with Indians,
and they were invariably treated differently. In fact, on the few
occasions that European convicts—mostly Portuguese—were shipped
out together with Indians they were housed separately and eventually
placed in an overseer capacity over their fellow convicts from India.
Generally, however, Europeans convicted of transportable offenses were
dispatched to Australia. Furthermore, early on the authori es in London
decided not to send any Indian convicts to Australia but to preserve it as
a place for Europeans only. 30

The puni ve and economic objec ves of transporta on did not always
dovetail, however. Certainly, they did not mesh well when the primary
colonial interest in inflic ng this punishment was in capitalizing on its
severity and its capacity to deliver a "just measure of pain." By contrast,
the transporta on des na ons were far more invested in its labor value,
that is, in the promise of its capacity to provide a cheap and reliable
pool of convict labor, the greater the number and the more physically fit
the be er. At mes, these conflic ng pulls, emana ng largely from the
sending and receiving ends, led to seemingly contradictory shi s in
colonial policies about transporta on.

The subject of transporta on was broached in India as early as 1773,

when Warren Has ngs, the governor of Bengal, recommended
banishing prisoners to Bengkulen (also known as Fort Marlborough) in
West Sumatra. Although sources differ on when the first Indian convicts
were actually transported there—according to one account as early as
1784 31 —an early batch was sentenced by the Supreme Court in
Calcu a in 1787 and deported to Bengkulen. Therea er, other
des na ons were sought and developed because of the lack of jail
facili es in Bengal and the increasing number of prisoners. In 1788
Governor-General Cornwallis recommended transporta on to the
Prince of Wales Island, be er known as Penang, which the East India
Company had acquired in 1786, or to comparable sites in lieu of certain
sentences: life imprisonment, a term of seven years, or forfeiture of
limbs. By 1790 the first Indian convicts had set foot on Penang soil. 32

Therea er, the number of prisoners eligible for transporta on and the
locales to which they were transported varied with changing legisla ve
and administra ve impera ves and with the changing geography of the
Bri sh Empire in Southeast Asia. Penal des na ons in the late
eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century included
Bengkulen, Malacca, Penang, the island of Amboyna ( south of the
principal Moluccan islands), and Java. By 1819 the flag of the empire
also flew over the island of Singapore, which Sir Thomas Raffles had
acquired when he was governor of Bengkulen. The Bri sh advance into
Burma opened up addi onal venues, specifically in Arakan and
Tenasserim, where they had secured concessions in the late 1820s. And
by the close of 1810 Britain had also acquired the former French
territory of Mauri us. Periodically, administrators in Calcu a and
London broached the possibility of adding Botany Bay, West Indies,
Aden, and various locales in Asia to this changing list of penal sites, but
these were not developed into penal colonies for Indian convicts from
South Asia. 33

If one impulse shaping transporta on laws was the ongoing colonial

Indian interest in making the punishment more severe, another dynamic
was the Southeast Asian preoccupa on with transforming the recipients
of this punishment into convict workers for their se lements. And
always there was a concern about increasing the numbers who could be
targeted by such laws. As early as 1799, Regula on II displayed this
intent in adjudging "convicts who may escape from confinement during
their sentences liable to transporta on." 34 Much of the ini al focus,
however, was on revising the terms of this punishment so that it
operated with op mum severity, a condi on that was believed to be
best safeguarded by maintaining it as a long-term sentence. Regula on
LIII of 1803 therefore sought to curtail its use to "none, except persons
convicted of heinous offences and sentenced to be imprisoned for life . .
." 35 In its insistence that "transporta on beyond sea shall be herea er
restricted to convicts who may be sentenced to confinement for life,"
this regula on nullified sec on X of Regula on IV of 1797 whereby
prisoners could be banished overseas for shorter terms, seven years or
other me periods. Enacted in part as a response to the concern
registered by several administrators that the return of transportees to
their na ve soil diminished the terror of that punishment, this
regula on also ins tuted capital punishment for escaped convicts. To
one scholar, these changes show that the "warnings in the replies to
Governor-General Wellesley's enquiry of 1801, that the deterrent effect
of this punishment was mainly based on uncertainty and would be
destroyed by returning convicts, was taken seriously." 36

Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly favorable light in which the judicial

authori es had cast transporta on in 1801, and notwithstanding the
several legal measures enacted to tailor it into a more long-term and
effec ve punishment, it was briefly abolished by Regula on XIV of 1811.
This decision to amend the "provisions of the exis ng regula ons
respec ng the punishment of criminals by transporta on" emanated
ostensibly from the administra ve concern—to use the language of the
Regula on—regarding the "delay experienced in carrying such
sentences into execu on." This seemingly drama c turnaround in view
was also jus fied by government on the grounds that (1) it entailed
considerable expense, (2) its reputa on as a terrible punishment had
been compromised by the frequent return of transported prisoners, and
(3) its capacity to evoke terror had been diminished partly from the
laxness in treatment of prisoners, par cularly those held in Penang.

On the one hand, then, the decision to abolish transporta on as a

punishment stemmed from financial and prac cal considera ons; on
the other hand, it issued from an ongoing concern regarding the
severity of the punishment because of escapes and returns and the
relaxed treatment of prisoners. Convicts, especially in Penang, were said
to enjoy privileges that diminished the rigors of their punishment.
Moreover, government now had the addi onal op on of confining
prisoners in its Alipur jail. Some authori es believed that this new jail in
Calcu a, in the heart of the emerging Indian empire, could take over the
transporta on func on of removing criminals from their home turf.
They also believed that it could guarantee be er the severity of the
punishment because of the secure confines of the jail and the added
possibility of requiring and extrac ng hard labor from the prisoners. 37
Regula on XIV was a momentary departure from an otherwise
consistent line in favor of transporta on. Not surprisingly, it was quickly
overturned by Regula on IX of 1813, which reinstated transporta on.
That it was abolished at all has rightly appeared puzzling, par cularly
given the rela ve absence of official delibera ons over why this decision
was undertaken in the first place. 38 Whatever wavering there was over
this form of punishment related not to its intrinsic merits as a harsh
sentence but to a concern about the lack of rigor enforced in its
implementa on and prac ce.

The ming of this revival—and the language employed in its

reins tu on and in subsequent legisla ve refinements of this
punishment confirms this—can be closely correlated with rising imperial
ambi ons and impera ves. Indeed, poli cal and territorial advances
abroad and in the subcon nent altered the parameters of the penal
discourse regarding transporta on from one directed solely at weighing
its severity as a punishment and its effec veness as a deterrence to an
es ma on of its role in the larger imperial configura on. In other words,
policies about transporta on increasingly became ed to ques ons of
labor. These new considera ons not only revived interest in
transporta on but also enhanced its value.

Note the imperial address to which Regula on IX of 1813 reestablishing

transporta on was directed. This enactment authorized the governor-
general to transmit convicts to whatever "Bri sh se lements in Asia"
that he deemed appropriate and to move "convicts from one place to
another in the se lements aforesaid." Convicts were, moreover, "liable
to be employed at any places within the limits of the se lement to
which they shall be sent, which shall from me to me be fixed on by
the local administra on." 39 All these strictures were clearly designed to
accommodate the shi ing labor needs and impera ves of the rising
Bri sh Empire.
Labor considera ons were also clearly etched into Regula on I of 1828,
the next legisla ve change in the condi ons of transporta on. This
regula on empowered the governor-general "to commute sentences of
imprisonment for life in the Allypore Gaol, to transporta on for life to
any of the Bri sh se lements in Asia, in certain cases," an amendment
that not only widened the pool of eligible offenders but also added new
transporta on des na ons. Thus, those Alipur prisoners under life
sentences who were desirous of securing a commuta on of their
sentences could, by this legisla on, seek "transporta on for life."
Another change enacted by this law was the ruling that prisoners could
"from me to me . . . be transported to the coast of Tenasserim, or to
other Bri sh se lements to which convicts are now usually transported,
in lieu of being imprisoned for life . . ." 40

Administra ve confidence in transporta on's efficacy in ex rpa ng

criminals from Indian soil and in supplying workers to labor-deficit
se lements overseas is conspicuously evident in the delibera ons of the
Prison-Discipline Commi ee. No wonder its report strongly advocated
con nua on of this punishment and even its greater use, a
recommenda on that enabled transporta on to persist in South Asia
well into the nineteenth century.

In the Southeast Asian outposts the support for transporta on of

convicts from India remained strong as long as the economic calculus
outweighed other considera ons. As one governor of Prince of Wales
Island put it euphemis cally, this type of coerced labor was helpful in
providing "public service." To con nue in his words, as he noted in 1800
in making a pitch for Indian convicts, they were needed "to carry on
works, par cularly roads, which could not otherwise have been
effected, but at a most enormous expence. The roads at present are
extensive, and as the cul va on and popula on increases they will s ll
require to be further extended, this can only be done in the first
instance by government, the inhabitants not having the means . . ." 41

The resident of Fort Marlborough echoed similar sen ments. He wanted

Bengal convicts because their services cost less than the "usual price of
labor of a Malay" and because their labor was vital to his plans to
develop the cul va on of coffee and spices in west Sumatra. The first
Bri sh governor of Mauri us, Sir Robert Farquhar (1810-23), added his
voice to this chorus when he sought Indian convict labor to develop the
island's agricultural resources. And speaking in the a ermath of the
aboli on of transporta on, the Bri sh resident at Amboyna called for its
immediate reinstatement, his argument for convict labor u ered in
words that were all too familiar in Calcu a and in many locales across
Southeast Asia. Convicts, he observed, performed "public service" that
was in the best interests of the Bri sh government to support. Such
"service" enabled the "na ves" in Amboyna to adhere to "their
domes c occupa ons" while the convicts were assigned to other
pressing engagements. 42

The impera ves of empire also favored transporta on by genera ng

"push" factors: forces that encouraged the banishment of convicts from
the Bri sh dominion in India to their rising empire overseas. As colonial
rule expanded across the subcon nent—through the annexa on of new
territories and the extension of its reach into the countryside—Bri sh
authori es increasingly perceived transporta on as a punishment
perfectly calibrated to rid the emerging empire of poli cal opponents on
the one hand and vicious criminals on the other. In other words, they
regarded it as a pliable instrument of empire building, to shore up the
founda ons of colonial rule, by ex rpa ng those people who resisted or
threatened to undermine its evolving regime of law and order.

Among the first to whom transporta on was extended were the

Poligars, seventy-three of whom were dispatched to Penang a er their
Sivaganga Revolt of 1799-1801 had been crushed in southern India.
Several of the principal supporters of the Pychee Raja who fought
against company rule in Mysore between 1799 and 1806, including
Yeman Nayar of Malabar, were also transported and found themselves
living alongside the Poligar prisoners. Briefly, authori es in Calcu a
considered banishing Indian soldiers who had fought pitched ba les
against their superior European officers in the Vellore Mu ny of 1806.
Although not carried out, the ini al plan was to divide the mu neers
into batches to be shipped off to the Cape, Penang, Bengkulen, and
Malacca. 43

Transporta on was also a weapon in the colonial arsenal aimed at

maintaining and reinforcing law and order. It was directed in the ini al
century of colonial rule at those crimes rela ng to property that were
considered especially malicious—burglary, dacoity, and housebreaking,
crimes that may have increased in the wake of agrarian changes ushered
in by the Bri sh-ins tuted Permanent Se lement of 1793. Regula on
XVII of 1817 "for the more effectual administra on of criminal jus ce in
certain cases" specifically targeted such offenders; "persons convicted of
robbery by open violence" in certain cases were liable to be whipped as
well as imprisoned and transported for life. The same punishment was
to be awarded for burglary and the under certain condi ons. 44
According to the "Comptroller of Indian Convicts" in the Straits
Se lements, Indian convicts in Southeast Asia were offenders whose
crimes included "Murder, Thuggee, and Dacoity" and some who were
"tried and convicted of frauds and forgeries, robbery with violence, and
such like misdemeanours." 45

Increasingly in the nineteenth century, the Straits Se lements

aggregated the largest body of convicts. Penang, which had been home
to Indian convicts from the late eighteenth century onward, ini ally
housed the largest number. Its total stood at 1,469 in 1824, 998 of
whom had been sent from Bengal; the remainder were made up of 272
from Madras, 192 from Bombay, and 7 from Ceylon (Sri Lanka). A sizable
propor on of these convicts had arrived between 1819 and 1823: 124 in
1819, 304 in 1820, 195 in 1821, 154 in 1822, and 185 in 1823, or 962 of
the 1,469 present in 1824. Only 24 of these 1,469, or less than 1% of the
overall convict popula on, were women. In 1824, on the eve of its
return to the Dutch, Bengkulen supported 773 convicts, a majority (579)
of whom were from Bengal; the other 194 had been sentenced from
Madras. Although an ini al batch of over one hundred convicts had
been dispatched to Malacca in 1805 to clear its Dutch for fica ons,
their numbers were not added to un l 1825 when it was returned to
Bri sh hands in exchange for Bengkulen. 46

The geographical distribu on of convicts changed somewhat as

Singapore and Burma emerged as penal des na ons and other
se lements declined as penal sites. They became the principal penal
des na on by the 1830s, as the Prison-Discipline Commi ee
acknowledged in its report and in designa ng them as the op mum
places to receive convicts. By 1835 Tenasserim in Burma counted 1,172
convicts, a substan al number considering the fact that this traffic had
only been in mo on since the 1820s. In the Straits, Singapore rapidly
surpassed Penang and Malacca as the premier se lement for South
Asian convicts. It boasted a tally of 901 by the mid-1830s, at a me
when Malacca only housed 284. Its numbers had grown in one big leap
in the mid-1820s when Bengkulen convicts were transferred there on
the occasion of its return to the Dutch. Penang's total stood at 566,
which probably represented a considerable underes ma on because it
counted only convicts sent out from Bengal and not those transported
from Bombay and Madras, the la er of which according to an 1837
es mate amounted to 122. The total for Mauri us that same year was
750, a drop from the all- me high of 986 returned for 1834 and the
beginning of a downward trend because it stopped accep ng convicts in
the late 1830s. 47

The Straits and Burma op ons persisted as the premier receiving locales
a er the 1830s. 48 A tally taken in the late 1840s counted 2,000 convicts
in the Straits, with Singapore alone accoun ng for almost 1,500 in 1846
and Penang 601. By the early years of the next decade—with the pool of
offenders eligible for transporta on widened by addi onal legal changes
ins tuted in the late 1840s—the total had reached nearly 3,000; 2,936
in 1854, to be precise. By September 1855 the number had reached
3,802, the majority of whom were in Singapore and Penang; Malacca,
which supported the smallest number, only had 388 in May 1854 but
this tally rose to 735 when 347 were added to this mix in 1854/55. 49

South Asian convicts became vital members of the workforce in the

rising outposts of the Bri sh Empire in Southeast Asia. The first
genera on of Bri sh se lers and administrators in the region was quick
to recognize their poten al and to capitalize on it. Thus, immediately
a er assuming formal possession of Penang in 1786 on behalf of the
Crown, the "country trader" Francis Light asked the governor-general in
India to "supply. . . one hundred coolies, as the price of labour in Penang
was enormous." 50 Light's request for labor, framed in terms of the high
costs of local labor, became a standard refrain in Southeast Asia in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

At mes, the demand for laboring hands was cast in specific terms, such
as was expressed in Penang's 1796 applica on for skilled workers or
"ar ficers." 51 Bengkulen's request in 1805 began with a familiar lament
about the high wages for coolies (15 rupees a month) and the "equally
exorbitant" rates for ar ficers. It then expressly men oned convicts who
could work as "ar ficers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, braziers, carpenters
and par cularly comars or po ers of which last descrip on there is not
one at this place." 52 Many were the calls as well for convicts who could
be employed in the different kinds of agricultural projects that were
being launched in Southeast Asia, tasks that Indians were said to be
especially suited for because of their peasant backgrounds. 53

Local authori es in Southeast Asia also a empted to meet their labor

demands by seeking out other types of labor, including "free" labor
recruited from India. In fact, Light's original request, although denied,
led to the recruitment of twenty-five Bombay ar ficers who arrived in
1787, the following year. Other Indians came as part of the entourage of
European officers and se lers and troops. By the early 1790s, according
to Light, there were "about one thousand" Indian shopkeepers and
"coolies" on the island. In addi on, vessels from south India were said
to bring in as many as 1,300 to 2,000 men to work every year. 54

The principal assignment for most convicts, as in Penang, was "public

works," that is, the construc on and maintenance of the
communica ons infrastructure of these colonial se lements. They also
toiled on many of the major government buildings and provided much
of the sweat and blood involved in clearing swamp and forestlands for
colonial expansion and reclama on.

An 1818 Penang list of convict du es furnishes addi onal details on the

enormous range of tasks that convicts performed and the numbers that
were involved in the different undertakings. A sizable propor on, two
hundred in toto, labored on the roads. The rest performed menial tasks
in a variety of offices. For many there are no specific job descrip ons,
only an iden fica on of the office they worked in and in what numbers:
council house (50 convicts), warehouse (45), customhouse (45),
engineers' department (30), paymaster and storekeeper (16), town
major and his garrison (20), hospitals of the 20th regiment (50),
courthouse (12), accountant's office (4), treasury office (2), police office
(5), brigade major's office (2), Chinese poorhouse (8), convict hospital
(6), officer commanding troops (8), superintendent of convicts' office
(10), free school (2), signal sergeant on Mount Erskine (2), junior civil
servants and military (56), military officers and deputy commissary (2
each), signal sergeant on great hill (2), commissariat department (10),
and government house (1). For some there are specific designa ons:
cooks for European troops (8), custodians for the lines of the 20th
Regiment (10), hospital a endants (18), dholi (li er) bearers and
medical stores (8), sweepers for the navy house (2), church furniture
cleaners (4), gravediggers (3), jail water carriers (7), cleaners and
weighmen in the convict lines (12), and sweepers, water carriers, and
cleaners of the sta onery in the secretary's office (15). Another 122
were hired out to various government and private individuals. 55

Informa on for other years shows a similar profile of convict work. The
largest con ngent of Penang's 1,469 convicts in the 1820s, 351 people
in all, were dedicated to road construc on. The rest were relegated to
posi ons designated servants, a endants, and coolies for different
senior administrators (254), workers employed in the botanic and hill
gardens and in cleaning the lines of troops (128), and labor for hire for
various individuals (98). Small groups worked as menial servants and
a endants at the hospitals (59), as syces (grooms) and grass cu ers to
junior civil and military servants (46), as cooks and servants for Bri sh
troops (22), in various capaci es for nonofficial Europeans (16), and
other comparable du es. 56

Colonial officials invariably appreciated the work carried out by Indian

convict workers. Typical was the following assessment made by one
Penang official, obviously u ered in apprecia on of their
accomplishments, that convict labor there had resulted in "numerous
and extensive roads. . . [that] intersect the island in every direc on, . . .
extensive public buildings . . . and the swamps and marshy grounds . . .
have been drained and raised, around and within Georgetown . . ." 57
Lavish praise was also heaped upon convicts for their work in Singapore
where they had played a cri cal role in its development as a major
Bri sh entrepôt a er it was founded in 1819. In the es ma on of
Governor Blundell of the Straits Se lements, convicts deserved credit
for building the

whole of the exis ng roads throughout the Island . . . every bridge in

both town and country, all the exis ng canals, sea walls, je es, piers,
etc. . . . But not only is the community indebted for these essen al
works to the mere manual labour of convicts, but by the introduc on
among them of a system of skilled labour, Singapore is indebted for
works which could not otherwise have been sanc oned from the State
funds. A church has been erected [St. Andrew's Church], every brick and
every measure of lime which has been made and laid by convicts. . .
Powerful ba eries have been erected at various points . . . which would
have been too expensive for sanc on if executed by free labour while by
means of convict labour, the whole of the public buildings in the place . .
. [were] kept in a state of efficiency and repair . . . 58
Convict hands were also responsible for the building of other notable
Singapore edifices, including the Government House and the
Mariamman Hindu Temple.

In addi on, in every se lement Indian convicts were put to work as

private servants for government and private individuals. Although this
prac ce may have grown out of the familiarity that many Bri sh
administrators and se lers had had with Indians because of their prior
South Asian experiences, it also stemmed from necessity because local
people were not readily available for hire, and especially not for the
wages that were offered. Several genera ons of Bri sh officials and
nonofficials alike in Southeast Asia would, no doubt, have agreed with
the administrator who admi ed that "the allotment of convicts
gratuitously as private servants has been resorted to in order to meet
the great inconvenience which seems to have always prevailed in
respect to the want of hired servants." 59

Both because of the kinds of tasks Indian convicts undertook, ranging

from "public works" to private employment, and because of the virtual
absence of a local labor market, their working and living condi ons were
apparently be er than what Indian authori es had expected them to
endure during their terms of transporta on. That is, convicts were,
contrary to the sentences passed on many of them, generally not
shackled, allowed to live rela vely freely and not behind walls, and
o en released from their terms of servitude well before the expiry of
their sentences. In many locales convicts were not chained together
because the shackles interfered with their work opera ons. Nor was it
easy to compel all the convicts to stay in one area because so many of
them were sca ered across the se lement, especially if they were
assigned to a variety of chores. Moreover, local administrators at mes
deliberately sought to distribute their convict popula ons across their
locali es so that they could be more easily controlled and with less
manpower. A er all, the colonial line of administra on was stretched
thinly across these outposts of empire in Southeast Asia; it was
strongest in the principal towns where the machinery of government
was generally aggregated and greatly a enuated in areas removed from
these urban se lements.

Furthermore, most se lements were unprepared to absorb large

numbers of convicts and had to scramble to build convict lines to house
them; these residen al quarters were built up gradually and then too
only with the help of convict labor. Because of the variety of
occupa ons that penal administrators slo ed convicts into, including on
at least one occasion in Bengkulen into the ranks of a convict mili a,
they were in some locali es lax about enforcing the terms of hard labor
that most transportees were sentenced to. In fact, Bengkulen convicts
who performed military service were formally released long before their
terms had expired. 60

No wonder the system of control that evolved in the penal colonies was
characterized as—in fact by an officer in charge of convicts—"prisoners
their own warders." That is, some convicts, typically those iden fied as
the be er behaved and further along in the dura on of their sentence,
were designated as the warders for their fellow prisoners. This
arrangement minimized the demands on government for an elaborate
machinery of control, personnel to staff this infrastructure, and the
costs of running all this and maximized the possibili es of u lizing
convicts as "free labour." 61 Moreover, the very terms of convict labor—
whether involving "public works" or other kinds of jobs ranging from
service in virtually every administra ve office to private service for
various European officials and non-officials—ruled in favor of a limited
system of discipline for Indian convicts in Southeast Asia.

To the authori es in India, for whom the economic u lity of

transporta on was not the paramount concern, the convict worker
system appeared much too benign and shorn of the "horrors" that this
punishment was supposed to inflict. Not surprisingly, they repeatedly
chided their counterparts in Southeast Asia to s ffen the condi ons
under which convicts worked and lived. A frequent complaint from the
Indian government was that the convicts were generally not shackled or
chained, as per the terms of their sentences, and when chained were
only lightly secured "in irons." And, above all, convicts freely mingled
with the local popula on, and occasionally escaped with the help of
other Indians and Malays. The response of the government of Madras to
the annual report on its convicts transported to Malacca sums up the
extent to which sentences of "hard labour in irons on the roads or other
public works" were apparently not enforced. Instead, some convicts
were said to be
"providing for themselves" suffering it would appear, no part of their
sentence, but that of expatria on. Others, . . . [were] "let out". . . as
private servants, and necessarily therefore in circumstances of much
comfort, others, even in offices of some trust; one is returned as a
"chokeedar" [night watchman], and several "in care of the commissariat
bullocks." One individual, no 117, under sentence for returning from
transporta on, is stated be "in the charge of bungalows" . . . 62
Many convicts who served out their terms of transporta on elected to
remain in their host communi es, their descendants becoming part of
the significant minority that Indians cons tute in the plural society of
Malaysia. Some married Malay women and became part of the Jawi
Pekan, or Indo-Malay community. An es mate for Singapore suggests
that in 1838 only 60% of the convicts returned to India, a number that
fell considerably by the 1860s when "only very few returned." 63

Yet even as the flow of convicts to the Straits reached new levels,
a tudes about con nuing this traffic began to change in the receiving
communi es. The emergence of Singapore as a thriving port city by the
mid-nineteenth century led many of its prosperous residents to reassess
their support for its convict popula on and to harp on the dangers of
the poten ally vola le popula on mix that this group of Indians created.
In the words of one Singapore governor, "Europeans were apprehensive
at being a ny minority among thousands of Asians, and well-to-do
merchants of all races looked with misgivings at the mass of poor,
illiterate, haIf-starving rootless youths who came to make their fortune.
They also began to appreciate that cheap convict labour was recruited
at the cost of flooding Singapore with dangerous criminals." 64 The
Singapore Free Press declared that the Straits Se lements was "the
common sewer . . . for all the scum and refuse of the popula on of
nearly the whole Bri sh possessions in the East." 65
To what extent the presence of a large popula on of Indian convicts
alarmed many inhabitants is also apparent from the scare of 1853 when
lightning struck Singapore's well-known St. Andrew's Church and
parishioners had to carry out their services in the courthouse. This
change of locale prompted a swirl of rumors, especially in the Chinese
community, regarding the authori es dispatching convicts to collect
human heads in order to pacify the evil spirits that had taken up
residence in the church. It was also in 1853 that about a hundred Sikh
prisoners, forwarded from Calcu a's Alipur jail, a empted to break out
of the Singapore Convict Gaol, further fueling the concern that many in
that city had developed about the presence of dangerous criminals in
their midst. Moreover, there were also "grave objec ons" about plans
underway to add European convicts to Singapore's Indian and Chinese
convict popula on. Governor E. A. Blundell, who took the lead on this
issue, spoke out in 1856 against any further importa on of Chinese
convicts who had been coming in from Hong Kong since the late 1840s.
Nor did the periodic riots by Chinese and Indians in the 1850s allay fears
about the growing ethnic mix of the city, as was manifested in the
disturbance by Indian convicts on the occasion of the Muslim fes val of
Mohurrum in 1856. 66

The rising de of opinion against any further influx of Indian convicts

crested during the mu ny/rebellion of 1857-58, when the colonial
government in India suddenly found itself faced with having to dispense
with huge numbers of mu neers and rebels. One op on broached in
Calcu a was to export the problem overseas by dispatching large
numbers of them to the Straits Se lements, or instead to send the
"criminals" who were already behind bars so that their removal to
Singapore would open up space in the jails for the newest offenders.
Singapore authori es were especially taken back by the public
declara on made by the lieutenant governor of Bengal clamoring for the
right to banish to the Straits "all prisoners sentenced to more than three
years imprisonment, whose reten on . . . may, from poli cal reasons, or
from the insecurity of their jails, be deemed unadvisable." 67

The response from Singapore was swi and empha cally nega ve. The
"Chris an inhabitants" of one locality in Singapore submi ed a
memorial sta ng that:

The whole convict system is ro en to the very core. . . . We are no

longer an infant colony—that state has been passed when convict
labour is either desirable or necessary. But the treatment of the convicts
reflects strongly upon a system which holds out greater privileges than
are conferred on nearly all the lower classes of na ves. Either let the
flow of convicts cease, or place them under a proper system, with a
large body of European troops to keep them down. We would rather
dispense with their service altogether, and return to the various
presidencies these offscourings. 68

Even Governor Blundell, who had called convicts "harmless se lers" 69

in 1856, joined the ranks of this dissen ng chorus. He added his voice to
the following memorial submi ed by a body of European merchants
anxious about rumors regarding the imminent arrival of a large
con ngent of "sepoy mu neers" to Singapore:

Hitherto . . . convicts have been men from all parts of India, unknown to
each other, speaking different languages and brought up in different
habits and pursuits. These mu neers, on the other hand[,] are men
bound to each other in a sort of e of brotherhood, accustomed to act
together, speaking the same language, and naturally entertaining the
most deadly sen ments of hatred and revenge against us. To keep such
men under control requires an amount of physical force not at our
disposal. We have no convict guards nor have we any means of
organizing any such guards . . . The internal economy of the [convict]
Lines and the supervision of the convicts when at work outside, is
entrusted to the convicts themselves . . .
I concur in what is stated in the memorial that any outbreak on the part
of the convict body might have the effect of s mula ng the turbulent
disposi on of the lower classes of our Chinese popula on. . . . I do not
mean that there would be any coalescing between convicts and
Chinese, because they would have no access to each other, but the
passions and cupidity of the lower classes of Chinese and the result
would be very awful. Indeed, I concur generally in the sen ment . . . that
commercial se lements like Penang and Singapore and especially the
la er, should no longer be used as penal sta ons. So long as these
se lements were in their infancy, a body of convicts proved beneficial in
the forma on of roads, digging canals, &c., but now . . . a large
commercial city such as Singapore . . . with a trade of ten millions
sterling, a harbor crowded with shipping, and large popula on earnestly
engaged in mercan le and tradal [sic] pursuits, is no longer a proper
place for the recep on of criminals of India and most especially for that
of the late sepoys of the Bengal army, men whose hands have been
imbrued [sic] in the blood of women and children and whose hearts are
full of hatred and revenge. 70
Thus, the Straits op ons for Indian convicts came to an end. Briefly,
some inmates of the Alipur jail were sent on to Arakan to make room for
incoming rebel prisoners. But this only provided temporary relief. Far
more promising was the sugges on—and one that Governor-General
Canning quickly acceded to—proposed in October 1857 by F.J.Mouat,
inspector of jails in Bengal. His recommenda on for the "best means of
disposing" of large numbers was to reestablish a penal colony in the
Andaman Islands or to ship them out as laborers to the West Indies,
which was said to possess the addi onal benefit of not having an Indian
popula on. By the beginning of 1858 government had se led on the
Andamans as the principal transporta on des na on. In the words of
the governor-general, these islands were to serve as "the recep on in
the first instance of convicts sentenced to imprisonment, and to
transporta on, for the crimes of mu ny and rebellion and for other
offences . . ., and eventually for . . . all convicts . . . whom. . . it may not
be thought expedient to send to the Straits Se lements or to the
Tenasserim Provinces." 71 By 10 March 1858, a batch of 1,000 convicts
arrived in the Andamans and ushered in a new chapter in the history of
transporta on in colonial South Asia in the late nineteenth and early
twen eth centuries. 72

As long as India's "offscourings" were pliable and produc ve as convict

workers, the "whole convict system" was considered an asset to the
Bri sh Empire in Southeast Asia. But as soon as convicts grew in
numbers and became engaged in the life of the mul ethnic
communi es that sprang up in the once "infant" colonies, their
reputa on as "harmless se lers" began to change. Especially drama c
was the shi in a tudes that occurred in Singapore in 1857-58 when it
was confronted with the possibility of hos ng a new wave of convicts,
this me people drawn from the ranks of sepoy mu neers and peasant
and other rebels. Nor were local authori es eager and willing to mix
these newcomers in with those other newcomers who were beginning
to make their way into these se lements as indentured laborers. 73

Convicts they were in South Asia and convict workers they became in
Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
because the penal socie es that received them desperately needed
their labor power. And they too keyed on this iden ty as workers—as
Company ke naukar, or servants of the Company to be precise—in
defining themselves in terms of their labor service and u lity and not in
terms of their punishment or exile. This dynamic worked well for both
par es as long as convicts seemed malleable and valuable as workers.
But as soon as the government in India threatened to dump its
mu neers and rebels on the Straits Se lements in the a ermath of the
Mu ny/Rebellion of 1857, the local administra ons in the penal
colonies were no longer willing to host any more transportees. Thus, the
flow of convicts from South to Southeast Asia, which was part of a
global system of forced migra on, came to an end, its termina on
ushered in by the poli cal threat that the latest batch of convicts posed
to the effec veness of the exis ng system of convic sm.

Notes

1. Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, "Unshackling the Past," in

Convict Workers: Reinterpre ng Australia's Past, Stephen Nicholas, ed.
(Cambridge, 1988), p. 7. This en re volume champions the revisionist
no on that transportees be viewed as "convict workers" who "were part
of a global system of forced migra on" and not a "dis nct class" of
"professional and habitual criminals."

2. Ian Duffield and James Bradley, "Introduc on: Represen ng Convicts,"

in Represen ng Convicts: New Perspec ves on Convict Forced Labour
Migra on, Ian Duffield and James Bradley, eds. (London, 1997), pp. 1-2.

3. Nicholas and Shergold, "Transporta on as Global Migra on," in

Convict Workers, p. 30; Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of Bri sh North
America: An Introduc on (Madison, 1986), p. 121.

4. Nicholas and Shergold, "Unshackling the Past," pp. 3-13.

5. Bengal Public Consulta ons (BPC), Oct. 1-28, 1808, Oct. 28, no. 12;
and June 9-July 27, 1830, July 27, no. 10; India Criminal Judicial
Consulta ons (ICJC), July 5-Dec. 20, 1845, Sept. 20, no. 13; and June-
Sept. 26, 1856. Penang, Malacca, and Singapore were collec vely
administered as the Straits Se lements beginning in 1826; Singapore
became its capital in 1832.

6. ICJC, Jan. 7-June 24, 1853, and July 1-Dec. 30, 1853.

7. Stanley L. Engerman, "Introduc on," in Terms of Labor: Slavery,

Serfdom, and Free Labor, Stanley L. Engerman, ed. (Stanford, 1999), p. 4.

8. Anthony Reid, "Introduc on: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian

History," in Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia,
Anthony Reid, ed. (New York, 1983), p. 36.

9. Reid, "Introduc on," p. 34. See also David Northrup, Indentured Labor
in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge, 1995).

10. Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the
Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp.
20, 76; Anand A. Yang, "Peasants on the Move: A Study of Internal
Migra on in India," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979):38-45.

11. See my "Slave/Convict/Laborer, Indian/Malay/Chinese," Associa on

for Asian Studies, San Diego, 9-12 March 2000, on the meanings of this
self-designa on. Public labor in India typically involved prisoners who
were sentenced to work on the roads. G.H.Bar low, Subsecty., to Magte.,
Patna, Bengal Criminal Judicial Consulta ons (BCJC), P/128/21, June 12-
July 10, 1795, June 26, no. 25.

12. The term "Indian" in this paper is used primarily to denote convict
place of origin and not to assume the existence of a na onal iden ty.
However, I have argued elsewhere that convicts forged a transregional
iden ty as a result of their experiences as convict workers in Southeast
Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See my
"Slave/ Convict/Laborer."
13. Ibid., and my "Convicts, Cannibals and Colonial Rule: India, the
Andaman Islands and Asia," 4th Annual Interna onal Conference of the
World History Associa on, Florence, Italy, 22-25 June 1995.

14. See K. S. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of Their

Immigra on and Se lement (1786-1957) (Cambridge, 1969).

15. Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

(London, 1989), p. 285; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England
1550-1750 (London, 1984), pp. 66-67.

16. David Meredith, "Full Circle? Contemporary Views on

Transporta on," in Convict Workers, p. 14.

17. Report of the Commi ee on Prison-Discipline (PDCReport) (Calcu a,

1838), p. 97.

18. J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New
South Wales (Sydney, 1983), pp. 10-14; and John Clive, Macaulay: The
Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973), pp. 61-65, on Bentham's
influence on Macaulay.

19. Ram Mohan Das, Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (with a
Par cular Reference to the Manusmr ) (Bodh Gaya, 1982), pp. 40-41;
Sukla Das, Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (c. A.D. 300 to A.D.
1100) (New Delhi, 1977), pp. 74-75.

20. Jorg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The Bri sh Transforma on of
the Bengal Criminal Law 1769-1817 (Wiesbaden, 1983), pp. 131-32. See
also Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe
(Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), pp. 137-38.

21. Bengal Revenue Consulta ons (BRC), Dec. 3, 1790; Fisch, Cheap
Lives, pp. 38-41.
22. "Answers to the Interrogatories of the Governor General; and New
Systems of Revenue, and Judicial Administra on (1801)," Parliamentary
Papers 9 (1812-13), esp. pp. 9, 45, 115.

23. Minutes of 14 Dec. 1835, in Lord Macaulay's Legisla ve Minutes,

selected by C. D. Dharkar (n.p., 1946), pp. 278-79; Anand A. Yang, "The
Voice of Colonial Discipline and Punishment: Knowledge, Power and the
Penological Discourse in Early Nineteenth Century India," Indo-Bri sh
Review 21 (1995):62-71.

24. PDC Report, p. 3. Much of this report focuses on exis ng condi ons
of jails and prisoners, reform of prison discipline, and the establishment
of peniten aries.

25. PDC Report, pp. 94, 80-81. Clive, Macaulay, p. 447, states that
"Macaulay's code was based upon what were for the me rather
advanced humanitarian principles. Thus, the death penalty was reserved
for murder and for treason, the highest offenses against the state . . ."

26. PDC Report, p. 86. Of the 800-1000 prisoners with life sentences at
Alipur jail at any one me, apparently no more than 48 a year ever
sought to have their sentences commuted to transporta on. By
Regula on I of 1828, prisoners were allowed to do so.

27. Suptd., Alipur jail to GOB, in PDC Report, appendix no. 4, p. 301. The
superintendent was also reac ng to the lack of severity in jail discipline.

28. Meredith, "Full Circle," p. 14.

29. A. Kyd to Bengal, 20 Nov. 1794, BPC, Jan. 2-Feb. 27, 1795, Jan. 19,
no. 3.

30. Extract Judicial Le er to Bengal, June 30, 1802, Board's Collec ons
(BC), F/4/142, nos. 2481A to 2496. Also BCJC, P/128/32, Jan. 6-April 28,
1797, Feb. 24, no. 2, for a list of transportees that includes Portuguese
convicts transported to Penang from India.

31. Fisch, Cheap Lives, p. 53. Some 270 convicts were banished to the
Andamans by the end of 1795. The following year government, "with a
view to humanity and economy," withdrew from this penal se lement
because of "great sickness and mortality . . . and the great expense and
embarrassment to government in maintaining it and in conveying to it
supplies at the present period." Minute by the Board, BPC, Jan. 4-Feb.
22, 1796, Feb. 12, no. 5. These convicts were later transferred to
Penang, also known as the Prince of Wales Island (POWI). Major J.F.A.
McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminister, 1899), p. 4.

32. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 132-33.

33. Extract judicial le er, June 30, 1802, BC, F/4/142, 1803-4; Foreign
Poli cal, 1839; Nicholas Tarling, ed. The Cambridge History of Southeast
Asia, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twen eth Centuries (Cambridge, 1992),
ch. 1; John Mulvany, "Bengal Jails in Early Days," Calcu a Review n.s. 6,
no. 292 (1918):297-98. Briefly, the Bri sh also held Java and other
former Dutch possessions.

34. "A.D. 1799. Regula on II," Harington's Regula ons; "List of convicts .
. . on . . . the ship Endeavour," "List . . . on board the ship London," BPC,
May 3-29, 1797, May 3, nos. 125, 127. See also Board to Suptd., POWI,
Mar. 11, 1796, BPC, Feb. 29-Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 14, no. 40.

35. "A.D. Regula on LIII," Harington's Regula ons; Mulvany, "Bengal

Jails," pp. 297-98. The sec on in Regula on II of 1799 extending
transporta on to escaped prisoners was rescinded. Fisch, Cheap Lives,
pp. 3-4.

36. Fisch, Cheap Lives, pp. 78, 62; "Regula on LIII."

37. "Resolu ons," BCJC, Nov. 26-Dec. 10, 1811, Dec. 10, no. 2; "A.D.
1811. Regula on XIV."

38. Fisch, Cheap Lives, p. 78, a ributes the aboli on to three reasons:
the building of a new jail at Alipur, the frequent delays experienced in
carrying out transporta on, and the costs incurred.

39. "A.D. 1813. Regula on IX."

40. "A.D. 1828. Regula on I."

41. Le er from Governor, POWI, May 31, 1800, Extract BPC, July 10,
1800, BC, 1803-1804, F/4/152.

42. "Extract from . . . the Colonial Dept.," June 5, 1813, BCJC, June 26-
July 24, 1813, July 24, no. 18; extract from Fort Marlbro to Fort William,
Aug. 5, 1806, in BC, 1808-1809, F/4/259. K. Hazareesingh, History of
Indians in Mauri us (London, 1977), pp. 4-9. In 1815, 700 prisoners
were sent from Bengal to work in Mauri us. 43. "Extract le er from
Governor General . . . ," Dec. 20, 1806, BC, 1808-1809, F/4/245; "Seizure
and Trial of the Rebel Yeman Nair . . . ," BC, 1809-10, F/4/268; "Extract. .
. from Fort St. George," May 9, 1803; Lt., 2nd Ba alion, 6th Regt., N.I.,
March 8, 1803 to Fort St. George, BC, F/4/55, 1803-1804.

44. "A.D. 1828. Regula on I"; John R. Mclane, Land and Local Kingship in
Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 75-76; and his
"Bengali Bandits, Police and Landlords a er the Permanent Se lement,"
in Crime and Criminality in Bri sh India, Anand A. Yang, ed. (Tucson,
1985), pp. 26-47.

45. McNair, Prisoners, p. 11.

46. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, pp. 132-33; Chief Secty's memo, Nov.
1824; T. S. Raffles to Secty, April 5, 1824, in BC, 1825-26, F/4/825;
Bombay to Court of Directors, May 22, 1841, BCJC, July 5-Sept. 27, 1841,
Aug 16, no. 9; C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819-1988, 2nd ed.
(Singapore, 1989), p. 46.

47. PDC Report, pp. 73-74, 77, 101; "Abstract . . . of Madras convicts. . .
," Oct. 17, 1837, BCJC, Nov. 13-Dec. 29, 1837, Dec. 18, no. 7; Commi ee
to Mauri us, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1-30 Dec. 1848, Aug. 19, no. 14;
Secty. to Fort Cornwallis, no 942, April 10, 1828, BCJC, April 2-May 1,
1828, April 10, no. 8.

48. Mauri us was phased out as a penal colony and its convict traffic
stopped in the late 1830s. Colonial Secty. to Secty., GOI, June 13, 1848;
and Commi ee to Governor, July 20, 1847, ICJC, July 1-Dec. 3 1848, Aug.
19, no. 14.

49. Governor to GOI, no. 106, Aug. 20, 1855, and Malacca to Secty., ICJC,
Oct. 5-Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 16, nos. 13, 16; Singapore to Governor, April
7, 1846, Singapore to GOB, no. 154, Nov. 12, 1847, ICJC, May 3o-Oct. 17,
1846, June 13, no. 22 and Oct. 21, no. 1; Governor to GOI, ICJC, July 7-
Dec. 22, 1854, Sept. 22, no. 14; GOB to GOI, no. 2310, Oct. 31, 1853,
ICJC, Oct. 5-Dec. 31, 1855, Nov. 23, no. 13. Whether convicts were sent
to Burma or to the Straits depended at mes on the exigencies of the
day. When the costs of shipping them to the Straits was ascertained to
be more than to transport them to the Arakan or Tenasserim,
transporta on to the former area was halted. But when the ensuing
influx into Burma produced overcrowding in the jails there, traffic was
redirected to the Straits. The then-governor of the Straits, Colonel
Bu erworth, proposed to take in as many as 500 to 600 addi onal
convicts.

50. Sandhu, Indians, p. 47.

51. BPC, Feb. 29-Mar. 28, 1796, Mar. 7, no. 6.

52. Resident, Fort Marlborough, Nov. 30, 1805, in G/34/24, Sumatra,
1799-1808, Nov. 30, 1805.

53. J. Taylor, Richard Becker to Sir George H. Barlow, Nov. 18, 1806,
G/34/24, Sumatra, 1799-1808, Nov. 30, 1805.

54. Sandhu, Indians, p. 47.

55. Minute by Governor, G/34/65, Jan. 3-April 3, 1818, Jan. 22.

56. Minute by President, POWI, G/34/8, Jan 8-May 27, 1824, April 15.

57. Ibid.

58. PP, XL, (1862), paper no. 12, pp. 32-33.

59. Fort Cornwallis to Capt Bunbury and others, Nov. 6, 1827, BPC, Sept.
15-Oct. 15, 1830, Sept. 15, no. 12. In Penang in the 1850s, convicts were
also put to work in "industrial employment," including "ra an work,"
the manufacture of chairs, baskets, and other items that were produced
for public consump on. McNair, Prisoners, p. 19.

60. Yang, "Slave/Convict/Laborer." Those convicts who performed

military service were ini ally reluctant to return their uniforms or to
accept a reduc on in their food allowances.

61. McNair, Prisoners, p. 18.

62. Foujdari Adalat to Chief Secty., Madras, Aug. 22, 1835, BC, F/4/1628,
1836-37, no. 65135.

63. K. S. Sandhu, cited in Sharon Siddique and Nirmala Puru Shotam,

Singapore's Li le India: Past, Present, and Future (Singapore, 1982), p. 9.

64. Turnbull, Singapore, p. 55.

65. Cited in ibid.

66. C. B. Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Kuala
Lumpur, reprint [1902] 1965), pp. 575-631; Hong Kong to GOI, no. 786,
Oct. 28, 1856, India Public Consulta ons (IPC), Jan.-Mar. 1857, Jan. 9,
no. 7; Governor to GOI, no. 60, June 1, 1853, ICJC, July-Sept. 28, 1855,
July 6, no. 6.

67. GOB to GOI, IPC, July-Aug. 1857, Aug. 28, no. 39.

68. "Respec ul memorial of Chris an inhabitants . . . ," ICJC, Sept.-Oct.

1857, Oct. 2, no. 77.

69. Buckley, Anecdotal History, p. 657.

70. Blundell to GOI, no. 201, Nov. 26, 1857, IPC, Jan. 1858, Jan. 8, no. 7.

71. GOI to Suptd., Moulmein, no. 87, Jan. 15, 1858, IPC, Jan., no. 21.

72. Howell, Note on Jails, p. 71; GOI to Bombay, Jan. 12, 1858, IPC, Jan.
1858, no. 13. An excellent study of this penal colony is Satadru Sen,
Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the
Andaman Islands (Oxford, 2000).

73. Secty. to Suptd., Alipur Jail, BCJC, Feb. 14-28, 1828, Feb. 28, no. 49;
Colonial Secty. to GOI, April 29, 1841 and Bombay to Court of Directors,
May 22, 1841, ICJC, July 5-Sept 27, 1841, July 19, no. 9. The decision to
halt penal traffic to Mauri us was based in part on the fear that a
con nuing infusion of Indian convicts would unduly influence the
island's growing Indian popula on. Once the convict traffic was stopped,
free laborers and their families were brought in. See also Clare
Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transporta on from South Asia
to Mauri us, 1815-53 (London, 2000).
Media Relations in China's Military: The Case
of the Ministry of National Defense
Information Of ice

Ma hew Boswell

Asia Policy, Number 8, July 2009, pp. 97-120 (Ar cle)

Published by Na onal Bureau of Asian Research

DOI: 10.1353/asp.2009.0037

During past crises involving the People’s Libera on Army (PLA), such as
the 2001 EP-3 collision or the 2003 SARS epidemic, both Chinese and
interna onal journalists have struggled to obtain mely informa on on
developing events. On January 8, 2008, members of the Chinese media
were surprised, therefore, by a press release issued for the first me in
the name of the “Chinese Ministry of Na onal Defense Informa on
Office” (MNDIO; Zhongguo guofangbu xinwen shiwuju).1 Several
months later, in the wake of the Wenchuan earthquake, a spokesperson
for this office unexpectedly came forward to provide the domes c and
interna onal media with news of PLA rescue opera ons underway. Over
the course of the next several months, uniformed officers represen ng
the MNDIO began regularly releasing statements, conduc ng interviews,
and holding press conferences in a manner unprecedented in PLA
history.

Based on an extensive review and analysis of publicly available

informa on, the present ar cle will describe the MNDIO’s ac ons to
date and explore the possible mo va ons behind the crea on of the
office. An inves ga on into this issue sheds light on the broader
interplay of two pressing agendas in the PLA: the need to be er inform
the public and the need to be er persuade the public.

First, the development of an MND spokesperson and press office

appears to reflect a realiza on by the PLA that in today’s highly
mediated environment, conspicuous silence on ma ers of public
interest is no longer a viable public rela ons strategy. In the past a
deeply entrenched tradi on of secrecy and ins tu onal insularity
hampered the PLAs efforts to communicate produc vely with anyone
outside the Chinese military. This shortcoming has generated cynicism
at home and suspicion abroad that has tarnished the PLAs reputa on
and undermined Beijing’s broader strategic ambi ons. In this context
the MNDIO can be understood as an effort on behalf of the Chinese
defense establishment to be er interface with the outside world.

Second, the MNDIO appears to serve as an instrument for the PLA to

generate a favorable public consensus on issues of strategic or poli cal
concern. The PLA depends on domes c popular support to a degree
that is unusual for a military and increasingly must consider its image
abroad. Countering nega ve percep ons and promo ng the image of a
capable, responsible, and transparent military has become an important
task for the PLA. The MNDIO advances this cause by serving as a vehicle
to project centrally approved messages about the PLA and its ac ons,
thereby allowing the PLA to more effec vely tell its own story. This role
takes on added significance given increased PLA a en on in recent
years to the strategic u lity of favorable public opinion. In this way, the
crea on of the MNDIO is indica ve of Beijing’s acceptance of certain
responsibili es—as well as propaganda opportuni es— that come with
increased engagement with the world.

This study is divided into four main sec ons: u pp. 100-106 overview
the available details regarding the ac vi es, staff, and ins tu onal
organiza on of the MNDIO u pp. 107-10 explore certain general trends
in People’s Republic of China (PRC) statecra that may have inspired the
MNDIO’s crea on u pp. 110-16 focus on possible determining factors for
the crea on of the office that are specific to the PLA u pp. 116-20 assess
the MNDIO’s ac vi es and their implica ons for U.S. policy

DESCRIPTION OF MNDIO ACTIVITIES, STAFF, AND INSTITUTIONAL

ORGANIZATION

MNDIO Ac vi es to Date

By the admission of Senior Colonel Hu Changming, office director and

chief spokesperson, the MNDIO is currently in the early stages of its
development.2 Unlike the more established press briefing system at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), the MNDIO does not currently appear
to hold briefings on a regular basis. The office has instead engaged the
media in the wake of certain high profile events related to the PLA,
typically by way of press releases, interviews, or formal press briefings.
Though there is currently no MNDIO website, Hu has indicated that
prepara ons for one are currently underway/ It should also be noted
that the great majority of news relevant to the PLA occurs without
comment from the MNDIO, including day-to-day military news and
some higher profile events such as mul lateral military exercises. The
specific condi ons under which the MNDIO is charged to act are
currently unclear.

At the me of wri ng, events promp ng MNDIO ac vity have

included: the Wenchuan earthquake in May 2008, the Beijing Olympics
and 80th anniversary of the PLA in August 2008, the U.S. weapons sale
to Taiwan in October 2008, the deployment of PRC warships to the Gulf
of Aden in December 2008, the release of China’s 2008 na onal defense
white paper in January 2009, the alterca on involving Chinese ships and
the USS Impeccable in March 2009, and the issuance, also in March
2009, of the U.S. Department of Defense annual report to Congress on
the military power of the PRC. MNDIO responses to these events have
been typically directed at both domes c and interna onal audiences,
though on certain occasions the office has engaged Chinese audiences
alone. The following is an empirical overview of the available
informa on concerning MNDIO ac vi es to date.

Crea on of the MNDIO u PRC retrospec ve accounts assert that the

decision to create the MNDIO came from the Central Military
Commission (CMC) in “the second half of 2007.”4 The first public
evidence of the development occurred in December of that year, when
Cai Wu, then minister of the State Council Informa on Office (SCIO),
declared that relevant prepara ons were underway.5 Brief follow-up
reports surfaced over the next month confirming prepara ons but did
not provide details.6 Several months passed without word from the
MNDIO, even as two major events—the winter blizzard in southern
China and the March unrest in Tibet—required the emergency
deployment of military personnel and equipment. During this me,
however, the online news portal run by Jiefangjun Bao created a special
link publicizing the crea on of the MNDIO.7

Wenchuan earthquake u The MNDIO’s first high profile ac vi es took

place in the a ermath of the Wenchuan earthquake of May 12, 2008.
Three days a er the earthquake, an uniden fied MNDIO spokesperson
issued a statement detailing PLA and People’s Armed Police (PAP) rescue
opera ons underway. According to a general with the Academy of
Military Science, this debut came earlier than had been planned: “We
recognize that the devasta ng earthquake requires that we accelerate
the pace of communica on processes.... This sudden disaster has raised
the priority level.we will do our best even if we are not yet completely
prepared.”8 Three days later, Hu appeared for the first me in his
capacity as MNDIO director and spokesperson to convene an
unprecedented press conference in which several officers made
statements and answered ques ons from the media.9 Topics covered
during the press conference included the PLAs response me during the
crisis, the organiza on of rescue opera ons, and the equipment used to
facilitate rescue work.10

Olympics security u Hu hosted a second MNDIO press conference for

select foreign and domes c journalists on August 1 at the Sixth Armed
Division of the Beijing Area Command.11 Hu and the par cipa ng
officers addressed the issues of threats during the Games, forces and
equipment deployed for the Games, ongoing PLA par cipa on in UN
peacekeeping opera ons worldwide, and PLA earthquake rescue efforts
to date. In addi on to a ques on and answer session, journalists were
treated to a tour of the barracks facility, which was largely devoid of
personnel.12

Taiwan arms sale u The MNDIO issued two statements over five days
condemning the U.S. arms sale to Taiwan that had been announced on
October 3.13 Issued on October 4 and 9, both statements were widely
carried in the PRC press. The second statement was issued by Senior
Colonel Huang Xueping in an interview with PRC media, his first public
ac on as MNDIO deputy director and secondary spokesperson.

Gulf of Aden deployment u On December 17 Huang told the Financial

Times that China would likely deploy warships to the Gulf of Aden in
order

to combat piracy there. Three days later Hu Changming officially

announced that three PLA Navy warships would embark for the Gulf of
Aden the following week. Huang then convened the MNDIO’s third press
conference on December 23—his first press conference and the first to
be held in the office’s new briefing facility—to address the issue of the
imminent deployment.14

Comments from officers present at the briefing yielded par culars on

relevant ship types, mission goals, training and equipment, coopera on
and communica on with other navies, length of mission, rules of
engagement, and possible plans on behalf of the PLA to build an aircra
carrier.15 Huang discussed the deployment once again during an
exclusive interview with English-language state newspaper China Daily
on January 16, 2009, during which he also addressed China’s rising
military budget.16 The MNDIO has since provided press releases to
update the media on ongoing developments in the Gulf of Aden
deployment.17

Release of the 2008 na onal defense white paper u On January 20,

the same day as U.S. President Barack Obama’s inaugura on, Hu
Changming held a press conference to announce China’s biannual white
paper on na onal defense.18 Hu and the officers ar culated a synopsis
of the white paper and addressed ques ons from the domes c and
interna onal media concerning rela ons with Taiwan, military es with
the United States, the upcoming Na onal Day military parade, the Gulf
of Aden deployment, and military poli cal work and logis cs building.19

USS Impeccable incident u On March 11, three days a er an

alterca on between the USS Impeccable and several Chinese ships in
the South China Sea, the MNDIO faxed a statement to reporters
condemning U.S. ac ons and

demanding that the U.S. Navy halt patrols in the area.20 The MNDIO
was not the first PRC organ to comment on the ma er; the MFA
spokesperson cri cized the U.S. ac ons during a regular briefing the day
before the MNDIO statement.21
 The U.S. Department of Defense report u Hu Changming made
statements to the PRC press on March 26 cri cizing the U.S. report on
the Chinese military and demanded that the Defense Department stop
publishing the report or else risk damaging military rela ons between
the two countries.22 The MFA made similar remarks on the same day.23

Ac ons aimed at a domes c audience u The MNDIO staff has also

directed certain ac ons exclusively to a Chinese audience. Hu
Changming has given personal interviews to Chinese magazines and
news outlets, and in January 2009 he and two other officers fielded
ques ons from Chinese ne zens on Strong Na on Forum, a discussion
forum hosted by Renmin Ribao’s online portal Renmin Wang.24 During
the session Hu and the officers addressed a variety of military and
defense related issues in some detail, including certain cri cisms raised
by the audience. Hu suggested that such sessions could occur regularly
in the future.25

Ins tu onal Orienta on and Staff

In name at least, the MNDIO is a ached to the Ministry of Na onal

Defense (MND). Since its incep on in the early 1980s, the MND has
served as a government mechanism through which the PLA interfaces
with foreign defense officialdom. As such, the MND is largely considered
a symbolic front that lacks independent authority and a full dedicated
staff. The MND’s dis nc vely outward orienta on is perhaps misleading
when considering the MNDIO, however, in the sense that the la er’s
pronouncements, briefings, and related messaging are typically
intended to reach domes c as well as interna onal audiences.

Details concerning the staff and structure of the MNDIO are difficult
to find. Evidence suggests the office boasts a modest staff of
approximately twenty individuals, largely culled from the MND Foreign
Affairs Office (FAO). The MNDFAO is the public face of the organ in the
PLA General Staff Department (GSD) that coordinates China’s defense
a aches, security-related exchanges, and exercises with foreign
militaries. The most important creden al for MNDIO’s senior staff
appears to be experience dealing with foreigners. The Chinese media
have only men oned by name Hu Changming, the office director and
spokesperson, and his deputy, Huang Xueping, who also serves as a
spokesperson. Both appear to have had extensive experience in the
foreign affairs work of the PLA, and their selec on as spokespersons is
likely based on the calcula on that their experience among foreigners
will allow them to more skillfully handle an interna onal press corps and
audience.

According to a biography released in the Chinese press, Hu has

visited more than 50 na ons on five con nents and thus has ample
experience dealing with foreign officials and military personnel. He has
served in a media rela ons capacity in each of China’s bilateral and
mul lateral military exercises between 2002 and 2007, including Peace
Mission 2007—among China’s highest-profile military exercises ever. Hu
has also par cipated in the planning and coordina on of each of China’s
white papers on na onal defense, published biannually since 1998. In
mid-2007 he was given a small staff principally culled from the ranks of
the MNDFAO and was tasked with spearheading prepara ons for the
MNDIO.

Less informa on is available about Huang Xueping. Sca ered data

indicates that Huang spent much of his career at the MNDFAO. Since the
late 1990s, Huang has worked in the FAO’s General Planning Bureau,
then in the America and Oceanian Affairs Bureau.26 There is also
evidence that during this me he served as a defense a ache in the
West, indica ng a possible link to the GSD’s intelligence branch.27

There is some indica on that the MNDIO maintains ins tu onal

linkages to the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department
(CCPPD).28 The SCIO, under whose auspices the MNDIO was created, is
itself an organ of and subservient to the CCPPD.29 The MNDIO staff has
representa on from the PLA General Poli cal Department (GPD), whose
propaganda func on within the PLA is also beholden to the CCPPD.
Given such connec ons, the CCP propaganda opera on likely plays a
role in supervising and coordina ng the MNDIO’s messaging.

Indica ng a long-term investment on behalf of PLA authori es,

MNDIO staff have drawn up an undisclosed plan to develop informa on
dissemina on and press briefing work for the PLA over the next five
years. In addi on, an MNDIO delega on was funded and authorized to
visit the United States in September 2008 in order to study public affairs
opera ons in the U.S. military and government. Led by Hu Changming,
the delega on a ended briefings from public affairs officials at the
Pentagon, the State Department, the Defense Informa on School, and
the headquarters of Pacific Command. According to their U.S. handlers,
members of the delega on were most curious about how informa on
was authorized for release and the ins tu onal structures that allowed
for coordinated messaging across military and civilian bureaucracies.
They also indicated an interest in how the U.S. military was
incorpora ng new and emerging media into public affairs work. The
MNDIO’s interest in these logis cal ma ers is not surprising as the PLA
aims to improve a track record of stonewalling and delayed or dissonant
messaging.

One member of the delega on was a professor from the PLAs

premier officer training academy, the Na onal Defense University. This
fact, together with the delega on’s visit to the Defense Informa on
School, reflects an interest on behalf of the PLA in be er training the
military’s officer corps in public affairs-related exper se. Also indica ve
of this shi was the March 2009 gradua on of 51 PLA officers from an
inaugural two-week public rela ons training course held at the PLAs
Nanjing Ins tute of Poli cs.30 Currently, the ubiquitous public affairs
officers in the U.S. military have no func onal equivalent in the PLA, and
in contrast to their U.S. counterparts, most PLA officers receive li le, if
any, training in public affairs.31

GENERAL MOTIVATING FACTORS BEHIND THE CREATION OF THE MNDIO

The Drive for Informa on Disclosure

The establishment of the MNDIO is among the more recent

manifesta ons of a trend in the PRC to make government informa on
more accessible to the public. Evidence suggests that at least as early as
the mid-1990s government leaders became aware of the dangers of
excessive secrecy in handling ma ers of public concern. PRC accounts of
this rising awareness cite, for example, the Qianhu Island incident of
1994, in which a PRC inves ga on into the deaths of several Taiwanese
tourists appeared shrouded in conspiracy. This percep on precipitated
an an -mainland swing in Taiwanese public opinion that significantly
upset cross-strait rela ons.32 Failing to manage informa on in a
manner that appeared accessible and responsive, the PLA learned,
could compromise a variety of strategic and public policy objec ves.
Nevertheless, officials con nued to balk at ins tu onal reforms aimed
at addressing this problem, ci ng the poten al for “panic among the
ci zens” were the government to be overly forthcoming on sensi ve
issues.33 Nevertheless, sufficient bureaucra c momentum for the cause
had accrued by early 2003 that dra regula ons on informa on
disclosure were sent to the Legisla ve Office of the State Council. Even
then, however, the regula ons were deemed “category 2” legisla on
and not subjected to speedy review.34

The status of the issue changed drama cally in the wake of the SARS
crisis that unfolded during the first several months of 2003. The ini al
government response to the epidemic was widely cri cized at home and
abroad as belated, stumbling, and rife with deliberate a empts to
misinform the public. The crisis revealed an embarrassing lack of
coordina on both among government bureaucracies and between the
state apparatus and the military.35 The ensuing public rela ons disaster
exacted a heavy toll on the government’s reputa on. Interna onally,
Beijing appeared to have failed to live up to China’s self-billing as a
responsible player in the global community. Domes cally, the
government’s apparent dissembling inflamed public opinion and raised
ques ons about the regime’s capacity to rule responsibly. Indica ve of
the Chinese leadership’s sensi vity to such percep ons, a wave of
sackings followed in which over 120 officials, including the minister of
health and the mayor of Beijing, were fired for derelic on of duty.36

PRC accounts published a er the fact point out that “tradi onal
methods” were to blame for the government’s un mely release of
inaccurate data that caused “confusion” about its handling of the SARS
outbreak.37 The widespread fallout in public opinion enabled the
freshly installed Hu Jintao administra on to push through several
disclosure-oriented reforms aimed at avoiding such imbroglios in the
future. The once-languishing dra regula ons on disclosure of
government informa on suddenly shi ed from “category 2” to
“category 1” legisla on, thereby moving them on to the fast track for
review and promulga on.38 In July 2003 the Leading Small Group for
Transparency in Administra ve Affairs was formed to coordinate central
direc ves concerning “government transparency.” Representa ves from
a number of civilian bureaucracies composed the group along with
“relevant comrades” from the Central Military Commission (CMC), the
top decisionmaking body in the PLA.39

In the ensuing months evidence of the shi emerged at the highest

levels of government. In his first annual work report to the Na onal
People’s Congress (NPC) in March 2004, Premier Wen Jiabao departed
from previous work reports to highlight the need to “keep the people
informed so they can oversee government work” by ins tu ng “a
system of public informa on” in the government.40 In September of the
same year the Sixteenth CCP Central Commi ee echoed this asser on
a er its fourth plenum, issuing a dra decision on improving the party’s
ruling capabili es that emphasized the need to “be er disseminate
general informa on and improve repor ng in response to major
unexpected events.”41 A er debate and review, these direc ves were
codified in two different laws, the Emergency Response Law and the
Provisions on the Disclosure of Government Informa on, which entered
into force in August 2007 and May 2008, respec vely.

A Prolifera on of Informa on Offices

An important element of these reforms has been the development of

informa on offices with spokespersons throughout the government
bureaucracy. Prior to the SARS crisis, there were only a handful of
informa on offices in the Chinese government, the most prominent of
which was created in 1983 for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1990
the central authori es created the SCIO to disseminate posi ve images
of China abroad. The SCIO has since taken a leading role in coordina ng
the establishment of informa on offices in state and party organs. Pilot
offices were established in mid-2003, and soon a er the SCIO ins tuted
the framework for a formal spokesperson system at the na onal,
ministerial, and provincial levels.42 To properly staff the prolifera ng
informa on offices, the SCIO has also organized a con nuing series of
spokesperson training courses for officials na onwide.43 By February
2008, according to a Chinese white paper on rule of law, 7 central party
organs, 74 State Council ministries and offices, and all 31 provincial-level
divisions had established informa on offices, boas ng a total of 160
spokespersons.44
 Despite the fact that the CMC was party to the Transparency in
Administra ve Affairs Leading Small Group, un l 2008 the Chinese
defense establishment was a conspicuous excep on to the growing
number of state and party bureaucracies with informa on offices and
spokespersons. Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the SCIO and the
architect behind the push for informa on offices, once stated that some
officials resisted the reforms because they were blind to the reforms’
u lity or they feared that their missteps would be widely publicized.45
Other observers have highlighted the ins tu onal iner a typical of top-
down bureaucra c centralism and the fact that many

PRC organs profit from secrecy and therefore guard it jealously.46 It is

likely that some mixture of these explana ons applies to the PLA, an
ins tu on that is among the most conserva ve, secre ve, and insulated
in the Chinese state. The following sec on explores possible reasons
why the PLA ul mately decided to follow the example set by the rest of
the government.

PLA-SPECIFIC MOTIVATING FACTORS

A PLA Image Problem at Home and Abroad

Image is reality, and image is power; military image-building is an

important part of na onal image-building. The establishment of the
MND spokesperson system is an important measure in thoroughly
implemen ng the scien fic development concept, raising the military’s
so power, and molding a good image for our military.47

More so perhaps than other militaries, the PLA is dependent on

domes c popular support. Several factors account for this. Since its
incep on, the PLA has been a party military whose paramount mission
has been to serve the interests of the CCP. Success in this mission has
historically required the broad support of the civilian popula on. During
the 1930s and 1940s, for example, the CCP and the PLA’s military
strategy during the Chinese civil war relied heavily on the support and
coopera on of large numbers of ordinary ci zens. To galvanize such
support, the PLA was constantly required to reinforce its image as the
“people’s military.” This strategic and opera onal dependency survived
the founding of the PRC in the form of the “people’s war,” the
centerpiece of PLA doctrine that required the rapid and widespread
mobiliza on of civilians to defend the homeland in the event of
invasion.

Today, while the centrality of the “people’s war” concept in Chinese

military strategy has waned, the importance of the PLA’s public image
has not. The CCP leadership views the PLA as the ul mate guarantor of
poli cal stability in China. For this reason, popular concep ons of the
PLA have a direct bearing on the CCP’s poli cal fortunes. The PLA also
relies on civilian organiza ons for many supply and logis cs func ons,
and the military’s ambi ous plans to modernize require the recruitment
and reten on of skilled personnel from civilian sectors.48 To ensure that
links to the public remain produc ve, the PLA conscien ously endeavors
to maintain a posi ve public image. A network of organs in the General
Poli cal Department (GPD) have tradi onally been tasked with
coordina ng a broad array of propaganda ac vi es—television
broadcasts, work in print and online media, cultural performances, and
so forth—to cul vate the PLA’s image both as a protector and servant of
the Chinese na on and as a model of moral rec tude and bravery.

Despite these efforts, the PLA faces a number of challenges in

managing its image at home. The military’s reputa on was severely
damaged by the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and
the PLA has spent a great deal of effort a emp ng to repair its image
ever since. This effort was complicated by public resentment throughout
the 1990s over the PLA’s once pervasive and notoriously venal business
opera ons. Though the PLA is now largely divested from such
businesses, analysts point out that popular resentment con nues to
fester. Another major public rela ons setback came amid the 2003 SARS
crisis, when it was leaked that over a hundred hidden cases of the
disease had been squirreled away in military hospitals.49 Exposed to
such scandals, an increasingly educated and cynical Chinese popula on
has grown to associate stonewalling with corrup on, lack of
accountability, midity, and incompetence. PLA authori es appear to
have accepted that a culture of secrecy and ins tu onal insularity in the
military has become untenable, at least in its current form. Evidence of
this shi was visible only weeks a er the SARS crisis in the
unprecedented PLA disclosure of details concerning a deadly submarine
accident.

The PLA has been forced to adapt to similar reali es as it emerges on

the interna onal stage. Un l rela vely recently, the PLA’s image abroad
was of marginal concern to leaders in Beijing. As China’s interests have
expanded overseas, however, so too has the role of the military tasked
with protec ng them. The steady rise in the PLA’s interna onal profile
over the past twenty years has been well-documented, characterized by
rising defense budgets, increased par cipa on in United Na ons
peacekeeping opera ons, a broadening array of bilateral and
mul lateral security agreements and exercises, more asser ve military
diplomacy, and the con nued acquisi on of increasingly capable
weapons and equipment.

In order to sustain these trends, the burden has been on Beijing to

forestall suspicion and unfavorable strategic hedging on the part of
other na ons. As one PRC academic has put it, “a posi ve interna onal
environment and good-neighbor rela ons are necessary condi ons for
the rejuvena on of the Chinese na on, and they have become
important subjects for China to realize its defense and foreign
policies.”50 Unpredictable behavior and a conspicuous pall of opacity
permea ng the PLA inflame interna onal anxiety and provide grist for
noisy recrimina ons from the United States. In a typical example of such
cri cism, the U.S. Defense Department has pointed out that “there is a
contradic on between the tendencies of China’s military establishment,
which favors excessive secrecy, and the civilians’ stated goal of
reassuring neighbors and exis ng powers about the peaceful nature of
China’s development.”51 As a consequence of such percep ons, the
state-run newspaper Wen Wei Po admits, “people in foreign countries
have misunderstood or misinterpreted China’s na onal defense
policy.”52

PRC media heralded the new MNDIO throughout the early months of
2008, proclaiming that the office would serve as a “large and bright
window”53 into the PLA that would not only “be er serve”54 the
interna onal and domes c media but also fulfill the people’s “right to
know.”55 Official rhetoric and an assessment of the MNDIO’s roles and
responsibili es to date, however, indicate that the ra onale behind the
office’s crea on is born less of a newfound commitment to openness
than of a perceived need to more de ly manage informa on and public
percep ons.

Comba ng “Informa on Hegemony”

We [o he MNDIO] are foot soldiers ofinforma on dissemina on and

public opinion guidance...[I]n the struggle for public opinion we are
strategists and fighters.56

The ra onale behind developing the MNDIO may also be based on

the PLA’s recent a en on to “media warfare.” The CMC highlighted this
concept when it approved the “three warfares” theory in 2003, which
focuses on the non-combat aspects of military strategy.57 Media
warfare, according to a U.S. Defense Department report, refers to “the
dissemina on of informa on to influence public opinion and gain
support from domes c and interna onal audiences for China’s military
ac ons.”58 Non-PRC analysts have argued that the concept appears
rooted in Beijing’s assump on that all states manipulate informa on for
strategic ends.59 According to this convic on, the United States, by
virtue of alleged dominion of the world’s informa on flows, maintains
what is variously termed “informa on hegemony” (xinxi baquan) or
“discourse hegemony” (huayu baquan). PRC analyses invoke the theory
of informa on hegemony to explain the existence of certain no ons in
public discourse in and outside China that Chinese leaders find
threatening. Among the most commonly cited of these are the “China
threat theory” (Zhongguo weixie lun) and the “separa on of the military
from poli cs and the party” (Jundui feidanghua, feizhengzhihua), both
of which have been a ributed to coordinated campaigns run out of
Washington.60 According to this view, media objec vity is but a ruse
deployed to be er infiltrate global public opinion and subvert CCP rule.

A professor at the PLA’s Nanjing Ins tute of Poli cs has offered an

analysis of U.S. strategic informa on hegemony. According to his
inves ga on, the U.S. military operates radio or television sta ons in
every country in which the military is sta oned and runs more than
1,800 print publica ons worldwide, many of which are directed at
foreign audiences. By way of these vehicles, American values are
transmi ed to influen al members of foreign governments and society.
Evoking this as both a threat and a model for emula on, the author
asserts that “the methods of the American military warrant our serious
a en on.. .In the face of so large a country’s mul faceted cultural
infiltra on and informa on hegemony. ..we must seize the ini a ve in
the realm of outward military propaganda to ac vely predict, ac vely
disseminate, and ac vely seize the high ground in public opinion.”61
 To counteract the influence of informa on hegemony, a consensus
seems to have emerged among Chinese officials on the need for more
sophis cated propaganda. In a January 2009 essay in the main CCP
poli cal journal Qiushi, CCP propaganda chief Liu Yunshan cited as an
“urgent strategic task” the need to “[make] our communica on
capability match our interna onal status.”62 Seconding this theme, the
dean of the Renmin University School of Journalism has asserted that
“cliched propaganda measures are useless” and cited the need for
“bigger efforts with smarter communica on skills.”63

These exhorta ons appear not to have been lost on the PLA
leadership. The PLA press con nues to give the idea of managing public
opinion full play. A June 2008 editorial in Jiefangjun Bao praised at
length a speech made by Hu Jintao during a visit to the paper’s
headquarters. The editorial characterized the challenges facing military
propaganda in this way:

With the expansion of mission responsibili es, great changes have

occurred in the content and scope of military opera ons. Comple ng
diverse military tasks has increasingly become an important method to
exercise na onal military power. Because of the strong poli ciza on,
sensi vity, and abruptness of military ac vi es, those at home and
abroad pay a high degree of a en on to them, military news
dissemina on must be open but also a en ve to confiden ality, must
be mely but also accurate, and must se le the minds of the people
while also boos ng morale.

Only this way can we firmly maintain the dominant voice and ini a ve,
and win the understanding and support of the masses and the
interna onal community.

To realize this end, the essay further stressed the need to “make the
military news more audience friendly, compelling, and appealing;
advance innova on and reform in military news dissemina on to
improve the effec veness and direc on of opinion guidance; [and]
strengthen the development of mainstream media and emerging media
to form a new design for public opinion guidance in military affairs.”64

A PRC analyst sheds further light on the perceived need to harness

public opinion in a recent ar cle concerning the stand-off that followed
the April 2001 collision of a U.S. surveillance aircra and a Chinese
jet.65 The author points out that during the first three days of the stand-
off, U.S.-based media outlets— “the U.S. side,” in his words—published
51 reports on the incident, whereas the Chinese media published only
10. By his count these included 9 ar cles from Xinhua, including 3 in
Chinese and 6 in English, and 1 commentary in the leading English-
language party mouthpiece, China Daily. The author asserts that it was
difficult for Chinese journalists to write on the issue because there was
nowhere for them to acquire official statements. The Foreign Ministry,
apparently ill-prepared to handle a crisis that principally involved the
military, refused to answer reporters’ ques ons during a scheduled
press briefing and instead instructed them to watch CCTV (China Central
Television) to obtain an official line to cite. The resul ng dearth of
repor ng precipitated a perceived loss in global opinion that in the
author’s view limited the ways in which China could respond to the
stand-off. Conversely, the United States had exercised its discourse
hegemony to bend public opinion in U.S. favor, thereby enjoying a
greater degree of freedom of ac on. In a perceived environment such as
this, the PLA is therefore opera ng at a strategic disadvantage because
it lacks the wherewithal to project favorable narra ves in an ongoing
ba le for global and domes c public opinion.

To rec fy this shortcoming, another PRC observer noted in early 2008

that “the Chinese military should normalize and systema ze its publicity
opera ons to help expand its influence in the world.”66 Key to this
endeavor is reducing what one Chinese journalist has called the
“grinding period” during which the government ascertains the situa on
from the military and then cra s an appropriate message.67 As alluded
to in the above analysis of the aircra collision, this delay has precluded
state media from repor ng on issues involving the military in a proac ve
manner, thereby leaving public opinion at the mercy of rumor and the
perceived machina ons of the West.

Providing the military with spokespersons and press briefing

capaci es improves this situa on by allowing the media direct access to
designated PLA authori es. In addi on to engendering the appearance
of openness, this reduces the turnaround me required to issue
authorized statements. Picked up by domes c and interna onal media,
these statements quickly appear in the pages of newspapers worldwide
and reverberate through the echo chamber of the Internet. Ins tu ng a
spokesperson system thus has the effect of amplifying messages
approved by the CCP.

ASSESSMENT AND IMPLICATIONS OF MNDIO ACTIVITIES

Assessment of MNDIO Roles and Responsibili es

Certain common themes in MNDIO ac ons and statements warrant

further comment because they yield insight into the roles the office may
be intended to play. These themes include: the MNDIO’s efforts to
publicize PLA ac vi es in a posi ve light; the office’s signaling of policy
posi ons to foreign governments; and its role as a vehicle for various
members of the PLA officer corps to engage the media.

Publicizing PLA ac vi es favorably u In certain respects the MNDIO

appears to serve as a bully pulpit for the PLA, from which the military
has issued a ra of highly par san homilies on a variety of themes.
Among these are the PLA’s proac ve and selfless service to the public,
eternally defensive posture, increasing transparency, modest budget,
and the destabilizing role of the United States in Asia. The standardized
nature of such asser ons suggests these messages may cons tute a
group of centrally approved talking points to be men oned whenever
prac cable. At other mes, the MNDIO has employed somewhat more
nuanced strategies in keeping with a drive for “smarter communica on.”
Hu Changming, for example, has gone out of his way to fla er
journalists and air stories from his life that reflect humble roots and
values.68 These may cons tute efforts to massage the press corps and
showcase a so er, more humanis c side of the PLA.

The MNDIO has also taken measures to defend the PLA’s reputa on
by rebu ng cri cisms and dispelling poten ally damaging rumors.
During the January 2009 online ques on and answer session with
Chinese ne zens, for example, Hu Changming and two other officers
addressed a number of cri cisms about the PLA and corrected several
apparent misinterpreta ons of the 2008 defense white paper. Shortly
a er the Wenchuan earthquake, Hu also preempted undue public
suspicion and alarm by dispelling rumors regarding alleged damage to a
local nuclear reactor and the death of PLA paratroopers in a helicopter
crash during the rescue opera ons. Similarly, in January 2009 the
MNDIO addressed public resentment over specula on that despite a
tough economic environment, the PLA was planning a costly and
grandiose parade for the PRC’s forthcoming 60th anniversary
celebra on. During the MNDIO press conference, Colonel Cai Huailie of
the GSD assured audiences that the parade would be “stately but
frugal.”69

According to certain PLA assessments, such efforts to engage the

media have yielded tangible dividends. An analysis from a Shanyang
Military Region newspaper arrived at the following conclusion
concerning the Wenchuan earthquake relief work:
Informa on openness and transparency won the people’s high trust and
assessment of the party and the government...[and] united the
confidence and power of the people to the extreme.

The openness and transparency of informa on also brought the

sympathy and support of the interna onal community, and allowed for
a beneficial external environment for earthquake relief. In consecu ve
days we received condolences and offers of support from many
countries...[and] na onal leaders. All foreign media provided objec ve
and friendly reports.We saw that the informa on openness and
transparency and the rapid, accurate, and objec ve news reports not
only eliminated the market for rumors and made all friendly and kind
people of the world join us to aid the people of the disaster area, but
also allowed the party and people to take control of the opinion
dominance and the ini a ve in releasing informa on, allowing all the
people of the world to be er know about China, be er understand
China, and be er support China.70

In light of such efforts, the MNDIO can be understood as a

mechanism for rallying domes c and interna onal opinion in a favorable
way by maximizing the impact of favorable messages and minimizing
the impact of unfavorable messages.

Signaling to foreign governments u Statements emerging from the

MNDIO o en appear intended to reassure, warn, welcome, or
otherwise signal defense-related policy messages to foreign
governments. Predictable examples include condemna ons of the
United States for arms sales to Taiwan, surveillance in the South China
Sea, and releasing unfla ering official appraisals of the PLA.

Signaling has occurred in a variety of less expected contexts as well.

Huang Xueping, for example, announced in December 2008 that a
forthcoming an -terrorism exercise with India was not aimed at any
third par es.71 The MNDIO typically does not report on such ma ers,
and Huang’s statement may have been intended to reassure Pakistan,
given the la er’s alleged role in the terrorist a acks on Mumbai only
days before. Huang and Hu Changming both aimed to reassure global
audiences that China’s deployment of warships to the Gulf of Aden had
been done under the auspices of a UN mandate and did not represent a
shi in China’s military posture or policies.72 Hu used the occasion of a
MNDIO press conference in January 2009 to signal China’s desire to
resume military contacts with the United States that had been broken
off in the wake of the U.S. arms sale to Taiwan.73 During the same
conference Hu also delivered an unprecedented overture to Taiwan by
sugges ng the PLA and the Republic of China military establish a
“mutual trust mechanism.”74

In one par cularly resonant message, Huang alluded in December

2008 to possible Chinese plans to build an aircra carrier, thus spurring
urgent headlines around the globe. No PRC authority has ever officially
confirmed or denied such plans, and no reference to the issue occurs in
the 2008 na onal defense white paper, released weeks a er Huang’s
comment. Similarly equivocal musings on China’s carrier plans have
occasionally emanated from the PLA for many years, and abundant
specula on has tended to ensue. The true mo va ons for such remarks,
however, will likely remain a mystery for some me.

That the MNDIO has been entrusted with delivering these signals,
several of which regard highly sensi ve ma ers, indicates a significant
degree of inter-bureaucra c coordina on and trust. The MFA, although
s ll the most frequent harbinger of Beijing’s official line on interna onal
affairs, has both

echoed and referred to MNDIO statements, sugges ng that the ministry

has ceded turf in ma ers regarding na onal defense and military
informa on. The MNDIO’s statements appear to be equally
authorita ve, and there is li le, if any, evidence to suggest that the
MNDIO has contradicted the posi ons of any other government press
office.

Providingface me to PLA officers u The MNDIO’s four press

conferences to date have afforded new visibility to members of the
PLA’s officer corps. Two such conferences—in the wake of the
earthquake and at the release of the 2008 defense white paper—
included representa on from the four PLA departments: General Staff,
General Poli cal, General Logis cs, and General Armament. Relevant
officers from the PAP and PLA Navy also appeared in briefings on
security during the Olympic Games and the deployments to the Gulf of
Aden, respec vely. Officers from the Academy of Military Science, the
PLA’s premier research ins tute, have also been featured in MNDIO-
sponsored events. The presence of these officers may cons tute an
effort to provide audiences with a greater degree of authorita ve detail,
while also reinforcing the appearance of transparency and highligh ng
the role each body plays in the func oning of the PLA. With the
excep on of one major general and one rear admiral, none of the
officers at press briefings have exceeded the rank of senior colonel. No
member of the CMC has figured into any MNDIO briefings, reflec ng the
con nued inaccessibility of the PLA’s top brass.

Implica ons and Conclusion

Alluding to the highly mediated nature of contemporary society, Hu

Changming has said, “under informa zed condi ons, everyone is the
media, everyone is a reporter, and everyone is an editor.”75 The
crea on of the MNDIO appears to reflect an effort to both adapt to and
take advantage of this environment. To date, the MNDIO’s ac vi es
have been rela vely infrequent. Given the MNDIO’s interest in the U.S.
military’s public affairs opera ons, however, and what appears to be
growing a en on from the Chinese defense establishment to the
strategic u lity of favorable public opinion, these efforts are likely to
expand in the future in one form or another.

The implica ons for the United States are mixed. The crea on of the
MNDIO is a small step in China’s slow progress in engaging the
interna onal order. Pa erns of this expanded public engagement have
been visible in many of China’s governing ins tu ons since the country
emerged from isola on in the 1970s. Possibly on account of new
priori es of the Hu administra on, this trend toward accessibility
appears to have accelerated in the wake of the SARS debacle in 2003.
The military has ini ated the process of engagement more slowly. As the
likely consequence of the PLA’s expanding interac ons with the
interna onal system and persistent interna onal a en on on the
implica ons of Chinese military moderniza on, the PLA has made small
steps to increase transparency, and the MNDIO seems to reflect this
progression. Insofar as the office represents conformity to interna onal
norms by improving access to reliable, authorita ve informa on on PLA
ac vi es and policy posi ons, the United States should welcome the
MNDIO.

Poten ally more problema c, however, is the MNDIO’s place in a

broader effort to market controlled informa on in a guise of openness
in order to be er appeal to audiences at home and abroad. The office
appears born of the realiza on that public cynicism and suspicion of the
PLA reflects badly on the regime in Beijing, thereby complica ng the
government’s strategic goals at home and abroad. Chinese leaders
appear to have concluded that genera ng a more favorable image for
their military—one characterized by confidence, accountability,
competence, and restraint—requires a more sophis cated and
interna onally oriented public rela ons strategy. The fact that
comments emana ng from the MNDIO are self-serving is not
necessarily surprising— u erances by comparable authori es in other
countries tend to be so as well.76 Yet ins tu onal mechanisms in China
already limit the ways in which public debate on Beijing’s strategic
choices can deviate from centrally formulated orthodoxy. Furthering the
reach and power of such mechanisms is cause for concern because the
resul ng deficit of informed, ra onal public debate increases the
possibility of miscalcula on or escala on in the event of crisis or
confronta on involving the United States.

This ar cle has focused solely on the crea on of and intent behind
the MNDIO. Further research is required to ascertain the extent to
which this and similar organs across the party-state apparatus actually
affect public opinion at the expense of U.S. interests.

Ma hew Boswell is a Research Fellow at the Na onal Bureau of Asian

Research. He can be reached at <ma boswell25@gmail.com>.
The author is greatly indebted to Alice Miller and two anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier dra s of this ar cle.

NOTES

1. The MNDIO is also occasionally referred to in China's English language

media as the press office of the Ministry of Na onal Defense.

2. "Hu Changming: Guofangbu fayanren shouxian shi yi ming junren"

[Hu Changming: MND Spokesperson is Foremost a Soldier], Renmin
Wang, January 20, 2009.

3. "Hu Changming: chongfen liyong wangluo" [Hu Changming: Take Full

Advantage of the Internet], Renmin Wang, January 20, 2008.
4. "Hu Changming: shenghuo zhong renqingwei hen nong de guofang bu
xinwen fayan ren" [Hu Changming: Living and Warmly Human Ministry
of Na onal Defense Spokesperson], Xinhua, May 18, 2008
h p://news.xinhuanet.com/mil/2008-05/19/content_8204981.htm.

5. Junmei Fan, "Earthquake Pushes Early Debut of MND Spokesperson"

h p://www.china.org.cn/ government/central_government/2008-
05/29/content_15542040.htm.

6. "China's Defense Ministry Info Office Under Prepara on," Xinhua,

January 18, 2008.

7. This website can be found at Zhongguo

Junwangh p://www.chinamil.com.cn/site1/2007ztpdd/2007g jlxwfyrz
d/index.htm.

8. Fan, "Earthquake Pushes Early Debut of MND Spokesperson."

9. It should be noted that the press conference was held in the briefing
room of the SCIO, presumably because prepara ons for a similar facility
at the MND were incomplete at the me. In addi on to Hu, the
following officers a ended the briefing: Major General (PLA Air Force)
Ma Jian, deputy chief of the Opera ons Department of the General Staff
Headquarters; Senior Colonel Guo Zengkui, deputy chief of the Mass
Work Office, the General Poli cal Department; Senior Colonel Xie
Weikuan, director-general of the Opera onal Logis c Planning Bureau,
Headquarter of the General Logis cs Department; Senior Colonel Ma
Gaihe, director general of the Opera onal Logis c Support Bureau, the
General Planning Department of the General Armaments Department;
and Senior Colonel Zhang Jinliang, director-general of the Opera ons
Bureau, Headquarters of the People's Armed Police Force.
10. "China Deploys 113,080 Armed Forces for Earthquake Rescue,"
Xinhua, May 18, 2008 h p://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-
05/18/content_8200061.htm.

11. Also in a endance were Senior Colonel Chen Xuewu, commander of

the Sixth Armed Division of the Beijing Area Command; and Colonel Tian
Yixiang, director of the Military Affairs Department under the Security
Command Center for the Beijing Olympics.

12. For a non-PRC media assessment of this tour, see Mark Magnier,
"And on Your Le , the Chinese Army Being Completely Open about the
Olympics," Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2008.

13. "China Denounces Proposed Arms Sale to Taiwan," Xinhua, October

4, 2008 h p://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-
10/04/content_10148477.htm; "China's Defense Ministry Express
Strong Indigna on over U.S. Proposed Arms Sale to Taiwan," Xinhua,
October 4, 2008 h p://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2008-
10/10/content_1116690.htm; and "Chinese Defense Ministry Condemns
U.S. for Taiwan Arms Sale," Xinhua, October 10, 2008
h p://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90785/6512521.html.

14. Also present at the news conference were Rear Admiral Xiao
Xinnian, deputy chief of staff of PLA Navy; and Senior Captain Ma
Luping, director of the Navy Bureau of the Opera ons Department of
the General Staff Headquarters.

15. For a transcript of the event, see Central People's Government of

the People's Republic of China h p://www.gov.cn/xw /2008-
12/23/content_1185458.htm.
16. Jiao Wu and Kuang Peng, "No Threat from Military Development,"
China Daily, January 16 h p://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-
01/16/content_7403124.htm.

17. See, for example, "Chinese Naval Frigate Comes to Escort Released
Filipino Tanker in Somali Waters," Xinhua, April 26, 2009.

18. Also par cipa ng were Colonel Cai Huailie, deputy director-general
of the Strategic Planning Bureau of the Opera ons Department, General
Staff Headquarters; Senior Colonel Shi Chujing, vice chief of the Mass
Work Department, General Poli cal Department; Senior Colonel Xue
Yongkang, deputy director-general of the Planning Bureau,
Headquarters, General Logis cs Department; and Senior Colonel Fan
Jianjun, deputy director-general of the General Planning Bureau,
Planning Department, General Armament Department.

19. For a transcript of the event, see Central People's Government of

the People's Republic of China h p://www.gov.cn/wszb/zhibo300/.

20. "China Demands U.S. Navy End Surveillance Missions," Associated

Press, March 11, 2009.

21. "FM: U.S. Naval Ship Violates Int'l, Chinese Law," Xinhua, March 10,
2009.

22. "Strong Dissa sfac on Voiced over U.S. Military Report," Xinhua,
March 26, 2009.

23. "China Expresses 'Resolute Opposi on' to US. Military Report,"

Xinhua, March 26, 2009.
24. For an example of such an interview by Hu, see Tian Feng,
"Yirenweiben, jiufang jianbei, kexue fazhan—ben kan du jia zhuanfang
guofangbu fayanren Hu Changming" [Put People First, Both Save and
Defend, Develop Scien fically: An Exclusive Interview with Ministry of
Na onal Defense Spokesperson Hu Changming], Zhongguo Ge Fanghu
Zhuangbei, no. 3, (2008): 5-7. The other officers in the January
interviews were Senior Colonel Chen Zhou and Senior Colonel Wen Bing,
both researchers at the Ins tute of War Theory and Strategy, Academy
of Military Science.

25. For a transcript of the session, see Renmin

Wangh p://military.people.com.cn/GB/52578/52579/144256/index.ht
ml.

26. See, for example, "All ARF Confidence Building Measures - Detailed,"
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), December 20, 2004
h p://www.aseansec.org/ARF/cbmdb.pdf; and "Remarks with Deputy
Chief of the PLA General Staff Ma Xiao an," Beijing, China, May 11,
2008 h p://hongkong.usconsulate.gov/uscn_state_2008051101.html.

27. On Huang as a defense a aché, author's conversa on with a former

U.S. defense a aché and acquaintance of Huang's, Washington, D.C.,
November 3, 2008. Though it is billed as part of the MNDFAO's por olio,
most funding and personnel for China's military a aché program comes
from the GSD Second Department, the PLA's intelligence bureaucracy.
See David Shambaugh, Modernizing China's Military: Progress,
Problems, and Prospects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),
125-26.

28. This body is also referred to in PRC English-language press as the

Publicity Department, due to the nega ve connota on in English of the
term "propaganda." No such nega ve connota on exists for the word in
Chinese.

29. Chen Wu, minister of the SCIO, serves concurrently as a deputy

director of the CCPPD. See Alice L. Miller, "The Central Commi ee
Departments Under Hu Jintao," China Leadership Monitor, no. 27
(Winter 2009): 5.

30. Christopher Bodeen, "China Military Trains First Public Rela ons
Team," Associated Press, March 21, 2009.

31. Author's conversa on with U.S. Defense Department staff charged

with handling the MNDIO delega on's visit, Arlington, Virginia, October
30, 2008.

32. Chen Kaihe, "Zouxiang 'yangguang shidai': cong kangzhen jiuzai

huishou Zhongguo xinwen fayanren zhidu" [Moving toward a 'Sunlight
Period': Looking Back from the Earthquake Rescue at China's
Spokesperson System], Shijie Zhishi 13 (2008): 55.

33. He Yong, "Shenru tuijin zhengwu gongkai, wei fazhan shehuizhuyi

minzhu zhengzhi zuochu xin gongxian" [Extensively Promote the
Transparency of Government Affairs and Make New Contribu ons to the
Development of Socialist Democra c Poli cs], Qiushi, no. 10 (May 16,
2008)
h p://www.qsjournal.com.cn/qs/20080516/GB/qs%5E479%5E0%5E1.h
tm.

34. Ibid.

35. Several observers have analyzed this issue at length. See, for
example, "China and SARS: The Crisis and Its Effects on Poli cs and the
Economy" (conference held at the Brookings Ins tu on, Washington,
D.C., July 2, 2003)
h p://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/cnaps20030702.pdf.

36. Joseph Fewsmith, "China's Response to SARS," China Leadership

Monitor, no. 7 (Summer 2003): 5.

37. Chen, "Zouxiang 'Yangguang Shidai,'" 56.

38. He, "Extensively Promote the Transparency of Government Affairs."

39. These bureaucracies include: the Ministry of Supervision, the

General Office of the State Council, the Organiza on Department of the
CCP Central Commi ee, the All-China Federa on of Trade Unions, the
Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of
Personnel, and the State Council Informa on Office. He, "Extensively
Promote the Transparency of Government Affairs."

40. Wen Jiabao, "2004 Work Report," Tenth Na onal Party Congress,
2nd sess., March 5, 2004
h p://www.china.org.cn/english/government/90522.htm.

41. Chen, "Zouxiang 'Yangguang Shidai,'" 56.

42. Zhao Qizheng, interview by Wandi Jiang and Chen Chao,

"Government Briefing and Spokesperson System," April 5, 2005,
available at China Through a Lens website
h p://www.china.org.cn/english/features/press/130538.htm.

43. "China Launches Spokesman Training Courses on Quick Response to

Accidents," Xinhua, December 2, 2005.
44. Informa on Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of
China, China's Efforts and Achievements in Promo ng the Rule of Law
(Beijing, February 28, 2008) h p://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-
02/28/content_7687418.htm.

45. Zhao, interview.

46. Shi Dong, "Zhengfu xinxi gongkai wangyangbulao" [Be er Late than
Never in Government Efforts to Publicize Informa on], Caijing, June 20,
2003, 34-38.

47. "Guofangbu xinwen fayanren: changtaihua jianshe shi yi ge

jieduanxing de mubiao" [Ministry of Na onal Defense Spokesperson:
Building Normaliza on Is a Goal Characterized by Incremental Steps],
Renmin Wang, trans. author, January 20, 2009.

48. For elabora on on this ma er, see David Finkelstein and Kristen
Gunness, eds., Civil Military Rela ons in Today's China: Swimming in a
New Sea (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc, 2006).

49. James Mulvenon, "Crucible of Tragedy: SARS, the Ming 361 Accident,
and Chinese Party-Army Rela ons," China Leadership Monitor (Fall
2003): 2.

50. He Qisong "China's Military Diplomacy," Contemporary Interna onal

Rela ons 18, no. 2 (March/April 2008): 61.

51. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress:

Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2009 (Washington,
D.C., 2009), 16.
52. Ni Erh-yen, "People's Libera on Army Established News Release
Channel," Wen Wei Po, January 15, 2008, available through BBC
Monitoring, January 17, 2008.

53. Ibid.

54. Yinan Hu, "More Party Organs Open to Media," People's Daily,
December 31, 2007.

55. "Sichuan dizhen cushi guofangbu xinwen fayan ren qian chulu: Hu
Changming danren" [Earthquake Pushes Early Debut of MND
Spokesperson: Sr. Col. Hu Changming], Interna onal Herald Leader, May
28, 2008.

56. "Hu Changming: Guofangbu fayanren shouxian shi yi ming junren."

57. The other two "warfares" are legal and psychological.

58. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress 2009,

16.

59. For a more complete explora on into this no on, see U.S.-China
Economic and Security Review Commission, 2008 Annual Report to
Congress, 110th Congress, 2nd sess., October 28, 2008, Washington,
D.C., chap. 5.

60. See, for example, Peng Guangqian, "'Zongguo junshi weixie' cong he
tanqi?" [Where Does Talk of the "Chinese Military Threat" Come From?],
Xinhua Banyuetan, March 3, 2006.

61. Shuai Qilang, "Zunxun dui wai xuanchuan guilu, shixian sixiang
guannian zhuanbian" [Follow the Laws of Outward Propaganda, Realize
a Transforma on in Conceptual Thought], Military Correspondent, no.
11 (2008) h p://www.chinamil.com.cn/sitel/jsjz/2008-11/06/
content_1536864.htm.

62. Liu Yunshan, quoted in Russell Hsiao, "Towing the Party Line on Free
Speech," China Brief 9, no. 5 (March 4, 2009)
h p://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?
tx_ news%5B _news%5D=346598&tx_ news%5BbackPid%5D=258&H
ash=afe92e1d6f.

63. Yu Guoming, quoted in Jonathan Landreth, "China Plans $6.6 Media

Push," Reuters, January 13, 2009.

64. "Kaichuang junshi xinwen xuanchuan gongzuo xin jumian: renzhen

xuexi guanqie Hu Zhuxi kaocha renmin ribaoshe de zhongyao jianghua"
[Open Up a New Vista in Military Press and Propaganda Work:
Conscien ously Study and Implement the Important Speech Delivered
by Chairman Hu during His Inspec on of the Renmin Ribao Office],
Jiefangjun Bao, June 28, 2008, trans. author
h p://www.chinamil.com.cn/sitel/zbxl/2008-
06/28/content_1338718.htm.

65. Chen, "Zouxiang 'Yangguang Shidai,'" 56.

66. He, "China's Military Diplomacy," 68.

67. Ni, "People's Libera on Army."

68. "Hu Changming: junlushengya zhong dui wo yingxiang zui da de ren

—nongmin, zhanshi he zhouwei de ren" [Hu Changming: Individuals in a
Life of Military Service Who Have Made the Deepest Impression on Me
—Farmers, Soldiers and Surrounding People], Renmin Wang, January 20,
2009; and "Hu Changming, junlushengya zhong yingxiang zui shenke de
shi—nanwang zhongwai lianhe junshi yanxi, jizhe rang ren gandong" [Hu
Changming: The Most Profoundly Affec ng Moments in a Life of Military
Service—an Unforge able Mul lateral Military Exercise and Emo onally
Moving Journalists], Renmin Wang, January 20, 2009.

69. "Na onal Day Parade to Showcase Strength, Transparency," China

Military Online, January 21, 2009
h p://english.chinamil.com.cn/site2/news-channels/2009-
01/21/content_1627225.htm.

70. Jin Weisen, "Xinxi gongkai de liliang" [The Power of Informa on

Disclosure], Qianjin Bao, May 22, 2008, trans. author.

71. "China, India to Hold Joint An -Terror Military Training," Xinhua,

December 4, 2008.

72. "Hu Changming: huhang xingdong shi zai lianheguo kuangjia xia
luxing guoji yiwu" [Hu Changming: Ship Escort Ac vi es Are Carried Out
under United Na ons Framework], Renmin Wang, December 25, 2008;
and "China to Use Force on Pirates," Agence France-Presse, December
23, 2008.

73. Alison Klayman, "China Calls on Obama to Promote Stronger Military

Ties," Voice of America, January 20, 2009.

74. "Mainland Calls for Military Trust amid Warming Cross-Strait

Rela ons," Xinhua, January 20, 2009.

75. "Hu Changming: Xinxi shifang shi shehui wending de 'jianya qi'" [Hu
Changming: Informa on Release Is a "Pressure Reducer" for Social
Stability], Renmin Wang, January 20, 2009.
76. The U.S. Army, for example, has a large, well-funded public affairs
opera on designed to "establish the condi ons that lead to confidence
in America's Army and its readiness to conduct opera ons in peace me,
conflict, and war." See "The Army Public Affairs Program," Army Public
Affairs, September 15, 2000, 9
h p://www.asaie.army.mil/Public/IE/Toolbox/documents/r360_1.pdf.
London's Global Reach?
Reuters News and Network, 1865, 1881, and
1914
Gordon M. Winder

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

Journal of World History : Volume 21, Number 2, June 2010

Abstract

In the fi y years before 1914, London was served by Reuters, the

world's leading news agency. Reuters both led and reflected London's
expanding interests in world affairs, so analysis of its news supply offers
insights into London's situa on as a late nineteenth-century world city.
Saskia Sassen has defined global ci es as forming a network with
transna onal producer services firms contrac ng with transna onal
corpora ons to supply the services that are necessary for their global
businesses. This ar cle asks whether Reuters offered worldwide
coverage, operated as an imperial network, or func oned as a
transna onal producer services enterprise networking world ci es. It
does so by mapping the world news Reuters delivered to London
newspapers using the telegraphic records of the Reuters Group Archive
for sample news weeks in 1865, 1881, and 1914. Analysis reveals that
Reuters was a nineteenth-century producer services firm offering
transna onal services organized by a web of enterprise and focused on
a network of world ci es. This suggests in turn that London may have
been a global city before 1914.

Recent scholarship informs us that London served as the world's bond

market between 1865 and 1914, and that while its bankers favored the
empire, including its poorest territories, by offering lower rates of
interest, most of their overseas investments went to countries outside
the empire. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick declare that the city
had an "authen cally global" investment por olio by 1914. 1 But such
achievements do not make early twen eth-century London a global city.
London cannot simply be iden fied as a global city by indica ng the size
and significance of its bond market or by coun ng the number of its
transna onal corporate head offices, the assets that they control, or the
buildup of communica ons capaci es in the city. Those are defining
characteris cs of world ci es, not global ci es.

Saskia Sassen defined global ci es as late twen eth-century

phenomena, the result of a rescaling of the strategic territories of
transna onal business associated with new systems of flows of goods,
capital, and labor. 2 The increasing dispersal of business ac vi es
requires more complex central enterprise func ons, and especially their
outsourcing to producer services firms, which must also operate on a
global scale. In turn, this necessitates the forma on of transna onal
urban systems in the form of a series of transna onal networks of ci es.
It is this last trend that is dis nc ve: "To a large extent major business
centres in the world today draw their importance from these
transna onal networks. There is no such thing as a single global city and
in this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of
empires." 3 Global ci es perform their work in networks of ci es.

Reuters's transna onal network of branches and agencies and their

services to Westminster, Whitehall, and the city are important evidence
when considering the globality of London's late nineteenth-century
corporate reach. This is because they address the issue of whether
London developed a nineteenth-century producer services enterprise
that was transna onal in scope. As historians reinterpret London as a
global city, we need to reinterpret the changing global reach of the
Reuters news agency. Reuters has been variously understood as an
imperializing ins tu on, 4 as an enterprise with global ambi ons that
were constrained by compe tors, 5 or as one of a dominant cartel of
transna onal news agencies that structured news flows for much of the
twen eth century. 6 It is dangerous to reduce these metaphors and the
complex research effort behind them to graphic representa ons, yet,
each of these interpreta ons implies a geographic model of how
Reuters operated as a network. 7 These geographic models of Reuters
are each formed from a par cular posi on. One is a view from the
perspec ve of the poli cal issues arising from interagency compe on
within the Bri sh Empire. Another is a view from within the Reuters
head office, where the managers surveyed an array of commercial
intelligence and pondered market strategy, while the third model is
formed by shi ing the focus away from Reuters to the structural effects
of the cartel and agency business on global news markets. If we are to
relate Reuters to London then we need to adopt a different viewpoint
again, not to contest the other models and interpreta ons, but to
interpret Reuters ac vi es in rela on to the London news market. If late
nineteenth-century Londoners indeed inhabited a global city rather than
an imperial city or a world city, 8 then we should expect their demand
for Reuters's services to be more than imperial or na onal. It should be
a demand for business and poli cal news from other global ci es.

In researching London's historical role as a global city, Reuters is a

crucial ins tu on to inves gate. Within the ins tu ons of London's
news world, Reuters's role was officially transna onal rather than
na onal (Press Associa on of India), provincial (UK Press Associa on), or
urban (The Times of London). Reuters was a nineteenth-century
producer services enterprise: it supplied poli cal and business
informa on to Fleet Street, the city, Whitehall, and Westminster, and it
sold communica ons services to governments, individuals,
organiza ons, and enterprises. The globality of its services and network
therefore reflects on the ques on of London's nineteenth-century status
as a global city. We will need to establish what agency services Reuters
delivered to Londoners. How geographically constrained were the news
services that were on offer, and how did Reuters mobilize these stories
for Londoners?

To answer these ques ons, this ar cle maps the ways Reuters London
news service was cons tuted within the news agency's wider networks.
It maps the news Reuters delivered to London newspapers using the
telegraphic records of the Reuters Group Archive for sample news
weeks in 1865, 1881, and 1914. The content of the Reuters copy is
compared and contrasted and related to the geography of the Reuters
news organiza on at the me. Analysis reveals that the speed-up in
telecommunica ons associated with me-space compression was
largely achieved before 1881, but that Reuters news services con nued
to deliver news from preferred source points rather than an increasingly
global coverage or the empire. 9 The Reuters copy was drawn
overwhelmingly from other world ci es, featured New York content
before all other news, and featured news from port ci es located along
shipping and cable routes. Reuters copy reveals London to have had a
restricted geography of a achment and rela on to the world as a
whole, but, interes ngly, one that was not strictly coincident with
empire. Instead of the territories of empire, the maps that emerge
feature the early telecommunica ons infrastructure that linked capitals
and commercial ports to London. The Reuters copy assembled and
mapped here provides one set of texts that allow us to chart aspects of
London's changing transna onal linkages and interests, and a hierarchy
of points of a achment. It suggests that Londoners may have
understood Reuters as the supplier of "interna onal news"—reports
from the capitals, courts, bourses, and docks of foreign countries—even
as Reuters became an imperial ins tu on.

Three Geographic Models of the Reuters Enterprise

Simon Po er interprets Reuters as an imperializing ins tu on, one

cons tuent part of the imperializing Bri sh press system. Along with the
UK Press Associa on, Reuters facilitated the transmission of
interna onal and imperial news, but Reuters cul vated a specific
imperial iden ty to gain respectability and government assistance.
Through its syndicated news reports and private business services,
Reuters became the key informa on broker of the Bri sh Empire. 10
Through its cartel agreements with other news agencies, Reuters
enjoyed an exclusive right to collect and sell news in the empire and
followed the telegraph cables to develop an imperial news agency
business. "By 1900, Reuters had some 260 offices and correspondents.
News from sources was in all but the most urgent cases compiled at
offices in major regional centres at Bombay, Cape Town, Melbourne and
Shanghai, and then sent to London head office by cable. Here services
were edited, telegraphed to Bri sh newspapers and subscribers, and
cabled back to the Reuters overseas agencies, where they were re-
edited for local consump on." 11 Simon Po er argues, I think rightly,
that the telegraph had the effect of systema zing and homogenizing
news and thus reshaped and restricted exis ng flows of news, which
had been more spontaneous and fluid. 12 Under the imperial press
system that emerged in the late nineteenth century, "common supplies
of news con nued to flow around the Empire, but under the auspices of
a small number of large news agencies and newspaper combines." 13
London's posi on as the news hub of the empire was reinforced, but the
news flowed not only along the spokes between hub and imperial
peripheries but also between sites within the empire.

In each dominion market Reuters aimed for a monopoly over the supply
of interna onal news, but local press associa ons countered such
efforts. In the ensuing conflict media enterprises drew on a range of
local, na onal, and imperial iden es to protect their interests, thus
nego a ng the limits for integra on of the cons tuent parts of the
imperial press system. Reuters posi oned itself as an agent of empire.
Thus, Roderick Jones, general manager of Reuters from 1919 to 1941,
claimed that Reuters carried on its press business at a loss, as a public
service, subsidized by private telegraph services. 14 In these ways
imperialism and empire impacted on the United Kingdom's emerging
modern press from 1850 to 1914. 15

Simon Po er argues that the Bri sh mass media did not repeatedly
stress a sense of transna onal community or a sense of na onal
iden ty, but that these and other possibili es were part of a broad
repertoire of iden ty construc ons that newspapers could choose
among, depending upon the occasion. Nevertheless, as the Bri sh press
imperialized Reuters became more and more an imperial ins tu on,
one that defended and promoted its interests by invoking the iden ty of
the loyal servant of empire. In following the cables, Reuters became an
imperial ins tu on, its iden ty wrapped in the symbols and rhetoric of
empire, its name synonymous with imperial networks and interests, and
its news aimed at the cons tuent readerships of the Bri sh Empire. In
all of these ways we can interpret Reuters, with its head office in
London, as both shaped by and cons tu ve of London as an imperial
metropolis. 16
Alterna vely, Reuters has been interpreted as an interna onal news
agency, based in London, which worked with other agencies to integrate
the world economy in ways that allowed global flows of news. 17 Oliver
Boyd-Barre points to long-term con nui es in news agency business.
18 First a cartel, then market advantage ensured agency domina on of
world news produc on. From 1890 to 2000 dominant news agencies
supplied "spot-news" in a journalism of informa on that privileged
specific categories of informa on and events, certain sources and
loca ons. A handful of agencies—Reuters, Wolff (Con nental or CTC,
later DPA), Havas (later Agence France Press), and Associated Press (AP)
—carved up the world news markets between them. They were later
joined by United Press Interna onal and WTN. Together, they
dominated world news produc on and distribu on, and began to face
serious new compe on only in the twenty-first century, from Al
Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. Cartel agreements da ng back to 1870 not
only carved up the world into separate news markets but also facilitated
exchange of news between agencies and therefore across borders. 19
The cartel made interagency sales rou ne while simultaneously securing
territorial markets for individual agencies. This news originated in and
was sold throughout the en re cartel network but by different agencies.
Under these agreements, Reuters's London office was a "clearinghouse"
for world news, deciphered, translated, sorted, and encoded for resale
in specific markets. 20 More, Julius Reuter, himself an émigré, took
advantage of his personal networks in Europe to recruit an interna onal
news network of agents and branch managers. Indeed, Emile Wolff,
Julius Reuter, and Louis Havas had shared the running of a telegraph
news agency business in Paris, and their subsequent business interests
con nued to meet, overlap, and coincide. In these various ways, Reuters
can also be interpreted as an enterprise formed by and cons tu ve of
London as a world city. In this reading London's merchant enterprises,
social ac vity, and diverse popula on are viewed as being shaped by
loca on in a port city embedded in worldwide networks and flows. 21
As readers of news, they forged imagined links with distant others and
thus generated ideas about global communi es. 22 Reuters worked to
interna onalize London within a network of world ci es, and notably
Paris, Berlin, New York, and Tokyo.

Both interpreta ons have merit, but, in his history of Reuters, Donald
Read argues that whereas Reuters began with interna onal aspira ons
it was forced by its compe tors to become an imperial ins tu on, as
early as 1878. 23 Even then, Reuters remained caught between
compe ng imperial and commercial projects. Read explains that around
1865 Julius Reuter launched ambi ous commercial projects that he
hoped would make his agency more interna onal in scope. He
expanded into Germany by establishing an office in Hamburg and by
financing a private cable across the North Sea to supply the new office.
He worked to develop preferen al access into the United States by
inves ng in the French Atlan c Cable Company. Reuter also aimed to
buy European agencies or at least to contain the expansion of his rivals
there through a cartel agreement. However, Reuter's expansionary plans
for Europe and the United States were stymied by his compe tors. To
pay off debts from the Franco-Prussian War, the French government
sold the French Atlan c Cable Co. in 1873 to Anglo-American, which
thus restored its monopoly over transatlan c cable traffic. Reuters
takeover bids for the Stefani (Italian 1862), Ritzau (Danish 1867), Wolff
(German 1869), and Havas (French 1872) agencies were all rebuffed.
Nevertheless, the cartel agreement Reuters signed with Havas and Wolff
in 1870 secured Reuters posi on within Europe. Reuters con nued to
run important agencies in Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Berlin,
Frankfurt, and Vienna, and a bureau in Paris. Under the cartel news
sharing arrangements, Reuters assumed a dominant posi on: it had the
largest network, the most agencies, correspondents and stringers, the
most news and the largest territories.

Reuter also exploited the opportuni es opened up by the expansion of

the Bri sh Empire and the network of telegraph cables linked back to
London: he appointed agents in outposts of the formal and informal
empire. A bureau in Constan nople proved a valuable news source for
the O oman Empire, and an office in Alexandria coordinated shipping
news to and from the Indian Ocean. The firm opened branches first in
Bombay and then from 1868 in Calcu a, Madras, Karachi, Colombo, and
Point de Galle. Donald Read shows that India and Egypt remained vital
to Reuters's business and revenues through to 1914 (Table 1). Branches
were opened in Melbourne and Cape Town to coordinate the collec on
and sale of news in the Australian and South African colonies. South
Africa became a very successful market for Reuters compared with
lackluster performance in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, where
the emergence of local press associa ons tempered agency sales to
newspapers. From 1874 Reuters established offices in La n America in
conjunc on with Havas. China and Japan were growing markets toward
the end of the nineteenth century. Reuters found that business in
informal empire markets could be risky, as both Julius Reuter's
investment debacle in Persia and problems with the Reuters agent in
Egypt illustrate. 24 However, Reuters developed a thriving trade in
private telegrams. Its Eastern Private Telegram Service handled up to
four thousand telegrams per month in 1875, and the trade was
subsequently enhanced by provision for remi ances. In the twelve years
before 1906 Reuters added fi een new branches (Table 2), but only four
of these were in Europe and North America, the home territories of
Havas, Wolff, and AP. Reuters revenues were declining in the United
Kingdom, Europe, and North America so that more distant market
regions became increasingly important to the firm (Table 1). Reuters
jockeyed for posi on within empire news markets and faced

Table 1.

Reuters revenue by region, 1898 and 1908

Table 2.

Reuters branch network, 1894 and 1906

increasing expenses, partly because of the costs of transmi ng cables

to its increasingly important distant markets. Donald Read concludes his
survey of market reports by interpre ng Reuters as an empire
enterprise, that is, one focused on markets outside Europe and North
America, whether they were in the formal Bri sh Empire or not.

Reuters operated in a complex fashion and context, as an imperializing

ins tu on, as an enterprise focused on formal and informal empire
markets because of its American and European compe tors, and as a
cons tuent enterprise in a long-las ng global news agency cartel.
However, the organiza onal (cartel, transna onal corpora on),
territorial (empire), and iden ty (imperial) concepts used in the
literature may obscure the network geography of Reuters. Where you
were on the cables influenced how much and what kind of Reuters news
service you received and whom you paid for this service. Different
places within the Bri sh Empire received very different Reuters service.
25 In 1914, Reuters sent news services from London around the African
coast to a number of telegraph offices, each of which received very
different services: the Cape Town service received 10,000 words per
month; Bonny received 4,800; Elizabethville, 100; and Melbourne, nil;
while other places located in Britain's African empire received no service
at all. Similarly, Reuters news was sold to Havas, which then sold the
translated copy to newspapers in Marseilles, Madrid, Lisbon, Rio de
Janeiro, and Bogotá, where it would be credited to Havas. Reuters
meant different things to people located in different places on the
interna onal news networks. Consequently we should pay a en on to
other viewpoints on Reuters than those possible from the vantage
points of the boardroom, cartel contracts, or arrangements and disputes
with dominion press associa ons.

What news service did Reuters deliver in London? The London market
was both large and diversified. Big London newspapers developed their
own bureaus and alliances with other news agencies, including
dominion press associa ons, and so Reuters had compe tors for this
sec on of the interna onal news market. There were many smaller
newspapers and bulle ns directed at niche markets within the city,
including migrant communi es, business readers, labor, religious and
poli cal groups, each of which desired news services tailored to its
audience's needs. Reuters also sold news and informa on services to
the Bri sh government, to private individuals, and to London
businesses. [End Page 280] We should expect that the Reuters news
business in London was both large and diversified, and consequently, it
will be difficult to do jus ce to the Reuters services.

With this in mind, this ar cle focuses on the telegram service Reuters
provided to London newspapers. Workers at Reuters pasted a copy of
each telegram dispatched into a set of telegraph books, a series that
runs to mid 1914. By mapping the sources and content of these
telegrams for three sample weeks, one in 1865, a second in 1881, and
the third in 1914, this ar cle summarizes the news flows into London
newspapers from Reuters. The geography of the company's bureaus,
branches, and correspondents is also mapped for these years using
contracts, correspondence, account books, and telegraph address books
in the Reuters Group Archive. Together these maps answer basic
ques ons about Reuters services in London: Did Reuters supply London
newspapers with empire or cartel news? Which were the places from
which Reuters reported? How "global" or "imperial" was the fare served
up to Londoners, and how did this change? In this ar cle I map the
changing Reuters network for Londoners in terms of source points,
flows, and general content. Just how such copy was used to construct
and promote iden es in the minds of Londoners is a separate ma er
requiring further and different analysis. Whether from European and
American capitals or from the ports of empire, news could have served
diverse purposes. It may have been used to construct various Bri sh
iden es among a more varied cast of others than those conjured by
the cons tuent subjects of empire, 26 however, answers to such a
ques on must await further a en on to the rituals of communica on in
such news stories. 27

Reuters Telegrams 15–21 April 1865

The news that John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln while he
a ended the theatre in Washington, D.C., 15 April 1865 was a beat for
Reuters in London when its telegraph boys dispatched the bulle n on 26
April, eleven days later. Reuters relied on steamships for the main
transatlan c leg between American and Bri sh ports, so the news from
Washington could not be delivered immediately. So, in the week 15–21
April, what news did Reuters sell to London newspapers, if not the
assassina on story?

Figure 1.

Reuters telegrams, 15–21 April 1865 (Reuters Telegram Book 1865,

Reuters Group Archive).

During those seven days, Reuters dispatched 4,795 words to London

newspapers (Fig. 1). Together, datelines in Asia (4.9 percent of all copy),
Gibraltar and Malta (3.1 percent), and the United Kingdom (8.7 percent)
headed just 800 words, or 16.7 percent of the copy. This "empire" news
comprised mostly shipping and commercial news from Bri sh and
empire ports and war news from Shanghai. The news from India and
China was at least eleven days old. There were no reports from Reuters
agents in the Australian colonies, and Reuters had no agents in South
Africa. Generally, the "empire" news coming through the Indian Ocean
and Mediterranean cables dovetailed with London business interests.

Datelines in the Americas contributed significantly more copy (about

1,300 words, or 27.2 percent). This featured news from Montreal
regarding Canadian interests in the American Civil War, and from Mexico
City concerning the French invasion of Mexico, but the Reuters
correspondent in New York compiled most of the copy coming across
the Atlan c by steamer: 1,186 words (24.7 percent of the total Reuters
copy in London). His news comprised commercial no ces from New York
markets and reports on the progress of the Civil War, including
Sherman's March and General Lee's surrender. Again Reuters served up
a steady stream of commercial news relevant to London business
interests, but in this transatlan c news flow rumors of wars made for
compelling reading.

More than half of the Reuters copy emanated from con nental Europe,
about 2,700 words, or 56.1 percent, in fact. The most important
datelines were Paris (674 words, or 14.1 percent), Turin (569 words, or
11.9 percent), Madrid (331 words, or 6.9 percent), and Rome (275
words, or 5.7 percent). Eleven other datelines contributed to the total.
News of Bri sh shipping in and out of Marseilles, and of stock, bond,
and commodity prices in Paris and Turin show some concern for London
interests on the Con nent. However, most of the news concerned the
courts of Europe. The two main stories of the week were the tensions
between the Va can and Turin over the unifica on of Italy, and the
impending death of the tsar's son, who was in Nice at the me. Reuters
bulle ns reported the tsar's hurried journey to Nice via Paris to be at his
son's side, the best wishes of the pope and other monarchs,
condolences, mourning, and funeral prepara ons. From St. Petersburg
to Lisbon Reuters reported Europe as engaged in the succession
problems and personal tragedies of monarchs, and the aspira ons of
new na onal parliaments. Reuters correspondents and agents in
European capitals compiled these bulle ns, which owed much to the
services of Havas and Wolff. Reuters's European copy also pulsed along
telegraph lines running through Paris or the Low Countries to London.
There was no news from South America, Africa, Central Asia, or the
South Pacific. Partly this was a result of lack of sources, but not en rely;
a er all, Reuters had agents in Australia. Partly it was a result of a lack of
commercial interest, but not en rely: there were Bri sh interests in the
Red Sea, the Caribbean, and in La n American ports. Most certainly this
was not strictly a ma er of empire, since the geography of Reuters
datelines bears li le rela on to the geography of the Bri sh Empire,
formal or informal, at the me. It might be be er to construe the
silences in terms of the paths and flows between the world ci es of the
me. Reuters delivered to London newspapers news from the Havas and
Wolff agencies and from its own correspondents in New York,
Constan nople, Paris, and Vienna. Reuters telegrams featured copy
from European capitals and New York. News was also neatly associated
with the telegraph lines and cables linking to London. That this was one
subset of Reuters news services can also not be doubted. 28 Reuters
tailored its services to clients, and the London news bulle ns were one
such target group. This meant that Reuters delivered to London
newspapers neither imperial coverage in the sense of news of and from
every part of the empire, nor global coverage in the sense of coverage
of and from every part of the world. Instead it offered interna onal
news from the major ci es located along Mediterranean, Red Sea, and
Indian Ocean cables, at transatlan c steamer ports, and along European
telegraph lines. In 1865 Reuters London news telegrams reported news
from other world ci es.

Reuters Telegrams 12–18 March 1881

In the week that followed the assassina on of Tsar Alexander II in St.

Petersburg on 11 March 1881, Reuters delivered 11,159 words of [End
Page 284] news telegrams to London newspapers (Fig. 2), more than
twice as much copy as in the week of 15–21 April 1865. In contrast to
the mid 1865 map (Fig. 1), the news for the week in March 1881 shows
both a speedup in delivery mes and a geographical extension of the
news point sources. War in the eastern Mediterranean caused delays in
receiving news from Athens. Travel delays affected news telegrams from
East and Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and La n America, but
European, African, and North American news arrived in London on a
same-day basis, ready for prin ng the next day. In March 1881, Reuters
telegrams featured news from thirty-three datelines, up from twenty-
nine in April 1865. Not one of the March 1881 datelines was in the
United Kingdom, and news was now reported from more American and
Asian capitals as well as South Africa. Generally, Reuters delivered news
stories as they broke; its delivery mes were faster, and its world
coverage had been extended.

Figure 2.

Reuters telegrams, 11–18 March 1881 (Reuters Telegram Book 1914,

Reuters Group Archive).

These findings are to be expected since me-space compression

accelerated in the decade a er 1865. 29 Jorma Ahvenainen has
recorded the drama c gains in travel mes for trade data as telegraph
cables replaced steamships on routes to London (Table 3). 30 However,
Ahvenainen's list of ci es features ci es (all but one of them port ci es)
located on, or soon to be on, telegraph cables, and especially those of
Eastern and Associated Telegraph Co. which had a London focus. 31
Transna onal telegraph services networked me-space compression
Table 3.

Time delay for trade data to London newspapers

between port ci es, producing a network of ci es. Those ci es that did

not have cable or telegraph connec ons, such as Kabul and Bangkok,
gained only indirectly from this process. More, this emerging network
geography of me-space compression should be evident in Reuters
news for Londoners, since Reuters grew its agency business by following
the cables.

In March 1881, Reuters telegrams con nued to emphasize commercial

and poli cal news from the financial and poli cal capitals of Europe and
the United States. News of the assassina on, funeral prepara ons,
succession plans, and reac ons to these events cons tuted the principal
news story in the Reuters telegrams. Consequently St. Petersburg (4,200
words, or 37.7 percent of copy) was the most important single dateline
during this week. Altogether fi een European ci es were the sources for
62.2 percent of the Reuters copy, but only St. Petersburg and Rome (590
words, or 5.3 percent) supplied more than 5 percent. Only three of
these fi een ci es were not capital ci es, and these three were sources
for disaster and war stories. Poli cal news and news of reac ons to the
assassina on dominated the copy.

News from the Americas made up 27.3 percent of Reuters copy. New
York (2,416 words, or 21.7 percent) was the most important news
supply center in the Americas. The Reuters bureau in New York collated
commercial news from other American ci es for dispatch. In this news
week Reuters featured its regular reports on American markets, news of
a revolt in Colombia, and a report from Buenos Aires on Bri sh army
procurement, and while this indicates a wider geographical network of
news supply centers, the news reported to London was tailored to
Bri sh and London interests. The news was overwhelmingly commercial
in character, since reports from the New York stock market, from
brokers, bond agents, and commodity traders, were of interest to
London readers.

Imperial news made up a modest component (11 percent) of Reuters

copy. This was sourced from datelines in five Asian ci es—
Constan nople, Teheran, Bombay, Calcu a, and Shanghai—from
Toronto, and from three ports in South Africa. There were no news
telegrams from the South Pacific or from Japan, despite the presence of
Reuters agencies in Melbourne, Wellington, and Tokyo. With the shi of
news service delivery from steamer to telegraph cable, United Kingdom
ports, Marseilles, Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria no longer featured as
Reuters news datelines. From Buenos Aires through Cape Town to
Calcu a, Reuters reported rumors of wars in South Africa and
Afghanistan. Reuters reported on the shipping of horses from Buenos
Aires and of troops from India as part of its coverage of the hos le
situa on in southern Africa. Nevertheless, while the Boer Republics
dominated news from South Africa, Durban, Cape Town, and Newcastle
supplied only 2.4 percent of telegram copy. The main Reuters news from
imperial territories was of plague outbreaks in Mesopotamia and
Odessa, and war news from Afghanistan, none of which lay within
Britain's formal empire. These stories circulated to London via Reuters
agents in St. Petersburg, Constan nople, Philippopolis, and Teheran, as
well as Bombay and Calcu a.

Generally, Reuters supplied Londoners with news from outside its news
sales territories (Fig. 2) and thus from outside the empire. This news
arrived from Havas, Wolff/CTC, and via Reuters correspondents located
in foreign capitals. Despite accelerated me-space compression and an
expanded organiza on, in 1881 Reuters remained focused on supplying
London newspapers with poli cal and commercial news from American
and European capitals. Vast territories in Scandinavia; Central, East, and
Southeast Asia; Africa; the Pacific; and La n America supplied no
telegrams at all. Generally, Reuters telegrams to London in this week of
1881 comprised news of and from other ci es on the London-centred
global cable and telegraph network.

Reuters Telegrams 30 June–6 July 1914

The assassina on of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo

on 29 June 1914 dominated newspaper headlines in the week 30 June–
6 July 1914. The Wolff/CTC and Havas agencies had special roles in
repor ng this event simply because the murder and much of the
subsequent reac on to it occurred in their news territories. Reuters had
bureaus in Vienna and Paris and could also par cipate. However, the full
scope of Reuters news supply cannot be determined for this week
because Reuters ceased to compile telegram books in the months
before the assassina on. Nevertheless, some sense of how Reuters
telegrams featured in London newspapers can be gleaned from
analyzing Reuters copy published in The Times. It is not at all clear that
The Times published all the Reuters telegrams it received. By 1914 this
and other London dailies had organized their own agents to supply news
from abroad, and these sources competed directly with Reuters for
news supply. Thus, the Reuters copy carried in this week by The Times
was much reduced compared with the full set of 1881 bulle ns: a mere
2,760 words sourced from just fourteen datelines (Fig. 3).

Financial and poli cal news from the United States had been the
mainstay of Reuters London telegram bulle ns from the Americas. But

Figure 3.
Reuters telegrams, 30 June–6 July 1914 (The Times 1914).

in June 1914, The Times's own New York bureau supplied these reports,
and Reuters American material published in The Times augmented this
in-house news produc on. Altogether, Reuters copy from the Americas
amounted to only 8.0 percent of The Times's Reuters copy in the week
30 June–6 July 1914. This copy originated from New York, Washington,
D.C., and Mexico City, but none of these datelines contributed 5.0
percent or more of the Reuters copy. Similarly, Reuters empire content
in The Times—8.2 percent of copy from Tokyo and Peking, another 3.6
percent from Melbourne and Sydney—was now sourced from the
extreme ends of the cables and not from South Africa or India.
Alterna ve sources made some London newspapers more independent
of the Reuters news agency. In this context stories from the cartel's
agencies in Europe remained the mainstay of Reuters copy. Seven
European datelines headed almost 70 percent of the Reuters copy in
The Times. 32 The London press may have imperialized its content, but
in doing so it rendered its recognizable Reuters content into
interna onal news.

This diminu on of the value of Reuters copy to some London

newspapers was not, however, reflected in the Reuters agency network
(Table 4), which had expanded since 1881 (Figs. 3 and 4). The Reuters
organiza on of 1914 comprised twenty-nine branches, eight bureaus,
forty-eight agencies, and another 121 named agents (Table 4). Two
pa erns are readily iden fied: a branch organiza on covering some of
the

Table 4.

Reuters network, 1914

Figure 4.

Reuters agency network 1914 (Reuters Telegraph Address Book 1914,

Reuters Group Archive).

major ci es of the Bri sh Empire, and agency contracts in many ci es,

ports, towns, and se lements located through the peripheral parts of
Britain's formal and informal empire. The company's London head
office, now colocated with that of the UK Press Associa on, centered a
branch network largely located within Bri sh Empire territories. Even so
Reuters branches were located in many, but not all, of the chief ci es of
the empire. There were no branches in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, or
Vancouver nor in any African ci es outside of South Africa. 33 Agency
contracts with sixteen expatriate enterprises—firms such as Gray,
Mackenzie and Company of Busreh, Iraq, and Gellatly, Hankey and
Company, of Jeddah, Pales ne—extended Reuters's reach into other,
peripheral territories. Reuters's par al coverage of empire markets
reveals the constraints on its sales, as pointed out by both Donald Read
and Simon Po er. 34

More interes ng however, is the Reuters organiza on in the rest of the

world. Reuters had a strong organiza on outside the empire. This
included contracts with Havas and Wolff/CTC, as well as eleven other
European news agencies, Associated Press, and the Dutch West Indies
Telegraph Company. In addi on, Reuters ran five branches and seven
bureaus, 35 and had contracts with sixty-three other agents (Fig. 4,
Table 4). Almost two thirds of all Reuters branches, agencies, and
bureaus were located outside the Bri sh Empire. This network served a
London and empire readership in that it gave Reuters a presence in
Bri sh tourist des na ons and expatriate communi es (for example
Swiss and Italian resorts and the towns of the French Riviera), the courts
of Europe, the New York financial scene, and important ports, islands,
and observa on points on sea lanes. The extended network partly
served to sell Reuters news from London in distant local territories. But
the full Reuters network also generated flows of news into London for
resale, and, as we have seen, interna onal news, especially from
European capitals and New York, was a mainstay of Reuters news
bulle ns. [End Page 291]

Reuters tailored the news arriving in London for sale to many different
buyers. Reports compiled for imperial shipping lines and telegraphed as
part of Reuters's general news services required agents in foreign ports.
36 Some London firms contracted Reuters to supply intelligence from
specific European markets. 37 Exchanges located outside Reuters's
cartel territory contracted for Reuters's market services. 38 Reuters
handled telegrams for the Bri sh Foreign Office. 39 Its contracts with
the UK Press Associa on were par cularly lucra ve. 40 The extent of
Reuters's web of enterprise enabled it to meet diverse needs. For one
enterprise Reuters was a supplier of news from or to the colonies, for
another the news service was one of market intelligence from European
bourses, and for European agencies its service might be as a supplier of
news of and from the United Kingdom, Bri sh Empire, or other places in
its news territory.

In this context Reuters's news supply to London newspapers was one

(important) segment of the Reuters news empire. Generally, Reuters
supplied London newspapers with market reports from New York and
poli cal and market news from Europe. By 1914 its posi on in this news
market had been squeezed by compe ng services, most notably those
developed by leading London newspapers. Donald Read noted that
Reuters's United Kingdom revenues were falling in the early decades of
the twen eth century, and the limited amount of Reuters copy in The
Times in the week a er the assassina on at Sarajevo confirms this
trend. It was not that The Times was publishing less interna onal news
but rather that other sources of interna onal news were filling space
once occupied by Reuters. So while Reuters looked to empire news
markets to shore up its revenues, London readers con nued to be
treated to a steady diet of news from the world's capitals and bourses.

Conclusion

Reuters operated as a transna onal web of enterprise 41 and worked to

secure a posi on in world markets in rela on to news agencies,
newspapers, private firms, individuals, and governments. Success
depended upon securing a posi on as a monopoly trader of news to
many specific markets. To do this meant regula ng compe on. Reuters
nego ated interagency contracts with na onal press associa ons and
other news agencies. These were necessarily transna onal contracts
and made Reuters into a web of enterprise, holding many contracts with
domes c, colonial, and foreign enterprises and governments.

Reuters's interagency contracts secured access to a large throughput of

world news, and it is the scale and extent of these flows that defines the
firm's global reach. The inward flow of news to London differed from the
outward flow. Reuters could source news from many parts of the world
and deliver it, tailored, to many specific markets. It sourced news from
Australia for sale to Bri sh provincial newspapers and vice versa, but it
also sourced news from European agencies for sale to London
newspapers and companies. Reuters's head office was indeed a
clearinghouse for world news, deciphered, translated, sorted, and
encoded for resale in specific markets. However, its sales to London
newspapers featured news from the courts, capitals, stock exchanges,
and commodity markets in Europe and the United States above news
from the ci es in Britain's formal and informal empire.

Reuters's contracts also secured access to a world market for news, but
this market was fragmented in many ways. Reuters bought news from
its cartel partners. Its news sales were not confined to the Bri sh Empire
—it sold to Havas, Wolff, and other agencies. Neither was the empire a
homogeneous sales territory; posi on on the cable network ma ered,
among other things. Reuters tailored its services to specific markets and
customer needs. Reuters's news bulle ns to London newspapers
indicate that London's newspaper market demanded both imperial and
interna onal news. Reuters's informa on services to London shipping,
insurance, and other companies indicate specific corporate interests.

Of course, Reuters was a creature of empire. Imperial and interna onal

news could be mutually cons tu ve of Bri sh iden es, which could be
shaped through comparisons with various others. 42 Reuters and the
Bri sh press system did become imperial. There are many signs of an
imperializing Bri sh press before 1914 and a er: most notably, Reuters
played the imperial servant. However, Reuters was also squeezed into
the role of interna onal news agency by growing na onal press systems.
Reuters needed both world and imperial news, otherwise it could not
hope to capture a large market. Reuters developed as a hybrid
ins tu on—imperial and global, Bri sh and foreign, a private enterprise
working as a (subsidized) servant of the Bri sh Crown—and presented
different faces to different audiences.

Behind the many faces, Reuters comprised a series of networks and

bundles of rela onships that linked disparate en es into circuits of
exchange and iden ty forma on. 43 Telegraphic cables wired together
these Reuters webs, and so the primary geographic metaphor for
Reuters must be a network diagram. This diagram has London at its focal
point, and ci es within some empire markets as increasingly significant
concerns, but Reuters's news supply to London newspapers was
primarily sourced from a network of world ci es, the most important of
which were not located in the Bri sh Empire but in Europe and the
United States, later China and Japan. This ar cle highlights extra-empire
news sources and flows as a significant component of the daily news
printed for London readers. The significance of Reuters within (and
beyond) the Bri sh Empire press system lay partly in its ability to obtain
and circulate such news even as the Bri sh (and presumably other)
modern press system(s) imperialized. That there was a demand for such
news in London a ests to the spread of the city's interests. That such
news could be sourced from a web of agents primarily located in a few
other world ci es speaks both to the persistent importance of those
ci es in organizing and coordina ng flows in the world economy, and to
the significance of London's rela onships with them as a leading center
in a network of ci es.
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, Reuters supplied news and
business informa on to London customers. It did so on a world scale
and not merely on an empire scale. Its services from European and
American capitals were key products. Reuters took advantage of the
growing network of telegraph cables. Paris, New York, Berlin, Tokyo,
Hong Kong, and Shanghai all sat on this telecommunica ons grid and
hosted Reuters agencies or branches. It is therefore temp ng to
proclaim that Julius Reuter developed a global producer services
enterprise on the back of the telecommunica ons spine laid from
London and that this serves as evidence for an emerging network of
nineteenth-century global ci es.

Saskia Sassen and Anthony King may each have underes mated the
scale and scope of late nineteenth-century producer services
enterprises, but cau on is advised. Reuters alone cannot stand for
London's nineteenth-century producer services sector; further research
is required. Moreover, Saskia Sassen notes that before the 1980s flows
tended to be "within the inter-state system" and that "na ons were the
key actors." 44 There certainly are signs that poli es and their territories
cut across the globality of the Reuters services. The analysis reported in
this ar cle confirms that the flows within the Reuters network need to
be understood in the context of nineteenth-century empires and
imperialism. Between them, Reuters, Havas, and Wolff/CTC provided
global news and business informa on services to a network of ci es, but
they did so as a strategic alliance coping with and fragmented by
imperial loyal es and priori es. Nevertheless, analysis of Reuters news
services to London reveals Reuters as a transna onal web of enterprise
working to connect a network of ci es in order to facilitate the
transna onal ambi ons of London, colonial and foreign business, as well
as the Bri sh Empire.

Footnotes

1.
Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, "The Empire Effect: The
Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globaliza on, 1800–
1913," Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (2006): 283–312. See also
Niall Ferguson, "The City of London and Bri sh Imperialism: New Light
on an Old Ques on," in London and Paris as Interna onal Financial
Centres in the Twen eth Century, ed. Yousef Cassis and Eric Bussiere
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 57–77; and Irving Stone, The
Global Export of Capital from Great Britain 1865–1914 (London:
Macmillan, 1999).

2.
The term is defined by Saskia Sassen, "The Global City: Introducing a
Concept," Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (2005): 27–43. See
also Diane Davis, "Ci es in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History,"
Interna onal Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005):
92–109.

3.
These trends imply an increasing disconnec on of global ci es from
broader hinterlands or na onal economies, and increasing inequality
within the city as a result of the demands of the professionals and
enterprises producing global produc on systems. Sassen, "Global City,"
pp. 27–43. Note that Anthony King iden fied the 1970s and 1980s as
the decades of globaliza on of the city of London, when American
transna onal corpora ons including producer services firms established
presences in the city and globalized its prac ces. Anthony King, Global
Ci es: Post-imperialism and the Interna onaliza on of London (London:
Routledge, 1991).

4.
Simon Po er, News and the Bri sh World: The Emergence of an Imperial
Press System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Simon Po er, "Webs,
Networks and Systems: Globalisa on and the Mass Media in the
Nineteenth- and Twen eth-century Bri sh Empire," Journal of Bri sh
Studies 46 (July 2007): 621–646.

5.
Donald Read, Power of News: The History of Reuters, 1849–1989
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
6.
Oliver Boyd-Barre and Terhi Rantanen, eds., The Globaliza on of News
(London: Sage Publica ons, 1998).

7.
I do not wish to discount the fluid associa ons and temporary linkages
of those networking across the empire, but this ar cle must take into
account the special character of Reuters as an organized, commercial
network opera ng in and among many other, less organized networks.
Alan Lester, "Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the Bri sh
Empire," History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 121–141.

8.
Anthony King argued that in the eighteenth century London was already
a world city with trade links largely to European ci es and to North
America. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars London became the
dominant world financial center, but in the second half of the
nineteenth century London increasingly reoriented its trade and
investments to its growing empire, and London became a more imperial
city. King dates the globaliza on of London later, in the postwar era,
when London became a base for foreign capital and the host for a much
more cosmopolitan complex of flows. King, Global Ci es.

9.
David Harvey, The Condi on of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989),
pp. 240–283. James Carey got behind the metaphor of a shrinking world
and the narra ve of me-space compression in the context of the
modern newspaper by rela ng the telegraph to the rise of the modern
newspaper and monopoly capitalism, the rhetoric of universalism and
the electrical sublime, changes in language (cablese), the development
of standard me, a shi from arbitrage to futures in the trading of
commodi es, and a shi from colonialism to imperialism. News
agencies had not only news genera ng and sales regions but also
systema c organiza on and flows of news, and thus network
geographies. James Carey, "Time, Space and the Telegraph," in
Communica on in History: Technology, Culture, Society, ed. David
Crowley and Paul Heyer (New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 132–137;
James Carey, "Space, Time and Communica ons: A Tribute to Harold
Innis," in Communica on as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed.
James Carey (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 142–172.

10.
Po er, News and the Bri sh World, pp. 87–88.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Po er, "Webs, Networks and Systems," pp. 629–635. Such effects of
telegraphy are known from other contexts. See Carey, "Time, Space and
the Telegraph," pp. 132–137, and Carey, "Space, Time and
Communica ons," pp. 142–172.

13.
Po er, "Webs, Networks and Systems," p. 636.

14.
Simon Po er, "Empire and the English Press, c. 1857–1914," in
Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Repor ng the Bri sh
Empire, c. 1857–1921, ed. Simon Po er (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2004), pp. 39–61.

15.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipula on of
Bri sh Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984); Po er, "Empire and the English Press," pp. 39–61.

16.
Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); David Gilbert and Felix Driver,
"Capital and Empire: Geographies of Imperial London," Geojournal 51
(2000): 23–32; Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Ci es:
Landscape, Display and Iden ty (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Crea ng Iden es in
Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).

17.
John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the
Media, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Terhi Rantanen,
"The New Sense of Place in 19th-century News," Media, Culture and
Society 25 (2003): 435–449; Terhi Rantanen, The Media and
Globaliza on (London: Sage Publica ons, 2005); Read, Power of News.

18.
Boyd-Barre and Rantanen, Globaliza on of News.

19.
Read, Power of News.

20.
Ibid.

21.
King, Global Ci es; Stanley D. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain
from the Industrial Revolu on to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); P. J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, Bri sh
Imperialism I: Innova on and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman,
1993); James Foreman-Peck, History of the World Economy:
Interna onal Economic Rela ons Since 1850, 2nd ed. (New York:
Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1995).

22.
Thompson, Media and Modernity.

23.
Read, Power of News.

24.
Graham Storey, Reuters' Century, 1851–1951 (London: Parrish, 1951);
Read, Power of News.

25.
See Donald Read's map of Reuters outward services for May 1914, in
Read, Power of News.

26.
For example, by expressing sympathy for the Habsburg emperor, a
"cons tu onal monarch" ruling through an elected parliament, at the
loss of his heir, described as a force for the modernizing of Austria-
Hungary, at the hands of a "vicious" na onalist Slav, the editor of the
New Zealand Herald made a distant news event into a confirma on of
"Bri sh" values of monarchy, democracy, liberalism, law, and order.

27.
The ritual view of communica on was pioneered by James Carey and
Benedict Anderson, who argued that reading a newspaper is an
everyday act promising simultaneity in me-space: all the other readers
share similar stories at the same me. This generates an imagined
(na onal) community. Thus, the press cons tutes the world, me-space,
and iden es, as readers share and par cipate, possess a common faith
in the news, and join a world as an observer of drama c ac on. Both
Terhi Rantanen and Steve Co le argue that this role for news was also
filled historically by late nineteenth-century newspapers. This social
construc on of the world became technically feasible because of the
telegraph, which constructed a simulacrum of complex systems and
provided an analog model of the railroad and a digital model of
language. It coordinated and controlled ac vity in space, o en behind
the backs of those subject to it. Barnhurst and Nerone count the
modern newspaper itself, with its streamlined and ra onalized front
page, hierarchical story placement, and the division of the newspaper
into compartments, as a product of this telecommunica on. Carey,
"Time, Space and the Telegraph," pp. 132–137; Carey, "Space, Time and
Communica ons," pp. 142–172. Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communi es: Reflec ons on the Origin and Spread of Na onalism
(London: Verso, 1983); Rantanen, "New Sense of Place in 19th-century
News," pp. 435–449; Steve Co le, "Media zed Rituals: Beyond
Manufacturing Consent," Media, Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2006):
411–432; Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A
History (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).

28.
For example, the Neue Börsenhalle, Hamburg, contracted in 1867 for a
"full" Reuters news service, to be delivered to their commercial club and
reading room within the Hamburg Exchange Buildings. A fee of £600 per
annum bought them an "impressive range of news, both for content and
place of origin (China and South America). Neither Havas nor Wolff
could match Reuters for news from outside Europe." Read, Power of
News, p. 51. Reuters supplied fund quota ons from ten exchanges, rates
of exchange for bills and discount reports from seventeen loca ons,
corn and flour reports from twenty specified places, co on reports
(fourteen places), colonial product reports (seventeen places), metal
reports (eight places), and reports on wool and petroleum, as well as
world poli cal news, news of the arrival of transatlan c mails and
specie, and freight news.

29.
Time-space compression involved a shi from rela vely isolated worlds,
through speedup in the pace of life, an apparent shrinking of space to a
global village of telecommunica ons, a spaceship earth of economic and
ecological interdependencies, and shortened me horizons to an
overwhelming sense of compression of our spa al and temporal worlds.
Harvey, Condi on of Postmodernity, pp. 240–283.

30.
Jorma Ahvenainen, "Telegraphs, Trade and Policy: The Role of the
Interna onal Telegraphs in the Years 1870–1914," in The Emergence of a
World Economy 1500–1914, ed. W. Fischer, R. M. McInnis, and J.
Schneider (Papers of the IX Interna onal Congress of Economic History,
Part II: 1850–1914, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1986), pp.
505–518.

31.
Gordon M. Winder, "Webs of Enterprise 1850–1914: Applying a Broad
Defini on of FDI," Annals of the Associa on of American Geographers
96, no. 4 (2006): 788–806.

32.
Paris supplied 690 words (25.0 percent), Berlin 645 words (23.4
percent), Durazzo 200 words (7.2 percent), Vienna 150 words (5.4
percent), and Athens 140 words (5.1 percent), and copy also came from
Sofia and Madrid.

33.
Reuters's empire branches in 1914 were O awa, Cape Town, Durban,
Johannesburg, Alexandria, Cairo, Aden, Bombay, Calcu a, Colombo,
Delhi, Karachi, Madras, Simla, Singapore, Hong Kong, Adelaide,
Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Wellington. Glasgow,
Manchester, and Birmingham had branches, but not Dublin.

34.
Read, Power of News; Po er, News and the Bri sh World.

35.
Reuters's foreign branches were located in Amsterdam, Constan nople,
Peking, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Except for Constan nople these lay inside
its cartel sales territories. Bureaus were located in Antwerp, Berlin,
Brussels, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Vienna.

36.
In 1902, Gray, Dawes and Company of London contracted Reuters to
supply it with reports on the movements of its steamers on its London-
Brisbane and London-Calcu a lines, with all reports to be circulated in
Reuters services to the Bri sh, Indian, and colonial press. Clearly aimed
at informing a Bri sh clientele, this service nevertheless required
Reuters agents in foreign ports: Lisbon, Marseilles, Naples, and Batavia.
Reuters, Reuters Telegram Company Limited and Messrs. Gray, Dawes
and Co. Agreement for repor ng the movements of Messrs. Gray,
Dawes and Co.'s steamers, dated 9th October 1902, Reuters Group
Archive, Archive Number 714035, LN 238. Reuters contracts with Lloyd's
and other shipping related enterprises hinged on their extensive port
network. See also Reuters, Agreement between Lloyd's and Reuters
Telegram Co. Ltd. dated the 14th February 1910, Reuters Group Archive,
Archive Number 8714048 LN 238; Reuters, Le ers from Lloyd's List to
Reuters Telegram Co. Ltd. regarding services for repor ng fires abroad
and quota ons for the Paris bourse, Reuters Group Archive, Archive
Number 8714045 Loca on LN 238; and Reuters, Agreement between
Reuters Telegram Co. Ltd. and Messrs. Spo swoode and Co. Ltd., for
supply of news to the Shipping Gaze e newspaper, dated 6 May 1914,
Reuters Group Archive.

37.
For an annual £200 fee, Reuters agreed in 1906 to supply Expanse,
Mullion, Marconi Interna onal Marine Communica on Co. Ltd., of
London, with a German news service of at least fi y words a day, six
days per week. Reuters, Service of German news from Berlin to Expanse,
Mullion, Marconi Interna onal Marine Com. Co. Ltd. le er dated 25
September 1906, Reuters Group Archive, Archive Number 8714057, LN
238. See also Reuters, Agreement with the Russian Outlook dated 21
June 1919, Reuters Group Archive, Archive Number 8714056 Loca on
LN 238; and Reuters, Agreement between Reuters Telegram Co. Ltd. and
P. S. Taylor for the right to copy and publish news in the Near East
newspaper, dated 20 March 1914, Reuters Group Archive, Archive
Number 8714049, Loca on LN 238.

38.
For example, in 1912 Reuters contracted to supply the Mexican stock
exchange with "quota ons of market" and Whitelaw's telegraphic code
with an explana on by le er of the method of deciphering quota ons.
Reuters, La Bolsa de Valores de Mexico P.C.L. Le er dated 10 October
1912 accep ng our terms, transla on 10 October 1912, Reuters Group
Archive, Archive Number 8714043 LN 238.

39.
The contract of 1921 defined previous arrangements. Reuters
contracted to disseminate Foreign Office news. Such contracts made
Reuters an agent of the UK government and open to charges that they
were subsidized by Whitehall. Reuters, Foreign Office Agreement dated
16 November 1921. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and
Reuters Ltd., Agreement for the dissemina on and distribu on of news,
dated 16 November 1921, Reuters Group Archive, Archive Number
871400 LN 238.

40.
The contract of 1921 confirmed the pa ern of a cartel agreement
crea ng separate provincial, London, and overseas news source and
sales regions, with Reuters collec ng an annual £12,000 fee for news
services. Reuters, Agreement with the Press Associa on, dated 7 May
1921, with le er from the Press Associa on dated 6 May 1921, Reuters
Group Archive, Archive Number 8714003 LN 238.
41.
Winder, "Webs of Enterprise 1850–1914," pp. 788–806.

42.
See for example Derek Gregory, "Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the
City of the Arabian Nights,"
h p://web.mac.com/derekgregory/iWeb/Site/performing%Cairo.html
(accessed 15 May 2009).

43.
This would follow Tony Ballantyne's ideas of nineteenth-century
newspapers as powerful transna onal agents of "imperial globaliza on"
but cons tu ng Reuters as hybrid rather than imperial ins tu on. Tony
Ballantyne, "Re-reading the Archive and Opening up the Na on-state:
Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)," in A er the Imperial
Turn: Thinking With and Through the Na on, ed. Antoine e Burton
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). See Po er, "Webs,
Networks and Systems," p. 625.

44.
Sassen, "Global City," pp. 27–43.
An Orientalist in the Orient:
Richard Garbe's Indian Journey, 1885-1886

Kaushik Bagchi
Goucher College

Journal of World History 14.3 (2003) 281-325

IN 1885, a German professor named Richard Garbe went on what we

might call today a study abroad. He journeyed by ship to India, spent a
year studying Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy at Benares, and wrote a
journal on his experiences in the "Third World."Unlike traveling scholars
today, he did not have immuniza ons against tropical diseases or
bo led water, and neither could he be evacuated at short no ce. He did
go, though, with a strong sense of wonder and excitement, not knowing
exactly what he would find or how he would manage in a new and
difficult environment. He returned, as some travelers to non-Western
socie es s ll do, wiser, but also disillusioned with the "reali es" of
countries like India.

In this ar cle, I study Garbe's experiences in India as described in his

travel journal. I also examine a novel he wrote a er his trip to India, a
monograph on the Mughal emperor Akbar, and a few other wri ngs.
The focus of my discussion is colonial power and its different
manifesta ons rather than Orientalist scholarship itself, and what I
examine here therefore are mainly Garbe's nonprofessional (non-
Orientalist) wri ngs.

Garbe (1857-1927), a professor at the University of Tübingen, had

earned his reputa on through his scholarship on Indian philosophy,
par cularly his work on reconstruc ng the Bhagavad Gita in its original
form. His year-long trip to India in 1885 was financed by the Prussian
government through its Ministry of Culture and the Royal Academy of
Sciences in Berlin. Garbe kept a detailed record of his experiences in
India, which he published in 1889 under the tle Indian Travel Sketches.
1 Garbe's travels and reac ons to the East are especially interes ng
because he was one of a handful of nineteenth-century German
Indologists (scholars of Indian culture and an quity) who actually visited
India. Another German scholar, Paul Deussen (1845-1919), a professor
of philosophy and Indology at Kiel, traveled to India and Ceylon in the
winter of 1892-93. 2 The best known German Indologist of all me,
Friedrich Max Mueller (1823-1900), is famous for never having set foot
in the country that he studied and roman cized all his life.

While my discussion draws on the cri que of Orientalism that has

emerged since the publica on of Edward Said's Orientalism, it is not
intended to be yet another debunking of European scholarship on the
Orient. Neither is it, as Wendy Doniger puts it, "flogging a dead white
male Orientalist horse." 3 I do not believe Garbe's academic and
nonacademic pronouncements on India and the East were wrong simply
because they were spoken by a white man. My study also does not
point to a clear linkage between Orientalist scholarship and European
colonial power or hegemony. My thesis, rather, is that German
Orientalism was more a reflec on of European power than a
contribu ng factor to its emergence and growth.

German Orientalism was not the focus of Said's ini al cri que, nor has it
received as much a en on as English or French Orientalism in
subsequent studies. One obvious reason is the rela ve lack of German
involvement in European colonialism. Since much of Said's cri que was
aimed at exposing the es between Orientalist scholarship and colonial
power, German Orientalism is not a natural candidate for Saidian-style
scru ny. But Said was aware of the absence of German Orientalism in
his book, and tried to preempt cri cs by arguing that German
Orientalism was not as important as French or English Orientalism. 4

Said's argument with respect to German Orientalism is, however, a weak

one, for several reasons. German Orientalism was not an isolated
phenomenon, but rather an integral part of European scholarship and
ideas as a whole. German scholarship influenced non-German European
scholars and vice versa. 5 And although the Germans, unlike the Bri sh,
the French, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, never established a colonial
presence in India, the German intellectual involvement with India was
an intense and sustained one. Rosane Rocher has correctly noted that,
"by failing to examine German scholarship, . . . [Said's sweeping
indictment of Orientalist scholarship] shies away from confron ng the
crucial issue of what may be a ributable to colonial condi ons and what
may not." 6 And last, but very importantly, German Orientalism
generated ideas that resemble very closely those espoused by two
aggressively chauvinis c groups in the twen eth century: the
perpetrators of racial persecu on and fascism in Europe, and the
proponents of Hindu na onalism in India.

Orientalism was concerned mainly with the study of an quity, with a

world that did not exist any more. It is to this aspect of Orientalism,
however, the fact that the Orient of the Orientalists did not have much
to do with the "real Orient," that the Saidian cri que has drawn our
a en on. While Western Orientalists approached the Orient of
an quity with due respect, their rela onship with the real, modern
(nineteenth- and twen eth-century) Orient was embedded in the
modern, unequal rela onships between Europe and the Orient. The
post-Orientalist cri que charges that to view the scholarly output of
Orientalists in complete isola on from these modern rela onships is
untenable. My discussion of Garbe shares this premise with the post-
Orientalist cri que and my guiding interest in this study is therefore the
rela onship between Orientalists and the modern Orient. More
specifically, I explore an area that has not received much a en on in
this debate, namely, the rela onship between scholars without
explicitcolonial backing and the Orient of the mid- to late nineteenth
century, which was predominantly under European colonial rule or
influence.

Orientalism and Orientalism:

A Brief Overview

The term "Orientalist" has entered academic parlance with

overwhelmingly nega ve connota ons ever since the publica on of
Orientalism in 1979. In that book, Said argued, with considerable
vehemence, that Western scholarship on the Orient has been in mately
ed to Western poli cal power over the Orient, especially in the era of
colonialism. The book focuses mainly on the Islamic Orient and English
and French depic ons of it. Although this a limita on on the study, as
Said himself has acknowledged, the thrust of Said's argument has been
carried over to studies on other regions. In later wri ngs, Said has
extended the scope of his thesis to the present day and context. 7 This
overview here will be brief, because numerous surveys of the
Orientalism debate already exist. More importantly, I believe that the
basic issues of the debate, given the impact of Said and the ideas he has
generated, are now unavoidable landmarks in the intellectual landscape
we work in. The arguments I discuss below are meant to convey the
flavor of this debate and also contextualize Garbe and his experiences in
India.

Orientalism, as Said defined it, was—and s ll is—"a corporate ins tu on

for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about
it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, ruling over it."It
was thus fundamentally a discourse, an "ensemble" of rela onships
between works, writers, audiences, and ins tu ons that "suffused the
ac vity [of Orientalist scholars] with meaning, intelligibility, and reality."
8 Orientalist discourse, according to Said, contributed significantly to the
construc on of Europe's "Other," which was, in the case of the "Near
East," or the Islamic Orient, both threatening and enchan ng. It was
threatening because it supposedly represented the precise opposite of
European civiliza on: Islam was undemocra c, despo c, sta c, and
irra onal. It was at the same me enchan ng because it was a land of
mystery, fairy tales, and exo c beauty.

The debate over Orientalism, and over Said, has been relentless. Wri ng
in 1995, seventeen years a er the publica on of Orientalism,Said
observed that the tremendous response to this work and the "local
discussions" it con nues to generate "went far beyond anything I was
thinking about when I wrote the book." The result, Said writes, is that
"Orientalism now seems to me like a collec ve book which has
superseded me as its author." 9 The book has been both admired and
cri cized intensely, and seems set to take its place alongside such
classics of non-Western "replies" toWestern power as Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth. 10

Even today, over twenty years since the book first appeared, the ba le
con nues with surprising energy and emo on. 11 The line in this debate
has been, broadly, between intellectuals with clear or tenuous
postcolonial and Third World affilia ons, and Western scholars of Asia
and other non-Western regions. The first group has viewed Said's ideas
as a valid and long-overdue cri cism of Western scholarship on Eastern
socie es and, more broadly in the area of postcolonial studies, of
Western power and control. The la er group has rejected Said's charges
as ideologically tainted and also not per nent to the actual content and
accomplishments of Western scholarship on the Orient. 12
Said himself has expressed dismay at the fact that Orientalism has come
to be seen as a general subaltern statement, as "the wretched of the
earth talking back," rather than as a mul cultural cri que in which the
crossing of boundaries is more important than maintaining them.
Orientalism, Said maintains, was not for or against theWest, although
that it is the way it has been read. 13 The recep on to Said's cri que in
the West has been, ironically, more sa sfying to him than reac ons from
Arabs and Muslims outside theWest, perhaps valida ng Keith
Windshu le's argument about Orientalism being a decidedly American
book. 14 In fact, some of the response from within the Muslim world to
Said's scholarship has been quite nega ve. 15 The countries Said lists
where his work has generated the reac ons he had hoped for are either
English-speaking socie es such as Australia and the United States, or
formerly colonized regions, such as the Caribbean or the Indian
subcon nent, where significant English-speaking orWesternized strata
exist. Within these countries, his cri que has been most influen al in
areas that are now associated with liberal or radical posi ons in the
Western academy: in Said's own words, "the analysis of subaltern
history, literary cri cism, postcolonial anthropology, and feminist and
minority discourses," among others. 16

Some of these posi ons are not simply associated with Said's cri que,
but have in fact been generated by it. Postcolonial studies is the best
example. In the a ermath of Said's book, the terms "post-Orientalist"
and "postcolonial" have been virtually synonymous. The term "post-
Orientalist" describes scholarship, culture, and poli cs a er the cri que
of Orientalist ideas was developed and points to a new phase in wri ng
and debate, especially on the Third World and non-Western socie es.
"Postcolonial" refers to the intellectual climate a er the end of
colonialism, although its connota ons go beyond the literal meaning of
the word. Linda Hutcheon's descrip on of postcolonial theory and
prac ce as broadly an -imperialist and emancipatory applies perfectly
to post-Orientalist ideas as well. 17

The confla on of post-Orientalist and postcolonial cri ques stems

therefore from their contesta on of Western power and ideas. The
specific ideologies against which they are ranged—Orientalism and
colonialism—were also, as Said has argued abundantly, part of the same
imperial project. On the colonized side of the rela onship as well,
colonialism and Orientalism were connected. Partha Cha erjee has
ar culated this rela onship by no ng that Orientalism (prac ced by
Westerners) provided the intellectual basis for the subsequent
"deriva ve" discourse on the na on-state (prac ced by the colonized)
by unearthing histories of the Orient that were previously unknown to
Orientals themselves. Orientalism thus implicated itself in the process of
coloniza on as well as in the emergence of na onalism or na on-
sta sm (during and a er colonialism). 18

Challenges to the post-Orientalist and postcolonial posi ons have been

numerous and fierce, and so are the rebu als. An illustra ve example of
this debate is an exchange between Rosalind O'Hanlon and David
Washbrook, and Gyan Prakash. 19 Taking aim at an essay by Prakash
called "Wri ng Post-Orientalist Histories," O'Hanlon and Washbrook
offered a strong and wide-ranging cri cism of both post-Orientalist and
postcolonial scholarship. Prakash has provided an > equally vehement
counterrefuta on. Said has taken note of this debate, and feels that
Prakash's approach, especially his "mobile poststructuralism," is the
winner, as is the work of other postcolonial writers such as Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashish Nandy. 20

O'Hanlon and Washbrook argue that Said's posi on is fundamentally

flawed, mainly because his postmodernist approach is incompa ble
with the "conven onal humanism" and the emancipatory poli cal
agenda his cri que also contains. 21 In response to this cri cism, Said
has admi ed to the inconsistencies as well as the "residual humanism"
in his approach. But Orientalism, he maintains, "is a par san book, not a
theore cal machine." It is for these reasons, he says, that he values the
methodological flexibility of scholars such as Prakash more than the
cer tudes of "academics of a rigorous and unyielding stripe." 22

O'Hanlon and Washbrook also ques on Prakash's idea of "post-

founda onality." Capitalism and its emergence, in Prakash's argument,
was the "founda on" of earlier historical wri ng by both colonial writers
and the early na onalist-Marxist schools, as well as by later exponents
of development studies. O'Hanlon and Washbrook maintain that the
rejec on of founda ons in the postcolonial and post-Orientalist
cri ques, derived mainly from postmodernism, is not of much use in the
"basic, inescapably ac ve, and interven onist task of historical
interpreta on," and may even be an "intellectual cul-de-sac." 23 Gyan
Prakash's reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook is that their cri que is yet
another a empt to establish defini ve "mastery [over a] space" that is
necessarily ambivalent. It is possible, he argues, to combine
postmodernist insights with a Marxist libera onist agenda, by using
Marxism to "historicize the emergence of capitalism," and using
deconstruc on to point to its origins as "a nineteenth-century European
discourse that universalized the mode-of-produc on narra ve." 24

O'Hanlon and Washbrook have also noted (disparagingly) what they see
as a new style of scholarship among postcolonial and the post-
Orientalist thinkers typified by "Said's characteris c blending of themes
[such as Third World histories and cultures, Foucauldian approaches to
power, engaged poli cs of difference, and postmodernist approaches on
the decentered and the heterogeneous]." 25 David Lelyfeld has pointed
to the interest in "colonial discourse" as a unifying element in this brand
of scholarship that emerged "in the wake of Said's Orientalism" among
anthropologists, historians, and literary theorists, especially of South
Asian origin. 26 Arif Dirlik has taken the a ack a step further by alleging
that postcolonial and post-Orientalist scholars are, in fact, beneficiaries
of the global, capitalist order. They have created the category of
"postcolonial," he argues, in order to carve out a niche for themselves in
a world that buys new marketable products, academic or otherwise. The
postcolonial school has yet to generate, as Dirlik puts it, "a
thoroughgoing cri cism of its own ideology and formulate prac ces of
resistance against the system of which it is a product." 27

Moving beyond the complexi es of the postcolonial debates, there is

also the more transparent problem that Said's cri que of Orientalism,
and of those who have followed his approach, is focused almost
exclusively on theWest's construc ons of the East. It does not look
outside of theWest-non-West encounter for examples of Otherness and
the exercise of hegemonic power. 28 In Orientalism, Said hardly
discusses, for example, Chinese, O oman, or Japanese imperialism.
Amal Rassam has wondered whether Said's belief in the ubiquity of
imperialism and ethnocentrism among "all advanced cultures" in their
dealings with "other" cultures is consistent with his singling out of
Europe's failure to rise above this tendency. The unintended implica on
is that the West should be judged by its own standards, which are, by
this line of reasoning, superior to others. 29 Catherine Mar n has also
accused Said of "reifying" the West and Western Orientalism by ignoring
all examples, outside of theWest, in his "history of domina on." She
also points out that all knowledge, not just Western Orientalist
knowledge, is based on the "observa on of difference and its transla on
from the unknown idea to the known concept." 30

Edward Graham, tes ng Said's hypotheses in rela on to East Asia, has

pointed to China's historical construc on of the "barbarian Other" living
outside the walls of Chinese civiliza on. The Chinese thus created "an
imagina ve geography" [Said's phrase] of barbarian lands, a set of ideas
that undercut the barbarians' sense of themselves while jus fying
Chinese manipula on and exploita on. Graham concludes that Said's
model of Orientalism is indeed applicable to the Chinese view of non-
Chinese peoples. 31 Although Graham hastens to add that this does not
detract from the validity of Said's cri que, I believe that it, in fact, does.
Said's cri que is not simply, as Graham suggests, "a concept of otherism
as a cultural ar fact" applied to Western percep ons of Asia. The
European colonial se ng and Western dominance are cri cal to Said's
theories, mainly because his standpoint is as much poli cal as academic.

Stephen Hay's Asian Ideas of East and West and Stephen Tanaka's
Japan's Orient also prove that cross-cultural interac ons in other
direc ons, besides that of the West looking at the non-Western world,
are indeed possible. In India, Stephen Hay suggests, Orientalist
construc ons of East and West were not simply imposed on a colonized
populace, but were an "expression of the symbiosis" between ruler and
ruled that was "[ar culated by intellectuals] on both sides of the
partnership." 32 Said's approach hardly admits any such symbiosis or
collabora on. For Said, the rela onship flowed in one direc on only: the
colonizer looking at and taking from the colonized. Stephen Tanaka's
Japan's Orient is a study of the way Japan developed a picture of other
Asian socie es, notably China, and used it, as Said's model would
predict, to construct Japan's own history and further Japanese interests.
The idea of toyo, or the "eastern seas," represented what Japan was
supposedly not: Asia c and backward. Japanese scholars even
developed a discipline, toyoshi, a Japanese version of Oriental studies,
that enabled them to see themselves as "an authority on Asia" and
"engage in a dialogue with the West" as an equal. 33

Orientalism, German Orientalism, and India

While colonialism is certainly the main contextual element in the debate
on Orientalism, it is not, even in Said's cri que, the only one.
Roman cism is the other factor, and the history of the two movements,
Roman cism and Orientalism, are closely intertwined. Raymond
Schwab, whom Said greatly admires, has even described Roman cism
not as a broader category in which Orientalism can be subsumed, but as
Orientalism itself. Roman cism and Orientalism, in this view, are one
and the same thing. 34

Johann Go ried Herder (1744-1803) provides a useful star ng point for

an overview of both Orientalism and Roman cism in Germany. 35
Herder, though not a professional Orientalist, was in a sense the founder
of scholarly Orientalism in his country, especially with regard to India.
For students of European history, Herder is also familiar as one of the
pioneers of Roman c thought. 36 The Roman c revolu on which
Herder set in mo on valued the local, as opposed to the universal, faith
—primarily Chris an—as opposed to reason, and tradi on and the past
over progress and the future.

Orientalists and Indologists shared with other Roman cs the love of the
local, the exo c, and the unique. They also imbibed from the Roman c
movement the urge to find origins, and the view that languages and
socie es grow together in an organic fashion. A (racist) corollary of this,
one which was subscribed to by some Orientalists such as Wilhelm von
Humboldt, was that "be er" languages and socie es would evolve more
organically than "inferior" ones. 37 Orientalists also shared the
inconsistencies of the Roman c posi on. They thus wished to preserve
local diversity, while striving at the same me to find a global unity, or a
common humanity, that would reconcile disparate cultures and
histories. Herder, in keeping with this globalist perspec ve, was an early
denouncer of Western colonialism in other regions of the world. 38
German Indologists were mo vated in their researches by the linguis c
and racial affinity they believed to exist among the na ons of the "Indo-
European" family. This family included, among others, the peoples of
northern Europe, Persia, and India, and was frequently contrasted by
Indologists with the "Semi c family of na ons." 39 Through their study
of India and Iran, these German scholars, all strongly influenced by the
Roman c tradi on, sought to unearth the "childhood" of the Indo-
European family, and thereby establish their own cultural lineage. The
principal tool in this exercise was the discipline of philology. Philology
was also central to German scholarship in the humani es as a whole in
the nineteenth century, culmina ng in the figure of the philologist-
philosopher Nietzsche. Joan DeJean has aptly describedphilological
science in nineteenth-century Germany as "an intellectual Page 292]
totality, a world unto itself that at the same me gave access to the
essence of na ons." 40

The ins tu onaliza on of the discipline of Orientalism in Germany

began with the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel. Friedrich
Schlegel (1772-1829), who admired intensely what he considered to be
the Indo-European socie es of Asia, considered the ancient Indian
language, Sanskrit, to be the source of all Indo-European languages.
Schlegel used this premise to iden fy several parallels between
Germany and the Indo-European socie es of the East. 41 He contrasted
this en re "family" of na ons with those of the Semi c group, whose
languages and cultural traits, he argued, were en rely different from
those of Indo-Europeans. 42 Franz Bopp (1791-1867), a pioneer in
compara ve linguis cs and professor at Berlin, where he was a
contemporary and friend of Hegel, set up a hierarchy among socie es
based on how close their languages were to "the perfect language,"
Sanskrit. Among the closest, he claimed, were "Greek and La n among
the ancient languages, the Germanic dialects among the languages of
modern Europe, and Persian among the Asian languages." The
dis nc veness of this language family from all others was central to
Bopp's work and ideas. "The true nature of Sanskrit and related
languages," he argued, "can be seen most clearly by contras ng them
with the roots of the Semi c languages." 43

This alleged affinity among Indo-European socie es was not a German

discovery. William Jones, the Bri sh Orientalist, is usually credited with
the first pronouncement on this issue, although he too had not made an
unexpected discovery. Edgar Polomé has pointed out that Jones's
contribu on of "bringing Sanskrit into the context of a developing
historical and compara ve framework to language study" was the
outcome of work done by numerous scholars before him, especially on
the Con nent. As early as the 1580s, Filippo Sasse , who traveled to
India, listed words that were common to Sanskrit and Italian. In
1686,Andreas Jaeger, a Swedish scholar, posited the existence of a
Caucasian mother tongue from which the Germanic languages of
Europe, as well as Persian, were derived. Par cularly helpful to Jones's
later achievements, Polomé argues, was the "fundamental work done in
the eighteenth century in the field of Cel c and Germanic studies."
William Jones's contribu on was to confirm these suspicions by placing
the "missing link," namely Sanskrit, in the puzzle. 44 Once this was
done, the concept of "Indo-European" emerged and became part of the
received linguis c and anthropological wisdom of the nineteenth
century. In 1823, the German philologist Heinrich Klaproth (1783-1835)
injected yet another idea into this field, namely "Indo-Germanic," in
order to denote the special connec on that Germans, more than other
Europeans, supposedly had with the Indo-European past. 45 Interest in
and work on this alleged Indo-German connec on took two different
but related forms in Germany.
The first was a broadly diffused interest in the supposed linguis c and
racial links between Germany and India (and also Iran). Several German
thinkers in the nineteenth and twen eth centuries, while
notprofessional scholars of India, had a keen interest in Indian
philosophy and culture. Two such prominent scholars were Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). While
Schopenhauer never became a full- me Orientalist, he read extensively
in the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. The centrality of metaphysics in
Schopenhauer's work—that is, the desire to transcend the world of the
senses and arrive at higher, eternal truths—received strong
confirma on and support from Indian philosophy, which Schopenhauer,
following the ideas of his fellow German scholars of the me, saw as a
crea on of the Indo-European mind. Schopenhauer also believed that
all the insights of Western philosophy had already been an cipated and
developed in Asia, par cularly India. Nietzsche, while even less of an
India expert than Schopenhauer, was also strongly influenced by Indian
and Asian ideas, not least through the many Indologists who were
among his close acquaintances and friends. Nietzsche's contemporary
and friend Richard Wagner (1813-83), the composer and extoller of
Germanic values, was also thoroughly exposed to this German interest
in India. Nietzsche met Wagner for the first me at the home of an
Indologist, F.Brockhaus, who wasWagner's brother-in-law. The mee ng
was arranged by another Indologist, E.Windisch, a friend of Nietzsche. It
is also interes ng to note that Nietzsche's closest friend from his school
days un l the very end of his life was the renowned Indologist Paul
Deussen, who had also traveled to India shortly before Garbe. 46 In the
twen eth century, this German fascina on with India found a global
audience through the works of the novelist Hermann Hesse. 47

The other current of German interest in India was cons tuted by the
discipline of Indology, which grew on the founda ons laid by the
Schlegels, Franz Bopp, Othmar Frank (1770-1840), and Chris an Lassen
(1800-76). Early German Indologists worked closely with other
European, especially French Orientalists, among them the famous
Eugene Burnouf (1801-52). Indology, we should also note, was
descended directly from the early nonprofessional Roman c dabblers.
Friedrich Maier, for example, one of the first professional Indologists,
was Herder's student. Maier's transla ons of Indian texts such as the
Gita were published in the Asia sches Magazin [Asian Journal], a
periodical Heinrich Klaproth issued from the mecca of German
Roman cism, Weimar. Indology, as Raymond Schwab has noted, was
thus very close, from the start, to the German Roman c movement. 48

By the mid-nineteenth century, Indology was a firmly established

academic discipline in Germany. The Deutsche Morgeländische
Gesellscha (German Oriental Society) was founded in 1845, and began
publishing shortly therea er a journal, the Zeitschri der deutschen
morgenländischen Gesellscha (Journal of the German Oriental Society).
Hermann Brockhaus, a professional Sanskri st, was among its principal
founder-editors. Both the society and its journal have con nued to
occupy an important place in Orientalist scholarship in Germany to the
present day. Another important journal, Indogermanische Forschungen
(Indo-German Research), was founded in 1892. By the late nineteenth
century, numerous universi es in Germany had professorships in
Indology. 49 The subject of our study, Richard Garbe, had been a
student of Rudolf Roth, an Indologist at the University of Tübingen.
Roth, who had studied under Burnouf in France, published a history of
the Vedas in 1846, and completed in 1875 a seven-volume dic onary of
Sanskrit. On Roth's death in 1895, Garbe was invited to fill Roth's chair
at Tübingen. Garbe's work on the Gita, as well as on Chris anity's
rela onship to Indian religions, has ensured for him a las ng name in
this field. 50
German scholarship on India did not exist in a vacuum. Hermann Tull
has shown how European Indology in the second half of the nineteenth
century rested on a curious "marriage of Bri sh and German
scholarship." The Bri sh had been the pioneers but, as Tull argues,
"despite (or, perhaps because of) Britain's interest in India, by the
middle of the nineteenth century the most diligent Sanskri sts were to
be found in the German universi es." 51 With the Bri sh now involved
in the down-to-earth task of actually governing a colony, Roman c
interpreta ons of India became the preserve of the Con nentals,
especially the Germans, who were already cut off from India poli cally,
and who further "isolated themselves from the 'living' Indian
tradi on."They did this, for example, by disparaging na ve
commentaries on the Vedas, or deliberately ignoring aspects of Indian
culture that appeared "tasteless and monstrous" in favor of what they
considered more refined. 52

German Orientalists in the nineteenth century were also intellectually

and poli cally a conserva ve group. They were part of the early German
Roman c movement, which, in the words of Hannah Arendt, comprised
"representa ves of conserva ve interests, who had formulated the
main tenets of a conserva ve ideology." 53 This conserva sm was in
keeping with the Roman cs' affirma on of the past and of tradi on, and
their opposi on to changes in the prevailing order. Friedrich Schlegel,
for example, was a close friend and associate of Me ernich, the
Austrian poli cian whose name became synonymous with conserva sm
in Europe a er the Congress of Vienna. 54 Another Orientalist trait, an -
Semi sm, as Leon Poliakov and Mar n Bernal have argued, was an
integral component of nineteenth-century European—especially
German—na onalism. In this area, the early Orientalists in fact provided
fuel for later agitators. Johann-David Michaelis (1717-91), one of the
leading Hebrew scholars of his me, had campaigned ac vely against
Jewish emancipa on. One of Herder's students, Friedrich Graeter (1768-
1830), founded the journal Bragur to propagate virtues from the old
Nordic-Germanic epics and sagas. 55

As Indians in the nineteenth century became aware of European

Orientalist research, the hypothesis of racial (Aryan) affinity between
Indians and Europeans was welcomed, par cularly by conserva ve,
upper-caste Hindus. These Hindus were recep ve to any ideas that
would reinforce their own status, based on a perceived racial dis nc on
between themselves and the supposedly non-Aryan lower castes
ofIndia, going back to remote an quity. 56 Hindus, and indeed all
Indians, were at this point chafing under the humilia on of rule by a
European power. They would therefore welcome any sugges on,
especially from Europeans, that would assuage their sensibili es and
confirm their "past glory."This is exactly what German Orientalists
provided. David Kopf and O.P. Kejariwal have pointed to the supposedly
rejuvena ng effect of Bri sh Orientalism on Indian cultural pride and
awareness. A similar argument for German Orientalism has been
developed by Nirad Chaudhuri in his biography of Max Mueller. 57

Richard Garbe:
The Passage to India

In the foreword to the travel memoirs he wrote shortly a er his Indian

journey in 1885, Richard Garbe stated bluntly that the book was not
about a "land of wonder," unlike other popular works of the me. He
warned instead that he would describe the hardships and unappealing
aspects of life in India, and he did so in ample measure throughout the
book. This did not mean that he found nothing worthy of admira on in
India. He found much there that was "great and beau ful," such as
Muslim architectural achievements, the landscape of the Himalayas, and
the beauty of Ceylon. In this list of things he liked, anything remotely
connected with Hindu society and culture—the heart of his life and
work, as was the case with most German Indologists in search of "Indo-
European" connec ons—was conspicuously missing. 58

In anew edi on,thirty-five years later,Garbenotedthathe thought it best

to let the vigorous tone of the first edi on stand. As for its content, he
felt that only minimal changes were required, such as sta s cson
popula on. The bulk of the descrip on was, however, as accurate as
when he first wrote it, because India was a country that did not change.
It was true, he wrote, that contact with Western civiliza on had
changed the appearance of the country, mainly through technological
innova ons such as motorcars and typewriters. But all these, in his
opinion, were changes on the surface that had destroyed some of the
romance of India, but not its core. This unchanging nature was visible
most of all, Garbe believed, in the city that took up a major part of his
story, Benares, the "ancient and holy center of Hinduism." 59

At the end of Garbe's sea voyage to India, as he was taking in his first
view of India from the ship, an English officer, "put a friendly hand on
his shoulder" and assured him that he would view the same scene with
greater sa sfac on when he stood again at the same spot a er his stay
was over. Looking back, Garbe believed the Englishman was right. 60
Garbe's trip to India was, with rare excep ons, a very unpleasant
experience for him, both physically and intellectually. He was drawn to
the country, like other Indologists, by its "ancient culture and deep
wisdom," which stemmed supposedly from the Aryan roots of its early
se lers. 61 Whether he found this or not when he visited the land is not
clear. What is certain is that he found more to despise than to admire;
this was true of things both ancient and modern. The
physicalenvironment, whether natural or man-made, did not appeal to
him. As for the people and their culture, one has to search hard in his
account for even a hint of praise. It seems remarkable, a er reading this
account, that he had in the first place devoted himself professionally to
anything remotely connected with India.

In his travelogue, Garbe made no a empt to hide his disgust or

contempt for Indians. He also made li le effort to offer possible
explana ons for the "lack of refinement" that he found. Instead, the
shortcomings are presented as intrinsic to Indian culture, as traits that
are bound to exist in Oriental, non-European socie es; all one could do,
therefore, was to flee such unpleasantness and take refuge among more
civilized surroundings and people. Time and again while in India, Garbe
fled, so to speak, to the company and hospitality of resident Europeans.
From his descrip on, these homes and the social intercourse they
offered were oases of civiliza on in an otherwise repugnant land. These
interludes were, in fact, among the few experiences in his travels that
Garbe enjoyed and remembered fondly. Garbe had also read the
account of the Indian travels of his fellow Indologist, Paul Deussen, and
noted, with reference to Deussen's posi ve views on India, that no one
should be allowed to pass a judgment on India without having
experienced at least one summer and the rainy season, 62 when India
was evidently at its worst. Deussen and his wife had traveled in the
winter months. 63

Garbe provides good material for the Saidian cri que of Orientalism: the
Orient for him was a career to which he devoted himself wholeheartedly
but with li le sympathy or love. 64 The people of the Orient were tools
that one had to use to understand the Orient, but more o en they were
obstacles in this exercise. To complete the picture, he found the real
Orient to be a repugnant and distasteful place that was dis nctly inferior
to Europe.

Garbe's account of his approach to India, the sea voyage, provides early
clues as to what was to come. From Egypt on, the story becomes a list of
the horrors of the Orient. In Alexandria, where he disembarked for the
first me at a non-European port, the Orient hit him with all its noise,
dirt, and chaos. "Brown and black scoundrel-faces," eager to sell their
wares and tricks, clambered on board even before the ship reached
shore and badgered the passengers so unrelen ngly that "they could
save themselves only with physical force." For the first me, he learned,
Garbe wrote, of the tremendous gap that separated the white man from
the non-European. In Alexandria, as he strolled through the garden of
the Khedive, his European companions reached down, in full view of the
garden supervisor, to pluck some flowers to adorn the dining table back
on the ship. When Garbe asked if this was permissible, the reply was,"Of
course not, but as a European one can do anything in the Orient." 65

Egypt also gave Garbe a glimpse of what he might expect in the Orient
besides its people and customs: the weather. Garbe's account reads like
that of a traveler se ng foot on a different planet, where the physical
environment is one in which only the na ves could survive. Europeans,
endowed with a fundamentally different cons tu on, could survive only
by using special strategies. The heat in Alexandria, while a sharp change
from European condi ons, was for Garbe in hindsight almost a
refreshing memory a er confron ng the hot weather in India. The
blinding sunlight was also a new element, which Europeans had to
guard against by wearing shaded glasses. In Port Said, the pankha, the
manually operated ceiling fan, was used for the first me as the
temperature climbed, a device which, according to Garbe, was an
absolute necessity in India for Europeans. 66

The gap separa ng Europeans and non-Europeans that Garbe no ced

during this voyage included differences in material prosperity. Egypt's
poverty was striking for Garbe, probably even more so a er the
luxurious lifestyle on board his Austrian ship. Port Said, for example,
especially the "na ve city," presented a horrible picture of filth and
decay. Children covered with scabs played in the streets, and there was
nothing but dry, scorched earth all around. The "garden of the city" was
a so-called traffic roundabout in the European quarter that boasted a
few miserable, wil ng flowers and an occasional concert by an Egyp an
band. At a German bar nearby, Garbe notes, one could buy a bo le of
beer for one and a half francs. Des tute Egyp ans offered their services
as guides to Europeans, catching their a en on first with a few broken
phrases in the appropriate European language. Later, on the Suez Canal,
youngsters ran along the banks shou ng "Johnny! Bakshish!" un l a
pastry or something similar was thrown to them. 67 Already before
arriving in India, Garbe seemed to be learning that the white man in the
Orient was all-powerful and that the locals were at his mercy, wai ng
for handouts.

Garbe and the Colonial Environment

Garbe appeared to "understand" well why the Bri sh presence was

required in India. He agreed with the professed goals of the Bri sh
project, namely, to bring progress and spread Western-style
enlightenment. Garbe felt that these elements were lacking in India and
that it was the duty of the Bri sh, and Europeans in general, to
introduce them into the country. Far from harboring moral objec ons or
doubts, he fully appreciated "the white man's burden" in the land of the
na ves.

Garbe also viewed the colonial Bri sh presence in India as a European

rather than a Bri sh presence, and one with which he iden fied closely
during his stay there. In his descrip ons of "European Life in India,"
there is almost no condemna on of the Western presence and no desire
to see the Indians le to themselves. Virtually everything the Europeans
did in India, from the minu ae of their households to their larger
policies, made perfect sense to Garbe. Some Europeans, such as English
missionaries, did make mistakes in Garbe's opinion, and he was quick to
cri cize them. But this cri cism was not aimed at the European mission
itself, but rather at elements that hindered the project from func oning
efficiently. Garbe, the German, blended easily and perfectly into the
Bri sh colonial establishment in India, both from his own perspec ve
and from that of the Indian "subjects" around him. To most Indians, the
sahib was a sahib, and whether he was German or English did not
ma er in the least.

Garbe lived in most respects like any other resident European in India in
the late nineteenth or, for that ma er, the twen eth century. He had a
re nue of servants, or at least various a endants and hangers-on who
were willing to listen to his commands. These commands could range
from cri cal ma ers such as the regularity of the manually operated fan,
to frivolous things such as wan ng a snake charmer to repeat a trick.
Garbe listed over fi een kinds of servants that, according to him, were
part of the average European household in India. 68 There was the
bearer, the gardener, the cook, the water-carrier, and so on. Since Garbe
was not part of the formal Bri sh structure, he did not have the full
range of colonial trappings. But he certainly did not lack access to any
conveniences that he wished. He was always welcomed by the Bri sh as
one of their own. While traveling by train for the first me in India, he
was invited by an Englishman to be his houseguest for two weeks and
join him on hunts. In Benares, the local Bri sh regiment, the 17th
Bengal Cavalry, made him an honorary member of the officers' mess. He
was thus en tled to visit the base and avail himself of their hospitality.
69 It was the nature of these rela onships with other Europeans and
vis-à-vis Indians that, more than the actual details of his lifestyle,
iden fied Garbe firmly with the European ruling class.

The issue of "survival" for Europeans in the harsh condi ons of Asia was
a constant concern for Garbe. Among the various places Garbe visited in
India, Calcu a made a very favorable impression on him, mainly
because, he writes, the living condi ons of Europeans there were be er
than in any other city. Europeans in Calcu a, Garbe writes, "look healthy
and fresh, and their social life is lively and vigorous." The climate was of
a kind suited to Europeans, and the material comforts of life that,
according to Garbe, "were not a luxury but a necessary prerequisite for
Europeans to func on effec vely," were to be found in greater
abundance in a "Calcu a household" than elsewhere in India. 70

Also adding to the charm of Calcu a were the local Europeans, who
lived in well-appointed homes and were hospitable to anyone,
presumably European, who happened to be traveling through. This is
probably what Garbe meant when he wrote that the good Indian
tradi on of welcoming recommended guests was s ll very much alive in
Calcu a. His own stay in the luxurious home of a resident German
scholar, Rudolf Hoernle, made his visit to Calcu a an especially
memorable one. Given such favorable a ributes, Calcu a, did not, in
Garbe's opinion, deserve the very nega ve review it had received from
an Italian traveler a few years earlier. The "hysterical Southerner," writes
Garbe, had called it a "s nking city," which a European visited at grave
risk to his life and would be lucky to get away from alive. 71

The heat and stresses of life in Benares, where he spent most of his me
in India, led Garbe to take a vaca on in Darjeeling, a hill sta on in
Bengal constructed by the Bri sh to get physical and psychological
respite from the hot plains. Darjeeling was one of many such sta ons in
India, and it was customary for the Bri sh, as it is today for the Indian
middle classes, to get away as much as possible in the summer months
to the cool climate and temperate flora and fauna of these towns. Garbe
relished the benefits the colonial infrastructure in India provided. In his
journal, he offered no apologies, nor did he a empt to distance himself
from the structures of power. He was full of gra tude, for example, for
the Bri sh engineer who had constructed the zigzag railroad to
Darjeeling, an engineering feat without which Europeans would never
have been able to enjoy the town. He also recorded how happy he was
to enter his comfortable hotel room and finally enjoy a fireplace a er all
the months in the heat. His evalua on of life in Darjeeling focused
almost en rely on Europeans; it was their well-being that made
Darjeeling, in his opinion, a good place to live. The rosy cheeks of
European children in Darjeeling and the happy countenances of all
Europeans were a pleasure to watch, he wrote, a er the drained and
sallow faces in the"hellish furnace" below. 72

Garbe viewed Indians in general as naïve and childish. One theref ore
had to humor them like children to establish a rapport and get one's
work done. Garbe recounted, for example, an incident told to him by a
well-known English administrator and ethnographer, H. H. Risley, who
had been assigned to carry out a census among the na ve tribes in
Bengal. On hearing that an English official wanted to conduct some
business with them, the tribespeople had fled into the forest,
apparently believing that the English intended to treat them with a
medicine and force them to work in tea planta ons. Risley reminded
them that the Bri sh had sent them rice during the last famine. It was
for the same reason, Risley told them, that the Queen wanted to know
how many of them were there, so that she would know how much rice
to send in the future. If, however, they insisted on being "silly" and did
not allow themselves to be counted, they would starve. The en re tribe
then emerged from hiding and eagerly answered all ques ons. 73

Garbe's retelling of these incidents seemed to reflect his belief in the

ignorance of these "nature creatures," as he called them, as well as the
intense fear that most Indians felt toward the Bri sh. This fear, Garbe
conjectured, might have had its origins in the fierce manner in which the
Bri sh had put down the rebellion of 1857. 74 This, together with the
innate Indian ins nct for servility, Garbe argued, ensured that the sahib
was treated like a god. The European, he observed, was safe wherever
he or she traveled, even in remote and "uncivilized" regions. If anything,
the European o en found that this exaggerated respect or awe got in
the way of what he or she wanted to accomplish. 75 Garbe, too, despite
not being Bri sh, experienced on numerous occasions this awe and
servility, as well as the ignorance—so much so that he concluded that
the achievements in the area of law and order and the administra on of
the famed Indian Civil Service had been made easier by the natural
servility of the Hindus, as well as the hos lity the different Indian races
felt toward each other. The net result of this awe and ignorance, Garbe
argued, was an insurmountable gulf that separated Europeans and
Indians. 76

While in Benares, Garbe was o en addressed by his servants as "Your

English Excellency" or "Your Lordship" (Bahadur), or "Protector of the
Poor." If reprimanded—although Garbe himself evidently did not
reprimand his servants—they would reply, "You are my father and
mother," meaning that they were dependent for their well-being on the
sahib's benevolence—this despite Garbe's percep on of himself as "a
harmless, private person." Garbe was also assured by his servants that
they worked for him not for the money but on account of his "good
name and reputa on." Such exaggerated sen ments and expressions
were typical of Indians, Garbe notes, and at mes they bordered on the
absurd. To express thanks, an Indian would say something patently
meaningless to a European, such as, "May God quickly make you
Viceroy." The absence of a phrase deno ng "Thank you" was partly
responsible for these awkward expressions, Garbe believed. 77 It was
very likely that Garbe was taking what people said too literally. He did
not realize perhaps that the Indians, too, might have been perfectly
aware of the meaninglessness of such statements but used them
nonetheless because they made sense in their own language and were
possibly even elegant ways of expressing respect and gra tude. To
Garbe, however, Western-style restraint had no place in this society. All
one encountered was "Oriental hyperbole."

Garbe got some relief from what was for him the jarring environment of
India, especially Benares, when he was ordered by his doctor to go to
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to recover from a severe a ack of malaria. The illness
itself had come as a brutal climax to the summer heat and the slush and
mosquitoes brought on by the monsoon rains, a far cry from the pris ne
southern idyll to which the early Indo-Europeans hadsupposedly come.
Benares, and perhaps India, became a li le too much for Garbe; an
English friend's prophecy that a er the summer things got even worse
seemed to be coming true. The a ack of malaria was a nightmarish
experience for Garbe, and he believed that he had barely escaped with
his life. 78

In Ceylon, a country that made a very favorable impression on Garbe,

the pleasantness of his stay was enhanced by the hospitality of a
resident German businessman, Mr. Freudenberg. In the res ul quiet of
this German's villa, Garbe was able to recuperate from his illness.
Freudenberg's "well-informed advice" on the country was also an
invaluable help. Garbe describes with evident pride the coconut-oil
factory Freudenberg operated. The factory was an impressive product,
he thought, of German know-how and hard work, and this, along with
Freudenberg's other accomplishments, such as construc ng an electric
tram system, had secured great regard on the island for both
Freudenberg and Germany. 79

Ceylon provided for Garbe a break not just from oppressive heat and
illness, but from India itself. In spite of its proximity to India, Garbe
noted in his journal, Ceylon was culturally, socially, and physically a
different land. It was a country he had long dreamed of visi ng, a place
that was "magical and blessed." The dominant religion was not the
Hinduism that he studied and despised at the same me, but Buddhism.
This alone should have provided Garbe with some intellectual relief, or
at least a change. As for the people, even the "half-castes," or the
Eurasians of Ceylon, he wrote, created a more favorable impression,
being more trustworthy than their counterparts in India. 80

But although he was pleased with the social life and structures he found
in Ceylon, Garbe was disappointed by the way Buddhism was prac ced.
The Buddhist temples, as well as the priests, failed to
impresshim.Worship in these temples, he noted, consisted exactly of the
same distasteful mumbo-jumbo as in Hindu temples in India. The priests
were considerably less learned than they claimed to be and were quite
immature in their personali es. Their libraries contained very few books
or manuscripts, and what li le there was seemed to be there by
chance.What did, in contrast, contain a significant number of
valuablemanuscripts and works of art was the local museum, run by an
Englishman, Mr. Haly, who took the me to show Garbe the "impressive
library" and the numerous examples of local arts and cra s in his
collec on. 81

Race, Color, And Culture

Among the various preconcep ons Garbe brought with him to India,
racial differences were prominent, and Garbe did not shrink from
making connec ons between "blood" and cultural and social
advancement. In Bombay, for example, Garbe noted the bewildering
ethnic mix in the city. Among them were the "Portuguese," who were
invariably the waiters in hotels. Garbe portrays these people as
mongrels, the pi able products of interracial mixing between
Portuguese and Indians (the Portuguese had a colony in the Indian
province of Goa). One could mistake them for La ns, he observes, had it
not been for their "pathe c builds" and their dark skin. They are, he
writes, lazy and dirty, and in spite of being Chris an, decidedly an
"inferior breed of humans." It is unfortunate, Garbe con nues, that they
do not share the prejudices of Hindus and Muslims on dietary ma ers,
since they therefore liked the same things as their European masters,
especially drink. Their knowledge of English, however, le Europeans
with no choice but to hire them as traveling servants. 82

Garbe was taken aback, though, by the manner in which resident

Europeans in India classified people depending on how European their
origins were. The new arrival in India would be shocked, he writes, by
the fact that even those with a ny frac on of non-European blood
were shunned by the European community. During the me he was in
Benares, a young Bri sh army doctor had apparently created a scandal
by ge ng engaged to a "Eurasian" woman. The woman's father was a
European, and she herself had been brought up en rely in England.
"What exactly is wrong with this engagement?" an astonished Garbe
asked the resident Europeans. 83 But despite his surprise, Garbe was
quite "understanding" of the desire to keep the races apart. The
principle of segrega on, was, in his opinion, jus fied since the products
of miscegena on did not in most cases measure up "physically, morally,
and intellectually" to good European society. The Eurasian element in
their blood would "erupt" in their physical appearance, some mes in an
ugly fashion, once every couple of genera ons. 84 Where the Indian
element predominates in these "mixeds," Garbe wrote, it was evident
that "nature is averse to the mingling of the two races, for the products
are o en weak and misshapen human specimens for whom there is no
appropriate place in the world." The Bri sh government, according to
Garbe, o en did not know what to do with them, and assigned them
mediocre jobs, since they were incapable of taking over posi ons of real
responsibility. 85

Such ideas on race had a long pedigree in the German Orientalist

tradi on. In the early nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel admired
India and its Aryan heritage fervently but at the same me admired the
Germanic races even more. Like Max Mueller in the late nineteenth
century and Raymond Schwab in the mid-twen eth, Schlegel claimed
that the discovery of Indian philosophy and culture in Europe would
lead to nothing less than a second Renaissance, comparable to the one
set in mo on by the "discovery of classical learning in Italy and
Germany" in the fi eenth and sixteenth centuries. 86 But in his wri ngs
which focused on Europe, for example his Lectures on Modern History,
Schlegel took quite a different stance toward the Orient. 87 There
Schlegel argued that it was the German race, and not Eastern peoples,
that epitomized all that is good and noble in humanity, although he
added that the Germanic na ons are all of "Asia c origin." 88

Garbe's ideas on race and civiliza onal advancement were also similar
toWilhelm von Humboldt's wri ngs in the mid-nineteenth century.
Humboldt (1767-1835), a wide-ranging German scholar and
linguist,wrote extensively on Sanskrit and the Indo-Europeanlanguage
or ethnic group. In a work aptly tled The Diversity of Human Language-
Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind,
Humboldt posited a close correspondence between a na on's posi on
in thehierarchy of civiliza on, as he saw it, and its language. 89 He
argued that "imperfect" languages would act as checks on intellectual
development. What this really amounted to, in Humboldt's scheme of
things, was an asser on of the preordained triumph of the "Indo-
European race," along with the irreversible decline of all others,
especially the Semi c ones. The in mate rela onship between race,
language, and culture, which for Humboldt—and for Garbe, too—
seemed to be self-evident, is also illustrated vividly in another of
Humboldt's essays, "The Distribu on of the Malayan Races." The
discussion is very similar to Garbe's evalua on of "mixed" and "pure"
racial types. The ethnic composi on of the popula on on the Malayan
archipelago, according to Humboldt, reveals various shades of color
ranging from black to brown to light brown. The level of social
development of these different groups would vary, in Humboldt's
opinion, in direct correla on with skin color. 90

Garbe in Benares

Garbe's distaste for the India he actually encountered could not but
color the way he viewed ancient India as well. As a professional
Indologist he had, of course, no choice but to search out the brighter
aspects of India's culture, even if only from the past. The German
tradi on within which he was working made this need even more
compelling, since the driving assump on behind German Indological
scholarship was the idea of the Aryan golden age of an quity that India
had supposedly been host to.

This professional interest is what led him to travel to Benares, the sacred
city on the river Ganges, and study there for a year with Sanskrit
scholars. Sanskrit was the bread and bu er of Garbe's scholarly life, and
the language had long been venerated by German scholars as the
original language of the Aryan family. The impact of the city of Benares,
though, was so overpowering for Garbe that he could not separate the
study of India's Sanskri c heritage from the immediate physical and
cultural environment in which he pursued his scholarship.

Garbe went to Benares with a preconceived picture of a beau ful city

steeped in tradi on where one would encounter medita ng Hindus and
grand temples amidst lush tropical vegeta on, and marble steps leading
down to the Ganges. U er disappointment, Garbe wrote, awaits every
European who expects to find such a city. In what is one of the longest
chapters in his book, Garbe le li le doubt as to his reasons for this
view, pain ng in detail a picture of Benares that is as far removed as
possible from its roman cized image: a dirty and chao c city, where
material deteriora on and social customs have become
indis nguishably intertwined. 91 And while he may have had some
respect for the intellectual crea ons of ancient India, his view of those
who were transmi ng this knowledge to him, the Sanskrit scholars, was
also a poor one.

In Benares, Garbe came fairly quickly to the conclusion that the no on

of a direct intellectual line connec ng the ancient Sanskrit texts,
principally theVedas, to modern Hinduism was a myth. Especially at the
popular level, Hinduism, with what Garbe saw as its grotesque gods and
other shallow trappings, was far removed from the Aryan ideas of the
Vedas. Most of the gods worshipped by contemporary Hindus were, he
believed, derived from those of the original, non-Aryan inhabitants. The
idea of "our Aryan brothers in India"—so dear to Max Mueller—was at
any rate another hopelessly false myth, Garbe claimed. Not only in
religion, but in racial composi on as well, Aryan origins had been
diluted to the point where only a miniscule frac on of Hindus could
truly be called "Aryan."The presence everywhere in India of strong
Aryan influences in language did not, Garbe argued, disprove this in the
slightest. The repulsive customs of this mixed people, Garbe con nued,
came not from the Aryans but from "the darker side." 92

The scholars Garbe encountered in Benares were, Garbe conceded,

somewhat different from most supers ous and uncultured Hindus. The
pundits—which is how Garbe referred to them—were quiet and
hardworking individuals who looked down on the uneducated majority
and their popular forms of worship. The breadth of their learning was
staggering, and for the European Indologist it was, therefore, an
invaluable experience to study with them. But the scholars of the
stricter, older school usually had no knowledge whatsoever of European
languages or Western scholarship and showed no interest in new ideas,
either. Their en re way of thinking was so totally at odds with the
Western method that the Western scholar was le with no choice but to
adapt himself to the Indian perspec ve as far as possible. But the
European, while absorbing all the informa on the pundits possessed,
also had to cast aside en rely these scholars' views on the historical
origins of the ideas they studied; anyone who started his studies with
these pundits, Garbe believed, would never develop into a genuine
scholar. 93

Garbe considered the pundits to be intellectually immature and

unsophis cated, despite their Sanskri c learning. They were for him like
a reference work that contained the bare facts but nothing resembling a
serious interpreta on. From his descrip on of his tutorials in Benares, it
appears as though he was the teacher who had to educate the pundits.
One had to be forever alert, he writes, and not merely listen to what the
pundits were saying but also monitor them closely, for there were mes
when they would a empt, he observed, to bluff their way through a
passage they did not understand. Garbe could not get the pundits to
discuss things in what he considered plain, logical language. Everything
was convoluted, and explanatory examples were always from the
"fabricated world of gods and demons." Garbe also observed that the
pundits did not seem to care much about the preserva on of Sanskrit
manuscripts. It was difficult for Europeans to acquire these documents
because the pundits who owned them were o en very reluctant even to
display them to a European, let alone sell them. Childish excuses were
offered to avoid keeping promises to show them and some manuscripts
were occasionally thrown into the Ganges as sacrifices. Garbe found his
tribula ons with the pundits to be more or less tolerable in the cool
winter months. But in summer, with his energies and spirit already
sapped by heat and illness, the idiosyncrasies of these scholars, Garbe
recalled, were a severe test of his pa ence. 94

Garbe found most Indians to be naïve and the pundits of Benares were
evidently no excep on. They displayed, according to Garbe, an almost
complete ignorance of the world outside their own lives. 95 In addi on,
they were arrogant, the result of their narrow vision and
overspecializa on. Garbe soon adopted the local custom and fla ered
pundits in ornate language, which the pundits accepted in a ma er-of-
fact way with no a empt to discount the fla ery. Their demeanor
reflected, again, a childlike mind that failed to see deliberate untruths or
irony. To their publica ons, which were small, the pundits would append
numerous high-sounding tles, almost all self-conferred. An example of
such a tle would be "composer of a hundred verses in twenty-four
minutes."The cover of a book would o en be adorned by a picture that
was totally unrelated to the contents of the work. If one asked for the
reason, the answer would invariably be "to look at." The pundits were
also evidently not made any more personable by the fact that they were
always afflicted with colds and coughs and by their habit of shaving only
on Sundays. 96

While an Indologist such as Garbe was thus appalled by the strange

ways and a tudes of the Brahmin pundits of Benares and the
an quated Sanskri c world they inhabited, there was arguably at the
same me a strange closeness and even convergence between their
Brahmanical and Indological worlds. Indologists, as Peter van derVeer
points out, focused almost en rely on "the study of Brahmanical
tradi ons in Sanskrit texts." The Indologists' picture of India was
therefore bound to mirror in certain ways the ideas of the class that
maintained itself as the sole authors, guardians, and interpreters of
these texts, namely Brahmins and upper-class Hindus. 97 In certain
fundamental ways, commentaries on Indian society such as Garbe's
were thus within the same discursive universe as "orthodox" Hindu
construc ons. Not surprisingly, Orientalist scholarship, as we have seen
earlier, became a reservoir that fed Hindu pride and chauvinism, thus
comple ng the circle that began with "Orientalism [feeding] on an
exis ng, dominant discourse carried on by a Brahmin elite." 98

The Redemp on of the Brahman

Garbe also made abundantly clear his feelings about Benares, its
pundits, its customs, and Hinduism in a novel published in English in
1894 called The Redemp on of the Brahman. 99 The tone of the book
was en rely in agreement with the cynicism toward Indian customs and
beliefs that marked the Sketches. The social se ng Garbe constructed
for the plot was bleaker than what he described in the travelogue, and
the "redemp on" for the Brahman in the story comes only when he
je sons all his cultural and religious beliefs and es to the society
around him. Not restrained by the need to be "factual,"Garbe built a
plot and characters that allowed him to make a scathing commentary on
Indian society and a rather charitable one on Bri sh colonial rule.

The Brahmin in the story is a person who curiously enough, like Garbe
himself, comes to Benares from a "distant land" to study its Brahmanical
tradi ons and texts. His "firm, energe c features, of a strongly marked
foreign type," set him apart even at the outset from the Hindu rabble
around him. 100 Threatened by a Muslim mob during a religious
procession, the Brahmin, Ramchandra, finds refuge in the home of a
wealthy merchant, Krishnadas. Krishnadas lives with his daughter Gopa
and his widowed sister Lilava . Gopa is married to a philandering
husband who lives in a distant province and whom she has hardly seen,
while Lilava had been "widowed" as a young girl when her husband,
also a child, died of smallpox. The wretched existence of Lilava , who, in
accordance with the dictates of Hinduism and its high priests, has led a
very restricted life, forms the backdrop for the first half of the story.
Lilava dies when, in the course of a severe illness, she is denied water
because widows were supposed to fast on certain days.
Ramchandra's studies are meanwhile being supported by Krishnadas,
who sees this as a privilege rather than a burden and is honored by the
visits Ramchandra, the Brahmin, pays to his merchant home.
Ramchandra is smi en by Gopa, who is exceedingly beau ful and has, in
addi on, intelligence, social charm, and good taste. "Oriental excess"
was clearly not her style. She was not "according to the usual custom of
the land, overladen with jewels; only a tasteful golden ornament hung
upon her forehead." She was also "of stately size and voluptuous form
[and] her features were nobly chiseled." 101 Garbe's heroine thus
seemed to be more of a Renaissance Venus than an Indian beauty.

Ramchandra also strikes up a friendship with an Englishman, Mr. White,

who is the local judge. White is interested in Indian philosophy and
languages and has employed Ramchandra as his tutor. But while White
is the one who is technically the pupil, it is Ramchandra who seems to
be learning more from this encounter. The similarity with Garbe's own
experience with the pundits of Benares is all too evident. 102
Ramchandra moves closer to White's intellectual posi on, thereby
distancing himself from other Brahmin scholars and their ideas.
Ramchandra, who like Gopa is already almost European in physical
appearance, is thus moving, also like Gopa, toward European-style
intellectual enlightenment. Shocked and inspired by White's ideas
andac ons, such as leading a blind untouchable by the hand,
Ramchandra is plagued by doubts, for example, about the customs that
had led Lilava to her death.

To construct the se ng for this plot, Garbe describes facets of life in

Benares that almost certainly drew on his personal experiences in the
city. Two Englishmen, for example, witness a fes val in a Hindu temple
and are disgusted by the noise and undisciplined behavior of the
worshippers. 103 Throughout the story, it is the Europeans, like the ones
at this fes val, who are omniscient. They know what is wrong with
Indian society, what Indians lack, and what they could be with proper
instruc on and guidance. Garbe's views, as recorded in his travel
sketches, were very similar to those of the Englishmen in his novel. At
the temple, scores of monkeys crawl with impunity all over the structure
and snatch at the food offered by adoring pilgrims. At mes, the
monkeys run off to the trees with the offerings and drop them into the
seething crowd of Hindus below who were "pushing, reviling, and
shrieking" to get to the hideous goddess, Durga, and "[give] her wreaths
of flowers, or [pour] milk, rice, and grain on the floor without
discrimina on." These offerings then decompose in the hot sun,
emi ng "a fearful stench, of which the thronging masses do not seem
to take no ce." The priests, meanwhile, driven more by avarice than
devo on, exhort the crowd to offer more cash than food to the goddess.
104 All in all, this temple scene represents, to Garbe and his fic onal
European observers, the ul mate in non-Europeanness, a virtual
nightmare in which the polar opposites of supposedly European traits
such as restraint, order, cleanliness, and ra onal a tudes prevail.

To complete the picture of the incomprehensible cultural and moral

environment in which Europeans had to live in India, Garbe describes an
exchange between the judge, White, and his Indian servants. These
servants, it appears, were such compulsive liars that they had lost the
ability to comprehend what was morally wrong or reprehensible about
lying. The lies, in this instance, related to the reasons for the breakage of
a glass and a lamp in the judge's house and a discrepancy in the
household accounts. The explana ons provided were evidently
incredible and bizarre to European ears:the glass "broke by itself" and "a
muskrat ran into the lamp." But White did not challenge these
explana ons, having learned long ago "the coolness which all Europeans
must acquire in India if they wish to avoid constant vexa on." Stern
warnings were appropriate, though, as was "a [significant] look at the
whip," and the servants "quaked" and promised that the lapses would
not happen again. 105

All this clearly did not, in Garbe's portrayal, make White a brutal
domes c tyrant. White remains a good man with high moral principles.
His stern behavior with the servants is presumably as well-meant as that
of a parent with wayward children. If anyone was in the wrong, it was
the servants who, while telling lies with no scruples or hesita on, refuse
on supposedly moral grounds to have anything to do with an
"untouchable" boy who comes to deliver a basket of fruit to White. The
boy was the son of the blind untouchable whom White had earlier
helped find his way. White points out to his servants their reprehensible
behavior and reprimands them severely. White remains ll the end of
the story, as he is in this episode, the embodiment of reason, high
morality, and a progressive, modern outlook. The Indians, that is, those
whose character and abili es are of the right kind, become more and
more like White, or come to see reason and light under his tutelage.

The pivotal factor in the final part of the story is Gopa's "widowhood,"
brought about by her husband's accidental death. Her father,
Krishnadas, is determined not to let Gopa suffer the same horrible fate
as his sister, and resists the threats and pleas of his community to make
Gopa conform to the norms of Hindu widowhood—cu ng her hair
short, for example, and donning austere clothes. Ramchandra,
meanwhile, con nues with his intellectual transforma on. He admits to
White for the first me, for example, that he does not understand a
passage he is supposed to teach. This is another allusion to Garbe's own
experiences, this me about the pundits of Benares never admi ng
their lack of knowledge on any text or issue. 106 By admi ng his
ignorance, Ramchandra evidently moves closer to the European ideal of
self-cri que and self-doubt in the pursuit of knowledge.
Having established a closer intellectual rapport, White now proceeds to
make Ramchandra more European in his emo onal a tudes as well. His
love for Gopa, he tells Ramchandra, should take precedence over all
supers ons and caste prejudices. He should, furthermore, express it in
a forthright manner, as opposed to the presumably "unspoken love"
among lovers in India. Ramchandra proceeds to do so and is thus on the
path to self-realiza on, European style, to the exclusion if necessary, of
all people and circumstances around him. Not only does he state his
love for Gopa, he also embraces her in the presence of her father, again
a very un-Indian act but one that is clearly, in Garbe's opinion, the only
logical and honest way to behave. The forces of reason—Ramchandra,
White, Krishnadas, and Gopa—all finally converge. The Indians in this
group have all been expelled from their castes and face a hard life
ahead, but they do not care any longer, and enjoy their newfound
freedom and happiness. White presides benevolently over the
gathering, sa sfied that he has made at least a few people see the light.
The last words of the story belong to him: to Gopa, who prostrates
herself in front of him, he delivers "a gentle reproach" that "one must
not kneel before man." To Ramchandra, he affirms that "you have
restored in me the belief in your people, which I had lost. In you I see
the future of this country." 107

Garbe could not have wri en a more severe indictment of tradi onal
Hindu society and customs than what he presented in the Redemp on.
In it, Garbe said what he could not say in the Sketches and le no doubt
as to his u er revulsion for Benares, its religion, and its high priests.
There appears to be a silver lining in this story in the form of the Indians
who liberate themselves from ignorance and supers onand act in an
enlightened manner. But the story line is too contrived for this to be a
genuine expression of hope and op mism on Garbe's part. One has the
impression that an outcome such as the one described in the novel is
too good ever to happen, mainly because it is incompa ble with the
social and religious environment of Hindu India. It is interes ng,
however, that the Indian heroes of the novel are all Hindus, and the
central character is a Brahmin. Perhaps the subject ma er and nature of
Indology, which was principally the study of ancient Hindu (and
therefore by assump on Indo-European) texts, languages, and culture,
predisposed Garbe to set up such a cast of characters. Muslims figure
only marginally in the novel, in the ini al street figh ng that throws
Ramchandra at Krishnadas's doorstep. At no place in the novel does
Garbe present a Muslim individual or Muslim beliefs as desirable
alterna ves to the corrup ons of Hinduism. The only desirable
alterna ves, in Garbe's view, are the ideas embodied in the Englishman
White.

Garbe on Akbar

Garbe could, however, at mes admire a par cular facet of Indian

culture with no apparent reserva ons. As we saw earlier, Garbe
appeared to prefer at least some accomplishments of the Muslim
tradi on in India—for example, architecture—to those of the Hindus.
This was ironic of course, given the alleged con nuity, rooted in
theVedas, between the ancient Aryan age and Hindu beliefs and
tradi ons. Garbe also harbored great admira on for the sixteenth-
century Mughal ruler Akbar (1542-1605) and eulogized him in a tract he
wrote in 1909to mark the birthday of the king of Wür emberg. 108 The
almost unqualified praise he showered on Akbar was given, of course, at
a forum far removed from the unpleasant reali es of modern India. It
was also delivered on an occasion when hyperbolic praise for a monarch
was not inappropriate.

The work begins, though, on a characteris cally nega ve note. The

Indologist who wishes to delve into Indian history, Garbe states, will find
to his disappointment that the country is very poor in historical sources.
109 Indians, he observes, are not historically inclined; specula ons and
dreams about nonearthly worlds, rather than historical reality, have
consumed the energies of Indian thinkers. Only with the arrival of
Muslims in India was this veil of myth and legend li ed. Muslim rule,
according to Garbe, marks the beginning of the new or modern era in
India, and the history of India is from then on wri en by foreigners. 110

Such comments were not new in the European tradi on. Friedrich
Schlegel, in 1828, had argued that "Indians have no regular histories, no
works of real historical science. . . . [All] their concep ons of human
affairs and events are exclusively mythological." 111 Hegel in 1830
described India as a land without history, in the sense of not having a
recorded history, as well as not "making history" in a conscious fashion.
India, in Hegel's view, had been acted upon by world-historical actors
rather than ac ng herself. And exactly as Garbe would do sixty years
later, Hegel pointed to "dreams" rather than "historical truth" as the
natural condi on and product of the Indian mind. Hegel had also
iden fied "foreign" observers, including Muslim historians, as the only
reliable source of historical informa on on India. 112

But while Garbe granted Muslim writers a fair degree of reliability, he

made it clear that he was by no means enamored of their culture.
Con nuing his bleak introduc on to the life of Akbar, Garbe launched
into a scathing a ack on Islam, describing it as a distorted religion,
characterized by fana cism and fatalism. The history of India since
about 1000A.D., when the first Muslim conquerors arrived in India, un l
the 1700s, when the Mughal dynasty came to an end, was, according to
Garbe, a tale of plunder, slaughter, and horror. 113

Against this backdrop, Garbe proceeds to paint his picture of Akbar, the
third Mughal emperor, as one of the noblest rulers in the history of the
world. Garbe then wrestles with the ques on whether Akbar was an
aberra on in this tradi on, as well as for the me in which he lived,
which Garbe describes as "an era of treachery, greed, and selfishness."
Everything about Akbar, he notes, was u erly at odds with what one
might expect from a person who was, among other things, a Muslim and
a descendant of the dreadful Timur. 114

But a closer look at Akbar's antecedents, according to Garbe, reveals a

different picture. From his father and grandfather Akbar inherited a love
of scien fic knowledge and art, while his childhood in exile toughened
him into an individual of resolve. He was also fortunate to have had as
his private tutor a brilliant thinker, an "enlightened and broadminded"
Persian, Mir Abdulla f, who laid the founda ons for Akbar's later
religious and ethical a tudes. And yet, despite all these favorable
circumstances and explana ons, Garbe concluded that Akbar's genius
was to be a ributed mainly to his own person, since with no other
Muslim ruler did these strains in the Muslim tradi on take root and
develop as they did with Akbar. "Akbar is unique," Garbe pronounces,
"in the history of Islam." 115

This an pathy toward Islam had not prevented Garbe, however, from
expressing unreserved admira on in his travel diary for the architectural
feats of Muslims in India. In his view, it was mainly the pomp and
splendor of the Mughal courts, as described by European travelers, that
had given India its reputa on as "a land of wonder." The impression had
spread mistakenly, however, that the en re country was as fabulous as
the Mughal courts. 116 In Delhi and Agra, Garbe had been awestruck by
the grandeur and cra smanship invested in the mosques and forts. The
famous Taj Mahal surpassed even the high expecta ons with which he
had come, probably the only thing in India about which he made such a
remark. He did add, though, that the historical record is silent on who
the master architect was behind this construc on. Based on other
informa on from the me, it was highly likely, Garbe argues, that a
French architect, Aus n de Bordeaux, designed the building or was
certainly closely involved with its construc on. To underscore his point,
though, that the wonders of India were nothing but the wonders of
Muslim art and architecture, Garbe remarked that to leave Agra
amounted to leaving behind the glories of India. 117

While Garbe clearly depicted Akbar as an oddity in the Muslim poli cal
tradi on, his account also conveys the impression that not being a
Hindu was a useful asset for Akbar. In other words, most Hindus would
not have had the character to accomplish what Akbar did. A possible
excep on were the Rajputs, the warrior Hindus who had been co-opted
and given high posi ons in Akbar's court. Garbe described the Rajputs
as "a bold, chivalrous, and reliable people who cherish their freedom
and are proud of their race, and are totally different in character and
type from other Hindus." 118

Garbe's work on Akbar reflects some of the same a tudes toward India
and Indians that were expressed in the Sketches. While Akbar is
depicted as an enlightened ruler, he is portrayed as pursuing his goals
single-handedly, against the natural tendencies of Indian society. Like a
wise patriarch, he had to chide his subjects into doing what was good
for them, usually against their will, much like the Bri sh did three
centuries later. 119 Also against the grain of Indian tradi on, Garbe
maintained, were Akbar's ideas on religion, since tension between the
Hindu majority in India and the Muslim minority was already by Akbar's
me a hallmark of Indian society. 120 Akbar's ideas on the universality
of all religions and his a empts to establish a syncre c faith were thus
completely at odds with the then prevailing ideas among both Muslims
and Hindus.

Garbe also cri cized the Jesuit priests who tried to convert Akbar to
Chris anity. 121 He did not, however, cri cize Chris anity itself. It was
the messengers whom he described as incompetent. Garbe was not
opposed to the prospect of Chris anity gaining a following in India, and
even stated that he "would welcome a large-scale conversion to
Chris anity in India as the first step toward well-being and progress."
122

Garbe's evalua on of Akbar was, on one hand, in keeping with his dislike
for Hindu culture and admira on for Muslim achievements which he
professed, for example, in the Sketches. But at the same me Garbe also
presented Akbar as quite unrepresenta ve of the Muslim tradi on in
India. Akbar, by Garbe's account, appeared to be an accident, both in
Muslim society and in the broader Indian cultural se ng. His praise for
Akbar was, therefore, hardly a nega on of the dismal view of everything
Indian that he presented in the Sketches. On the contrary, Garbe's
portrait of Akbar, by presen ng him as the only worthwhile poli cal
en ty India has ever produced, displayed the same arrogance and
patronizing tone that characterized the Sketches.

Conclusion

Does German Orientalism, and the case of Richard Garbe in par cular,
fit Edward Said's model? Since Germany, unlike Britain or France, did not
possess a large colonial empire, the connec on between German
Orientalism and colonial domina on of the non-European Other is not
an obvious one. Thomas Trautmann expresses the same point
differently when he maintains, with specific reference to India, that the
"Saidian concep on of Orientalism [does not help explain] the
inverserela on between colonialism and the produc on of Sanskri sts
[Indologists] as between Britain on the one hand and the Con nent on
the other." 123 I believe that this paradox, as Trautmann calls it, stems
from a somewhat narrow reading of Said's analysis as well as from a
narrow defini on of colonialism. If colonialism is seen only as the
conquest and actual administra on of foreign regions, then the paradox
does indeed hold, since in India, Germany was hardly involved in visible
colonial domina on.

But colonial domina on manifested itself not just in poli cal structures,
but also, as Said put it, in the form of "intellectual authority." 124
Kamakshi Mur has extended this idea and argued that German
produc on of Orientalist knowledge on India was very much part of the
imperialist game on several counts. Mur shows, for example, how even
a venerable German scholar and India-worshipper such as Max Mueller
was essen ally a firm believer in the white man's burden. That the
white men in ques on would be English and not German was for Max
Mueller a minor point, since the two were, for him, related Teutonic
na ons. Mur maintains that German scholars did not just share
intellectual authority with colonial actors such as England and France,
but in fact conferred it on them. 125 Nina Berman, in her study of
Orientalism and colonialism, also concludes that German ideas about
the Orient were not exclusively scholarly in nature. On the contrary,
German cultural discourse on the Orient reflected power and
dominance and was very similar to discourses generated by countries
actually involved in colonialism. Said, Berman argues, unfortunately
omi ed from his study other forms of power rela onships besides those
involving a physical colonial presence with an administra on and an
army. 126

My study of Richard Garbe shows that there was indeed power and
dominance in the rela onship between Garbe and Indians. Even when
there was a collabora ve or interdependent rela onship, as with the
pundits of Benares, the loca on of final authority was clear. Garbe did
not consider the pundits his equals. Rather, he was confident of the
superiority of his methods and the cultural tradi on in which he was
rooted over theirs, and he viewed this superiority and the "du es" it
implied (including his own scholarly ac vi es) as a natural corollary of
Western rule over India.

As for Trautmann's argument about Orientalist knowledge not propping

up colonial rule, there never was any such simple equa on, whether in
India or elsewhere, and to look for one is to interpret Said too literally.
Said's cri que of Orientalism lives on in various forms and se ngs far
removed from his original context of the Middle East, because as Gyan
Prakash puts it, it was "a cri que of Western knowledge," "a cri que of
culture that depends on and reproduces unequal distribu on of power
between East and West," and lastly "a fundamental challenge to the
authority of the modernWest." 127 In other words, it is far more than
simply a cri cism of Western colonialism and Orientalism in the Middle
East in the nineteenth century. Reading the Saidian cri que in this
expanded fashion—which the huge volume and range of scholarship
spawned by Said's Orientalism seems to jus fy —the inverse correla on
or lack of correla on between German Orientalist ac vity and German
colonial control is no longer a paradox. The rela on between European
knowledge and European power was diffuse and yet quite discernible,
even if it was not quan fiable in terms of an actual count of colonies.

My discussion of Garbe's reac ons to India also demonstrates that the

rela onship between Europeans and non-Europeans in the late
nineteenth century was in the early stages of a transforma on from old-
fashioned colonialism to the modern First World-Third World divide that
is now one of the hallmarks of the global landscape. Today, affilia on
with something called theWest is more cri cal to power and well-being
than affilia on with specific countries. Garbe's experiences in India, his
observa ons on countries such as Egypt where he stopped during his
sea voyage, and his rela ons with other Europeans and Indians clearly
point to this broader, more modern affilia on.
The innocence of German Orientalism is also suspect from another
perspec ve. Several writers have pointed to German society's "internal
other," at whom distancing and control was directed rather than toward
the non-European Other. More specifically, the German other was the
Jew, and German Orientalism's complicity in the process of
marginalizing this "Oriental within" became all too clear in the Nazi era,
when many Indologists became ac ve collaborators with the "Aryan"
establishment. 128

Donna Heizer has argued that the percep ons and a tudes of German
Jews toward the Orient have reflected the same ambivalence they have
felt about their own posi on with respect to the European
"mainstream." While Jews o en viewed the East through the same
lenses as Western Chris ans, at other mes they saw Eastern socie es
as kindred cultures, peopled by fellow Orientals. 129 This ambivalent
status of being an "internal other" was taken a step further when it was
used by Jews as a strategy to counter their disadvantaged posi on vis-à-
vis the non-Jewish majority. Paul Levesque has shown how this
"Orientalizing strategy" took shape in the wri ngs of one German Jewish
intellectual, Lion Feuchtwanger, only to be destroyed by the an -Semi c
leanings of German Orientalists, par cularly those in the field of
Indology, and the parallel forces of Nazi fascism in the early twen eth
century. Levesque speculates that Feuchtwanger's strategy played on
the hope that "when the modern Jew speaks, Europe listens, for
through him speaks the wisdom of the Orient."The strategy clearly
failed and to the extent anything Oriental was fêted in Germany in the
1920s and 1930s, it was done by the likes of Walter Wüst,Vedic studies
professor at Munich and SS-Hauptsturmführer, and Erich Frauwallner,
professor of Sanskrit in Vienna and member of the Austrian Na onal
Socialist Party. 130 In German Indology, an -Semi sm and the study of
Indo-European socie es were two faces of the same coin. Both saw race
as the determinant of culture. 131 While Garbe was not blatantly an -
Semi c in his ideas, the views on race that he expressed in his travel
journal show that he was located firmly within this tradi on. 132

This pro-Aryanism (or Indo-Europeanism) of German Indology was

echoed in another form of internal othering that was to be found not in
Europe, but in India: the caste system, with Brahmins and Brahmanical
texts of supposedly Aryan origin at the apex of the hierarchy. If we use
Sheldon Pollock's defini on of Orientalism as any ideological system
that perpetuates hierarchy and inequality, whether indigenous or
imposed from outside, there was indeed an oppressive "Orientalism"
that existed within India before the advent of Western colonialism. This
internal, premodern Orientalism was similar to modern German
Orientalism in that it also sought to acquire control over the Other
(lower castes) within. This "indigenous discourse of power" had been
created by the Brahmin class, and subsequently given legi macy in the
colonial era by Western Orientalists who "elevated certain Brahmanic
formula ons to the level of hegemonic text." 133

For all of Garbe's contempt for the Brahmin pundits, it was they who
supplied the raison d'être for his trip to India. It was to listen to their
Sanskri c sermons, to read and acquire manuscripts of the texts these
pundits considered sacred, and to absorb the Indianness of the city that
he hated, Benares, that Garbe went to India. The Hindu priestly class
was vital to Garbe's intellectual existence, and Garbe in turn, by being
their student, elevated their status and power considerably in a society
in which power ul mately lay with Europeans.

While it was principally the Indo-Aryan idea that drove German

Indologists to study India, an informal travel journal such as Garbe's—in
which he lets down his guard—reveals the colonial face of German
Orientalism as well. Garbe shared li le of the respect for Indian culture
that early Bri sh Orientalists such asWarren Has ngs (India's first Bri sh
governor-general) professed. 134 For him, India was a job devoid of all
romance, and colonial rule in India allowed him to perform his work
efficiently. In turn, his job would allow colonial rule—or European
domina on in a broader sense—to func on more efficiently, since the
task in which he was engaged was part of the white man's burden
around the globe: preserving manuscripts and knowledge, ferre ng out
informa on from scholars, and interpre ng Indian ideas in a way the
na ve pundits could not. 135

John MacKenzie has suggested that Orientalists, far from denigra ng the
Orient, were frequently looking to the Orient to subvert the values of
their own socie es, and to enrich their own cultural universe. Even if
this implied "using" the Orient for selfish ends, there was li le harm
done because the interac on with Asian ideas was a crea ve process
from which many valuable products emerged. The Saidian cri que,
MacKenzie argues, resembles what it seeks to overturn: a "monolithic,
binary discourse" that pits the Orient against the Occident and impedes
the very cultural understanding it wants to promote. 136 Jayant Lele has
also similarly pointed to the "Occidentalism" that the cri que of
Orientalism has inadvertently created. Lele maintains that those who
"suspect the en reWestern tradi on, including its earlier cri cal-
revolu onary moments, as a conspiracy, seem to join those whom they
opposeas oppressors," mainlyby joining theirWesterncolleaguesinthe
modern or postmodern"Western fragmenta on of life and thought."
Lele also points to the many contribu ons to our body of knowledge
that came out of the tradi on condemned by Said for its supposedly
shoddy treatment of the Orient. 137

Several good scholarly works also undoubtedly resulted from Garbe's

encounter with India. From this point of view, his contempt for India can
be seen as irrelevant. But this is precisely what the cri que of
Orientalism ques ons, and in a case such as Garbe's, jus fiably so.
While Said ignored the case of German Orientalism (in Orientalism, and
also in his later work), 138 German Indologists who went to India, such
as Garbe, were clearly on the colonizer's side of the power divide in the
colonial se ng. As Europeans, they became part of theWestern colonial
presence and were treated as such. Garbe's revulsion toward India thus
took on a shape that was in mately ed to colonial domina on over the
country. Even his solid, scholarly work, therefore, becomes a li le less
perfect when we consider that the study of the Orient was for him
essen ally a knowledge-gathering mission about a seemingly less
competent and, at the me, subordinate society.

Notes

1. Neue Deutsche Biographie[New German Biography] (Berlin: Duncker

& Humblot, 1953), s.v. "Garbe, Richard Karl," by Helmut Hoffmann; and
Richard Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen [Indian Travel Sketches] (Munich:
Oskar Schloss Verlag, 1925), p. xii; henceforth, the Sketches. All
transla ons in this paper are my own.

2. Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Indien[Memories of India] (Kiel,

Leipzig: Verlag von Lipsius & Tischer, 1904).

3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). This paper
is not intended to be another exercise in poli cal correctness of the kind
David Kopf, author of Bri sh Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance
(Berkeley: University of California, 1969), has o en accused post-
Orientalist scholars of engaging in. See, for example, Kopf's review of
Christopher Bayly's Empire and Informa on (Cambridge University
Press, 1996) in The Historian61, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 441-42; I do agree,
though, with Ali Behdad's conten on that fresh and ongoing cri ques of
Orientalism and the colonial encounter are s ll very much needed,
because Orientalism as a "dominant discourse" is alive and well, in new
and shi ing disguises, even in our contemporary world; see Behdad,
Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolu on (Duke
University Press, 1994); Wendy Doniger, "Presiden al Address: 'I have
Scinde': Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse" Journal of
Asian Studies58, no. 4 (November 1999): 940-60.

4. Said, 16-19. According to Said, "The sheer quality, consistency, and

mass of Bri sh, French and American wri ng on the Orient li s it above
the doubtless crucial work done in Germany, Italy, Russia, and
elsewhere."

5. See Kamakshi Mur , India: The Seduc ve and Seduced Other of

German Orientalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001);
Herman W. Tull, "F. Max Mueller and A. B. Keith: 'Twaddle,' the 'Stupid'
Myth, and the Disease of Indology," Numen38, fasc. 1: 30; and Linda
Dowling, "Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language," PMLA97, no. 2
(March 1982), 163, 165. Also see sec on below on German Orientalism
and India.

6. Rosane Rocher, "Bri sh Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The

Dialec cs of Knowledge and Government," in Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament: Perspec ves on South Asia, South Asia
Seminar Series, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993), p. 215.
7. Said's Culture and Imperialism(New York: Vintage Books, 1993) is the
best example of this broader a ack.

8. Said, Orientalism, pp. 3, 20, 95.

9. Edward Said, "Orientalism: An A erword," Raritan14 (Winter 1995):

32-33.

10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance

Farrington (first published 1961; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).

11. Keith Windshu le, for example, in "Edward Said's Orientalism

Revisited" (Quadrant, Jan. 2000), has a acked Said's academic
arguments and personal credibility with vehemence, claiming that Said,
a dis nguished and privileged American academic at Columbia
University, is hardly an authen c spokesperson for Arab or other vic ms
of Western hegemony. Windshu le also ques ons Said's account of his
life as a persecuted Pales nian in Jerusalem before the Second World
War. Timothy Brennan, in "The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as
Travelling Theory" (Cri cal Inquiry26, Spring 2000), also a empts to take
some of the halo off Said by arguing that Orientalism is in fact not a
Pales nian or Arab book, but rather an American book inspired by and
set in a specific American context (the Cold War and the Reagan years).
Brennan also believes that Orientalism's links with both Foucault and
postcolonial studies, one a supposed inspira on and the other a result
of the book, are exaggerated. Wendy Doniger, cited above, has pleaded
for a balanced approach tothe now muddied issue of the study of the
East by Western scholars. The cri que of Orientalism, she believes, must
be acknowledged, but neither can "the baby [Orientalist scholarship
itself] be thrown out with the bath [the colonial and neo-colonial
associa ons of Orientalism]." Doniger, p. 945.

12. There are excep ons. See for example Ronald Inden's Imagining
India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) for an a ack by a "Western" scholar
on Orientalist a tudes and methods almost as harsh Said's original
cri cisms. On the other side, Aijaz Ahmed is an example of

a "Third World" scholar who has challenged the validity of Said's

pronouncements on Orientalism, partly by calling into ques on the
legi macy of Said and others of his school as spokespersons for the
colonized and the Third World. See Ahmed's In Theory: Classes, Na ons,
Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). Tapan Raychaudhuri is another writer
who has used a nonpostcolonial and nonconfronta onal approach to
the study of Indian contacts with the West during colonialism. See his
Europe Reconsidered: Percep ons of the West in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Raychaudhuri has also
argued that "Orientalists did not see the civiliza ons of Asia exclusively
as Europe's other, nor did they de-emphasize altogether the shared
inheritance of mankind European Other." Raychaudhuri, "Europe in
India's Xenology," Past and Present, no. 137 (November 1992): 161-62.

13. Said, "Orientalism: An A erword."

14. See footnote 11.

15. Emmanuel Sivan, "Edward Said and his Arab Reviewers," The
Jerusalem Quarterly35 (Spring 1985): 11-23.

16. Said, "Orientalism: An A erword," p. 44 and passim.

17. Hutcheon notes, however, that the term "postcolonial" has its own
complica ons, arising partly from the difficul es in situa ng oneself
among the cons tuencies of class, gender, sexuality, religion, and race
that postcolonial scholarship has to address while avoiding a totalizing
or homogenizing agenda. Linda Hutcheon, "Colonialism and the
Postcolonial Condi on: Complexi es Abounding," PMLA110, no.
1(January 1995): 8, 10, 12.
18. See Partha Cha erjee's The Na on and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 88, 97-98;
and also his Na onalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Deriva ve
Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

19. Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "A er Orientalism:

Culture, Cri cism, and Poli cs in the Third World," Compara ve Studies
in Society and History 34, no. 1(January 1992): 141-67; Gyan Prakash,
"Can the Subaltern Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook,"
Compara ve Studies in Society and History34, no. 1(Jan. 1992), 168-84.

20. Gyan Prakash, "Wri ng Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World:

Indian Historiography Is Good to Think," in Colonialism and Culture,
Compara ve Studies in Society and History Book Series, ed. Nicholas B.
Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992), pp. 353-88; Said, "An
A erword," p. 45; O'Hanlon and Washbrook also cri cize James Clifford
and postmodernist anthropology, which they see as shaped by the
Orientalism paradigm.

21. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, pp. 155-58.

22. Said, "An A erword," pp. 44-45.

23. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, pp. 144-46.

24. Prakash, "Can the Subaltern Ride?" pp. 168-69.

25. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, p. 141.

26. David Lelyveld, "Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani,"

Compara ve Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 666.

27. Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Cri cism in the Age of
Global Capitalism," Cri cal Inquiry20 (Winter 1994): 356.
28. Alok Bhalla has termed this story of the dominance of the West and
what it has perpetrated, to the virtual exclusion of other examples of
injus ce and oppression, as a "revenge history." In "A Plea Against
Revenge Histories: Some Reflec ons on Orientalism and the Age of
Empire," in Indian Responses to Colonialism in the 19th Century, ed. Alok
Bhalla and Sudhir Chandra (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1993), pp. 1-
13.

29. Amal Rassam, "Comments on Orientalism: Two Reviews;

Representa on and Aggression," Compara ve Studies in Society and
History22, no. 4 (Oct. 1980): 505-508.

30. Catherine G. Mar n, "Orientalism and the Ethnographer: Said,

Herodotus, and the Discourse of Alterity," Cri cism32, no. 4 (Fall 1990):
517, 526-27. In an essay on "Yeats and Decoloniza on," Said has argued
that Western imperialism has been qualita vely different from all others
in history; in Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said,
Na onalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 69-95.

31. Edward D. Graham, "The Imagina ve Geography of China," in

Reflec ons on Orientalism (East Lansing, Michigan: Asian Studies Center,
Michigan State University, 1983), pp. 31-43.

32. Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970), pp. 4, 21.

33. Stephen Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 3, 12-14, 28.

34. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of

India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Gene Pa erson-Black and Viktor
Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Edward Said,
"Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas," in The World, The Text,
and the Cri c (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp.
248-67.

35. Works on German Roman cism that I have used include Hans A.
Neunzig, Lebensläufe der deutschen Roman k[Biographies from the
Roman c Age in Germany] (Munich: Kindler, 1986); Siegbert Prawer, ed.,
The Roman c Period in Germany (New York: Schocken Books, 1970);
Erich Ruprecht, Geist und Denkart der deutschen Bewegung [Spirit and
Ideas o he German Movement] (Pfullingen, Germany: Neske/Opuscula,
1986); Isaiah Berlin,Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
(London: Hogarth Press, 1976); Wulf Koepke, ed., Johann Go ried
Herder: Innovator through the Ages (Bonn: Herbert Grundmann, 1982);
and, not least, Said's Orientalism and his The World, the Text, and the
Cri c (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

36. As Wilhelm Halbfass has remarked in India and Europe: An Essay in

Understanding (Albany: State University of New York, 1988), Herder "did
not just pioneer the Roman c movement in general, but also broke
ground precisely in terms of its awareness of India" (p. 69); Leon
Poliakov points out in The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and
Na onalist Ideas in Europe (New York: New American Library/Basic
Books, 1977) that "it was Herder above all who introduced the passion
for India into the Germanic lands and who prompted the imagina on of
the Roman cs to seek affilia on with Mother India" (p. 186); and
Raymond Immerwahr has argued that "[Herder] always remained
sensi ve to the beauty and charm of
medieval European culture and what he assumed to be its oriental
sources [and associated] the adjec ve 'roman sch' with the peoples
especially involved: the Persians, Arabs, Spaniards,Welsh, and
Normans." In "TheWord Roman sch and its History," in The Roman c
Period in Germany, p. 41.

37. See the discussion below on Humboldt's ideas.

38. See Lynn Zastoupil, "Orientalism?: Herder's Revolt against the
Enlightenment and South Asia," paper presented at the Associa on for
Asian Studies annual mee ng,Washington D.C., 1995; Kaushik Bagchi,
"European Others: Na ve Americans and Asians," paper presented at
annual mee ng of World History Associa on, Philadelphia, June 1992.

39. See, for example,Vasudha Dalmia-Luderitz, "Die Aneignung der

vedischenVergangenheit: Aspekte der frühen deutschen Indien-
Forschung," [The appropria on of the Vedic Past: Aspects of Early
German Scholarship on India] Zeitschri fur Kulturaustausch (Stu gart,
Germany) 37, no. 3 (1987): 434-43.

40. Joan DeJean, "Sex and Philology: Sappho and the Rise of German
Na onalism," Representa ons27 (Summer 1989): 148.

41. Schlegel argued, for example, that "the caste of warriors in India
[and] the aristocracy of the country are founded on exactly the same
principle as the hereditary nobility of Germany." Friedrich Schlegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), p.
143.

42. Jeffrey Libre has argued, however, that Schlegel's apparent

admira on for the Indo-European culture of ancient India was in fact an
intellectual device to give Indian culture the place formerly accorded to
Judaism as a "prefigura on" of Chris an modernity. The honor Schlegel
accords ancient Indian culture thus becomes dubious, since he only
grants it the capacity to prefigure what European Chris anity alone can
ul mately bring to frui on. Libre , "Figurizing the Oriental, Literalizing
the Jew: On the A empted Assimila on of Le er to Spirit in Friedrich
Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier,"The German
Quarterly69, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 261-76.

43. Franz Bopp, Kleine Schri en zur vergleichenden Sprachwissenscha

[Brief Works on Compara ve Linguis cs] (lectures delivered 1824-1854;
Berlin: Opuscula, 1972), pp. 1, 10.

44. Edgar C. Polomé, "Sir William Jones and the Posi on of

Germanic,"The Journal of Indo-European Studies 16, nos. 3, 4
(Fall/Winter 1988): 209-10, 212-18.

45. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of

India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Gene Pa erson-Black and Victor
Reinking (Paris, 1950; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp.
184, 431.

46. Wilhelm Halbfass has an excellent discussion of Schopenhauer's and

Nietzsche's rela onship with Indian philosophy in India and Europe: An
Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of NewYork, 1988). The
anecdotal informa on on Nietzsche and Wagner is also from Halbfass, p.
124; Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, 427-52; and "Deussen's
Recollec ons of Nietzsche," Open Court27 (1913): 616-19 (author
unknown).

47. Ganeshan, Das Indienerlebnis Hermann Hesses[The Indian

Experience of Hermann Hesse] (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert
Grundmann, 1975).

48. Schwab, p. 58.

49. Ashim K. Roy and N. N. Gidwani, A Dic onary of Indology (New

Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1983), s.v. "Deutsche Morgenländische
Gesellscha ," "Brockhaus, Hermann"; See Halbfass, India and Europe,
on the scope and spread of Indological scholarship in Germany in the
nineteenth century.

50. Roy and Gidwani, s.v. "Roth, Rudolf" and "Garbe, Richard." TheVedas
and the Gita are ancient Hindu scriptures da ng back to around 1500-
1000B.C., when Indo-European migrants entered the country from the
north.
51. Tull, p. 30.

52. Ibid., pp. 30-31; Linda Dowling has also argued that Bri sh a tudes
to the study of Indo-European languages were strongly influenced by
this "German philological tradi on," with its Roman c leanings.
Dowling, pp. 163, 165.

53. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 35.

54. Ernst Behler, "Concordia: Die Geschichte einer Zeitschri "

[Concordia: History of a Newspaper], in Concordia: Eine Zeitschri
herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel [Concordia: A Newspaper
Published by Friedrich Schlegel] (Darmstadt, Germany:
Wissenscha liche Buchgesellscha , 1967).

55. See Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and
Na onalist Ideas in Europe (New York: New American Library/Basic
Books, 1977), chap. 9; Mar n Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asia c
Roots of Classical Civiliza on (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1987).

56. Thomas R. Trautmann, in Aryans and Bri sh India (University of

California Press, 1997), chapters 7 and 8, discusses why this "racial
theory of Indian civiliza on," based on the Indo-European or Aryan
construct, is "a bad job" (p. 215). Linguis c affini es, Trautmann
explains, do not warrant the construc on of racial categories, in the way
Orientalists and their Indian followers derived the no on of an Aryan
racial grouping in Indian history from the fact that "Sanskrit was brought
to India from without . . . by people calling themselves Arya" (p. 215).

57. See David Kopf's Bri sh Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; O.
P. Kejariwal, The Asia c Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's
Past, 1784-1838 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Nirad Chaudhuri,
Scholar Extraordinary (London: Cha o and Windus, 1974), 311-18.
58. Garbe, Sketches, pp. xi-xii.

59. Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.

60. Ibid., p. 16.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., pp. 142-43.

63. Chris ane Günther, in her survey of German wri ng on the Orient,
Au ruch nach Asien: Kulturelle Fremde in der deutschen Literatur um
1900 [Off to Asia: Cultural Others in German Literature around 1900]
(Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 1988), pp. 49-50, has noted this difference in
a tude between Deussen and Garbe. Hermann Hesse's accusa on in
1931, she writes, that Indologists at the turn of the century always
discussed India with an air of condescension, could well apply to Garbe
but not to Deussen. She quotes Deussen as saying that the principal
benefit of Indian knowledge was that it made Westerners aware of the
one-sidedness of their own world view.

64. Said, Orientalism, chapter 1.

65. Garbe, Sketches, pp. 6-7.

66. Ibid., pp. 4, 7, 9.

67. Ibid., chap. 1 passim, pp. 8-9.

68. This is debatable. There are numerous accounts of Europeans in

India, including Bri shers, who struggled to make ends meet. See Sara J.
Duncan's "A Mother in India," based partly on her own experiences in
India, in Stories from the Raj: From Kipling to Independence, ed. Saros
Cowasjee (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins India, 1992), pp. 74-118; also
see Charles Allen's Plain Tales from the Raj (Andre Deutsch and Bri sh
Broadcas ng Corpora on, U.K., 1975; Calcu a: Rupa, 1992), pp. 47-48,
56-57, in which he describes the plight of men in the Bri sh Indian
Army.

69. Garbe, Sketches, p. 168.

70. Ibid., pp. 86, 87.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., pp. 110-11.

73. Ibid., pp. 164-65.

74. In 1857, Indian sepoys (soldiers) of the Bri sh Indian army in Meerut
in northern India rose in revolt against their Bri sh masters. The revolt
quickly spread to many provinces of India, but the Bri sh, partly through
the use of the telegraph, were able to coordinate their strategies
effec vely and put down the "Mu ny," as it has come to be known.
Some of the troops who had rebelled were given unusual punishments
such as being blown apart from the mouth of a cannon. See, for
example, Bipan Chandra et al., India's Struggle for Independence (New
Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 31-41.

75. Garbe, Sketches, pp. 163-64.

76. Ibid., p. 169.

77. Ibid., pp. 159, 162.

78. Ibid., pp. 123-26.

79. Ibid., pp. 129-30, 135-37.

80. Ibid., pp. 126, 130.

81. Ibid., pp. 131-32.

82. Ibid., p. 20.

83. Ibid., pp. 166-67.

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid.

86. Frederick von Schlegel, "On the Indian Language," in The Aesthe c
and MiscellaneousWorks of Frederick von Schlegel trans. E.J. Millington
(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 427; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental
Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880,
trans. Gene Pa erson-Black and Victor Renning (Paris: Edi ons Payot,
1950; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), chap. 1; F. Max
Mueller, Biographical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), pp. 230-
32; also see Said, "Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas," pp.
250-51, 261-62.

87. Friedrich von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Modern History

(Vienna, 1810; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849).

88. Ibid., p. 17.

89. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human

Language Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of
Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (original 1836; Cambridge University Press,
1988). See, for example, chapter 20 ("Character of Languages").

90. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

91. Garbe, Sketches, p. 50.

92. Ibid., pp. 57, 58.

93. Ibid., pp. 57, 58-59, 61.

94. Ibid., pp. 61-62, 71-73.

95. Ibid., pp. 64, 69-71.

96. Ibid., p. 65.

97. Michel de Certeau has listed orality, spa ality, alterity, and
unconsciousness as the a ributes of a "primi ve society" that set it
apart from the modern ethnographer's constructs of wri ng,
temporality, iden ty, and consciousness. Orientalists did not, as a rule,
study "primi ve socie es" of the kind de Certeau has in mind. In most
instances, and clearly in the case of Garbe, they went on the contrary to
the wri en texts of a "high civiliza on." However, they s ll did not credit
the documents they studied with a consciousness or sense of history in
the way, de Certeau argues,Western historians do with "the documents
of Western ac vity." Michel de Certeau, "Ethnography: Speech or the
Space of the Other," in The Wri ng of History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), pp. 209-12.

98. Peter van derVeer, "The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in

Sociology and Communalism," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial
Predicament: Perspec ves on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and
Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993), pp.
25-26.

99. Richard Garbe, The Redemp on of the Brahman (Chicago: The Open
Court Publishing Company, 1894).

100. Ibid., p. 2.

101. Ibid., p. 6.

102. See Garbe, Sketches, chap. 4.

103. Garbe, Redemp on, chap. 5.

104. Ibid., pp. 31-33.

105. Ibid., pp. 56-58.

106. Garbe, Sketches, p. 61.

107. Garbe, Redemp on, p. 82.

108. Richard Garbe, "Kaiser Akbar von Indien: Ein Lebens- und Kulturbild
aus dem sechzenten Jahrhundert," [Emperor Akbar of India: A
Biographical and Cultural Portrait from the Sixteenth Century], lecture
delivered at the birthday celebra on of William II, King of Wür emberg,
at the University of Tübingen on 25 February 1909 (Leipzig: H.Haessel
Verlag, 1909).

109. Ibid., p. 1.

110. Ibid., p. 2. Garbe uses the term Neuzeit, which I have translated as
the "new or modern" age.

111. Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History in a Course of Lectures

(London: Henry Bohn, 1859), p. 150.

112. See G.W.F. Hegel, "The Oriental World: India," The Philosophy of
History, trans. J.Sibree (Colonial Press, 1889; repr., New York: Dover
Publica ons, 1956), pp. 140-41, 162-64.

113. Garbe, Emperor Akbar, pp. 2-3.

114. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

115. Ibid.

116. Garbe, Sketches, p. 40.

117. Ibid., pp. 46-47.

118. Garbe, Emperor Akbar, pp. 20-21.

119. Ibid., pp. 16-18.

120. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire, The New Cambridge History
of India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 2-3.

121. Garbe, Emperor Akbar, pp. 37-41.

122. Garbe, Sketches, p. 171. In a scholarly work published in 1914

Garbe argued that while many similari es could be iden fied between
Indian religious thought and Chris anity, the two systems had
developed independently of each other. While a weak case could be
made for the connec ons between Buddhism and Chris anity, there
had been no points of contact whatsoever, he argued, in the evolu on
of Hinduism and Chris anity. This book, though less opinionated than
the Sketches, also supports Garbe's view of Chris an thought and
ac ons as totally alien to the Indian temper. See Garbe, Indien und das
Christentum[India and Chris anity] (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr
[Paul Siebeck], 1914).

123. Trautmann, p. 27.

124. Said, Orientalism, p. 19.

125. Mur , pp. 36-37, 118.

126. Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus, und Moderne

(Stu gart, Germany: M&P Verlag für Wissenscha und Forschung,
1996), pp. 18-19.

127. Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now," History and Theory34, no. 3

(October 1995): 201, 209, 211.

128. Sheldon Pollock, "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power

Beyond the Raj," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, pp.
76-133.

129. See Donna Heizer, Jewish-German Iden ty in the Orientalist

Literature of Else Lasker-Schuler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel
(Camden House, 1996).

130. Paul Levesque, "Mapping the Other: Lion Feuchtwanger's

Topographies of the Orient," The German Quarterly71, no. 2 (Spring
1998): 158, 159.

131. See the discussion on Wilhelm Humboldt above.

132. There are a few places in the Sketches, though, where his an -
Semi sm is hardly concealed, as in his derogatory descrip on of Jewish
merchants trying to sell things on the ship that took him to India. Garbe,
Sketches, p. 13.

133. Pollock, pp. 77, 96. See also Peter van der Veer, "The Foreign Hand:
Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism," in Orientalism
and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspec ves on South Asia, ed.
CarolA. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1993), pp. 25-26.

134. See Kopf, Bri sh Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance.

135. The systema c analysis of these documents would, as Timothy

Mitchell puts it, offer the "meaning and the order" that non-Western
socie es lacked and that only colonialism and colonial representa ons
of na ve knowledge could provide. See Timothy Mitchell, "Orientalism
and the Exhibi onary Order," in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B.
Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 313.

136. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts

(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 39, 210-15,
and passim.

137. Jayant Lele, "Orientalism and the Social Sciences," in Orientalism

and the Postcolonial Predicament, eds. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter
van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993), pp. 45, 67.
138. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Literature, Poli cs, and Theory,
ed. Francis Barker et al. (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 211; "[Other
problems proposed by some of my cri cs]," Said writes, "like my
exclusion of German Orientalism, which no one has given any reason for
me to have included—have frankly struck me as superficial or trivial, and
there seems to be no point in even responding to them."
Selling Mankind:
UNESCO and the Invention of Global History,
1945-1976*

Poul Duedahl

Aalborg University

Journal of World History : Volume 22, Number 1, March 2011

* This ar cle draws in part on a paper presented at the interna onal

symposium "Towards the Transna onal History of Interna onal
Organiza ons," held at the Centre for History and Economics at King's
College, University of Cambridge, on 6 April 2009. I am most grateful to
a number of individuals for help and discussions during the finaliza on
of the ar cle. In par cular to Jens Boel, Mahmoud Ghander, Guy S.
Métraux Jr., Michelle Bra ain, Aigul Kulnazarova, Edgardo C. Krebs,
Sarah Fee, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Jean-François Sirinelli, Sunil
Amrith, and Andrew Fish.

Abstract

In the wake of World War II, UNESCO promoted a new approach to the
wri ng of world history in an a empt to support UN peacekeeping
through "mental engineering" in the service of peace. The first task was
to launch an authorita ve world history without par cular geographical
orienta ons. This was intended to provide a profound understanding of
the interdependence of various cultures and to accentuate their
contribu ons to the common cultural heritage, thus disarming history
by construc ng a sense of interna onal unity. This ar cle focuses on the
discussions leading up to the publica on of the much-cri cized History
of Mankind volumes of 1963 to 1976 and demonstrates why it makes
sense to characterize the project as the star ng point of the genre of
global history.

Into the History Business

"UN goes into the history business," an American newspaper announced

in December 1951, when it became official that a commission under the
global umbrella of the United Na ons would undertake the task of
wri ng a history of mankind. 1

It was far from the first a empt at producing such a work. Edward
Burne Tylor, J. B. Bury Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, and Arnold J.
Toynbee are only a few of the many of those who had taken on the
daun ng task. But from a postwar perspec ve these writers had a
tendency to write history on Western premises, or—in the case of
Spengler and Toynbee—of describing the world as a number of separate
civiliza ons pursuing essen ally independent careers.

A major objec ve of the new undertaking was to dis nguish it from the
ethnocentric and especially the Eurocentric world histories of the past
by producing a history with no par cular geographical orienta on and
to deal with the Spengler-Toynbee view by arguing that human cultures
interacted at every stage of their history. This makes it appropriate to
regard the project as the earliest expression of a new trend of wri ng,
so-called global history—the history of globaliza on—that came in the
wake of World War II.

The most obvious explana on for the fact that the final product, History
of Mankind, has never come to play that role in historiography is that
recurrent delays prevented the work being published un l the 1960s
and 1970s—years a er the project was ini ated. Therefore almost as
soon as it appeared it came across as an an quated le over from past
decades and was be er known for its other major objec ve of
grounding its content on the consensus of the more than a thousand
scholars who were involved—leaving an impression of a work that was a
monument to the "commonwealthiza on" of history. 2

In a thorough and o en cited study of world history in American

educa on that was published in 1990, Gilbert Allardyce described this
ul mate failure by focusing on the American historian Louis Go schalck.
For Go schalck, edi ng one of the volumes was a veritable nightmare.
In fact it took him twelve years to complete the volume, exceeding the
deadline by eight years, and the very same day he delivered the final
manuscript, he suffered from a heart a ack. For Allardyce this was
probably the perfect illustra on of an interna onal undertaking that
was out of control. Allardyce thus ended up giving a few American
historians of a slightly later period credit for the postwar showdown
with Eurocentrism and the introduc on of global history as a discipline.
3

This conclusion seems somewhat hasty in light of the fact that a global
or at least non-Eurocentric interpreta on of history was highly sought
a er in a number of UN member states in the era of decoloniza on. At
the same me Go schalck was never a key decision maker in the
shaping of the work and therefore he cannot be seen as a fair
personifica on of the whole process.

In this ar cle, I dis nguish between the History of Mankind as a long-

term poli cal project ini ated and financed by the UN system on the
one hand, and as a work of dubious reputa on that came to be the
project's first visible outcome on the other. The reason for the
dis nc on is that the project generated discussions of a far more frui ul
[End Page 102] nature than the work itself. In fact the work's biggest
cri cs were to be found within the UN system itself, especially in the
1970s and 1980s, and they did not confine themselves merely to
cri cizing the work; they insisted on improving it. 4 Therefore it makes
more sense to consider the History of Mankind volumes as a work in
progress, a provisional report on the overall project, which gave rise to
new ac vi es; these included the produc on of a number of new
history books based on thoughts about the best possible way to write
history in a globalized world.

The ar cle is concerned with the UN history project as a whole, but

focuses mainly on thoughts and discussions among its key players in the
ini al phase leading up to the publica on of the first History of Mankind
volume. It is based primarily on documents found in the archives of the
Interna onal Commission for the Wri ng of the History of the Scien fic
and Cultural Development of Mankind at the UNESCO Archives in Paris,
and in the Julian S. Huxley Papers at the Woodson Research Center at
Rice University in Houston, Texas. The archives give a more varied
impression than present historiography of the project and of the difficult
processes it involved—including a rare and fascina ng glimpse of global
history in the making.

Leaving Eurocentrism Behind

In a world devastated by war there was a widespread recogni on

among na onal leaders of the need for poli cal leadership on a global
level and of the need of uni ng mankind. For many of the first and
mainly Western par cipants involved in the making of interna onal
organiza ons, this recogni on involved a move from na onal arrogance
and Eurocentrism to worldviews. Therefore universalism and the no on
of "one world" or a standardized "world civiliza on" came to
overshadow the idea of cultural diversity as the founda on of postwar
intergovernmental rela ons. 5

But right from the beginning there were two different schools of people.
One school wanted to judge the new organiza ons' programs by their
direct and immediate contribu on to peace in the present, and the
other laid stress on the indirect and long-term but indispensable
contribu on of educa on, science, and culture to the peaceful unified
world of the future. 6

The English biologist Julian S. Huxley belonged to the la er school. As

one of the founding fathers of the United Na ons Educa onal, Scien fic
and Cultural Organiza on (UNESCO) in November 1945, he was
preoccupied with iden fying the tasks that could ensure peace in the
long term. For that purpose he involved people around him, including
his old friend Joseph Needham, the eccentric biochemist from
Cambridge University, who was in charge of Bri sh scien fic assistance
to China at the me. Needham had become deeply interested in
Chinese culture and history and had just published a book on the history
of Chinese technology, in which he demonstrated the enormous and
underes mated importance of Chinese inven ons on developments in
other parts of the world. 7

Needham found that the principal factor promo ng historically

significant social change was contact with strangers possessing new and
unfamiliar skills. History could thus be be er understood by
emphasizing the mutual indebtedness and interdependence of the
peoples of the world, and Needham suggested to Huxley that the new
organiza on took on the task of wri ng a history of mankind stressing
cultural interchange—as an an dote to the kind of history taught in
many schools focusing on military and poli cal events and based on
ethnocentric biases and preconcep ons. This would be a work that
could be used as a source for classroom textbooks for schools in all
countries and could contribute to UNESCO's mission of educa on for
peace. 8

Huxley included Needham's idea in his inaugural address as execu ve

secretary of the Preparatory Commission for UNESCO in London in
March 1946. In the speech, this grandson of Charles Darwin's loyal
defender, T. H. Huxley, defined the organiza on's overall philosophy as a
"scien fic world humanism, global in extent and evolu onary in
background." This was a philosophy based on the convic on that history
was a con nua on of the general process of evolu on, leading to some
kind of social advance, even progress, featuring increased human
control and the conserva on of the environment and of natural forces
and culmina ng in a unified world civiliza on. As far as UNESCO was
concerned, this process should be guided by humanis c ideals of mutual
aid, by the spread of scien fic ideas, and by cultural interchange. And,
Huxley claimed, the first and "chief task before the Humani es today
would seem to be to help in construc ng a history of the development
of the human mind, notably in its highest cultural achievement." 9

Needham was the first person Huxley invited to join the staff, and in
March 1946 he returned from China to take office in one of the
Preparatory Commission's two adjoining small terrace houses at
Belgrave Square near Victoria Sta on in London. Needham had already
been largely responsible for having the S —for science —put into the
name of the new organiza on, and now it was his job to build up a
division for the natural sciences. 10

Watching the barrage of unread documents piling up on delegates at

that me, Huxley decided to wait a couple of years before ini a ng the
process of construc ng a collec ve memory of mankind. But he and
Needham discussed the idea whenever they had me. They knew, of
course, that it would require a rather dras c selec on to accommodate
the history of the en re world in a few volumes, and during their search
for the unifying element, a member of staff recalled that a similar
discussion had taken place during the war among the Allied ministers of
educa on in exile in London. The idea of this project had been to
promote European communality, but the ministers' conclusion only
confirmed Needham's own supposi on, namely that the major unifier
between people of various cultures over me had been scien fic
knowledge and technology. 11

In November 1946 UNESCO moved to Paris, where it established its new

headquarters in a former hotel in Avenue Kléber near the Arc de
Triomphe—a beau ful old building full of elegance and gilded ceilings
and chandeliers—with Huxley as its first director-general and Needham
as the first head of its Natural Science Department. At about this me
they hired the Portuguese historian Armando Cortesão as consultant on
the project under Needham's guidance. In the following months
Cortesão inves gated the impact of science on philosophy, humani es,
and the social sciences from a historical perspec ve. 12

During the first two months of 1947 the project began to take shape and
was the subject of lengthy discussions with prominent scholars, mainly
from France, about science as the prime mover in history. Looking at the
notes that were the immediate outcome of these mee ngs, the plan s ll
seemed fairly Eurocentric in the choices of the names and events that
the work was to cover. 13

In that sense the project was—for all its good inten ons—a reflec on of
the fact that UNESCO's principal contributors at all the various levels of
the organiza on were at the me s ll primarily from France, the United
Kingdom, and the United States. The reason for this was that the USSR
and several other communist countries had refused to join the
organiza on, while significant por ons of other con nents were under
colonial rule.

As the General Conference approached, Huxley and Needham ordered a

report by V. Gordon Childe, head of the Ins tute of Archaeology in
London. The report was suppor ve of Huxley's evolu onis c approach
and of Needham's emphasis on the history of science. It therefore
fulfilled its main func on, which was for Huxley and Needham to add to
their supporters the name of one of the greatest archaeological and
historical authori es at the me before selling the project to UNESCO's
member states. 14

The strategy was par ally successful. The UNESCO General Conference
in Mexico City in November and December 1947 adopted a resolu on
that welcomed the idea of producing a history of mankind with an
emphasis on the "understanding of the scien fic and cultural aspects of
the history of mankind, of the mutual inter-dependence of peoples and
cultures and of their contribu ons to the common heritage." 15 But the
delegates also demanded a thorough study of how the more prac cal
sides of the project were to be tackled before recommending its
execu on.

Shortly a er this the project faced a major blowback. UNESCO had long
been under suspicion from the United States of being a cover for
espionage, and the CIA had warned President Harry S. Truman that the
organiza on was being infiltrated by communists. Joseph Needham
a racted par cular a en on due to his interest in science and to the
fact that he was a member of the Cambridge University Communist
Group. UNESCO's involvement in the debate about atomic energy made
the United States fear that Needham would soon be able to bring secret
informa on or even uranium samples to the USSR. 16

Needham felt under pressure to resign, and in the beginning of 1948 he

moved back to Cambridge, where he began working on what was to
become his masterpiece on science and civiliza on in China. 17

With Needham out of the picture Huxley and Cortesão had to take on
the task themselves, and in May 1948 Huxley presented a plan of a work
consis ng of three volumes to be wri en by a single author whose
immense task would be eased by having at his disposal so many
resources that he would be able to draw on all the best scholars in the
world. The work should be elaborated along the lines described in
Gordon Childe's report, with its emphasis on science as the prime
mover in the evolu on of human history. Huxley had even placed the
world's cultures in various evolu onary layers—primi ve, barbaric,
intermediate, and advanced—not much different from the hierarchy to
be found in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man. 18 It was obviously a
tough job to abandon well-established Eurocentric percep ons of the
existence of dominant and subordinate cultures. [End Page 107]

Approaching Globalism

In the light of the United Na ons' Universal Declara on of Human Rights

from 1948 and of the organiza on's debates on decoloniza on, the
world was about to change, and this was soon to be reflected in
UNESCO's work, too.

In late October 1948 Huxley and Cortesão had mee ngs and
correspondence with European scholars to discuss Huxley's plan and its
execu on in order to sell it at the coming General Conference. Among
the invitees were his friend Joseph Needham and his own brother, the
author Aldous Huxley, now based in the United States. Also invited was
the French historian Lucien Febvre, professor at the Collège de France,
who was already a living legend among fellow historians for his journal
commonly known at the Annales, with its emphasis on social rather
than poli cal and diploma c themes, and for his own agenda of
organizing the past in accordance with present needs. 19

Febvre stressed that the History of Mankind project should in his eyes
a empt truly to integrate all cultures in the new world civiliza on. Thus
the final plan wiped out cultural hierarchies and emphasized the
"exchanges" between all cultures. To ensure this global approach, the
work was to be wri en by an en re group of specialists represen ng all
con nents. Huxley the evolu onist insisted, however, that the
interac ons should only be chosen when they indicated a direc on that
pointed forward toward greater unifica on and integra on. The plan's
"universal character and the factors which it will take into account will
invest it with a new meaning and a new scope," Huxley concluded, fully
content with this outcome. 20

Huxley also proposed to divorce the project from UNESCO by allowing

an independent ins tu on to deal with its execu on. This had a double
purpose. The first was to give the future authors a sense of working
without pressure from UNESCO and its member states, thereby ensuring
that the outcome would be an "objec ve and dispassionate" work. The
second was to make sure that Huxley, the project's most dedicated
advocate, could con nue to work on the project when his term as
director-general was over. 21

This it soon was, as the Americans, for various reasons, did not support
his con nued candidacy. Huxley and Needham came along to the
General Conference in Beirut, Lebanon, in November 1948, and Huxley
describes in his memoirs how his last and most difficult task was to
persuade the delegates to implement his proposals for a history of
mankind. He managed to get the plan approved and entrusted to a
subcommission under UNESCO, but at the same me the delegates
demanded that the views of the various na onal commissions and
nongovernmental organiza ons should be taken into account by this
sub-commission before the project got underway. 22

On his return to Europe, Huxley had been replaced as the organiza on's
director-general by the Mexican writer and diplomat Jaime Torres
Bodet.

Selling Febvre
Suddenly and unexpectedly thrown open to na onal commissions and
nongovernmental organiza ons, the project was all at once at the mercy
of a welter of new inputs. Huxley tried desperately to set the direc on
of the project by quickly sending Torres Bodet a revised and expanded
version of his plan, but the former Mexican minister, well known for his
educa onal reforms and effec ve fight against illiteracy, did not pay
a en on, more occupied as he was with projects that had an
immediate impact. 23

One of the first nongovernmental organiza ons to intervene was the

newly founded and UNESCO-sponsored Interna onal Council for
Philosophy and Humanis c Studies, whose bureau was dominated by
French scholars. This council asked Lucien Febvre to immediately write a
report presen ng his personal views on the project. 24

Febvre undertook the task in close collabora on with Paul Rivet,

director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Indeed the collabora on
was so close that members of the UNESCO staff cri cized Febvre and
Rivet for appropria ng the collec ve project by refusing Huxley's
coopera on. 25

The report was finalized in May 1949. According to Febvre, the

overarching theme should be "the history of peaceful rela ons" based
on the convic ons that communica on and exchange of knowledge,
products, and values between cultures had occurred for centuries; that
all cultures had contributed; and that only cultural loans could explain
the sudden appearance of large arrogant civiliza ons. This approach was
not only directed against Eurocentrism but also against what, in Febvre's
eyes, appeared to be the one-eyed evolu onism characterizing Huxley's
plan.

Febvre imagined a work consis ng of six volumes of a more

encyclopedic appearance. Two of the volumes should clarify "everything
that had been subject to circula on" such as technical knowledge,
systems of ideas, beliefs, material objects, animals, and so forth. "From
that will emerge the image of a moving humanity since its origins,
travelling permanently through a perpetual series of transcon nental
migra ons."

Two other volumes would be divided geographically in order to see

what each of the con nents had contributed to or received from other
parts of the world, star ng with Asia. "From this picture would emerge
the idea that separa ons in the world are mere illusions, and that the
earth never ceases to diversify, to enrich, to mutually fer lize with
streams of peaceful exchanges." 26

But even Fevbre's plan received only minimal a en on from Torres

Bodet, and immediately before the General Conference the new
director-general ordered his own report, wri en by the Brazilian
physiologist Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, which was supposed to bring
together the diverse wishes and ideas of those interested in the project.

Huxley saw Almeida's sudden interven on as a chance to reintroduce

his idea of history as a con nua on of biological evolu on and looked
forward to a visit from him. But Almeida never turned up at his house
on Pond Street in Hampstead, London. "I have been trying [End Page
110] to find out from the authori es at UNESCO when he was coming to
England," Huxley wrote in a le er of complaint to Torres Bodet, "but I
now understand that he is engaged in wri ng his report, apparently
before having discussed the ma er with the experts who had previously
considered it! I must confess that this seems an unsa sfactory
procedure." 27

It turned out that Almeida had felt uncomfortable with the idea of the
history having an underlying doctrine or philosophy and thought that
Febvre's plan had a be er chance of ge ng the approval of the coming
General Conference. For these reasons he stuck to a repe on of
Febvre's main points and his encyclopedic approach in presen ng his
plan in June 1949.

Huxley, in return, only received a copy of Almeida's report and

responded right away by sending a long series of comments, claiming
that the work "should be wri en from the definite angle of what I might
call 'scien fic humanism,' trea ng the growth of civiliza on as a
con nua on of the process of evolu on," even sugges ng that the final
tle of the en re work should be "The Natural History of Civiliza on." 28

However, Almeida's report had been somewhat hazy in nature. It

contained no metable or economic perspec ves, and as a result the
delegates of the various member states could only confirm the request
of the previous General Conferences for a more detailed and accurate
plan before recommending the project's execu on. 29

None of this came to Huxley's knowledge, and this obviously annoyed

him. "For although I have been made 'Honrary Counsellor to UNESCO,' "
he wrote in a resen ul le er to René Maheu, director of Torres Bodet's
Execu ve Office, "I have so far received no informa on whatsoever as to
the General Conference and its results!" 30

Huxley did not even receive a response to his le er, for as a private
person his views were not interes ng, and the Bri sh UNESCO Na onal
Commission, which did not like his evolu onary approach, passed him
over as their representa ve on the subcommission that was supposed
to carry out the project, while the French immediately asked Febvre and
Rivet to be theirs. 31

"I trust that you will not imagine that I look upon your absence from the
progress of this work with anything other than shame and disgust,"
Needham told Huxley. "I have a good deal that I should tell you about
what I have heard concerning your rela on with it, and the extreme
disinclina on of UK officials to agree to your con nued associa on with
it. I cannot put this in wri ng . . ." Needham himself only just managed
to be accepted onto the subcommission in his capacity as a scien fic
advisor for UNESCO. He was the organiza on's last choice, but "by the
mercy of God the names they [UNESCO] suggested were all unable to
go." 32

Making a Deal

In December 1949 the new subcommission or group of experts,

including Febvre, Rivet, and Needham, met at the UNESCO House in
Avenue Kléber, and within a few days they held a further ten mee ngs
to finalize the plan. 33

Febvre and Needham, whose views of history were not as different as

Huxley's and Febvre's, soon found a common understanding, which
included an opposi on toward strictly posi vis c, evolu onis c, and
Eurocentric approaches. Highligh ng the "exchanges and borrowings
between peoples and countries" would be plenty in their eyes, and
throughout the days that followed terms like "culture contacts,"
"interrela ons of cultures," "interchange between peoples," and
"cultural exchanges and transmissions" were used frequently in the
spirit of the Febvre plan. 34

Febvre even admi ed that science and technology played a larger role
in bringing about exchanges and a deeper understanding between
people than art, religion, and philosophy, which, according to Needham,
had a tendency to divide rather than bring together. 35

As soon as Needham returned from Paris he enthusias cally explained

to Huxley that Rivet and Febvre had been "at the top of their form and
very helpful," and in all secrecy provided Huxley with a detailed plan of
the more or less topic-based work in six volumes. 36
Huxley was not surprised but rather disappointed, and sent Cortesão,
who was in charge of the daily affairs of the project at UNESCO House, a
handful of objec ons, in which he appealed for a chronological
approach. "I would like you to see," he almost commanded Cortesão,
"how best you can get in, at the outset, the evolu onary idea, and that
the book is a natural history of the evolu on of man, from the
evolu onary (historical or developmental) angle." 37

Cortesão had no authority to change a word, and soon the various

na onal commissions also welcomed the new Needham-Febvre plan,
especially the fact that "cultural exchanges" were going to be the central
pillar of the en re work. The objec ons centered rather on whether the
results would jus fy the great expenses or related to details that were
supposed to take na onal demands and wishes into account, all of
which Febvre characterized as the result of "the obs nacy with which so
many representa ves of so-called 'European' or 'Western' civiliza on
regard the la er—their own—as the only true civiliza on." 38

In London, however, Huxley s ll refused to give up and managed to

convince the hos le Bri sh UNESCO Na onal Commission that it should
at least create a small commi ee with the sole purpose of reconsidering
the plan. Besides Huxley and Needham this commi ee consisted of a
few other scholars including the infamous Bri sh historian A. J. Toynbee.
It turned out to be a rela vely difficult task to agree on much, including
Huxley's evolu onis c approach. Instead they decided to recommend a
more open approach in order to give the individual writers more
freedom, and the Na onal Commission was asked to work for a
complete separa on of the History of Mankind project from UNESCO's
control at the forthcoming General Conference. 39

That was intended to pave the way for Huxley's comeback.

None of UNESCO's Business

At the General Conference in Florence in May and June 1950, around
eight hundred delegates were si ng with their headphones on,
listening in silence and not smiling, to an update of the organiza on's
various projects. All the arguments for and against the history project
arose once again, but having secured the support of each na onal
commission, its progress was considered a formality.

This at least was how it appeared, un l the philosopher Benede o

Croce, in his capacity of Italian delegate, delivered a surprising and
unprecedented a ack in which poured scorn on the whole organiza on,
which he characterized as an associa on of Western scien sts, who
were invited to support the organiza on's apparently worthy cause
while failing to address the world's real problems. As an example he
drew a en on to the many appealing phrases in the outline for the
project, such as "the need" for an "objec ve and dispassionate" history
of mankind, though it seemed clear to him that all history was wri en
by men of passion. Unless UNESCO openly declared that it was a
Western organiza on and that its work would follow the tenets of the
United Na ons' Universal Declara on of Human Rights, this large and
expensive project would be s llborn due to the lack of a unifying idea or
vision and be the ul mate expression of UNESCO's uselessness. 40

It would have been comfortable to regard Croce as a grumpy old man,

whereas he was in fact one of the most influen al intellectuals in
Europe at that me, and news stories soon started appearing,
lampooning the History of Mankind project as an illustra on of how the
huge hydra, UNESCO, could spawn countless numbers of useless
projects.

The cri cism had to be faced one way or another, and the delegates
responded by giving their blessing to the posi on of the Bri sh UNESCO
Na onal Commission, accep ng their claim that history wri ng was not
UNESCO's business and should be handed over to a commission totally
independent from anything resembling pressure from the outside. With
this adjustment the delegates asked the director-general to proceed
immediately with the project's execu on. Altogether "the resolu on
accepted at Florence was largely dra ed by us," as one of the Bri sh
delegates later with some slight exaggera on recalled the event. 41

Dealing with the Delicate

The academic cockfight between Huxley and Febvre was a fair indica on
that the ques on of choosing the representa ves for the new
commission would be "sans doubte la plus delicate." 42 Therefore a
small working group was formed with the sole purpose of dealing with
this issue. Besides UNESCO staff it included representa ves of the
Interna onal Commi ee of Historical Sciences and the Interna onal
Council of Scien fic Unions.

"Your name is men oned by prac cally everybody with whom I have so
far discussed the ques on," Cortesão told his old protégé, Huxley, "but I
have met with some sort of resistance somewhere in this same floor of
the House. As you know, I think it essen al that you should represent
the UK in the Commission, and eventually become its President, of
course." 43

Huxley now knew that he had Cortesão's full support, and by pulling a
lot of strings he also managed to convince the Interna onal Council of
Scien fic Unions to appoint Joseph Needham as their representa ve. 44

The small working party met in October 1950, and the support of
Cortesão and Needham made it impossible to maintain Huxley's
con nued exclusion from the project. On the contrary, he was
appointed as the very first member of the new commi ee.

The group also considered Febvre and Rivet but could not agree on
them—officially due to their advanced age—and ended up appoin ng
Febvre's coeditor of the Annales journal, Charles Morazé, a professor at
the Université de Paris. 45

Other appointments went more smoothly, though it proved hard to find

"suitable" names from non-Western countries. This was partly because
of the lack of knowledge and partly because China, the USSR, and other
communist countries failed to respond to any requests sent to them.
The final commission thus consisted of ten scholars from France, the
United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, Brazil,
Mexico, India, and Syria. They were joined by representa ves of the
Interna onal Commi ee of Historical Sciences and the Interna onal
Council of Scien fic Unions. As a form of consola on to the non-
Western countries, the new commission would be obliged to co-opt a
large number of correspondents from all parts of the world, so that all
interest groups would have a voice and would be able to provide
specialist advice on the project. 46

Huxley Back in Business

In December 1950 the new Interna onal Commission for the Wri ng of
the History of the Scien fic and Cultural Development of Mankind met
in Paris.

The American member, Ralph E. Turner from Yale University,

immediately insisted on taking the floor. During the war Turner had
wri en The Great Cultural Tradi ons, in which he had developed his
own ideas on the history of mankind, and he was thus the only member
of the commission who had a working knowledge of the task ahead.

Turner proposed making an en rely new plan for the project. Given the
many previous unfinished plans, the other commi ee members only
reluctantly agreed to give this a try.
Turner worked all night and returned next morning with his plan. It
included a strict metable for the elabora on of the six volumes
without changing much at the heart of the Needham-Febvre plan, with
its emphasis on cultural exchanges and its global scope. There was one
noteworthy excep on. Turner reintroduced Huxley's idea of a clear
chronological line of development from prehistory to the present me,
which through a selec ve progress had reached its preliminary climax in
—as the French representa ve, Charles Morazé, bi erly described it
—"the American way of life." 47

Huxley was deeply impressed with Turner's "knowledge and clear-cut

points of view," and immediately proposed him as the commission's
president, 48 a sugges on that got only a lukewarm recep on. Morazé,
in par cular, voiced his discomfort, and Turner, who, albeit an energe c
man, had worked all night and could barely tolerate cri cism, began
shou ng at Morazé. The atmosphere turned aggressive, and the session
was postponed.

Over dinner Huxley and Morazé agreed to approve Turner's plan but to
propose the biochemist Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro from the
University of Brazil for president of the commission. Carneiro, being
Brazil's permanent delegate to the organiza on, knew UNESCO from
[End Page 117] within, and this could prove to be an advantage when it
came to selling Turner's new plan to Torres Bodet and the na onal
commissions. This would not be an easy job, considering that the plan
demanded considerably more me and money than had been envisaged
by Torres Bodet in his report to the Florence conference—five years
instead of three. Then Turner, who obviously had flair for the prac cal
work, could get the post of chairman of the editorial commi ee to
ensure that the editors and authors followed his own schedule. In this
way Huxley kept his evolu onis c approach, while Morazé got Huxley's
support for his idea of publishing an addi onal journal called World
History. 49

Huxley felt that the mee ng had been the most construc ve of all the
dozens he had had to take part in over the years, and he returned from
Paris well sa sfied with the outcome. Not so Morazé, who, when the
Turner plan became known, immediately came under severe a ack
from the French UNESCO Na onal Commission and from several French
historians, mostly because the plan favored Huxley over Febvre. 50

The commission feared that the Franco-Bri sh differences would cause

problems when trying to get the new plan adopted by the General
Conference, at least un l Carneiro for the first me displayed his
obvious flair for diplomacy and ensured that the plan would pass even
with French support. "You will have heard that a story blew up in the
French Commission, largely over Febvre," Huxley wrote to Turner.
"However, Carneiro reported that Febvre would be extremely happy to
take over the editorship of the Cahiers [the new journal] . . . and this I
am sure would remove the difficul es." 51

In February 1952 the commission was officially made an independent

associa on under contract to UNESCO and had to establish its own
secretariat in three rented offices at UNESCO House. Shortly a erward it
managed to get the Turner plan with its rather extended budget
approved by the General Conference in Paris. But Torres Bodet, [End
Page 118] who was shocked by the enormous amount of money offered
to the project by the General Conference, gave his approval with the
sarcas c remark that UNESCO intended to sponsor "a" history and not
"the" History of Mankind. 52

All prac cal difficul es had been solved. But the process had le
Armando Cortesão, the commission's new secretary-general, so
devastated by the months of prepara on that he had to leave the
posi on in urgent need of rest far away from UNESCO House. His
successor was the Swiss-American historian Guy S. Métraux, who was
appointed on the recommenda on of Turner and Huxley in fear that the
French would use the situa on to gain control of the commission and
the secretariat. This was not good news for Charles Morazé, who had
pictured himself in that posi on. 53

Febvre's Compensa on

In early 1952 Lucien Febvre began a new chapter of his life as editor of
the new magazine that the commission had created for him, as a kind of
re rement scheme for the man whom Morazé considered to be the
intellectual father of the History of Mankind project. 54

The journal was the only one in its field, and Febvre immediately
received so many ar cles that the Commission had to hire a young
historian, François Crouzet from the Université de Lille, as Febvre's
editorial assistant. 55

In the early days of July 1953 the first issue of the Journal of World
History, Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, or Cuadernos de Historia Mundial,
to give it the names of the three edi ons, hit the streets—including
abstracts in German, Russian, and Arabic.

The journal inspired a mixed bag of commentaries. A French journal

cri cized the ar cles for appearing almost inaccessible to non-
specialists, while other reviews showed great interest in the many new
themes it brought up. 56

In the following years, Febvre and Crouzet printed about one thousand
pages of original contribu ons annually, published on a quarterly basis,
and made it possible for researchers of all kinds to help shape
discussions on the design of the plan.
Several contemporary scien fic authori es contributed. Among them
were the American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, the German
historian Werner Conze, the Polish philosopher and sociologist Florian
Znaniecki, and the Bri sh American historian, orientalist, and poli cal
commentator Bernard Lewis. In fact, the scholarly quality of many of the
first contribu ons to the Journal of World History proved to be very
high. In the long run, however, the most cited ar cle was wri en by
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, who was s ll a young and rela vely unknown
historian at the me. He argued that a postwar world history needed to
be a systema c cri que of the basic presupposi ons of Western
historiography. Nothing less than a radical reorienta on of the
contemporary historical and geographical a tudes about the world
could produce the kind of world history that the History of Mankind
project was supposed to express. 57

Some of the ar cles addressed global-scale issues, but most of them

focused on the historical development of a single na on or region, and
especially the ar cles on Middle Eastern history were o en quoted in
contemporary literature. 58

As me passed, thema c issues were added, o en trea ng themes and

parts of the world that had previously not been given much a en on,
such as the history of Africa, India, Japan, and La n America.

In one sense the journal proved to be a success. "Every day we are

ge ng be er and be er materials but, at the same me, the publisher
proves his total incompetence," Métraux informed Turner in wake of the
first handful of issues. 59 The problem was that the channels for
distribu ng the journal were almost nonexistent. Despite the
commission's subsequent press campaigns, the journal never managed
to become a publica on with a broad readership. But it appeared in
bookshops and in libraries all over the world for as long as the
commission worked on the project, with Guy S. Métraux and François
Crouzet as the editors a er Febvre's death in September 1956. 60

Altogether, the journal was supposed to capture materials relevant to

the History of Mankind project, and it was envisaged that the
knowledge gathered in the journal should eventually be reflected in the
manuscripts of the work. It was also Huxley's view, and UNESCO's whole
philosophy, that the organiza on and all related commissions should
generate knowledge useful for maintaining peace, and that this
knowledge would subsequently trickle down through the educa onal
system almost by itself. 61

This is not quite what happened in prac ce, since the quan ty of inputs
was too overwhelming. Selected wri ngs from the journal were,
however, published in separate volumes, so-called mentor books or
"readings in the History of Mankind," which could be used for
educa onal purposes and which were widely distributed. 62

Turner's Temper

Within the commission two members set the agenda: Turner and
Morazé. Both were energe c, eloquent, and proud historians, and these
similari es brought them onto an increasingly confronta onal course.

Turner's enthusiasm for the project and immense knowledge of early

history on a global scale was a thorn in the side of Morazé, because
Turner's arguments o en proved to be decisive when giving the
volumes their defini ve form and selec ng the editors and authors. It
was, for instance, Turner's idea to avoid na onal biases by appoin ng
authors who were experts on periods that were different from the
heyday of their own culture. This meant planning for the first volume,
dealing with prehistory, to be wri en by scholars from the United
Kingdom, while the following five in chronological order would be
wri en by people from Italy, France, the United States, Peru, and India.
It was also at Turner's ini a ve that the commission was enlarged to
include addi onal members, to widen its geographical and cultural
represen ta on—which had a posi ve impact on the project and gave it
the much needed and enthusias c support of countries like India,
Pakistan, and Iraq. 63

But Turner's ideas were never adopted without intense clashes with
Morazé. Each and every me these two men met there were
thunderstorms, and, in addi on to the difficult task of extrac ng
addi onal money out of the UNESCO Budgetary Commission, a second
equally difficult duty soon fell to President Carneiro, namely to smooth
ruffled feathers and maintain order whenever these disagreements
occurred. 64

Turner's occasional outbursts of temper when his ideas were opposed

soon became legendary and gained plenty of a en on within UNESCO
House. The most drama c mee ngs a racted so many spectators from
all parts of the organiza on that even its great hall could not hold them
all, and people from outside were eventually banned from entering the
doors to listen. 65

Morazé felt that his posi on in the commission con nued to

deteriorate. "And par cular through your doing," Morazé later accused
Turner. "My le ers le unanswered, your evident desire not to have me
replace you, even for a single year, as chairman of our commi ee, your
failure to inform me of your consulta ons with our colleagues on the
editorial commi ee and with the directors of volumes, have ended by
crea ng around me an isola on which the slightest incident could
transform into open hos lity." 66

By October 1953 Morazé had had enough and sent in his resigna on
from the Editorial Commi ee. 67
Only a month later, however, UNESCO's new director-general, Luther H.
Evans, announced a reduc on of the commission's budget. It generated
a sudden feeling of living on borrowed me that made Turner reflect on
his behavior, and he decided to write to Morazé in an a empt to save
what was le of their rela onship to overcome the crisis, and, faced
with this state of emergency—and with the prospect of wri ng and
edi ng one of the volumes himself—Morazé finally gave way. 68

The Russians Are Coming

In the early 1950s the Cold War was a harsh reality. Un l the death of
Joseph Stalin in March 1953, the Soviets had refused to have anything to
do with UNESCO, but the Khrushchev administra on inaugurated a
reappraisal of the USSR's foreign policy priori es, and the country joined
the organiza on in April 1954. 69

That was bad news for Turner, who certainly wanted the commission to
be interna onal but never missed a chance of depic ng poli cized
Marxist history wri ng as the image of what the History of Mankind
project was not. Now he feared that these historians would ask to join
the commission, and it was far from helpful for him to have Carneiro
express his eagerness to cooperate with anybody willing to par cipate
in making it a truly interna onal undertaking. This inevitably led to a
clash between Carneiro and Turner. During a mee ng at which feelings
ran high over the Soviet ques on, Carneiro flung down his napkin on the
table and stormed out of the room, leaving Turner very much inclined
"to drop the whole business," concentrate on his own work, and leave
the project to Carneiro. 70

But Turner, whose life had become more or less synonymous with the
project, was no longer capable of taking such a dras c step, and he was
s ll chairman of the editorial commi ee in November 1954, when the
commission received commitments from the Soviet delegates at
UNESCO that the Soviet scholars were prepared to take "an ac ve part
in this important, interes ng and valuable undertaking of UNESCO." 71

The Soviet representa ve, Alexandre A. Zvorikine (), who was a

professor at the Ins tute of History at the USSR Academy of Sciences in
Moscow, arrived in Paris in January 1956 and was—despite Turner's
objec ons—appointed vice president of the commission.

Zvorikine proved to be a pleasant man, liked by all members of the

commission but, of course, very much influenced by the system that had
sent him. He explained that he and his Soviet colleagues had already
been working on a series of detailed, in-depth comments on the plan,
and he intended to return to Paris as soon as possible, at his own
expense, to present them. 72

Turner, who feared that an alterna ve philosophy of history would

change the basic approach of the en re project, informed Zvorikine that
he and his colleagues could only expect the commission to accept minor
modifica ons at this advanced stage of the process. When Zvori kine
later returned to Paris, it did also appear as if the Russian threat had
been exaggerated, since the correc ons only involved the inclusion of a
few extra Russian names and reference works in the various volumes.
Furthermore, during the months that followed Zvorikine proved to be a
highly efficient addi on to the workforce, ensuring that any request was
promptly granted and mee ng all discussions, correc ons, and
challenges with laudable openness. 73

But the Soviet scien sts would soon manage to remove the shine from
the miracle of a truly interna onal history of mankind that the
commission was in the process of compiling. In November 1956,
addressing Western ambassadors at a recep on at the Polish embassy in
Moscow, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, made his drama c claim:
"Like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." This was a shock
to everyone present. Khrushchev later claimed that he had not been
talking about nuclear war but about the historically determined victory
of communism over capitalism. 74

At almost the same me as this was happening, Turner received the first
full manuscript of one of the volumes. The commission circulated it to
their members and to consultants all over the world and to the UNESCO
Na onal Commissions, from where the authors then would receive
comments that would be incorporated before the volume was prepared
for publica on in September 1957. But this me the Soviet comments
were so voluminous that they verged on the absurd, and, since several
of the Eastern European countries that had also been included in the
work sent in altera ons on a similar scale, the commission realized that
there was no way that the authors could possibly comply with the
deadline, and Carneiro once again had to go to UNESCO to ask for
addi onal funds. 75

The field of history had now taken on a tangible reality as a major

poli cal ba lefield of the Cold War, where the different sides of the Iron
Curtain fought over the correct interpreta on of their common past. As
a Czech commentator concluded a er having read one of the
manuscripts: "Summarily it can be said of this study that the fact that
the authors do not see the economic and poli cal development in the
world in the 20th century from a class point of view leads them to a
posi vist and unscien fic interpreta on of the events of this century."
76 It was that kind of comment that prompted par cipants from the
United States to object to any acknowledgment given to the communist
scholars.

Of course the manuscripts also provoked other comment. Israel was

riled by passages highligh ng Arab objec ons to the State of Israel. A
number of Muslim countries were provoked by the interpreta on of the
Chris an crusades. The Catholic Church did not like the representa on
of religion as something that had a tendency to divide rather than unite
people. There were also objec ons to the lack of priority given to
African and South American history. And so on and so forth. But most of
these disagreements could be solved by quiet diplomacy, by removing
the more sensi ve phrases in the text or by invi ng more non-Western
scien sts to take part in the editorial work. However, when these had
been dealt with, what remained were the more fundamental ideological
differences, and there was nobody on the commission who had a clue
how to overcome these.

"That Damned Commission"

As UNESCO moved into its new headquarters of cement and glass on la

Place de Fontenoy at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in November 1958, the
History of Mankind project was in decline.

Turner, a man of vigorous opinions and unbound energy, was furious at

the sheer quan ty of mainly Soviet objec ons and at the prospect of
repeatedly having to ask the authors to change and reshape their
contribu ons. Several authors had already died or resigned by this
stage, causing severe delays to some of the volumes, and there were
rumors that the early death of one of them had been provoked by the
overwhelming amount of comments flooding his mailbox. 77

Eventually even the physically strong Turner was laid low by work. In
late January 1959 he suffered two heart a acks and was hospitalized.

In February and March the work came to a complete stands ll, while
Turner's health slowly improved. His mind soon proved to be perfectly
clear, but the a acks had caused a considerable slurring of his speech,
he couldn't walk, and he also had problems with wri ng. "It's a difficult
situa on because we suppose that the UNESCO history and its progress
is what our friend is living for," a colleague from Yale University told the
project's secretary-general, Guy S. Métraux. "To take it away would be a
considerable responsibility." 78

But there was also a job to be done, and as soon as it was clear that
Turner would not be able to accomplish the work of edi ng the final
texts, Carneiro, the diplomat, solved the problem. It involved Turner
remaining the editor, but his workload being greatly reduced. In prac ce
Métraux would take over some of his du es, while a number of eminent
historians were appointed as special consultants with the task of going
through the en re manuscript.

Turner objected, but there was nothing he could do. His con nued
illness prevented him from a ending mee ngs, and he spent his days
wheeling himself about in his wheelchair, trying to keep up with the
progress of the project and feeling somewhat hurt that he was not
receiving more material from Paris. 79

With Turner out of the picture, the Soviet objec ons to the manuscripts
reached their culmina on point. This happened when the commission
received the final manuscript for volume 6, covering the twen eth
century. Only a few days a er the manuscript had been handed over to
the Soviet scholars, Zvorikine and his colleagues returned a
comprehensive cri cal review—a total of five hundred pages of
objec ons to the treatment of communism, of technological
developments in the USSR, of the Soviet economy and poli cal system—
not to men on a very detailed guideline for the rewri ng of the en re
manuscript. 80

Several a empts at reaching a compromise failed, and once again

Carneiro had to face UNESCO's director-general with a demand for
addi onal money.

It was difficult to see how to reach agreement, for how should the
concept of democracy be dealt with when, according to Soviet
historians, it only expressed "the will of the economically and poli cally
dominant class"? 81 And could the concept of "colonialism" be used
only about past Western phenomena, or could it also be used about
Tsarist Russia, or the huge investments in other countries made by
American companies?

The American author-editor felt obliged to incorporate into her text

"contra-notes" to her Soviet colleagues' notes, which they tried to
prevent, and when they failed, they demanded space for notes to the
author's notes. 82

From the sidelines, Turner could only watch the conflict escalate
without being able to take ac on himself. He remained chairman un l
his death in October 1964, and his old rival, Charles Morazé, was sure
that it was the project that ul mately cost him his life. One of Turner's
last statements, allegedly had been: "That damned Commission!" 83

"A Great Story Le Untold"

In June 1963 the first volume of the work was published simultaneously
in London and New York, marking the first achievement of an
interna onal endeavor without parallel in history. To UNESCO and the
members of the commission it was a great relief, and even more so as it
turned out that the reviewers treated the volume kindly.

Behind the scenes the commission was s ll awai ng half of the final
manuscripts, of which one was way behind schedule. "Every me I tried
to sa sfy one cri c, I would dissa sfy another," one of the authors told
Carneiro. "So I plead incompetence." 84 Only in 1965 was the second
volume released, and this was accompanied by posi ve reviews in some
newspapers, but this me also by rather more cri cal comment. This
was par cularly the case in the influen al New York Times, whose
reviewer characterized the volume as a history with no soul, a mistaken
enterprise with a lot of distrac ng notes. "The total effect is of an
encyclopaedia gone berserk, or resorted by a deficient computer," the
reviewer claimed, concluding that it was altogether "a great story le
untold." 85 The review surprised the members of the commission, and,
according to Métraux, some American scholars regarded it as "one of
the most savage reviews ever published in the New York Times." 86 The
review had the immediate and nega ve consequence that a number of
publishers in various countries withdrew from their ini al agreement to
publish the en re work in their respec ve languages.

In the following years volume a er volume was published, and the

cri cism grew no less trenchant as me went, despite the fact that
reviewers could never agree on alterna ve approaches to the wri ng of
a global history of mankind. Nevertheless the commission managed to
have the volumes published in transla on in several languages. In 1967
the first volume in French appeared, and one year later came the first
versions in Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic,
Dutch, and Japanese.

"Now we no longer talk of the prepara on of the History of Mankind,

but of its publica on," Métraux noted with a great deal of relief in a
le er to Huxley, but he was also worried about the possibility of the last
volumes being outdated even before they hit the streets due to the
changes and confusion of the me. "The year 1968 has changed in a
considerable way the fundamental orienta ons of society in the
Twen eth Century," Métraux con nued. "It will be most difficult to
assess the direc on which mankind will be taking in the last third of the
century." 87

That also applied to the rela onship between the two friends and
colleagues. Huxley was eighty years old and on his way into re rement,
while Métraux's work was reaching its conclusion a er fi een years,
when he had ini ally thought that it would last for a maximum of only
five years. The commission was dissolved in September 1969, while
Métraux and the publica on of History of Mankind became officially
incorporated into UNESCO. 88 The last volume of the History of
Mankind was published in 1976.

The Mental Decoloniza on

For its me—not the me of its publica on but that of its long
prepara on—the History of Mankind stands as an intellectual landmark.
Not so much in the form of a concrete achievement but as a process. It
was the first coordinated a empt to involve experts from around the
world to reach agreement on a common understanding of history and
thus the first truly interna onal account of the history of mankind.

It was, however, precisely the ambi on to achieve interna onal

uniformity that also proved a major obstacle toward the other ambi on
—that of analyzing global cultural diversity and its mutual influences.
The priority of universalism over cultural diversity caused a number of
problems that undermined the value of the work. Achieving "truth"
through majority vo ng and relying on the ponderous movement of
official envelopes to and from the far reaches of the globe, involving
more than one thousand some mes unwilling scholars, caused major
delays, and, when the work was finally released, it had already passed
its own sell-by date.

When the last volumes were published, social scien sts were already
busy reconciling themselves with the eli st no on of "civiliza on,"
which was frequently used in the work as a synonym for a more refined
form of "universalis c culture" with the UN system as its provisional
culmina on. Although the tle of the first volume talked about several
"beginnings" of civiliza on, the tendency was s ll to discuss it in
conven onal terms: it was born in the Middle East, its backbone was
modern science, and it had been the driving force in the crea on of the
UN system. Interven on by non-Western cri cs had come too late to
challenge this tendency, with the result that the final outcome was
slightly more Eurocentric than the par cipants of the late 1960s and
early 1970s wished. Even "mankind," the work's central concept, which
had enjoyed very posi ve connota ons when the project had been
ini ated, was under a ack at the me as it was seen as a sexist relic
with "humankind" or "humanity" as more appropriate conceptual
replacements.

At the same me the focus on consensus history—especially a er the

involvement of the USSR in the work in 1956—turned its content into an
extensive, highly complex, and diverse text dissected by marginal
annota ons and addi ons. And where that was not the case, the texts
tended to follow the lowest common denominator, that is a harmless,
smooth, and harmonized history that did not really bring sa sfac on to
anyone—not even to the authors, who in several cases found it
necessary to distance themselves from parts of their own text. 89

Several authors were on the verge of giving up on a number of

occasions but felt obliged to do the hard work and take up the
some mes drama c challenges—in long periods even without
remunera on—out of goodwill and in honor of the organiza on with
the perfect name, the United Na ons.

The hard work therefore barely had a frac on of the impact that some
of them had envisioned in wake of Turner's claim that it was going to be
the most influen al history book ever wri en.

The problems were compounded by the lack of a single author to unite

the en re work, and here Gilbert Allardyce's important ar cle on world
history in American educa on seems to offer a credible explana on by
focusing on the similar and yet so different careers of Louis Go schalck,
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, and William McNeill. They were all historians at
the me, they were all from Chicago, and they all shared the same
ambi on: to write a truly global world history. Of these three Hodgson
prepared materials on Islamic culture for the History of Mankind, while
Go schalck—as men oned earlier—was preoccupied for years with
wri ng and edi ng an en re volume of the History of Mankind, which
he himself characterized as "the first global history of mankind." 90 And
that might just be the very reason why their names and the names of
the many colleagues from Chicago they involved in the process as
specialists and researchers today appear to have been buried in the long
list of faceless UNESCO historians. McNeill on the other hand received
all the a en on he could ever wish for when in 1963—same year as the
first volume of the History of Mankind—he released his major work, The
Rise of the West, a work that had a similar evolu onis c approach, even
with a Eurocentric focus, and that was also employed with the Spengler-
Toynbee approach, namely that various civiliza ons had undergone
essen ally different and independent lines of development.

McNeill's name gave his work a profile and at the same me he clearly
possessed some star poten al. His book was also shorter and easier to
understand for ordinary people, and more money was spent on
adver sing it. Altogether, McNeill's book had be er press, immediately
reached the American bestseller list, and has sold in great numbers ever
since. It was, therefore, not the UNESCO concept of "cultural exchanges
and transmissions" but McNeill's idea of "cultural [End Page 131]
encounters" that became the cornerstone of the new genre focusing on
the history of globaliza on. This became even more evident a er yet
another historian from Chicago, Le en Stavrianos, popularized the
concept of global history. 91

Unlike the scholars who ini ated the History of Mankind project and
believed that they could create an interna onally authorita ve work on
global history once and for all, those who completed the History of
Mankind volumes were more modest, more aware of the great
limita ons of bringing together the world's historians to create a
common but nevertheless useful understanding of human history, and
more inclined to consider the publica on—mainly because of the
content's global approach—as "a transi onal document with good
insights and many flaws of interpreta on." 92

Today the final version of History of Mankind does not play a role in
historiography as an example for imita on but rather as a monument of
a universalism that did not quite succeed. But it would be unfair to
regard the en re process leading up to the publica on in that
perspec ve, groundbreaking as it was as the first trial of na onalism and
Eurocentrism a er World War II and as the expression of how far it was
possible to extend a Eurocentric view in an era of burdensome
ideological divisions and a me when Western colonialism was s ll very
much both a poli cal reality and a relevant frame of reference for the
way historians looked at the world.

It is rather meaningful to characterize the process as the star ng point

of the postwar trend of wri ng global history because of the early start
of the en re project and its ambi on of focusing on "cultural exchanges
and transmissions," but also because UNESCO used this par cular
project to form its so-called World Heritage List (1972), which is
probably UNESCO's most widely known ac vity today, as well as the fact
that UNESCO maintained the ambi on of wri ng history with global
approach in wake of this first major a empt.

In 1978 the organiza on decided to embark on a new and completely

revised edi on of the work along the same basic principles to include
those parts of the world—par cularly Africa and South America—that
had been heavily underrepresented in the previous version. This me
the work was under the guidance and Presidency of Charles Morazé,
among others, and was published under the new tle History of
Humanity (1994-2005).

The work was followed by several others, suppor ng the United

Na on's decoloniza on prac ce through a kind of "mental
decoloniza on," rehabilita ng countries and con nents by giving them a
place in the history of humanity. The most noteworthy was the work
ini ated in 1966 as a response to the lack of informa on on Africa in the
History of Mankind, which resulted in the General History of Africa
published in the English edi on from 1981 to 1993 in eight volumes.
UNESCO's series of area studies also include the important mul -volume
works History of Civiliza ons of Central Asia (1992ff.), General History of
the Caribbean (1997ff.), The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture
(1998ff.), and the General History of La n America (1999-2009). [End
Page 133]

Footnotes

* This ar cle draws in part on a paper presented at the interna onal

symposium "Towards the Transna onal History of Interna onal
Organiza ons," held at the Centre for History and Economics at King's
College, University of Cambridge, on 6 April 2009. I am most grateful to
a number of individuals for help and discussions during the finaliza on
of the ar cle. In par cular to Jens Boel, Mahmoud Ghander, Guy S.
Métraux Jr., Michelle Bra ain, Aigul Kulnazarova, Edgardo C. Krebs,
Sarah Fee, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Jean-François Sirinelli, Sunil
Amrith, and Andrew Fish.

1. "UN Goes into the History Business," Chicago Tribune, 24 December

1951.

2. See for instance Niels Steensgaard, "Universal History for Our Times,"
Journal of Modern History 45, no. 1 (1973): 72-82.

3. Gilbert Allardyce, "Toward World History: American Historians and the

Coming of the World History Course," Journal of World History 1, no. 1
(1990): 23-75.
4. UNESCO, Prepara on of a History of the Scien fic and Cultural
Development of Mankind (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), pp. 7-10.

5. Alexander Ranasinghe, UNESCO's Cultural Mission: An Evalua on of

Policies, Programs, Projects (New York: Carlton Press, 1969), p. xvi.

6. Julian Huxley, "UNESCO: The First Phase, I—The Two Views,"

Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1950.

7. Joseph Needham, Chinese Science (London: Pilot Press, 1945).

8. Le er from Julian Huxley (Director-General, UNESCO) to L. H. Frank

(Professor), 3 September 1948, 2.31 (2) —Planning of the work. UNESCO
Secretariat. Natural Sciences Sec on (NS). File 9.3., SCHM 8, UNESCO
Archives, Paris; Le er from Julian Huxley (Former Director-General,
UNESCO) to F. J. H. Stra on (President of Caius College, Cambridge, UK),
5 September 1950, Box 19, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University,
Houston, Texas; and Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper and
Row, 1970), 1:54.

9. Julian S. Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (London:

Preparatory Commission for UNESCO, 1946), p. 42.

10. Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China (New York:
HarperCollins, 2008), p. 165; Maurice Goldsmith, Joseph Needham:
20th-Century Renaissance Man (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1995), pp.
89-92; and Gail Archibald, "How the 'S' Came to Be in UNESCO," Sixty
Years of Science at UNESCO, 1945-2005 (Paris: UNESCO, 2006), pp. 36-
40.

11. Julian Huxley, "Notes on the History of Mankind: Cultural and

Scien fic Development," December 1961, p. 2, "0.27 & 0.28, SCHM 1
and Compte-rendu sommaire d'une reunion avec Sir Ernest Barker et Sir
Richard Livingstone" (Undated), 2.31 (1) —Planning of the work before
the 1st Mee ng of the Commi ee of Experts, SCHM 7, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.

12. "The History of Science and Its Rela on to Philosophy, Humani es

and Social Sciences" (Report), 22 January 1947, 2.31 (1) —Planning of
the work before the 1st Mee ng of the Commi ee of Experts, SCHM 7,
UNESCO Archives, Paris.

13. Memo, 14 November 1947 and "Cultural and Scien fic History of the
World." Sugges ons by JSH —1947, Box 118, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers,
Rice University, Houston, Texas.

14. "Cultural and Scien fic History of Mankind. Dra Proposal by Prof.

Gordon Childe" (Undated), Box 118, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice
University, Houston, Texas, and "UNESCO General Conference. Second
Session. Working Paper on the Project of a Scien fic and Cultural History
of Mankind" (by Joseph Needham and Julian Huxley), November 1947,
2.31 (2) —Planning of the work. UNESCO Secretariat. Natural Sciences
Sec on (NS). File 9.3., SCHM 8, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

15. Records of the General Conference of the United Na ons Educa onal
and Cultural Organiza on, Second Session, Paris, UNESCO, 1947,
resolu on 5.7.

16. "Evalua on of Communist Infiltra on of UNESCO. Report. Central

Intelligence Agency. Top Secret," 7 February 1947, Declassified
Documents Reference System, Ohio University.

17. Winchester, Man Who Loved China, p. 166.

18. "Notes on the Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," May 1948,
Box 118, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

19. "Comments by Aldous Huxley," October 1948, Box 118, Julian Sorell
Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.
20. "Dra Document for the General Conference. Scien fic and Cultural
History of Mankind" (Undated), p. 1, 2.31 (1) —Planning of the work
before the 1st Mee ng of the Commi ee of Experts, SCHM 7, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.

21. "Rapport sur les Réunions du 25 et du 27 Octobre 1948" and

"Addendum (October 1948) to Notes by Dr. Julian Huxley (May 1948) on
Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," 26 October 1948, 2.31 (1) —
Planning of the work before the 1st Mee ng of the Commi ee of
Experts, SCHM 7, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

22. Huxley, Memories, 1:69.

23. Memorandum from Julian Huxley (Former Director-General,

UNESCO) to Jaime Torres Bodet (Director-General, UNESCO), 17 January
1949, Box 118, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston,
Texas.

24. "Mee ng of the Standing Commi ee of the Interna onal Council for
Philosophy and Humanis c Studies (May 1949)," 8 June 1949, UNESCO,
Paris.

25. Patrick Pe tjean, "Needham, Anglo-French Civili es and Ecumenical

Science," in Situa ng the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph
Needham, ed. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 177.

26. "Rapport de M. Lucien Febvre," (May 1949), Box 118, Julian Sorell
Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

27. Le er from Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO) to

Jaime Torres Bodet (Director-General, UNESCO), 6 July 1949, Box 18,
Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.
28. "Memorandum by Julian Huxley on the Report of Professor Ozorio
de Almeida," July 1949, 2.31 (2) —Planning of the work. UNESCO
Secretariat. Natural Sciences Sec on (NS). File 9.3, SCHM 8, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.

29. [A. Cortesão], "Commi ee of Experts Responsible for Preparing the

Plan of the Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," (26 January
1950), 2.31 (3) —Planning of the work. UNESCO Secretariat file (PHS).
Dr. Huxley's file on Cultural History of Mankind (NII i), SCHM 8, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.

30. Le er from Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO) to

René Maheu (Director, Execu ve Office, UNESCO), 11 October 1949, Box
18, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

31. Le er from Jean Thomas (Assistant Director-General, UNESCO) to

Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO), 9 December 1949,
Box 18, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

32. Le er from Joseph Needham (Professor, Cambridge University) to

Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO), 17 December 1949,
Box 18, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

33. "Report of the Commi ee of Experts Responsible for Preparing the

Plan of the Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," (12-16 December
1949), "2.633 (1). Commi ee of Experts 12-16 Dec. 1949," SCHM 23,
UNESCO Archives, Paris.

34. Summary records (12-16 December 1949), "2.633 (1). Commi ee of

Experts 12-16 Dec. 1949," SCHM 23, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

35. [A. Cortesão], "Report of the Commi ee of Experts Responsible for

Preparing the Plan of the Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," (10
February 1950), 2.31 (3) —Planning of the work. UNESCO Secretariat file
(PHS). Dr. Huxley's file on Cultural History of Mankind (NII i), SCHM 8;
Records of the dra ing commi ee, December 1949, 3rd Session, SCHM
23, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

36. Le er from Joseph Needham (Professor, Cambridge University) to

Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO), 17 December 1949,
Box 18, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

37. Le er from Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO) to

Armando Cortesão (Counsellor, SCHM), 13 January 1950, Box 19, Julian
Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

38. 2.324 —Comments on the Plan, 1950, SCHM 8 and Report

5C/PRG/2, SCHM 7, 2.225, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

39. "Special Commi ee on the UNESCO Project for a Scien fic and

Cultural History of Mankind," 13 March 1950; "Tenta ve Personal
Sugges ons by A.J. Toynbee for carrying out the Plan of the Scien fic
and Cultural History of Mankind," 1950; "Report of a Special Panel of
the U.K. Na onal Commission set up to Consider the UNESCO Project for
a Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind," March 1950, and "Notes
by J. S. Huxley," March 1950, SCHM 8, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

40. Il Mondo (Rome), 8 July 1950, "Should UNESCO Die?" Manchester

Guardian, 19 July 1950; and "Croce Puts the Liberal Case Against
UNESCO," Manchester Guardian, 27 July 1950.

41. Charles K. Webster, "Le ers to the Editor: Should UNESCO Die?"
Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1950; "Scien fic & Cultural History of
Mankind. Approved at Florence, 9 June 1950," "0.22, 0.24 —Outgoing
le ers and memos, 1950-53," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

42. "Memoire. Conférence avec M. Thomas," 20 July 1950, "0.22, 0.24—

Outgoing le ers and memos, 1950-53," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives,
Paris.
43. Le er from Armando Cortesão (Councellor, SCHM) to Julian Huxley
(Former Director-General, UNESCO), 25 July 1950, Box 19, Julian Sorell
Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

44. Le er from Ronald Fraser (Liaison Officer, Interna onal Council of

Scien fic Unions) to Julian Huxley (Former Director-General, UNESCO),
28 September 1950; and Le er from Joseph Needham (Professor,
Cambridge University) to Julian Huxley (Former Director-General,
UNESCO), 14 October 1950, Box 19, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice
University, Houston, Texas.

45. A. Cortesão, "Dra . Introduc on to the special document requested

by Mr. Maheu on 2nd Jan. 1951," "0.22, 0.24—Outgoing le ers and
memos, 1950-53," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

46. "Geographical Distribu on of Persons Associated to the

Interna onal Commission," 19 November 1952, "0.22, 0.24—Outgoing
le ers and memos, 1950-53," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

47. Charles Morazé, Un historien engagé: Mémoires (Paris: Fayard,

2007), p. 181; "Plan of the History of Mankind," (January 1951), "2.632
(4). Working Papers 1-6," SCHM 24, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

48. Le er from Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal

Commission, SCHM) to Luther H. Evans (Member of the U.S. Na onal
Commission for UNESCO), 25 January 1951, Box 19, Julian Sorell Huxley
Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

49. Morazé, Un historien engagé, pp. 181-182.

50. Le er from Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal

Commission, SCHM) to Joseph Needham (Professor, Cambridge
University), 19 December 1950, Box 19, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice
University, Houston, Texas; Le er from Charles Morazé (Member of the
Editorial Commi ee, SCHM) to Ralph E. Turner (Chairman of the
Editorial Commi ee, SCHM), 20 December 1953, "1.36. G. S. Métraux:
personal files," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

51. Le er from Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal

Commission, SCHM) to Ralph E. Turner (Chairman of the Editorial
Commi ee, SCHM), 5 February 1951, "2.624 (1). Dr. Julian Huxley,"
SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

52. Contract between UNESCO and the Interna onal Commission for a
Scien fic and Cultural History of Mankind, 21 January 1952, "2.41 (1).
Office of the Director-General," SCHM 9; Le er from Paulo E. de Berrêdo
Carneiro (President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to Julian
Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 26 May
1952, "2.624 (1). Dr. Julian Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

53. Le er from Armando Cortesão (Secretary-General, SCHM) to Julian

Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 16
October 1951, "2.624 (1). Dr. Julian Huxley," SCHM 17; Le er from
Armando Cortesão (Secretary-General, SCHM) to Guy S. Métraux
(Future Secretary-General, SCHM), 21 January 1952 and le er from
Armando Cortesão to Guy S. Métraux, 17 February 1952, "1.36. G. S.
Métraux: personal files," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

54. Patrick Pe tjean, "Needham, Anglo-French Civili es and Ecumenical

Science," in Sciences and Empires: Historical Studies about Scien fic
Development and European Expansion, ed. Patrick Pe tjean et al.
(London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), pp. 174-176.

55. Le er from R. C. Mujumdar (Member of the Editorial Commi ee,

SCHM) to Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM), 6 May 1953,
"0.22, 0.24—Outgoing le ers and memos, 1950-53," SCHM 1, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.
56. Revue de Paris, April 1954 and "Press Review, March-April, 1954," 17
May 1954, "0.30," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

57. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, "Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an

Approach to World History," Journal of World History 1, no. 3 (1954):
715-723.

58. Especially H. A. R. Gibb, "An Interpreta on of Islamic History,"

Journal of World History 1 (1953): 30-62; and Bernard Lewis, "The
Impact of the French Revolu on on Turkey," Journal of World History 1
(1953): 105-125.

59. Le er from Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM) to Ralph E.

Turner (Chairman of the Editorial Commi ee, SCHM), 22 October 1954,
"1.36. G. S. Métraux: personal files," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

60. The first Journal of World History was published un l 1972 and
should not be confused with this journal of the same name, first
published in 1990.

61. Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy.

62. Among the tles were The Evolu on of Science (1963), The
Nineteenth Century World (1963), Religions and the Promise of the
Twen eth Century (1965), and The New Asia (1965) edited by Guy S.
Métraux and François Crouzet for the New American Library.

63. Huxley, Memories, 1:70; "The Seventh Session of the General

Conference of UNESCO," 18 December 1952, "0.30," SCHM 2, UNESCO
Archives, Paris.

64. Huxley, Memories, 1:70.

65. Morazé, Un historien engagé, p. 182.

66. Le er from Charles Morazé (Member of the Editorial Commi ee,
SCHM) to Ralph E. Turner (Chairman of the Editorial Commi ee, SCHM),
20 December 1953, "1.36. G. S.Métraux: personal files," SCHM 2,
UNESCO Archives, Paris.

67. Le er from Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the

Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the
Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 21 October 1953, "2.624 (1). Dr.
Julian Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

68. Le er from Ralph E. Turner (Chairman of the Editorial Commi ee,

SCHM) to Charles Morazé (Member of the Editorial Commi ee, SCHM),
16 December 1953, and le er from Charles Morazé to Ralph E. Turner,
20 December 1953, "1.36. G. S. Métraux:personal files," SCHM 2,
UNESCO Archives, Paris.

69. Ilya V. Gaiduk, "L'Union sovié que et l'UNESCO pendant la guerre

froide," 60 ans d'histoire de l'UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 2007), p. 282.

70. Le er from Ralph E. Turner (Chairman of the Editorial Commi ee,

SCHM) to Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM), 19 October 1954,
"1.36. G. S. Métraux: personal files," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

71. "Fi h Plenary Mee ng [UNESCO]," 15 November 1954, "0.30,"

SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

72. Le er from Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the

Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the
Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 31 January 1956, "2.624 (1). Dr.
Julian Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

73. Answers from Louis Go schalck and Caroline F. Ware (Author-

Editors, SCHM) on A. A. Zvorikine's (Vice-President of the Interna onal
Commi ee, SCHM) comments, 1.6. and 10.7.1956, "0.25 & 0.26," SCHM
1, UNESCO Archives, Paris; Morazé, Un historien engagé, pp. 183-184.
74. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin
Press, 2005), p. 84.

75. "Notes made by G. S. Métraux in the course of several mee ngs held
with Mr. R. Williams of Li le, Brown & Co. (February-March 1957),"
"0.27 & 0.28," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

76. Memo from the author-edi ors of volume VI to the Bureau of the
Interna onal Commission, SCHM, 14 April 1960, "0.27 & 0.28," SCHM 1,
UNESCO Archives, Paris.

77. Morazé, Un historien engagé, p. 183; Memo from Guy S. Métraux

(Secretary-General, SCHM) to the Interna onal Commission, SCHM, 14
October 1964, "0.29," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris and le er from
Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to
Guy S. Métraux, 6 November 1964, Box 37, Julian Sorell Huxley Papers,
Rice University, Houston, Texas.

78. Le er from George W. Pierson (Chairman, Department of History,

Yale University) to Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM), 17 March
1959, "1.36. G. S. Métraux:personal files," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives,
Paris.

79. Le er from Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal

Commission, SCHM) to Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the
Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 27 May 1961, "2.624 (2). Dr. Julian
Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

80. "Résolu on adoptée par le Bureau au Cours de sa XVème réunion,"

27-28 February 1961, "0.30," SCHM 2; Le er from Julian Huxley (Vice-
President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to Paulo E. de
Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 17
April 1961, "2.624 (2). Dr. Julian Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives,
Paris.
81. Notes on the revised manuscript of volume VI, April 1963, p. 17,
"0.27 & 0.28," SCHM 1, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

82. Le ers from Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM) to Paulo E.

de Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM),
18 and 30 March 1965, "0.29," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

83. Morazé, Un historien engagé, p. 183; Memo from Guy S. Métraux

(Secretary-General, SCHM) to the Interna onal Commission, SCHM, 14
October 1964, "0.29," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris, and le er from
Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to
Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM), 6 November 1964, Box 37,
Julian Sorell Huxley Papers, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

84. Allardyce, "Toward World History," p. 34.

85. J. H. Plumb, "A Great Story Le Untold," New York Times, 1 August
1965.

86. Memo from Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM) to the

members of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM, 5 October 1965,
"0.29," SCHM 2, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

87. Le er from Guy S. Métraux (Secretary-General, SCHM) to Julian

Huxley (Vice-President of the Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 17
March 1969, "2.624 (3). Dr. Julian Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives,
Paris.

88. Le er from Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro (President of the

Interna onal Commission, SCHM) to Julian Huxley (Vice-President of the
Interna onal Commission, SCHM), 30 June 1969, "2.624 (3). Dr. Julian
Huxley," SCHM 17, UNESCO Archives, Paris.

89. Caroline Ware et al., History of Mankind: Cultural and Scien fic

Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), 6:xii, xiv, xvii-xx.
90. Louis Go schalck, "Wri ng World History," The History Teacher 2,
no. 1. (November 1968): 17-23.

91. Bruce Mazlish, "Global History and World History," in The Global
History Reader, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (New York: Routledge,
2005), pp. 16-20; Patrick O'Brian, "Historiographical Tradi ons and
Modern Impera ves for the Restora on of Global History," Journal of
Global History 1 (2006): 4-7; and Gilbert Allardyce, "Toward World
History," pp. 40-45, 23-75.

92. Told to me by Professor Guy P. R. Métraux, son of Guy S. Métraux

(Secretary-General, SCHM), on 24 January 2008. See also Charles
Morazé, History of Mankind: Cultural and Scien fic Development
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 5: xiv.
Taiwan-Japan Relations in an Era of
Uncertainty

Thomas S. Wilkins

Keywords
Taiwan, Japan, military coopera on, nontradi onal security

Execu ve Summary

This ar cle examines the substance and dynamics of contemporary

Taiwan-Japan rela ons and considers poten al avenues for the
consolida on and expansion of bilateral coopera on.

Main Argument

Taiwan and Japan are acutely affected by shi ing power balances in the
Asia-Pacific. While increasing economic interdependence with China
works to secure economic prosperity and reduce tensions, nega ve
shi s in the strategic balance portend adverse long-term implica ons
for both countries' na onal security. Informal and formal alignment with
the U.S. reassures Taipei and Tokyo in the face of a poten al Chinese
threat but simultaneously generates concerns that Sino-American rivalry
will entrap them in a great power conflict. As a result of these external
contexts and Taiwan's unofficial diploma c status, moves to solidify
bilateral rela ons, though mutually desirable, must be handled with
cau on. Instead of direct military-defense coopera on, Taiwan and
Japan might profitably explore collabora on on nontradi onal security
issues such as climate change, pandemics, or transna onal crime. In
par cular, both countries' recent na onal defense white papers place
strong emphasis on disaster relief opera ons. Joint coopera on in this
sphere would strengthen bilateral rela ons and lay the founda on for a
deeper and expanded partnership. Such efforts would enhance Taiwan's
interna onal space and security, building on the close democra c,
economic, and cultural es that already unite Taipei and Tokyo.

Policy Implica ons

• Both Taiwan and Japan are feeling the pressure of a rising China
and have every incen ve to deepen their rela ons in the face of
shared challenges. Bilateral coopera on on nontradi onal security
issues, especially disaster relief, provides such an opportunity.

• There are three main policy op ons for advancing the Taipei-
Tokyo alignment: (1) con nue a close bilateral rela onship "as is,"
(2) form a strategic partnership based on the model of Japan's
rela ons with Australia and India, or (3) enter into a virtual
trilateral alliance with the U.S.

Examina on of the foreign and security policies of the Republic of China

(ROC), or Taiwan, is o en subsumed into the dominant discourse on the
rise of China, the great power rivalry between China and the United
States, or the cross-strait military balance. This can obscure other more
subtle but meaningful trends. "What is really happening," Jing Sun
observes, "though less drama c, is a solid strengthening of rela ons
between Japan and Taiwan, two countries commonly perceived as
secondary players in this poten ally explosive issue."1 Sun argues that
Taipei and Tokyo share strong es in terms of their economic, strategic,
and poli cal interests, which mark out their rela ons as "unofficial in
name only." As Lam Peng-Er notes, "Taiwan assiduously cul vates be er
es with Japan to bolster its security and expand its interna onal
space."2 Mathieu Duchâtel provides addi onal context for why Japan
comes third, behind only China and the United States, in Taipei's
strategic calcula ons:

Tokyo has engaged the ac ve support of Taiwan's par cipa on as an

observer in certain interna onal organiza ons which do not require
state status (such as the World Health Organiza on), in Track II trilateral
security discussions with the United States and Taiwan, in increasing
parliamentary exchanges with Taiwan, and in inter-military contacts with
the Taiwanese.3

Such quiet but important developments make the burgeoning bilateral

partnership worthy of further inves ga on.

Due to the sensi vi es a ending Taiwan's anomalous diploma c status,

both official documenta on of and scholarly inquiries into the bilateral
rela onship are rela vely limited. The scarcity of primary and secondary
source material, at least in English, is par ally a result of the relevant
issues being subsumed into the more high-profile issues of U.S.-China
rivalry and cross-strait rela ons, which dominate the discourse.4 As Jing
Sun notes, "the Taiwan issue is becoming a sub-field in the study of
Sino-American rela ons."5 Likewise, Philip Yang also suggests that
"Japan's Taiwan policy has historically been a subset of Tokyo's policy
toward China."6 This ar cle therefore seeks to disaggregate per nent
informa on on bilateralism from this blanket tendency and to present it
in a meaningful and structured pa ern.

This ar cle proceeds in three steps. First, it examines the substance of

the Taiwan-Japan rela onship and the internal dynamics that shape
rela ons. The second sec on places the bilateral rela onship within its
external context by considering the impact of the People's Republic of
China (PRC) and the United States on Taipei-Tokyo interac on. The
ar cle then concludes by pu ng forward poten al schemes for
con nued and invigorated bilateral coopera on. Through this three-step
process, it constructs a comprehensive picture of the problems and
prospects for Taipei-Tokyo interac on and of the resul ng regional
implica ons. Note that this ar cle does not specifically chart the history
of Taiwan-Japan rela ons but only considers them insomuch as they
bear on contemporary issues.7

Internal Contexts

Taiwan and Japan interact in a series of func onal or issue areas where
actual or poten al synergies exist. These include strategic security,
economics, ideology and democra za on, leadership and domes c
cons tuencies, and history and culture.

Strategic Security Issues

The realm of military-defense coopera on, or wider security strategy, is

the primary concern of realist analysts.8 While both countries are
obliquely united by shared threat percep ons of the PRC, there is only
minimal and informal coopera on in this sector, and the prospects for
deeper and explicit coopera on are currently low. There is no formal
pledge on the part of Japan to guarantee Taiwan's security in the event
of a cross-strait conflict (and Taiwan has no commitment to Japan's
defense). Instead, all that exists on Tokyo's part is an ambiguous
commitment to Taiwan's integrity through the U.S.-Japan Joint Security
Declara on (1996), which pronounced the stability of cross-strait
rela ons a "joint strategic interest."9 Tokyo is unlikely to officially
upgrade this weak de jure assurance and is therefore only tenuously
commi ed to Taiwan's security. De facto, however, Japan's own security
and its commitments to the U.S. alliance ensure that in the extreme
event that Taiwan's existence was seriously menaced, Tokyo would be
virtually compelled to support Taipei. Yet the considera on of this fact,
and indeed any military-security issue, is extremely sensi ve for both
par es given the unofficial diploma c status of Taiwan and the influence
of the PRC. As a consequence, an NBR Analysis concludes that "there is,
unfortunately, a general dearth of informa on on defense contacts
between Taipei and Tokyo."10

Overall, bilateral defense and military-to-military contacts are nominal

and confined to Track 2 (or Track 1.5) channels since the foreign and
defense ministers of Taiwan are actually prohibited from visi ng Japan,
as are incumbent execu ves. The sta oning of re red Japan Self
Defense Force (JSDF) officials at Tokyo's unofficial embassy in Taiwan—
the Interchange Associa on (Riben jiaoliu xiehui)—and the constant
exchange of government or ministerial personnel between the two
countries on tourist visas are the preferred methods of circumven ng
the abnormali es of Taiwan's diploma c predicament. Indeed, Taiwan's
na onal security adviser has frequently visited his counterparts in Japan
under the guise of tourism. Likewise, direct poli cal contacts are also
underwri en by the visits of former Japanese premiers to the island
(Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso in 2010, Yoshiro Mori in 2003 and 2006, and
Takeo Fukuda in 1992). This is significant because former prime
ministers—of whom there are many—o en retain considerable poli cal
influence back in Japan. Taiwan's informal embassy, the Taipei Economic
and Cultural Organiza on (TECO), allows ROC personnel to engage with
their Japanese counterparts in a similar unofficial fashion. In addi on, in
2004 a group of Japanese legislators formed a commi ee on Taiwan's
security to advocate and facilitate such contacts.11

Despite this rather low-key coopera on and modest future prospects,

there remains an unspoken but inescapable recogni on that the two
countries are ed by their shared geostrategic vulnerability. Taiwan and
Japan fear the growing military might of the PRC and the inten on of
the People's Libera on Army Navy (PLAN) to break out of its mari me
cordon sanitaire and into the Pacific. In doing so, it would infringe on or
breach the territorial security of both countries. Increasing Chinese
naval ac vity in neighboring waters and other "probing" ac vi es have
already catalyzed such thinking in both Taipei and Tokyo. This wider
strategic context, par cularly with regard to the roles played by the PRC
and the United States in bilateral calcula ons, will be taken up below.

Economic Issues

The absence of official diploma c channels and overt defense

coopera on has proved li le impediment to burgeoning economic es
between Taiwan and Japan. Such es are more significant for joint
feelings of security than they might appear at first glance. For medium-
sized powers, "the search for na onal economic wellbeing and the
maximiza on of economic sovereignty [has become] as important as
tradi onal concep ons of security, which fixed on physical or territorial
concep ons of integrity."12 Denied access to its tradi onal markets on
the Chinese mainland in the postwar period, Japan concentrated on
trade with Taiwan and was instrumental in the island's development
into an advanced economy. Despite the greater importance of the
Chinese mainland to both Taiwanese and Japanese economic security
today, the two countries remain closely bound economically, with
bilateral trade being worth $70 billion in 2010.13 A high-profile example
of this deep economic integra on is the Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR)
based on Japan's Shinkansen (bullet train). This deep interdependence
was further demonstrated to Taiwanese companies in the a ermath of
the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, when their supply chains in Japan were
disrupted. Tokyo looks favorably on Taiwan as a safe and reliable
offshore produc on base and as a desirable partner in the development
of biotech, cloud compu ng, and other high-end technologies
industries, which are areas that both governments have priori zed.
Taipei is equally interested in the technology transfers that a end such
prospects. Hence, there are a number of new ini a ves designed to
deepen this close rela onship and mutually reinforce economic security.
First, the par es have just agreed to an "investment protec on deal"
that recognizes Taiwanese investors as ROC na onals—an important
step in the legi miza on of contacts that has been described as a
"major breakthrough" by President Ma Ying-jeou.14 An open skies
agreement to liberalize commercial avia on services between Taiwan
and Japan is s ll under nego a on. Furthermore, interested par es in
both Taiwan and Japan are advoca ng the study of a bilateral free trade
agreement (FTA).15 Taiwanese vice-minister of economic affairs Lin
Sheng-chung claims that "signing FTAs with regional economies has
been the country's policy and Japan is one of our targets."16 Indeed,
some see the investment protec on agreement as a "stepping stone" to
an FTA.17

Second, a major catalyst in this process has been Taipei's recent

Economic Coopera on Framework Agreement (ECFA) with the Chinese
mainland. As Yasuhiro Matsuda argues, "deepening cross-strait
economic es have made it easier for Japanese companies inves ng in
Taiwan to envision future prospects."18 President Ma has even talked
specifically about Taiwan and Japan "entering China as partners."19 By
working through Taiwan, a gateway into the Chinese market, Japan is
able to leverage Taiwanese linguis c and cultural exper se and sidestep
the nega ve image that many mainlanders have of the Japanese people
—factors that may otherwise impede direct economic coopera on.
Despite this posi ve outlook, however, economics ma er only insomuch
as they underwrite na onal power and military capabili es. Economic
security per se does li le to directly contribute to Taiwan's military
security. In this respect, the prospects for military-technological
coopera on are strongly circumscribed and will likely remain so unless
the self-imposed restric ons placed on Japanese arms transfers are
loosened.20
Ideology and Democra za on

Underpinning the oblique Taiwan-Japan defense rela onship and the

countries' mutual economic importance are addi onal idea onal and
so power factors.21 Both countries may be classified as like-minded
states on the basis of shared adhesion to liberal democra c principles.
As Qingxin Ken Wang notes, "many Japanese have shown increasing
admira on for Taiwan's democra za on and perceived a convergence
that could form the basis for expanding bilateral es."22 Commitments
to freedom of speech, human rights, and rule of law are important
unifying factors between the partners in a region that includes many
authoritarian or otherwise flawed systems of governance. This speaks to
what might be categorized as a "values-based" alignment, a no on that
has gained in prominence as states seek to deepen rela ons with their
ideological counterparts. Indeed, Taiwanese poli cians have played up
this element of "democra c solidarity" to great effect, contras ng it
favorably with the mainland's authoritarian system in order to gain
sympathy from Japan, the United States, and other democra c
countries. This strategy coincides with Japanese emphasis on coali on-
building among countries with common values. Former Japanese prime
minster Shinzo Abe called for an "arc of freedom and prosperity" (a
democra c alliance) in the Asia-Pacific to align such states.23 However,
such values-based alignments can also serve as the basis for a empts to
reinforce strategic coopera on, as may be seen in the U.S.-Japan-
Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD). In a previous ar cle, I
probed the ques on of whether shared interests (such as joint threat
percep ons) are the primary drivers for interna onal alignment, or
whether countries that share common values (such as democracy or, in
the past, socialism) will naturally be drawn into coopera on.24

Leadership and Domes c Cons tuencies

Ideological convic ons neatly dovetail with domes c poli cs in the two
countries. On the Taiwanese side, bilateral rela ons blossomed under
the presidency of Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000). Lee fostered close rela ons
with Japan, even a ending a ceremony at the controversial Yasukuni
Shrine to commemorate Taiwanese that served with the Imperial
Japanese Army (IJA) in World War II. As Lam notes, "Fluent in Japanese
and strongly rooted in Japanese culture, Lee mesmerized the Japanese
mass media with his charisma, passion, and intense admira on of
Japan."25 The following president, Chen Shuibian (2000-2008), though
lacking Lee's deep a achment to Japan, con nued this trend. Current
president Ma Ying-jeou, however, has been noted for "latent an -
Japanese sen ment," perhaps stemming from his previous role in
na onalist ac vism regarding disputed sovereignty of the
Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands (currently occupied by Japan).26 Ma's domes c
support base seeks to define Taiwanese iden ty historically through
an -Japanese resistance, and this has led him to clash with Tokyo over
claims to the islands, temporarily chilling bilateral rela ons. (For its part,
Japan has intercepted ROC vessels in what it considers to be Japanese
territorial waters, though with less furor than the infamous collision
between a Japan Coast Guard ship and a Chinese fishing trawler in
2010.) Matsuda records that "the Ma administra on lacks strong affinity
for Japan at its power center and its support base includes a poli cal
force that harbors strong an -Japanese sen ments."27 Cons tuencies
such as the Pan-Blue Coali on, which supports reunifica on, must also
be appeased. Ma is nevertheless a uned to the prac cal impera ves for
close Taiwan-Japan coopera on. Thus, he felt compelled to deny rumors
of his "an -Japanese" creden als by claiming to be "Japan's best friend"
and seeking to boost links with the Democra c Party of Japan (DPJ).28

On the Japanese side, there are strong pro-Taiwan poli cal leanings,
especially in conserva ve fac ons. The controversial Tokyo mayor,
Shintaro Ishihara, has long been a vigorous supporter of Taipei and
received important poli cal delegates from Taiwan, which is just one
current in the significant flow of officials in both direc ons. There are
also outspoken Taiwanese exiles, such as Jin Mei-ling, who publicly
retain a vocal pro-Taiwan, an -PRC stance. However, as a counterpoint
to this potent Taiwan lobby, the Japanese bureaucracy, par cularly the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), contains a strong group of pro-PRC
advocates, collec vely dubbed the Chaina sukuru (China School).

Historical and Cultural Contacts

Poli cal es are largely grounded on popular percep ons among the
respec ve publics of Taiwan and Japan. As Matsuda notes, "the
Japanese and Taiwanese share very strong feelings of friendship,"29 due
to close bonds of history and culture. The bilateral rela onship between
Taipei and Tokyo is remarkable for being the only one in Northeast Asia
not tarnished by the "history issue." In contrast to the agita on shown
by Beijing, Seoul, and Pyongyang over Japan's war me record from
1937 to 1945, Taipei's views are moderate, even posi ve. Some
Taiwanese poli cians occasionally seek to reinforce no ons of a dis nct
na onal iden ty with an -Japanese elements by highligh ng the
nega ve aspects of Taiwan's previous "Japaniza on," but there are large
sec ons of popular and poli cal opinion that hold favorable views of
Japanese colonial rule in Formosa (known as Takasago in Japanese)
from 1895 to 1945.30 This period is some mes favorably juxtaposed
with the repressive rule of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the late 1940s (the
"white terror"). Indeed, when the issue of "comfort women" (the
employment of foreign women as sex slaves by the IJA in World War II)
arose in the 1990s, the leadership intervened to quickly contain the
controversy and prevent it from impairing rela ons with Japan as the
issue con nues to do with other Asian countries.31 Moreover, former
Japanese colonial rule is o en praised for its efficiency, moderniza ons,
and cultural impact. Older genera ons in Taiwan, exemplified by former
president Lee, o en speak good Japanese and cherish the countries'
close historical bonds. Architecture from the colonial period proliferates
and is appreciated as a na onal treasure, whereas most buildings from
that period were torn down in the PRC and North and South Korea. For
its part, the younger genera on appears enamored with Japanese pop
culture, looking to Tokyo as the arbiter of contemporary fashion, media,
and technology (these enthusiasts are known as harizu, or Japanophile
geeks). This is reciprocated by the Japanese (including hataizu, or
Taiwanophile geeks), who account for one-third of foreign tourists to
Taiwan, where they can be sure of familiar language and symbols and
where they will be warmly received by the populace.32

The mutual confidence and goodwill generated by such so power

assets should not be underes mated, and Taipei has not been slow to
capitalize on this. For example, during the 2009 "Taiwan-Japan special
partnership promo on year," tourist, cultural, and youth exchange
ac vi es were sponsored; flights were inaugurated between Taipei
Songshan Airport and Tokyo's Haneda Airport; and a Taiwan
representa ve was posted to Sapporo. These developments have been
further reinforced by Taiwan's unprecedented response to the 2011
Tohoku earthquake. Taipei dispatched disaster relief teams, and TECO
undertook strenuous ac vi es to provide moral and material comfort to
Japan. Though it is difficult to find conclusive data, all sources indicate
that through a combina on of government and private dona ons
Taiwan was unques onably the largest donor by a significant margin
(contribu ng $186-$260 million), with the United States second,
followed very distantly by South Korea and China.33 The Japanese have
responded to this gesture on all levels, with official thanks, private
ini a ves, and numerous tokens of apprecia on, such as the gi of two
rare red-crowned cranes to the Taipei Zoo. The Japanese weekly
magazine Shukan Shincho proclaimed that "Taiwan has donated more
money than any other country or region in the world, surprising the
Japanese and making them realize Taiwan is a true friend."34 A study
carried out by the Interchange Associa on further revealed that Japan is
Taiwan's favorite country.35 This feeling is amply reciprocated, with Lam
no ng that "many Japanese view Taiwan as the friendliest poli cal
en ty toward Japan in Asia, if not in the world."36 This all adds up to
what Sun iden fies as a "cross-genera onal effort for the Taiwanese to
reach out and deepen es with Japan."37

External Contexts

Taiwan-Japan rela ons do not exist in a vacuum. Both countries' foreign

policies are profoundly affected by the region's two major powers, the
PRC and the United States.

China

Beijing casts an ominous specter over what could otherwise be

interpreted as one of the most cordial rela onships between
neighboring countries in the world. China's treatment of Taiwan as a
"renegade province" and its determina on to use force against the
island in certain circumstances, enunciated in the 2005 An -Secession
Law, ensure that both capitals must tread carefully in their bilateral
rela ons (especially in the military or defense sphere). Poli cal—or, in
the case of Taiwan, military—threats from Beijing cannot be
disregarded, and Tokyo grows ever more fearful of China's growing
strength in contrast to its own na onal stasis. A shared sense of
strategic threat from the PRC subliminally unites Taiwan and Japan,
while officially dividing them. In addi on, both countries have deep and
extensive economic rela ons with the PRC. This level of
interdependence makes them extremely vulnerable to retalia on in the
event that Beijing is displeased by their individual or joint policies. This
reality was crudely demonstrated to Tokyo in 2010, when the PRC
suspended shipments of rare earth metals to Japan a er a mari me
clash over the Diaoyu Islands. This incident also caused a minor ri
between Taipei and Tokyo, but interes ngly Taipei rebuffed overtures
from Beijing to cooperate on puni ve measures against Japan.

These and a constella on of other factors mean that rela ons between
both Taiwan and Japan vis-à-vis the PRC may be generally characterized
as "cold poli cs, hot economics" (zheng leng jing re). Trilateral rela ons
are further complicated by the fact that the poli cal and business elites
in Taiwan and Japan are determined to reap the economic benefits of
closer engagement with the PRC, while their publics (and defense
personnel) o en demonstrate ambivalent a tudes toward China.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that cross-strait poli cal rela ons are
currently quite healthy, a factor that reassures a Tokyo worried about
any crisis that will disrupt trade or ini ate a conflict.

The United States

The diploma c postures of Taiwan and Japan are also condi oned by
their alignment with the United States. Now that the Obama
administra on has begun to extricate itself from the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan, it has started to refocus its energies on the pivotal Asia-
Pacific region.38 The United States is currently taking an ac ve role in
issues such as the South China Sea dispute, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), and democracy in Myanmar, as well as enhancing its military
presence in northern Australia. What are the ramifica ons of this new
approach with regard to Taiwan's predicament?

Though Washington repudiated the 1952 formal defense pact, replacing

it with the much weaker Taiwan Rela ons Act of 1979, the United States
s ll remains commi ed in principle to the defense of the island. Under
the current arrangement, Taipei retains broad support from Washington
for its de facto independence, assistance with military training, and
technology. On the other hand, Washington places a major emphasis on
deepening rela ons with its most powerful Asian ally: Japan. Tokyo
enjoys a firm defense pledge under the 1960 Mutual Security Treaty,
including a nuclear guarantee. According to the 1996 U.S.-Japan Joint
Security Declara on, the revitalized U.S.-Japan alliance includes joint
strategic interests in "situa ons in areas surrounding Japan," thus
theore cally making it applicable to a Taiwan Strait crisis. Yoshihide
Soeya goes as far as to claim that Japan has no independent policy
stance toward Taiwan, but that its behavior is shaped wholly by the U.S.-
Japan alliance.39

As men oned earlier, there is no explicit agreement by Japan to come to

Taiwan's defense in the event of an a ack. However, the United States
would most likely be engaged, which would automa cally bring Japan
into the conflict due to the sta oning of U.S. forces on its islands and
Washington's nonnego able expecta ons of support. Lam observes that
"these condi ons mean that Japan will be involved in any Taiwan Strait
conflict should the United States choose to intervene, regardless of
whether Japan wishes to be a party to cross-strait hos li es."40 Indeed,
public opinion in Japan is sanguine about the prospect of providing U.S.
forces with support in the event of such a conflict, with approximately
60% of Japanese in favor.41 This is just as well, since one U.S. official
bluntly stated that "if Americans and Chinese are killing each other"
over Taiwan and "Japan doesn't support us, the [U.S.-Japan] alliance is
dead."42 The Chinese are perfectly cognizant of this and, as Soeya
notes, see the "direct linkage of the alliance with the security of
Taiwan."43

Not surprisingly, U.S. military forces in the region con nue to preoccupy
themselves with their ability to force the Taiwan Strait in the teeth of
the PLA's so-called an -access and area-denial strategy (A2AD).44
Finding a way to respond to ever-improving Chinese missile capabili es
is the key challenge in countering A2AD. In this respect, the United
States is con nuing to assist the Taiwanese in supplemen ng their
indigenous capabili es (Tien Kung I, II, and III) with American systems
(Patriot and Hawk) and, in the event of conflict, would presumably add
its own na onal capabili es, such as Aegis, to the defense.45 However,
one recent problem for Taiwan appears to be a weakening poli cal
determina on on the part of Washington to support Taipei
unequivocally, exemplified by the failure to provide Taiwan with the F-16
C/D fighter planes it had requested. Instead, Washington agreed to
retrofit exis ng airframes, a poor alterna ve. While the United States'
inten on may have been to avoid provoking the PRC, this decision sent a
chilling signal to not only Taiwan but also Japan. The la er may have
viewed this as a litmus test of Washington's commitment to defend its
allies.

What do these trends add up to? The predicament for Taiwan and Japan
is best summed up by iden fying the diverging economic and strategic
interests men oned above. In the realm of economics, Taipei and Tokyo
have seemingly bandwagoned with the PRC's great opportuni es. This
increases Beijing's leverage over both countries, regardless of China's
military capabili es in the Taiwan Strait or its ability to project naval
force toward the Japanese archipelago (what Beijing dubs the first
"island chain" in its long-term strategy to break out into the Pacific
Ocean). However, any flagrant exercise of Beijing's economic weapons
will create insecurity in Taiwan and Japan, drawing them strategically
closer both to the United States and to each other in order to balance
such threatening behavior. Lam asserts that "the Japanese and the
Taiwanese likely will feel closer to each other than to the Chinese,
especially if the percep on of a threat from China looms. This sen ment
will help underpin the good informal es between the na ons."46
In prac ce, Taiwan's con nued autonomy and modest military-strategic
contribu on to the containment of the PRC are cri cal to the security of
Japan and the U.S. forward deployment in East Asia. In a zero-sum
game, the loss of Taiwan to the Chinese side would gravely weaken the
U.S.-Japan strategic posi on. In par cular, Wang observes that should
China control Taiwan, "China would be in a posi on to blockade the sea
lanes around Taiwan, which are cri cal for Japanese oil shipping, or
[could] a empt to take over the Senkaku islands."47 A friendly and
autonomous Taiwan also precludes the sta oning of PRC air and missile
forces closer to Japanese territory. Likewise, Taiwan holds de facto
sovereignty over Taiping (Itu Aba) Island in the Spratly island chain of
the South China Sea. This island group is strategically significant due to
its loca on and surrounding resources, and there are compe ng claims
by Taiwan, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. Japan,
along with the United States and the Associa on of Southeast Asian
Na ons (ASEAN), does not recognize Taipei's sovereignty over this
territory.48 Yet Tokyo would prefer that this island chain remain out of
the hands of Beijing, since it sits astride Japan's vital communica on
routes.49

Assuming the priority of strategic over economic interests in the final

analysis, is the United States willing and able to protect both countries?
This dynamic cuts two ways. On the one hand, Taipei and Tokyo worry
about abandonment by Washington. In the event that they come into
conflict with the PRC, the loss of the United States as an ally would most
likely lead them to capitulate. On the other hand, wan ng to enjoy the
economic benefits of the rela onship with Beijing, Taiwan and Japan
fear that geostrategic compe on or conflict between the great powers
could entrap them in a crisis they would rather avoid. For Tokyo, there
remains the anxiety that the United States "may drag Japan into an
unwanted war with China, which may place Japan at the mercy of
China's nuclear missiles."50

Schema for Con nued and Renewed Coopera on

In a shi ing and uncertain global and regional landscape, modali es for
security coopera on are being redefined.51 No longer is the Cold War
model of formal defense pacts a viable op on for new or upgraded
bilateral and mul lateral rela onships. Moreover, extant alliances, such
as NATO or the U.S.-South Korea and U.S.-Japan alliances, are being
greatly reconfigured. There are two reasons for what Rajan Menon calls
"the end of alliances."52 First, tradi onal military alliances are seen as
too constric ng in an unpredictable security environment; powers
prefer to retain greater autonomy and the op on to pursue more
flexible hedging strategies.53 Second, the forma on of any new and
explicit military alliance pact, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, would
be seen by its puta ve targets as being inexcusably provoca ve,
precipita ng a crisis that would lead to massive arms races or the
forma on of counter-alliance blocs. In addi on, the special
circumstances of quasi-statehood and renuncia on of de jure
independence further preclude such an op on and compel Taipei to
pursue alterna ve and more subtle forms of alignment. Given such
general and na onally specific circumstances, states have eschewed
new alliance pacts and relied on more informal and flexible instruments.
There are three archetypes of alignment in the 21st century that could
poten ally serve as schema for allied coopera on between Taipei and
Tokyo. These are presented in order of increasing desirability but
decreasing achievability.

Maintain the Status Quo: Tacit Alignment

The first op on is to maintain the bilateral rela onship in its current

form: a tacit or virtual bilateral alignment, but one that in substance
amounts to li le more than exceedingly cordial rela ons. Such a
con nua on is unlikely to destabilize rela ons with Beijing or
Washington, but there would be no increase in commitment or benefits
for Taipei from Japan. Wang argues that "tampering with the exis ng
policy [with regard to Taiwan] can only jeopardize Japan's interests in
China, which greatly outweigh its interests in Taiwan."54 Significant
steps have certainly been taken under the present rela onship, such as
the investment protec on agreement (which may serve to
ins tu onalize coopera on in the direc on of the second op on
below). However, although Japan (influenced by the United States)
backed Taiwan's entry to the World Health Assembly, whether Japan will
support Taipei's efforts toward membership in the TPP is open to
debate, as no comment has been made on this by the Japanese side.
Overall, the con nua on of business as usual does not relieve any of the
pressure on Taiwan's ghtening interna onal space and provides no
addi onal reassurance for the island's security. This is an acceptable but
subop mal outcome.

Strategic Partnership

In 2009, President Ma called for a "special partnership" between Taiwan

and Japan, perhaps echoing periodic calls for a Taiwan Rela ons Act-
type agreement with Tokyo.55 Such an arrangement could be built
around the commonly employed model of "strategic partnership,"
though it need not be explicitly referred to as such. This op on basically
involves further codifica on and deepening of achievements made
under the current status quo. Indeed, the recent 2010 memorandum of
understanding could be seen as a step in this direc on. It covers a wide
range of poten al func onal areas of coopera on, including trade and
commerce, tourism, academia, culture, technology, disaster preven on,
environmental protec on, mari me security, joint efforts to combat
crime, agriculture and fishery, local government, and the media.56
Moreover, seeking to expand and deepen economic rela ons, a Japan
Chamber of Commerce and Industry white paper has advocated for a
direct channel to facilitate ministerial-level bilateral links—an important
component of other such strategic partnerships.57 Beijing itself has
been promiscuous in the forging of such special bilateral partnerships,
and they are by no means mutually exclusive, binding, or provoca ve to
other par es. A strategic partnership can be readily cons tuted around
the bases of coopera on already enumerated in the first part of this
ar cle. Given the commonali es men oned previously, collabora on on
tackling nontradi onal security threats seems eminently possible. Taipei
and Tokyo could reach further memoranda of understanding on issues
such as environmental risks, pandemics, and piracy, and perhaps also on
terrorism and counter-prolifera on. The ROC's 2011 Na onal Defense
Report, for example, states:

In addi on to force development and possible enemy threat, the

Ministry of Na onal Defense a aches great importance to
unconven onal security issues, because the threat of terrorism,
complex disasters (earthquake, tsunami, typhoon, nuclear disaster) and
pandemics to people's lives and proper es is no less than war.58

The emphasis placed on the role of ROC armed forces in disaster relief
opera ons creates strong synergies and possibili es for coopera on
with Japan, which is s ll recovering from the 2011 earthquake and
tsunami. There are strong precedents for increased coopera on in this
field. Japan provided aid and dispatched its disaster relief team in the
wake of Taiwan's 1999 earthquake and the flood damage caused by
Typhoon Morakot in 2009. This ar cle has already noted how strongly
Taiwan reciprocated with financial and technical assistance in the
a ermath of the Tohoku earthquake, once again reinforcing the
goodwill between the two countries and peoples. Such new emphases
are mirrored in Japan's 2011 Na onal Defense Program Guidelines in
the "dynamic defense force" concept—which includes responding to
emergencies as a core mission in the context of defense restructuring
and force redeployments to Japan's southern regions (closer to
Taiwan).59 In addi on, what Tokyo labels "gray zone disputes"—that is,
"confronta ons over territory, sovereignty and economic interests"—are
as much a poten al problem for Taiwan as they are for Japan, the
source of tension more o en than not being the PRC.60 This could
incen vize low-key mari me and surveillance coopera on between
Taiwan and Japan, especially in the areas adjacent to both countries.

Such a strategic partnership seems to offer tangible benefits in both the

func onal and formal consolida on of bilateralism. Though difficul es
might arise due to the abnormal status of Taiwan, the forma on of a
strategic partnership is en rely in accord with Japan's current policies of
se ng up such alignments, as indicated by its upgraded bilateral
rela ons with Australia, India, Vietnam, and others.61 As Daniel Sneider
notes, the Japanese government seeks es in Asia "with countries such
as India, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia...[to]...create a security
structure in Asia that can cope with the rise of China's power."62 This
strategy resonates with Taipei's interests. A strategic partnership could
serve to offset Taiwan's overdependence on Washington, but also
simultaneously reinforce its unofficial posi on in the U.S. hub-and-spoke
alliance system by a aching it more firmly to the United States' most
important allied "spoke," Japan. This model would be a posi ve and
highly desirable outcome for Taipei.

Trilateralism

According to Mathieu Duchâtel, "Taiwan's security is now envisaged on

a trilateral level."63 Indeed, trilaterals and other mini-laterals, as
men oned above, are now becoming an integral part of the regional
security architecture. Though this is the most difficult alignment model
for Taipei to achieve, it may offer the most tangible benefits to na onal
security, par cularly in strategic affairs. Sun argues that "the United
States should encourage growing affinity between Japan and Taiwan
because this would create a more balanced triangular alliance network
among the three and thereby lessen America's security burden in
protec ng Taiwan from China's threat."64 Former president Chen
apparently ar culated such a desire, calling for a "quasi-military
alliance" between the three.65 The inclusion of Taiwan in such a new
triangle with Washington and Tokyo would likely raise the ire of Beijing,
which would naturally protest that the move intrudes into the PRC's
internal affairs. Whether such a configura on could be achieved virtually
—genera ng a de facto shadow alliance (like the TSD)—remains to be
seen.

This is not to say that seemingly independent moves by one country or

the other cannot serve to consolidate broader security es. A good
example is Japan's move to extend the air defense iden fica on zone
(ADIZ) around territories in the East China Sea and explore possibili es
for Japanese military and surveillance development of Yonaguni Island,
just 65 miles from Taiwan, straddling the PRC's "first island chain." In
2007 a U.S. government official noted that "Yonaguni Island, as the
Japanese territory forward located closest to Taiwan, foreseeably could
become a hub for mine countermeasures opera ons in the event of a
con ngency in the Taiwan Straits."66 In general, Washington welcomes
enhanced Taiwan-Japan bilateral coopera on, provided it does not
trigger an excessive response from Beijing. In fact, promo ng such
coopera on is part of a subtle American strategy of networking the
"spokes" of the U.S. alliance system in Asia, whereby individual allies of
the United States augment their own bilateral rela ons, thus crea ng a
denser and more cohesive regional alliance web.
Perhaps an easier alterna ve trilateral would be the par cipa on—
probably informal or virtual—of Taiwan in a tacit concert of regional
middle powers.67 In 2000, then vice president-elect Anne e Lu
suggested that Japan lead such a coali on of middle powers in
Northeast Asia.68 Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea have much in
common, both in terms of democra c values and security concerns.
However, while such a triangle of middle powers has much to
recommend it, it faces many of the foreign policy obstacles that have
already been men oned with regard to the bilateral and trilateral
schemes discussed above.

Conclusion

The current state of Taiwan-Japan rela ons appears to be extremely

posi ve. A release from the Taiwan MOFA declares:

The Japan-Taiwan Special Partnership is not just a slogan, as policies will

be put into ac on in the most effec ve and efficient manner. Our goal is
to strengthen mutual understanding and a more comprehensive
partnership with Japan by expanding the depth and scope of our
bilateral rela onship.69

A MOFA spokesperson even claimed that "right now, bilateral es

between Taiwan and Japan are at their best ever."70 Excep ng perhaps
the occasional diploma c skirmish over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands,
there is no reason to doubt this proclama on or to expect any reversal
in the momentum of bilateral rela ons. President Ma has declared that
he is "pro-Japanese, not an -Japanese" and "Japan's best friend."71
Neither the recent change in leadership in the DPJ nor a poten al
change of government following the ROC elec ons in 2012 is likely to
affect this situa on. In the la er case, the opposi on Democra c
Progressive Party (DPP) "comprises mostly Taiwanese who appear to like
Japan be er than mainland China."72 Public support for Japan in Taiwan
is also phenomenal: a recent survey found that 91.2% of respondents
thought Taiwan-Japan rela ons were "good" or "very good" (an increase
of approximately 10% since 2009).73

Nevertheless, this op mis c outlook is tempered by some serious

obstacles. External pressure from Beijing and the United States places
limits on the prospects for augmented bilateral coopera on. This is
par cularly true with regard to explicit military-defense coopera on.
Progress in this sphere must be covert, cau ous, and incremental, and
significant developments are unlikely to occur unless the policies of the
major powers shi drama cally. However, Taiwan's objec ves of
increasing its interna onal space and improving its security can be
advanced in partnership with Japan on nontradi onal security issues,
alongside other confidence-building measures. As the ROC's 2011
Na onal Defense Report indicates, "it has become a global consensus
that unconven onal security issues are a threat to people's lives and
proper es no less than conven onal security issues, such as military
conflicts."74 Hence, the opportuni es for expanding the two countries'
joint capaci es in disaster relief opera ons and in areas of
environmental, scien fic, and technical coopera on will work to bolster
their already deep economic es and overall security.

Thomas S. Wilkins

Thomas S. Wilkins is a Senior Lecturer in Interna onal Security at the

University of Sydney. He can be reached at
<thomas.wilkins@sydney.edu.au>.

Note

The author would like to thank the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan
for funding this research through a Taiwan Fellowship and his gracious
hosts at the Department of Poli cal Science, Na onal Taiwan University.
Thanks also to Niamh Cunningham and Penjai Sinsamersuk for their
assistance in preparing the ar cle and to the anonymous reviewers for
their valuable comments on the ini al dra .

1. Jing Sun, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Unofficial in Name Only," Asian

Survey 47, no. 5 (2007): 791.

2. Lam Peng-Er, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Between Affinity and Reality,"

Asian Affairs 30, no. 4 (2004): 249.

3. Mathieu Duchâtel, "Taiwan: The Security Policy of the Chen

Government since 2000," China Perspec ves, no. 64 (2006): 8.

4. See " 'The World and Japan Database Project': Documents Related to
Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," Ins tute of Advanced Studies on Asia,
University of Tokyo, Database of Japanese Poli cs and Interna onal
Rela ons, h p://www.ioc.u-
tokyo.ac.jp/~worldjpn/documents/indices/JPTW/index-ENG.html.

5. Sun, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Unofficial in Name Only," 791.

6. See Roy Kamphausen, "Introduc on," NBR Analysis 16, no. 1 (2005):
7.

7. A good survey of their joint history is enumerated in Yoshihide Soeya,

"Taiwan in Japan's Security Considera ons," China Quarterly, no. 165
(2001): 130-46.

8. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Poli cs (New York:

W.W. Norton, 2001).

9. "Japan-U.S. Joint Declara on on Security—Alliance for the 21st

Century," Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, April 17, 1996,
h p://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/security.html.

10. Kamphausen, "Introduc on," 8.

11. Anthony Faiola, "Japan-Taiwan Ties Blossom as Regional Rivalry

Grows," Washington Post, March 24, 2006.

12. Andrew F. Cooper, Richard A. Higgo , and Kim Richard Nossal,

Reloca ng Middle Powers: Australia and Canada in a Changing World
Order (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 21.

13. "Forging a New Taiwan-Japan Coopera on Model," Economic Daily

News, March 25, 2011.

14. Grace Soong, "Taiwan Signs Historic Pact with Japan," China Post,
September 23, 2011.

15. Meg Chang, "Rebuilt Trust Cements Taiwan-Japan Rela ons," Taiwan
Today, January 3, 2011, h p://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?
xItem=141106&CtNode=436.

16. Jason Tan and Ted Yang, "JCCI Urges Taiwan, Japan to Ink FTA," Taipei
Times, November 27, 2011.

17. Chinmei Sung, "Japan, Taiwan Sign an Investment Accord as

'Stepping Stone' to an FTA," Bloomberg, September 22, 2011.

18. Yasuhiro Matsuda, "Improved Cross-Strait Rela ons Confusing to the

Japanese," AJISS Commentary, no. 80 (2009): 2.

19. Kazuhide Minamoto and Satoshi Saeki, "Ma: Japan, Taiwan Should
Enter China as Partners," Daily Yomiuri, July 23, 2011,
h p://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/world/T110722004765.htm.

20. Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, The Council on Security and
Defense Capabili es Report:Japan's Vision for Future Security and
Defense Capabili es (Tokyo, October 2004).
21. Joseph S. Nye Jr., So Power: The Means to Success in World Poli cs
(Cambridge: PublicAffairs, 2005).

22. Qingxin Ken Wang, "Taiwan in Japan's Rela ons with China and the
United States a er the Cold War," Pacific Affairs 73, no. 3 (2000): 360.

23. "Japanese PM Calls for 'Arc of Freedom' Democra c Alliance," Taipei

Times, August 23, 2007.

24. Thomas. S. Wilkins, "Towards a 'Trilateral Alliance?' Understanding

the Role of Expediency and Values in American-Japanese-Australian
Rela ons," Asian Security 3, no. 3 (2007): 251-78.

25. Lam, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," 258.

26. Matsuda, "Improved Cross-Strait Rela ons Confusing to the

Japanese," 1.

27. Matsuda, "Improved Cross-Strait Rela ons Confusing to the

Japanese," 3.

28. "Ma Calls Himself Japan's Friend," China Post, May 9, 2011.

29. Matsuda, "Improved Cross-Strait Rela ons Confusing to the

Japanese," 3.

30. Masahiro Wakabayashi, "Taiwanese Na onalism and 'Unforge able

Others,' " in China's Rise, Taiwan's Dilemmas and Interna onal Peace,
ed. Edward Friedman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3-21.

31. Shogo Suzuki, "The Compe on to A ain Jus ce for Past Wrongs:
The 'Comfort Women' Issue in Taiwan," Pacific Affairs 84, no. 2 (2011):
221-42.

32. Sun, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Unofficial in Name Only," 801.

33. "Japan PM Thanks Taiwan for Post Disaster Relief," Taiwan Today,
September 15, 2011; and "Six Japanese Men Swim to Taiwan in Thanks
for Quake Aid," MSNBC, September 19, 2011.

34. Cited in Jimmy Chuang, "Japan Omits Largest Donor Taiwan from
Thank-You Note," Want China Times, April 16, 2011.

35. "Japan Taiwan's Favorite Country, Survey Reveals," Taipei Post,

March 24, 2010.

36. Lam, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," 252.

37. Sun, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Unofficial in Name Only," 792.

38. Hillary Clinton, "America's Pacific Century," Foreign Policy,

November 2011.

39. Yoshihide Soeya, "Changing Security and Poli cal Contexts of Japan-
Taiwan Rela ons: A View from Japan," NBR Analysis 16, no. 1 (2005): 38-
57.

40. Lam, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," 259.

41. "Japanese Support Helping U.S. Defend Taiwan: Survey," Taipei

Times, December 25, 2010.

42. Susan V. Lawrence, "Miles to Go," Far Eastern Economic Review,

November 26, 1998, 23.

43. Soeya, "Taiwan in Japan's Security Considera ons," 144.

44. A2AD is basically a mul layered and integrated set of capabili es

and tac cs designed to make U.S. naval interven on too risky
(deterrence) or too costly (punishment) for Washington to contemplate.

45. Ed Ross, "Taiwan's Ballis c-Missile Deterrence and Defense

Capabili es," Jamestown Founda on, China Brief, February 2011.
46. Lam, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," 263.

47. Wang, "Taiwan in Japan's Rela ons," 361.

48. Sco Snyder, "The South China Sea Dispute: Prospects for Preven ve
Diplomacy," United States Ins tute for Peace, Special Report, no. 18,
August 1996.

49. In fact, in World War II, Japan itself used the island as a submarine
base to interdict shipping lanes.

50. Wang, "Taiwan in Japan's Rela ons," 371.

51. Thomas S. Wilkins, " 'Alignment,' Not 'Alliance'—The Shi ing

Paradigm of Interna onal Security Coopera on: Toward a Conceptual
Taxonomy of Alignment," Review of Interna onal Studies (2011),
available on CJO 2011 doi:10.1017/S0260210511000209.

52. Rajan Menon, The End of Alliances (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).

53. Patricia Weitsman, Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace,

Weapons of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

54. Wang, "Taiwan in Japan's Rela ons," 360.

55. Matsuda, "Improved Cross-Strait Rela ons Confusing to the

Japanese," 3.

56. Shih Hsiu-Chuan, "Taiwan and Japan Sign Bilateral Rela ons MOU,"
Taipei Times, May 1, 2010.

57. "Japan-Taiwan Talks Urged by JCCI," China Post, November 1, 2009.

58. Ministry of Na onal Defense, Na onal Defense Report (Taipei,

2011), 16-17.
59. Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, Na onal Defense Program
Guidelines for FY 2011 and Beyond (Tokyo, December 17, 2010),
h p://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/kakugike ei/2010/ndpg_e.pdf.

60. Na onal Ins tute for Defense Studies, East Asian Strategic Review
2011 (Tokyo: Japan Times, 2011), 244.

61. Thomas S. Wilkins, "Japanese Alliance Diversifica on: A Compara ve

Analysis of the Indian and Australian Strategic Partnerships,"
Interna onal Rela ons of the Asia-Pacific 11, no.1 (2011): 115-55.

62. Daniel Sneider, "The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under
the Democra c Party of Japan," Asia Policy, no. 12 (2011): 100.

63. Duchâtel, "Taiwan: The Security Policy of the Chen Government

since 2000," 8.

64. Sun, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons: Unofficial in Name Only," 791.

65. Faiola, "Japan-Taiwan Ties Blossom as Regional Rivalry Grows."

66. "Ex-U.S. Japan Desk Diplomat Reported that Yonaguni Island Could
Become a Hub for Mine Countermeasure Opera ons," Ryukyu Shimpo,
September 15, 2011,
h p://english.ryukyushimpo.jp/2011/10/01/3034//.

67. "Asia's 'Middle Powers' Seek to Balance China: Think-Tank," China

Post, September 8, 2010.

68. See Straits Times, August 17, 2000.

69. "The Year to Bolster Japan and Taiwan's Special Partnership,"

Republic of China, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Press Release, January 20,
2009, h p://www.ioc.u-
tokyo.ac.jp/~worldjpn/documents/texts/JPTW/20090120.S1E.html.
70. "Japan Ties to Stay Strong as PM Changes: MOFA," China Post,
August 30, 2011.

71. "Ma Calls Himself Japan's Friend," China Post, May 9, 2011.

72. Lam, "Japan-Taiwan Rela ons," 249.

73. "Poll Shows Most Japanese Feel Affec on for Taiwan," Taipei Times,
June 3, 2011.

74. Ministry of Na onal Defense, Na onal Defense Report, 20.

The Asian Monetary Fund Reborn?
Implications of Chiang Mai Initiative
Multilateralization
William W. Grimes

Keywords
Chiang Mai Ini a ve, Asean +3, Asian Monetary Fund, IMF

Execu ve Summary

This ar cle analyzes the current implica ons and likely future course of
Chiang Mai Ini a ve Mul lateraliza on (CMIM), which some observers
have argued is a major step toward the crea on of an Asian monetary
fund (AMF) that would be fully autonomous from the IMF.

Main Argument

Like the previous version of the Chiang Mai Ini a ve (CMI), CMIM seeks
to provide an efficient and credible mechanism for offering emergency
liquidity to ASEAN +3 economies in currency crises. "Mul lateraliza on"
in this case means the crea on of formal reserve pooling arrangements,
a weighted vo ng system for disbursement of funds, and enhancement
of surveillance capabili es.

CMIM differs in fundamental ways from the AMF concept. Much

a en on has been given to the establishment of weighted vo ng for
disbursement of funds, but in fact CMIM maintains the CMI's exis ng
"IMF link," whereby crisis countries are able to access the bulk of their
line of emergency credit only a er having already entered into
nego a ons with the IMF for a standby agreement. Technocra c
advocates of delinking CMIM from the IMF have looked to surveillance
measures within ASEAN +3 to replace IMF surveillance and
condi onality. In contrast, this ar cle argues that the need for third-
party enforcement through the IMF link arises from the poli cs of Sino-
Japanese rivalry and therefore cannot be eliminated through
ins tu onal measures.

Policy Implica ons

• Though East Asian economies avoided currency crises during the

2008–10 global financial crisis, the crisis offers many lessons. The
near-crisis in South Korea, which was managed mainly through a
temporary swap agreement with the U.S. Federal Reserve, revealed
gaps in CMI and CMIM coverage. The 2010 Greek crisis
demonstrated anew the dangers of depending on regional
surveillance and enforcement mechanisms for financial and
currency stability.

• U.S. interests are not threatened by CMIM, even though the

process specifically excludes the U.S. from direct involvement,
because the ins tu onal need for the IMF link ensures for the me
being that CMIM will remain nested within global ins tu ons.

• The U.S. should engage ASEAN +3 governments in ongoing

regional and global discussions of how currency crises can best be
prevented and managed.

Since 2000, East Asia has seen an efflorescence of regionally based

economic ini a ves touching on trade, investment, financial regula on,
and preven on of currency crises. The growing literature on these
developments no longer asks whether regionalism is happening or
whether it will be consequen al. Rather, the debate has shi ed to trying
to understand the nature of regional coopera on and its poli cal and
economic causes and consequences. 1
There is considerable varia on across issue areas with regard to the
shape and membership of regional ini a ves. Trade coopera on, with
the notable excep on of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and
assorted AFTA +1 agreements, has been primarily bilateral in nature,
leading to a bewildering "noodle bowl" of cross-cu ng free trade
agreements (FTA) with varied rules of origin. 2 Coopera on on cross-
border investment, likewise, has been primarily bilateral through
investment trea es and frameworks for agreement, many of them
a ached to FTAs. Limited subregional agreements such as within the
Associa on of Southeast Asian Na ons (ASEAN) and the new trilateral
investment treaty among Japan, China, and South Korea tend only to
confirm the fragmented and compe ve nature of "regional"
investment coopera on.

Only in finance and currency-related issue areas has coopera on among

East Asian economies actually developed on a regional basis, with
ASEAN +3 as the main arena. 3 The Chiang Mai Ini a ve (CMI), which
was designed to provide dollar liquidity for countries experiencing
currency crises, is by far the most advanced component of East Asian
financial regionalism. The CMI is the only ASEAN +3 ini a ve that
commits par cipa ng states to significant and reciprocal financial
obliga ons. Although CMI lending is formally supplemental to
Interna onal Monetary Fund (IMF) funds, the ini a ve's origins in
debates over the role of the United States and IMF in crisis management
during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis have led to an ac ve debate
among scholars, policymakers, and opinion leaders over whether the
CMI will eventually stand on its own as a regional alterna ve to the IMF.
On March 23, 2010, financial coopera on among ASEAN +3 countries
moved to a new stage when ASEAN +3 officially implemented Chiang
Mai Ini a ve Mul lateraliza on (CMIM), which replaced the exis ng
network of bilateral agreements with a reserve pooling arrangement
totaling $120 billion. While the official press release was a terse four
paragraphs, many observers saw the move as a major step toward the
inevitable fulfillment of the 1997 proposal to create an Asian monetary
fund (AMF) that would be independent from the IMF and U.S. influence.
Since first being proposed, the AMF concept has excited advocates of
Asian regionalism and caused U.S. Treasury officials concern.

This ar cle addresses the ques ons of what CMIM is, where it is going,
and what implica ons the process has for the United States and the
ASEAN +3 economies. It argues that CMIM will not transform the CMI
into a de facto AMF (throughout this ar cle "AMF" is used as short-hand
for a regional facility that is fully independent of the IMF) but that CMIM
is an important milestone signaling a maturing of ASEAN +3
coopera on. Although for the moment there are no nega ve
implica ons for U.S. economic or poli cal interests in Asia, policymakers
should stay closely engaged in the process.

The ar cle is organized as follows:

pp. 83–86 lay out the contras ng forces of economic integra on

and Sino-Japanese rivalries that have combined to shape East Asia's
dis nc ve approach to regional bailouts

pp. 86–89 describe the evolu on of the CMI from its origins in
the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and summarize how the ini a ve
was structured from its establishment in 2000 un l
mul lateraliza on in 2010

pp. 89–92 consider the impact of the 2008–10 global financial

crisis on East Asian economies, focusing par cularly on the Korean
near-crisis in fall 2008 and on na onal responses to large-scale
drops in external demand and shi s in the flow of funds

pp. 92–103 describe the details of CMIM and analyze the

implica ons of the changes that mul lateraliza on entails in light
 of both the Korean experience and the 2010 Greek crisis,
demonstra ng that CMIM is closely entwined with global standards
and ins tu ons such as the IMF and that the poli cs and
economics of regional coopera on will likely ensure that CMIM
stays nested in the global architecture

pp. 103–4 conclude the ar cle by highligh ng both the limits to

regional bailout coopera on and the benefits that the current
approach provides to CMIM members

Regionalism, Leadership, and Rivalry

There are many issues driving economic regionalism in East Asia. It is

impossible to ignore the growth of cross-border regional trade and
investment and the crea on of regional produc on networks, which
local economies have an interest in facilita ng. 4 Some authors also
point to the emergence of a pan-Asian iden ty, developed either as a
recogni on of commonali es or as a defensive reac on against a U.S.-
dominated global economic architecture. 5

Behind the analysis of the rise of East Asian regionalism (whether

implicitly or explicitly) is the assump on that such regionalism is made
possible—and indeed necessary—by the rise of East Asia poli cally and
economically. East Asian poli cal and economic elites are seeking to
structure future interac ons so as to take advantage of that rise.
Regionalism is one manifesta on of those efforts, and rules and
ins tu ons created regionally will no doubt be highly relevant to global
governance. There is considerable evidence of greater economic
coopera on among East Asian economies, but the accomplishments of
economic regionalism are as yet less impressive than the hopes and
predic ons of its strongest proponents.
A variety of explana ons have been put forward for the weakness of
regional economic ins tu ons, including economic diversity, cultural
unease with legalis c arrangements, the nascent state of a regional
iden ty, and enduring poli cal conflicts. 6 My own work, in contrast, has
focused on issues of power, par cularly with regard to the general
problem of leadership—a focus that leads inevitably to the problem of
Sino-Japanese rivalry. That perspec ve is skep cal of the ability of
ASEAN +3 to create an ins tu onal solu on to what is essen ally a
poli cal problem.

A central problem of understanding what is happening in ASEAN +3 is

that observers and par cipants look at regionalism through a variety of
prisms. Many advocates of the AMF idea, and of financial regionalism in
general, have a tendency to lament the interference of poli cs in the
regionalism project. But poli cal rivalry is a central factor in the process
of regionalism. The effects of poli cal rivalry on regionalism are
par cularly interes ng when looking at regional liquidity arrangements
where Japan's and China's economic interests are essen ally iden cal. 7
Reflec ng the pervasiveness of regional produc on networks and the
growth of regional trade and investment, both countries have a deep
interest in suppor ng the financial stability of their East Asian economic
partners. Moreover, Japan and China are the financial tans of the
region—either one could rescue one or more neighboring economies
from a currency crisis with cash on hand. (Analysts o en invoke the vast
foreign exchange reserves of China, but Japan has even greater
wherewithal, given that the yen is itself a major interna onal reserve
currency.) The sheer fact of having such capabili es means that Tokyo
and Beijing are likely to be approached in the case of a crisis, thus
compounding their stake in preven ng balance of payments crises. At
the same me, as likely creditors, they have a strong interest both in
ensuring repayment of loans and in avoiding the moral hazard that is
created when bailouts are certain and come without condi ons. Despite
the commonality of Chinese and Japanese economic interests, however,
emergency liquidity provision is also an arena in which the two states
compete for regional leadership and in which the basic problem of
mistrust has limited the scope and effec veness of regional coopera on.
As is demonstrated below, the challenges arising from compe on and
mistrust cannot be resolved through ins tu onal means, despite the
best efforts of AMF advocates.

My book Currency and Contest in East Asia develops at length the

concept of the great-power poli cs of financial regionalism. 8 This
ar cle will not recapitulate the theore cal background and logic of the
argument but instead will argue that financial regionalism in East Asia is
heavily influenced by rela ve power games among China, Japan, and
the United States. There are two overlapping games in this story: East
Asia vs. the United States and Japan vs. China.

Compe on between East Asia and the United States should sound
familiar to anyone who observed the Asian financial crisis and the deep
anger that was directed at the IMF. Scholars and other observers of East
Asian regionalism have long recognized the role of the "poli cs of
resentment" 9 in East Asian a empts to reduce dependence on (and
thus vulnerability to) U.S. macroeconomic and financial events and
policies. Although this is a useful star ng point for thinking about the
East Asia–U.S. game, it is also important to consider that the no on of
resentment, accurate though it may be in an emo onal and even
mo va onal sense, can blind observers to the ra onal nature of that
resentment and its uses. In reality, policymakers are considering actual
trade-offs in a ra onal manner. In my version of the story, financial
regionalism combines pure insurance against contagion with defense
against what Benjamin J. Cohen calls the U.S. "power to deflect." 10
Cohen argues that the preponderance of the U.S. dollar and the
dependence of producers around the world on U.S. markets have
allowed the United States to shi some costs of excessive borrowing to
current account surplus countries that have li le choice but to hold onto
deprecia ng dollars. Japan and China, as major holders of dollars, both
have good reason to try to reduce the U.S. power to deflect.

The story of the Japan-China rivalry is also a familiar one. With respect
to regional liquidity arrangements, where the two countries' economic
interests are essen ally iden cal, there are two relevant aspects of the
game: the contest for regional leadership and uncertainty about each
other's inten ons and likely behavior. Uncertainty is a par cular
challenge. Because the nature of crisis management is that decisions are
one-shot and must be made quickly, classic enforcement strategies,
such as " t for tat," do not necessarily apply.

Thus, both China and Japan are playing dual hedging games, against the
United States and against each other. Both countries also face prac cal
economic issues. With regard to the provision of emergency liquidity,
creditor states seek to ensure credibility that funds not only will be
made available to deserving partners but also will not be made freely
available when irresponsible policies have led to a crisis. In other words,
such states must confront the problem of moral hazard. Japan and China
together could make such a credible guarantee and threat if only both
countries could trust that the other would behave as promised. But they
cannot. This sets up a dynamic by which there are two other
conceivable op ons—nes ng within the global regime in order to
borrow credibility from the IMF or crea ng some sort of
ins tu onalized guarantees regarding how each will act in preven ng
and managing regional crises.

To date, the CMI has followed the nes ng strategy, but given the
unpopularity of the IMF in the emerging market economies of ASEAN
+3, there has been much discussion of purely regional arrangements.
However, ins tu onal means of overcoming the China-Japan game are
not feasible in the foreseeable future. That is why, despite the hype of a
new dawn in financial regionalism, CMIM s ll relies fundamentally on
the IMF to play the enforcer. It is also why this author predicts that an
AMF is not in the cards any me soon, unless there is a serious
miscalcula on by a major actor or un l China's regional dominance is
more clearly established.

The Road to CMI Mul lateraliza on

The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 was a cri cal juncture in the
development of East Asian regional coopera on. 11 While many
ques ons remain contested concerning the genesis of the crisis and the
response of the interna onal community, the crisis clearly laid bare the
vulnerability of East Asian economies to the nega ve effects of
globaliza on and demonstrated the inadequacy of exis ng global
ins tu ons for dealing with trauma c currency and financial crises.

In the midst of the crisis, the Japanese government proposed the

forma on of an Asian monetary fund; in the face of opposi on from the
IMF, United States, and China, the proposal was withdrawn. Details of
the proposal (if indeed they even existed beyond a broad outline) have
never been released, but the general contours are known: a regional
fund of approximately $100 billion (half provided by Japan) that would
provide large-scale liquidity rapidly and without condi ons to
economies suffering from currency crises. At the me, the IMF and U.S.
Treasury cri cized the proposal as one that would increase moral hazard
among East Asian economies; it was also widely suspected among both
scholars and pundits that the IMF was concerned with protec ng its turf
and that the United States and China were concerned about the
prospect of Japanese regional leadership. 12

The CMI, which was announced in May 2000, resurrected the idea of a
regional emergency liquidity facility, but the ini a ve differed in
fundamental ways from the AMF proposal. First, the CMI was
constructed as a network of bilateral swap agreements (BSA) among the
ASEAN +3 economies, eventually totaling over $80 billion, rather than as
a single pool of funds. Second, the bulk of the funds (90% ini ally and
80% a er 2005) were to be released only to states that had ini ated
nego a ons with the IMF for a standby agreement. This "IMF link" was
cri cized by poten al borrower countries in Southeast Asia as
perpetua ng the role of the IMF, which they saw as having exacerbated
the 1997–98 crisis. Further, the link appeared to many observers to
subvert the idea of a regional solu on to the vulnerabili es created by
financial globaliza on. The CMI and other elements of East Asian
financial regionalism did indeed support the global financial architecture
rather than rival it. 13 In prac ce, the CMI was very clearly designed to
supplement IMF resources and to provide bridge financing between the
onset of nego a ons with the IMF and the final standby agreement.
However, it is also important to note that the CMI by its very existence
cons tuted a credible threat of exit from the IMF on the part of ASEAN
+3 countries, which could be used as leverage to ensure favorable
treatment by the IMF if a CMI member were in need of a bailout. 14

Three contending explana ons have emerged for the differences

between the AMF proposal and the CMI reality. The first, which posits
an an -U.S. or an -globalist impetus for the project and which I term
the "regionalist" explana on, is that the CMI is a stepping stone toward
the re-emergence of the AMF. 15 Proponents of this posi on advocate
regional arrangements that are independent of the IMF, and argue that
in the CMI the ASEAN +3 countries maintained the broader poli cal
purpose of promo ng an East Asia–only organiza on that would exclude
the United States and IMF from crisis decisionmaking for the region.
However, par cipants also understood that opposi on by the United
States and IMF would be difficult to overcome and thus chose to
proceed in a deliberate and incremental fashion. The second
explana on, which I term the "func onalist" explana on, emphasizes
the prac cal difficul es of crea ng effec ve surveillance measures to
prevent moral hazard and seeks to address them through ins tu onal
means. 16 While there is some overlap between regionalists and
func onalists, the regionalists are generally mo vated more by a
poli cal vision of an East Asian community than by the technocra c
allure of collec ve goods.

The third explana on, which I term the "realist" explana on and which I
have advocated, is that the reliance of the CMI on the IMF reflects not
just temporary constraints such as external poli cs or underdeveloped
regional ins tu ons but rather intra–ASEAN +3 poli cal challenges that
are inherent to the project of regional coopera on. 17 Fundamentally,
the problem of emergency liquidity provision is that avoiding moral
hazard is impossible unless there is a credible threat of a aching strict
condi ons to assistance or even outright denying requests for help from
states that have brought crises on themselves through their own
macroeconomic or other policies. In order to create such credibility,
leading states (i.e., likely lenders) must either be willing to reject
requests from regional partners in the midst of crisis or be able to
delegate to an independent body the determina on of whether a given
crisis was caused by contagion or by irresponsible policies.

In East Asia, Japan and China are the primary poten al lenders and thus
are the states with both the most to lose from moral hazard and the
greatest ability to shape the decisionmaking structure. Neither Japan
nor China is willing to pay the poli cal price of refusing a neighbor in
need (especially given that neither can rely on the other for support in a
crisis), nor is either country willing to pay the poten al price of throwing
good money a er bad or of making future crises more likely. AMF
advocates o en look to the European Union as an inspira on, but
regional ins tu ons in Europe were built on the coopera on of
Germany and France under the security and economic umbrellas
sponsored by the United States. Japan and China have fundamentally
differing rela onships with the United States and also are strategic
rivals. Thus, unlike in Europe, a Sino-Japanese condominium is not
feasible. Meanwhile, given the small number and o en illiberal nature
of East Asian governments, delega on to a truly independent regional
organiza on is also not feasible. Thus, the IMF link became—and has
remained—an indispensible component of the CMI for both Japan and
China, despite a 2005 agreement that created a roadmap calling for
greater regional decisionmaking and capabili es through
mul lateraliza on of the BSA network and enhanced surveillance.

East Asian Financial Regionalism and the Global Crisis

From the beginning, East Asian financial regionalism was meant to

protect par cipa ng economies from vulnerability to global financial
and currency market vola lity so as to prevent a recurrence of the
painful economic and poli cal turmoil of 1997–98. Former Japanese
vice-minister of finance for interna onal affairs Sakakibara Eisuke, for
example, described the Asian financial crisis as the first "crisis of global
capitalism"; 18 the CMI and other aspects of financial regionalism were
meant to act as a bulwark against the next such crisis. The year 2008
delivered just such a crisis, and with a far greater magnitude and global
reach than the crisis in 1997. It is thus important to step back and take a
look at what the ASEAN +3 economies did to address it.

While there is a great deal to say about how the global crisis played out
in East Asia, for the purposes of this ar cle, three facts are essen al.
First, no East Asian economy was devastated by a financial or currency
crisis, although all were injured to some degree by the drop in U.S. and
European demand for exports. Second, no economy had to draw on its
CMI swap lines or go to the IMF for assistance; nonetheless, the ASEAN
+3 finance ministers responded to the crisis by accelera ng their plans
to significantly enhance regional financial coopera on through CMIM as
well as by strengthening surveillance. Third, East Asian economies were
protected from the crisis largely by their own individual policies,
including massive accumula on of foreign exchange reserves (which
gave ammuni on to prevent currency runs), conserva ve fiscal policies
(which provided enough fiscal slack to implement massive s mulus
programs), and, in most cases, flexible exchange Page 89] rates. 19 Yet,
although regional arrangements were not directly tested, the crisis s ll
exposed cracks in the capabili es of regional ins tu ons. These cracks
have yet to be effec vely fixed, if indeed it is possible to do so.

Backstopping Regional Liquidity: The Case of South Korea

The only East Asian economy that had a truly close brush with crisis in
this period was South Korea in the fall of 2008. Despite accumulated
foreign exchange reserves of approximately $200 billion at the me, 20
the Bank of Korea (BOK) became concerned about dollar liquidity in the
banking system. The BOK acted swi ly to head off this threat by
concluding a $30 billion swap agreement with the U.S. Federal Reserve,
which was announced on October 30. (The Fed simultaneously
announced the conclusion of iden cal swap lines with Singapore, Brazil,
and Mexico; a swap agreement with New Zealand was announced the
previous day.) 21

The ac ons of the BOK (and the Monetary Authority of Singapore) speak
volumes about the capacity of the CMI to prevent and address currency
crises. 22 Several points stand out. First, the fact that the CMI requires
the ini a on of nego a ons with the IMF makes the ini a ve virtually
unusable for an advanced economy with open financial markets, such as
South Korea; it would also be highly disrup ve for regional trade and
investment. For this reason, the +3 economies of China, Japan, and
South Korea have maintained "peace me" BSAs between their central
banks in parallel with their formal CMI swap obliga ons in order to
address yen, won, and renminbi liquidity needs in the absence of a
financial crisis. Second, while the peace me BSAs with Japan and China
were expanded to $20 billion and 180 billion renminbi (approximately
$26 billion), respec vely, a month and a half a er the Fed swap line was
agreed to, the BSAs were not u lized. In contrast, the BOK drew on the
Fed swap line five mes in December 2008 and January 2009 for a total
of $16.3 billion, which cons tuted about 60% of the BOK's emergency
provision of foreign exchange to domes c financial ins tu ons. 23 In
other words, not only was the CMI itself irrelevant to the preven on of
currency crisis, but Korea and Singapore chose to insure the stability of
their financial systems with the United States (which had been explicitly
excluded from regional financial coopera on) rather than with their
ASEAN +3 partners.

Both opera onal and prac cal factors compelled Korea to turn first to
the United States rather than to its ASEAN +3 partners. Some Japanese
and Korean officials argue that the decision to turn to the Fed was
purely opera onal: the Korean banking system required dollar liquidity,
and the peace me BSAs between the +3 central banks are denominated
in their own currencies (i.e., yen-won, renminbi-won, renminbi-yen),
which are not supposed to be converted to dollars to supplement
foreign exchange reserves. But this apparently purely technical
reasoning obscures two larger issues regarding the role of the U.S. dollar
in East Asia (and indeed the world). First, the dollar remains so
dominant as a vehicle currency and store of value in trade and finance in
the region that the need even for yen (an important interna onal
currency, unlike the inconver ble renminbi) is minimal. More broadly,
the move—not only by Korea but also by a host of other systemically
important emerging economies—to establish temporary swap lines with
the Fed as a means of preven ng specula ve a acks on their currencies
in the fall of 2008 reflects the enduring structural power of the United
States in the interna onal monetary system and financial markets. The
ming was par cularly striking—at a point at which the stability of U.S.
financial markets and the solvency of many U.S. financial ins tu ons
stood in the balance due to a global crisis of the United States' own
making, the Fed and the dollar remained the final backstop of monetary
credibility in East Asia and around the globe. Although China and other
states have railed against the dollar-based system and called for
mul lateral alterna ves, the effects have been purely rhetorical. 24

The Response of East Asian Economies to the Global Financial Crisis

East Asian macroeconomic authori es responded effec vely to the

global financial crisis with massive fiscal and monetary s mulus plans,
25 as well as with stepped-up monitoring of domes c financial
ins tu ons. This was not done in a coordinated manner, although
countries communicated with each other, the IMF, ADB, and other
interna onal interlocutors. Exchange rates adjusted, some drama cally
(e.g., the Korean won), but without crea ng currency crises. With regard
to exchange rates, there was no evidence of a coordinated response,
although governments stood ready to honor their CMI commitments if
necessary.

Though it is important not to minimize the challenges that East Asian

countries faced in terms of declines in export demand, manufacturing
produc on, and GDP, even the worst-hit among East Asia's emerging
economies (e.g., Malaysia) made it through the crisis much less scathed
than economies elsewhere. 26 Moreover, East Asian financial systems
were never seriously threatened. These were remarkable
accomplishments, indeed, in the face of the global financial crisis.

Nonetheless, it is striking that the success of East Asia as a region in

riding out the global financial crisis was based not on coordinated ac on
or regional ins tu ons but rather on the ac ons of individual
governments and central banks (even if there was spillover from the
s mulus plans of other regional economies). Moreover, their ability to
carry out those ac ons was based on a decade's worth of conserva ve
macroeconomic policies and financial supervision that were also
uncoordinated—not to men on on the massive accumula on of foreign
exchange reserves and the establishment of more or less flexible
exchange rates. ASEAN +3 financial regionalism was not relevant to the
story, even though regional coopera on had been developed precisely
to prevent and manage financial and currency crises in the region.
Indeed, the very fact that emerging economies had insured themselves
by building up massive foreign exchange reserves over the previous
decade suggests a lack of confidence in regional solu ons such as the
CMI.

CMI Mul lateraliza on and its Implica ons

Despite the apparent irrelevance of regional arrangements such as the

CMI to East Asian economies' handling of the crisis, the primary
response of ASEAN +3 as a group was to accelerate efforts to expand
and enhance regional coopera on, most notably through CMIM and the
establishment of the ASEAN +3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO)
to improve surveillance. These efforts culminated in an agreement at
the end of 2009 that represented the concrete realiza on of goals of the
2005 CMI roadmap. 27 The agreement standardized countries'
agreements around a single contract, superseded the bilateral swap
network with a reserve pooling agreement in which funds would be
disbursed based on commi ed reserves and a "purchasing mul ple,"
and set up a mechanism to improve surveillance in order to reduce
reliance on outside help for that func on. 28

CMIM seems to call for a reconsidera on of how the development of

regional liquidity facili es is understood. Advocates of the regionalist
and func onalist explana ons see the changes as confirma on that the
CMI is moving away from being simply a regional adjunct of the IMF to
being a dis nct regional alterna ve, and characterize CMIM as a major
step toward the achievement of the AMF dream. 29 (Func onalists have
tended to be more cau ous than triumphal compared to regionalists,
however, emphasizing the steps that are s ll necessary to ensure
effec ve surveillance and fund provision.) Other observers have been
more measured in their appraisals, though acknowledging that the
changes have been significant. 30

It would indeed be difficult to avoid the conclusion that CMIM was

equivalent to an AMF if one were to focus simply on the ini al press
reports in spring and summer 2009. A careful reading of the actual
ASEAN +3 statements, however, suggests that greater cau on is in order.
Although it is frustra ng that the actual agreement has not been made
public, 31 this author's discussions with various par cipants in the
process confirm that CMIM is not the AMF. Nor is it at all inevitable that
something like an AMF is the endpoint of the process.

The official press statements, though not exactly a model of clarity,

contain seven main points: 32

1. 1. The overall size of the pool of reserves is increased from

approximately $80 billion to $120 billion.

2. 2. The core objec ves are "(i) to address balance of payment

and short-term liquidity difficul es in the region, and (ii) to
supplement the exis ng interna onal financial arrangements."

3. 3. CMIM replaces the exis ng network of bilateral swap

agreements with "a common decision making mechanism under a
single contract." 33
4. 4. The agreement establishes country-specific "financial
contribu ons," which also translate into vo ng shares. The ASEAN
economies collec vely contribute 20% of the total funds, while
the +3 economies contribute the remaining 80% (Japan 32%;
China 32%, of which 28.5% is from mainland China and 3.5% is
from Hong Kong; and South Korea 16%). According to the May
2009 agreement to establish CMIM, "on decision-making
mechanism of the CMIM, the fundamental issues will be decided
through consensus of members of ASEAN+3, while the lending
issues will be decided through majority [sic]." 34

5. 5. Countries are able to borrow a "purchasing mul ple" of their

financial contribu ons, ranging from 0.5 for Japan and China to
2.5 for ASEAN-5 economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines,
Thailand, and Singapore) and 5.0 for Brunei, Cambodia, Laos,
Myanmar, and Vietnam.

6. 6. The reserve pool operates under the principle of na onal

"self- 6. management." In other words, states maintain their own
reserves but pledge an amount up to their CMI financial
contribu on in the event of a crisis. Although procedures and
condi ons for releasing funds have been standardized and
streamlined, each par cipa ng government or central bank is s ll
responsible for releasing funds from its own reserves.

7. 7. The agreement provides for the crea on of the ASEAN +3

Macroeconomic Research Office as an independent regional
surveillance unit. Essen ally, the agreement creates a three- ered
surveillance system. Regional think tanks will generate and test
ideas for how to monitor regional economic performance, AMRO
will monitor actual performance, and the ASEAN +3 finance
ministers and their subordinates will discuss performance in the
context of economic review and policy dialogue (ERPD). ERPD will
 remain the locus of state-to-state communica on regarding
policies, including cri cisms and warnings as appropriate.

The fourth and seventh points in par cular appear to support the idea
that CMIM is a major step toward an AMF-style regional organiza on
that effec vely delinks from the IMF. But there is significantly less here
than meets the eye. Although CMIM clarifies and standardizes
commitments, the ini a ve is essen ally just a more elegant version of
the ungainly CMI swap mechanism.

That these condi ons may be transi onal in nature is, of course,
debatable. However, this author's discussions with par cipants and
close observers make clear that the likely lender governments
(especially China and Japan) strongly subscribe to the principle that the
regional liquidity organiza on must not create moral hazard. Despite the
formal changes, ins tu onal guarantees remain unfeasible. Thus, while
one can look forward to the con nued development of CMIM, the
primary shi s will likely be incremental func onal improvements such
as greater clarity about how and when funds are to be released as well
as greater uniformity of ac on among the par cipa ng governments.

Weighted Vo ng

One of the most striking innova ons of CMIM is the introduc on of

weighted vo ng for lending decisions. This development has been
exci ng for AMF proponents, who have long assumed that a vo ng
procedure would be a necessary element of an autonomous regional
funding mechanism. That disbursement and renewal of CMIM funds are
to be decided on the basis of a two-thirds majority of vo ng shares does
appear consequen al at first glance. However, what is more important is
that the IMF link remains in place—in other words, appealing to the IMF
remains an essen al precondi on for even triggering the vote to release
the bulk of CMIM funds. The s pula on that CMIM will "supplement
the exis ng interna onal financial arrangements" is not just a rhetorical
sop to the IMF and United States but an accurate reflec on of reality.

There are a number of addi onal red herrings in discussions of vo ng

weights. For example, Korean analysts with whom I spoke in 2009 were
quite pleased about the fact that Korea ended up with half the vo ng
share of Japan and China. This percentage proves to be numerically
inconsequen al, however, because funding approval requires a two-
thirds majority rather than a simply majority. The face-saving
compromise between Japan and China—i.e., crea ng equal shares but
assigning a share of China's commitment to Hong Kong in order to allow
Japan to retain its nominal role as the largest contributor—is also
irrelevant to the func oning of any weighted vo ng regime.

A more important factor is that both Japan and China are one ASEAN-5
country vote short of veto power. Although for the me being a veto
would s ll likely require coopera on between Japan and China (or
perhaps China and Korea or Japan and Korea), in the future one can
imagine China working with a combina on of ASEAN client states to
threaten a crisis economy with non-disbursement of funds. This threat
could in theory be very powerful, indeed, even if never invoked.
However, the financial capacity of Japan to provide liquidity support on
its own if necessary reduces the poten al use of such a threat.

For the moment, any such exer on of power seems unlikely, both
because of China's con nuing desire to act as a benevolent regional
leader (and to keep Japan from ac ng as the good guy) and because of
the IMF link. Any state reques ng CMIM funds must already be in
nego a ons with the IMF, which significantly reduces the financial risk
for CMI lenders. Prac cally speaking, the fact that vo ng only occurs
a er the IMF has intervened means that the vote itself provides no
added value; in fact, vo ng actually adds a modicum of uncertainty to
the process at a me when a borrower would most crave certainty.
Nonetheless, the structure of CMIM does provide China with a
poten ally important future power resource. If ASEAN unity were to
fracture (perhaps in response to China-Japan rivalry), China (or Japan for
that ma er) could use its near-veto power to punish a rival's client-state
or to force a rival to bail out the client-state.

Surveillance and Enforcement

The fundamental challenge for any crisis lender is how to prevent moral
hazard among likely borrowers. This is essen ally an issue of
enforcement, which can be achieved either through imposing strict
condi ons when a loan is made (ex post condi onality) or refusing to
bail out an economy that has not met accepted standards of economic
management (ex ante condi onality). The problem is that enforcement
can be poli cally costly. The coordina on problem for ASEAN +3 is that
China is not a hegemon and a Sino-Japanese poli cal condominium is
not a near-term possibility given that neither China nor Japan can
absolutely rely on the other to s ck to a poli cally costly agreement to
enforce condi onality. In the absence of a clear leader, enforcement in
the form of either ex ante or ex post condi onality requires effec ve
delega on of decisionmaking based on clear criteria. That is why the
process of financial regionalism in East Asia has paid so much a en on
to ins tu onal mechanisms to ensure coordinated ac on. Func onalists
have pushed the agenda based on their belief that an effec ve
surveillance mechanism can be used to enforce ex ante condi onality.
35 Prac cally speaking, however, ins tu onal mechanisms cannot
simultaneously address the three essen al challenges of credibility,
effec veness, and moral hazard in the absence of a link to the IMF.

Crea ng effec ve ins tu ons to which authority could be delegated is

no easy task, and this author is skep cal that making surveillance
apoli cal and objec ve in the ASEAN +3 context is even possible.
Although such delega on is not unheard of among interna onal
organiza ons, such as the IMF, World Bank, and EU bureaucracy, 36
ASEAN +3 differs in size, character, and history from those examples. In
the absence of hegemonic leadership or dependable coopera on
between Japan and China, AMRO and ERPD represent an effort by the
two states to rely on delegated authority as a means of pu ng distance
between themselves and difficult decisions. ERPD does not, however,
provide a viable way for governments to distance themselves from
decisions on ex ante or ex post condi onality inasmuch as their official
representa ves are direct par cipants in the process. The IMF link, on
the other hand, serves up condi onality on behalf of the lenders, but
without forcing them to take responsibility, which is why the IMF has
been a rac ve to Japan and China.

With regard to AMRO, it is hard to imagine that a unit of the proposed

size and composi on (a total staff of perhaps 50 or so, consis ng of
academic and government economists from the par cipa ng
economies) would cons tute an effec ve and independent monitoring
unit. Is it, for example, reasonable to expect that government-affiliated
economists from Vietnam, China, or even Malaysia would be opera ng
—or be perceived as opera ng—as individuals, unconnected to the
policy preferences of their home countries? If not, the unit would offer
Japan and China none of the poli cal benefits of true delega on.

Another, more prac cal, considera on will erode the likely credibility of
ASEAN +3 surveillance: what will be the standards by which AMRO will
monitor regional economies? In theory, it may be possible to come up
with regionally appropriate standards that work be er than the
standardized IMF criteria. 37 Indeed, there have been some efforts to
do just that, 38 but without any proven u lity and thus no market
credibility. Of course, AMRO could simply do what the IMF already does,
albeit without the IMF's track record or budget, but that would seem to
add li le u lity. Such an outcome might be be er than the alterna ve,
however, in which markets and states are unsure whether IMF or AMRO
standards will be applied. Indeed, one senior Japanese financial
policymaker told me unequivocally in 2009 that "there cannot be two
different standards."

Limits of CMIM as a Crisis Manager

The Korean near-crisis in 2008 demonstrates an addi onal limita on of

the CMI mechanism, which has not changed in any meaningful way with
CMIM. CMIM itself is set up to deal with severe crises, hence the
a en on to condi onality (both ex ante condi onality and the IMF link).
For an advanced and highly open economy such as South Korea,
however, IMF involvement is something to be avoided at all costs
because disrup on and capital flight would be enormously costly. The
same would be true of the uncertain and likely clumsy process of a
bailout by a fledgling AMF. An economy such as South Korea's must
have access to dollars rapidly and without ambiguity of commitment if
the regional process is to be at all meaningful.

ASEAN +3 policymakers are aware of this issue, which is why the +3

central banks established peace me BSAs in 2005. These swap lines
(totaling a paltry $7 billion) were set up in 2005 to address short-term
liquidity needs unrelated to fundamental economic problems, and they
work outside the CMI process. This sort of swap line can be extremely
helpful in stabilizing global financial flows and preven ng crises. A
lender central bank, however, must ensure that the borrower will be
able to redeem the swaps in full, so that the bank does not become just
one more creditor needing to cut a deal in the case of an actual bailout.
The swaps are, therefore, not applicable in the face of major currency
shi s and are subject to significant ex ante condi onality and lender
discre on. This leads to a yawning gap between central bank swaps and
CMIM funding. Perhaps a fully realized AMF would provide a solu on,
but no one has yet made clear what this solu on would be. 39
The 2008 Korean experience demonstrated the inadequacy of the
exis ng +3 peace me BSAs in another way. The peace me BSAs
between the Bank of Japan (BOJ) and Bank of Korea (BOK) and between
the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the BOK were own-currency
swap lines. Korean banks, however, needed dollars rather than yen or
inconver ble renminbi. In theory, the BOK could have changed yen or
renminbi into dollars and then provided dollars as needed to Korean
banks. In prac ce, the BSAs did not allow for such opera ons, which
could increase the exchange-rate risk of the transac on (and, technically
speaking, would cons tute a foreign exchange market interven on in
yen-dollar or renminbi-dollar markets, albeit one carried out by the
BOK). The peace me BSAs could certainly be amended to allow
exchange into dollars, but that would introduce prac cal or legal
complica ons for the BOJ and PBOC. In any event, such amended BSAs
would s ll lack the credibility of a Fed swap line. Indeed, financial
markets would likely see the use of BOJ or PBOC swap lines to obtain
dollars as an implicit acknowledgement that the BOK could not borrow
from the Fed, which could prompt further a acks. Greater emphasis on
swap lines among China, Japan, and Korea would also leave open the
ques on of how to deal with similar crises in ASEAN if they were to
arise. Despite the desirable increase in flexibility, poten al creditors
would be back in the posi on of making fateful judgments about their
partners' policies. Crea ng consistency across ASEAN +3 in this regard
would reopen the very problems that the IMF link and surveillance are
meant to eliminate.

As if the logical challenges to the ability of ASEAN +3 to enforce ex ante

condi onality based on delegated surveillance were not sufficiently
daun ng, 2010 brought concrete evidence from Europe about the
difficul es of such enforcement. Early that year, the EU was rocked by
the sovereign debt crisis of Greece, one of the euro zone's most
peripheral members, which in turn led to the biggest crisis in the euro's
short history. This was not the way the EU—let alone the euro zone—
was supposed to work. The Stability and Growth Pact was meant to
prevent solvency crises by restric ng deficits and debts to sustainable
levels. Admi edly, there had been some breaches in the past (especially
by leading countries), and the financial crisis had necessitated new
breaches. But the scale of Greece's problem (deficits of approximately
13% of GDP and debt levels well above 100% of GDP), combined with
the flagrant decep on perpetrated by the Greek government in
concealing it, went far beyond minor or jus fiable viola ons of the pact.
With no means of devaluing its currency or of managing its solvency
problem in the short-term, the Greek government turned to its EU
neighbors for help. Four months and a trillion dollars later, leading EU
economies had managed the crisis for the me being, albeit with the
help of the IMF, which was a reputa onal blow to the European Central
Bank, and the near erup on of crises in several other euro zone
members.

The Greek crisis offered some sobering lessons for East Asia. Two
par cularly striking features of the crisis were the failures of ex ante
condi onality in the form of the Stability and Growth Pact and of
surveillance mechanisms to provide prior warning. Surveillance failed
not just at the EU level but globally. Although the IMF evalua on of
Ar cle IV on May 25, 2009, was certainly correct in warning about
Greece's fiscal challenges, the report's es mates of the country's fiscal
deficits were only roughly half as high as the reality. 40 As for the
effec veness of ex ante condi onality in changing behavior, Greece's
fiscal problems were not new, despite its commitments as a euro zone
member. Even without the impact of its finance ministry's extraordinary
decep on, Greece's fiscal picture had been bad for years and was
growing predictably worse. Indeed, even before the global crisis the
Greek government had blithely expanded spending every year (except
for 2005–06) since its entry into the euro zone in 2001. Euro zone
membership involved significant ex ante condi onality in the form of
commitments regarding fiscal deficits and debt, the inability to devalue
rela ve to EU trading partners, and the European Central Bank's
supposedly ironclad promise that it would not bail out member
governments. The crisis in Greece demonstrated that governments'
commitment to responsible economic policies cannot be guaranteed
even by treaty commitments, extensive ins tu onaliza on of
monitoring and enforcement, and issue linkages in the most developed
and highly ar culated system of interstate coopera on that has ever
existed. For East Asia, the Greek crisis was an unpleasant reminder of
the importance of ex post condi onality and the con nued relevance of
the IMF in managing crises.

Beyond CMIM: How East Asian Financial Regionalism Contributes to

Global Stability

Despite the confluence of the global crisis ini ated in the United States
and the poli cal will to mul lateralize the CMI, the ASEAN +3 process
does not appear likely to lead to the regionalists' dream of an
autonomous AMF. Nonetheless, the crisis has revealed opportuni es for
East Asian financial regionalism to improve crisis management for local
economies. Such opportuni es could be as important moving forward
as CMIM and the establishment of AMRO.

One key global development that should not be minimized is the

changed behavior of the IMF. Unlike in the Asian financial crisis, IMF
bailouts in 2008–10 were massive and did not impose unduly harsh
condi ons on economies affected by contagion. This approach reflects a
change in how crises are understood, as well as a new sense of urgency
regarding contagion. Emblema c of the IMF's new approach was the
crea on of the flexible credit line, which has essen ally eliminated
quota-based limits and puni ve interest rates for economies that have
become embroiled in crisis despite responsible fiscal, monetary, and
financial policies. This is arguably a success of the CMI, as some
observers predicted years ago. 41 It also means that ASEAN +3 will
probably not have to go it alone or cross swords with the IMF in the
next East Asian crisis.

Also on the global level, one of the interes ng side effects of the
financial crisis was the accelera on of efforts to fully involve East Asia in
global financial and monetary governance. The solidity of the East Asian
financial systems, the locomo ve power of the Chinese economy, and
Japan's decisive move in fall 2008 to expand resources available to the
IMF contributed to preven ng the global crisis from becoming a global
depression. The increasingly prominent role of East Asian governments
in global governance in the IMF (partly through quota realloca ons),
group of twenty (G-20), Financial Stability Board, Basel Commi ee, and
other ins tu ons reflects a recogni on of their growing importance in
the global economy. This means that ASEAN +3 is not the only (and
indeed probably not even the most important) venue in which East
Asian economies can work to stabilize their external financial
environment. Due to the types of issues addressed in the G-20
processes and the varying interests and levels of financial development
of East Asian par cipants, however, there is no par cular reason to
expect them to cooperate with each other in those venues.

The global crisis also highlighted the gap in ASEAN +3 arrangements

between "peace me" liquidity support and crisis management.
However, the success of the Fed-BOK swap line, ad hoc though it was,
gives hope that episodic coopera on among the leading global central
banks can address poten al crises in systemically important, well-
managed economies. There may well be room for the expansion and
revision of the +3 peace me BSAs to make the agreements more useful
in this regard. The ques on remains, however, of how to assure that
economies con nue to be "well-managed" when they have reason to
expect assistance.

Finally, East Asian economies have demonstrated in the face of the

global crisis that prudent macroeconomic and financial policies can help
countries weather even the strongest of storms. Unfortunately, these
economies have also demonstrated that having massive foreign
exchange reserves is the ul mate insurance policy in a world where
ins tu ons and commitments are not trustworthy. East Asia's
developing economies will likely con nue to remember this lesson no
ma er what ins tu onal arrangements ASEAN +3 devises and
implements.

Overall, the lessons that the ASEAN +3 economies drew from the Asian
financial crisis have served members countries well. While the key policy
choices of the last decade have been made by individual governments,
the development of the CMI has also proceeded in a way that has not
caused harm to East Asia or the global economy. Indeed, the exercise of
trying to ins tu onalize surveillance and effec ve crisis management
has probably contributed to a be er understanding of the dynamics of
crisis propaga on, preven on, and management than have previous
debt crises. This is something for which to be grateful, even for those
regionalists whose dream of an AMF cut loose from the dominance of
both the United States and the IMF is unlikely to come to frui on.

Conclusion

While this ar cle rejects the idea that CMIM cons tutes the realiza on
of the AMF concept, the ini a ve is undeniably an important step in the
crea on and defini on of regional coopera on in East Asia. CMIM is the
largest and most concrete commitment of the ASEAN +3 states to each
other, and it has the poten al to posi vely transform the course of a
currency crisis involving one or more of the smaller economies so as to
make recovery more rapid and less painful. CMIM is also a major step in
the legaliza on and ins tu onaliza on of coopera ve ventures in East
Asia; only trade agreements approximate the same level of legal
reciprocal obliga on, but there is as yet no ASEAN +3 free trade
agreement, nor does one seem imminent. As ASEAN and ASEAN +3
begin to move away from generalized principles of consulta on and
coopera ve spirit toward clearer ins tu onal commitments, some of
the uncertain es of economic life in East Asian emerging markets will
subside. Although this is not likely to lead to the realiza on of the more
grandiose concep ons of an East Asian community or to the crea on of
a single currency, over me this dynamic will be consequen al and will
support the ongoing economic integra on of the region.

Nonetheless, regional coopera on will con nue to be limited by two

enduring poli cal reali es that will be difficult to overcome. The first is
ongoing Sino-Japanese compe on and distrust. The second is the
global financial power of the United States, as seen both in the key
currency role of the dollar and in U.S. dominance in interna onal
financial ins tu ons and regimes. Poli cal scien sts are notoriously bad
at making long-term predic ons, but it seems fair to say that any
ins tu on that is predicated on a Chinese-Japanese poli cal
condominium will not be a highly credible one for years to come, if ever.
That is indeed why advocates of financial regionalism in East Asia have
paid so much a en on to ins tu onal mechanisms to ensure
coordinated ac on. As we have seen, however, the ins tu onal
mechanisms cannot simultaneously address all the issues of credibility,
effec veness, and moral hazard in the absence of a link to the IMF.

For now, the mul lateralized Chiang Mai Ini a ve aligns the common
interests of China and Japan in regional financial stability and effec vely
addresses the need to provide emergency liquidity support to East Asian
economies experiencing currency crises, without relying on Sino-
Japanese coopera on. The ini a ve does so at minimal poli cal cost to
the two countries and without disrup ng regional rela ons. CMIM is,
therefore, a very a rac ve arrangement for both states. It is possible,
however, that this will change as the balance of economic and poli cal
power shi s toward China. At some point, China may be willing to take
on the rights and responsibili es of regional enforcement. For now,
however, CMIM and the IMF are likely to reinforce each other in
suppor ng regional financial stability.

William W. Grimes

William W. Grimes is Professor and Department Chair of Interna onal

Rela ons at Boston University, and a Research Associate of the Na onal
Asia Research Program. He is the author of Currency and Contest in East
Asia: The Power Poli cs of Financial Regionalism (2009) and Unmaking
the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Poli cs, 1985–2000 (2001). He
can be reached at <wgrimes@bu.edu>.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Michael J. Green and Bates Gill, Asia's New
Mul lateralism: Coopera on, Compe on, and the Search for
Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Ellen Frost,
Asia's New Regionalism (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2008); Kent Calder and
Francis Fukuyama, eds., East Asian Mul lateralism: Prospects for
Regional Stability (Bal more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and
Christopher M. Dent, East Asian Mul lateralism (London: Routledge,
2008).

2. Richard Baldwin, "Managing the Noodle Bowl: The Fragility of East

Asian Regionalism," Asian Development Bank Ins tute (ADBI), ADBI
Working Paper Series on Regional Economic Integra on, no. 7, February
2007; Thomas G. Moore, "China's Interna onal Rela ons: The Economic
Dimension," in Interna onal Rela ons of Northeast Asia, ed. Samuel S.
Kim (Lanham: Rowman and Li lefield, 2004), 101–34; Mireya Solís and
Saori N. Katada, "Understanding East Asian Cross-Regionalism: An
Analy cal Framework," Pacific Affairs 80, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 229–57;
and John Ravenhill, "The 'New East Asian Regionalism': A Poli cal
Domino Effect," Review of Interna onal Poli cal Economy 17, no. 2 (May
2010): 178–208.

3. ASEAN +3 includes the members of ASEAN plus China, Japan, and the
Republic of Korea.

4. See, for example, Naoko Munakata, Transforming East Asia: The

Evolu on of Regional Economic Integra on (Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Ins tu on, 2006). For a somewhat different take, see Ravenhill, "The
'New East Asian Regionalism.' "

5. Paul Evans, "Between Regionalism and Regionaliza on: Policy

Networks and the Nascent East Asian Ins tu onal Iden ty," in
Remapping East Asia: The Construc on of a Region, ed. T.J. Pempel
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 195–215; Yong Wook Lee,
"Japan and the Asian Monetary Fund: An Iden ty–Inten on Approach,"
Interna onal Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 2006): 339–66; and Yong
Wook Lee, The Japanese Challenge to the American Neoliberal World
Order: Iden ty, Meaning, and Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008).

6. Gilbert Rozman, Northeast Asia's Stunted Regionalism: Bilateral

Distrust in the Shadow of Globaliza on (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); Shaun Narine, "The Idea of an 'Asian Monetary
Fund': The Problems of Financial Ins tu onalism in the Asia-Pacific,"
Asian Perspec ve 27, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 65–103; and Peter
Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American
Imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

7. This argument is fully developed in William W. Grimes, "East Asian

Financial Regionalism in Support of the Global Financial Architecture?
The Poli cal Economy of Regional Nes ng," Journal of East Asian Studies
6, no. 3 (September 2006): 353–80; and William W. Grimes, Currency
and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Poli cs of Financial
Regionalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

8. See Grimes, Currency and Contest, especially chap. 1.

9. Richard Higgo , "The Asian Economic Crisis: A Study in the Poli cs of

Resentment," New Poli cal Economy 3, no. 3 (November 1998): 333–56.

10. Benjamin J. Cohen, "The Macrofounda ons of Monetary Power," in

Interna onal Monetary Power, ed. David Andrews (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006), 31–50.

11. Higgo , "The Asian Economic Crisis"; Kent Calder and Min Ye,
"Cri cal Juncture and Compara ve Regionalism," Journal of East Asian
Studies 4, no. 2 (2004): 1–43; and Lee, The Japanese Challenge; and
Grimes, Currency and Contest.

12. Higgo , "The Asian Economic Crisis"; Eisuke Sakakibara, Keizai no

sekai seiryokuzu [Map of World Economic Power] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju,
2005); and Lee, The Japanese Challenge.

13. Grimes, "East Asian Financial Regionalism"; and Grimes, Currency

and Contest.

14. Saori Katada, "Japan's Counterweight Strategy: U.S.-Japan

Coopera on and Compe on in Interna onal Finance," in Beyond
Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Rela ons in the New Asia-Pacific, ed. Ellis Krauss
and T.J. Pempel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 176–97.
15. See, for example, Masahiro Kawai, "From the Chiang Mai Ini a ve to
an Asian Monetary Fund" (paper presented at the "Future Global
Reserve System" conference, Tokyo, March 17–18, 2010); Lee, "Japan
and the Asian Monetary Fund"; Lee, The Japanese Challenge; and Oh
Yong-hyup, "Asian Monetary Fund Is on the Horizon," Korea Herald, May
25, 2009.

16. This is essen ally the official approach and is represented by various
CMI planning documents. See Chaipravat Olarn, "Reserve Pooling in East
Asia: Beyond the Chiang Mai Ini a ve," in Monetary and Financial
Integra on in East Asia: The Way Ahead, vol. 1, ed. Asian Development
Bank (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 97–142; Eric Girardin,
"Informa on Exchange, Surveillance Systems, and Regional Ins tu ons
in East Asia," in Asian Development Bank, Monetary and Financial
Integra on, 53–96; and Kawai, "From the Chiang Mai Ini a ve."

17. Yeongseop Rhee, "East Asian Monetary Integra on: Des ned to
Fail?" Social Science Japan Journal 7, no. 1 (April 2004): 83–102; and
Grimes, Currency and Contest.

18. Eisuke Sakakibara, Kokusai kinyu no genba: Shihonshugi no kiki o

koete [The Arena of Interna onal Finance: Moving Beyond the Crisis of
Capitalism] (Tokyo: PHP Shinsho, 1998).

19. William W. Grimes, "The Global Financial Crisis and East Asia: Tes ng
the Regional Financial Architecture," EAI Working Paper Series, no. 20,
June 2009.

20. Bank of Korea, "Official Foreign Reserves," Press Release, December

3, 2008.

21. Bank of Korea, "Stabiliza on of Foreign Exchange and Foreign

Currency Funding Markets," undated web document ?
h p://www.bok.or.kr/broadcast.ac on?menuNaviId=1664
22. This has been noted ruefully by the dis nguished Japanese
economist and advocate of regionalism Masahiro Kawai. See Masahiro
Kawai, "Reform of the Interna onal Financial Architecture: An Asian
Perspec ve," ADBI, ADBI Working Paper, no. 167, November 2009.

23. Bank of Korea, "Stabiliza on of Foreign Exchange."

24. Zhou Xiaochuan, "Reform the Interna onal Monetary System," Bank
for Interna onal Se lements (BIS), BIS Review, no. 41, March 23, 2009.

25. Fitch Ra ngs, "Bank-Support and Fiscal Measures Being

Implemented in Asia-Pacific," Asia-Pacific Special Report, March 4, 2009.

26. Unlike East Asia's emerging markets, the region's most developed
economy, Japan, took a hit to its real economy that exceeded even that
of the United States and Western Europe.

27. Ministry of Finance of Japan, "Enhancement of Chiang Mai Ini a ve

(CMI)—2nd Stage," undated, received by the author in May 2005.

28. "The Joint Media Statement of the 12th ASEAN Plus Three Finance
Ministers' Mee ng," ASEAN, May 3, 2009 ?
h p://www.aseansec.org/22536.htm.

29. See, for example, Kawai, "From the Chiang Mai Ini a ve"; Oh, "Asian
Monetary Fund"; Joel Rathus, "The Chiang Mai Ini a ve's
Mul lateralisa on: A Good Start," East Asia Forum, March 23, 2009 ?
h p://www.eastasiaforum.org/2010/03/23/the-chiang-mai-ini a ves-
mul lateralisa on-a-good-start; and Joel Rathus, "The Chiang Mai
Ini a ve: China, Japan and Financial Regionalism," East Asia Forum, May
11, 2009 ? h p://www.eastasiaforum.org/2009/05/11/the-chiang-mai-
ini a ve-china-japan-and-financial-regionalism.

30. C. Randall Henning, "The Future of the Chiang Mai Ini a ve: An
Asian Monetary Fund?" Peterson Ins tute for Interna onal Economics,
Policy Brief, no. 09-5, February 2009; and Grimes, "The Global Financial
Crisis and East Asia."

31. Indeed, this author has been told by officials at the Japanese
Ministry of Finance that the text would not be released in order to
reduce the likelihood that speculators will seek to find loopholes to
exploit. Yet, to the extent that the key to CMIM's effec veness will be
market credibility, the lack of clarity about who is commi ed to what
and under what circumstances would seem to reduce the ini a ve's
credibility.

32. "Joint Press Release: Chiang Mai Ini a ve Mul lateraliza on (CMIM)
Comes into Effect on the 24th of March 2010," Monetary Authority of
Singapore, March 24, 2010 ?
h p://www.mas.gov.sg/news_room/press_releases/2010/Joint_Press_R
elease_CMIM_Comes_Into_Effect.html.

33. As noted, the "single contract" is not publicly available. The same
was true of the BSAs under the previous arrangements.

34. "The Joint Media Statement of the 12th ASEAN Plus Three Finance
Ministers' Mee ng."

35. Haruhiko Kuroda and Masahiro Kawai, "Strengthening Regional

Financial Coopera on in East Asia," Pacific Research Ins tute, PRI
Discussion Paper Series, no. 03A-10, May 2003; Girardin, "Informa on
Exchange"; Olarn, "Reserve Pooling in East Asia"; Masahiro Kawai, "East
Asian Economic Regionalism: Progress and Challenges," Journal of Asian
Economics 16, no. 1 (2005): 29–55; Kawai, "Reform of the Interna onal
Financial Architecture"; Kawai, "From the Chiang Mai Ini a ve"; and
Shinji Takagi, "Designing a Regional Surveillance Mechanism for East
Asia: Lessons from IMF Surveillance," ADB, Asia Regional Integra on
Center, Report, June 2010 ? h p://aric.adb.org/grs/papers/Takagi.pdf.
36. Michael Barne and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World:
Interna onal Organiza ons in Global Poli cs (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2004); Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank
and Their Borrowers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and
Kenneth Abbo and Duncan Snidal, "Why States Act through Formal
Interna onal Organiza ons," Journal of Conflict Resolu on 42, no. 1
(February 1998): 3–32.

37. Masaru Yoshitomi and Kenichi Ohno, "Capital-Account Crisis and

Credit Contrac on," ADBI, ADBI Working Paper, no. 2, 1999.

38. ADB, Early Warning Systems for Financial Crises: Applica ons to East
Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); ADB, "Technical Assistance:
Strengthening Economic and Financial Monitoring in Selected ASEAN+3
Countries," Technical Assistance Report, no. 39579, December 2005;
and ADB, "Enhancing the Capacity of Selected ASEAN+3 Countries for
Assessing Financial Vulnerabili es," Technical Assistance Report, no.
40565, March 2007.

39. Kawai does suggest some solu ons, which presume that the
borrower country will be a deserving one as Korea was in 2008. Yet how
to create effec ve mechanisms to deal with more ambiguous cases is
not clear. See Kawai, "From the Chiang Mai Ini a ve."

40. IMF, "Greece: 2009 Ar cle IV Consulta on—Staff Report; Staff

Supplement; Public Informa on No ce on the Execu ve Board
Discussion; and Statement by the Execu ve Director for Greece," IMF
Country Report, no. 09/244, August 2009.

41. Katada, "Japan's Counterweight Strategy."

The Rise of the Jute Manufacturing Industry
in Colonial India:

A Global Perspective *

Tara Sethia

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Journal of World History 7.1 (1996) 71-99

Indeed, theories of world history which see Europe making the world
have come to terms with the fact that Europe was constantly being
remade by that same world itself. A mul -centered approach to world
history, then, would be concerned while recognizing dispari es in
power, to draw a en on to the mul lateral character of historical
rela ons and developments.

David Washbrook

The significance of south Asia in world history is an emerging trend in

recent scholarship, as scholars of south Asia and world history engage in
dialogue to situate the history of the Indian subcon nent in a global
context. The scholarly exchange between Immanuel Wallerstein and
David Washbrookis representa ve of an ongoing de-bate over the
applicability of Eurocentric models to the historical under-standing of
non-European socie es such as India and over the ques on of a
Eurocentric versus mul centric global economy in historical perspec ve.
In this debate, Wallerstein proposes to incorporate south Asian history
under the model of world-system analysis, that is, the system of an
expanding world economy rooted in fi eenth-century Europe. In
response, and based on recent research of numerous case studies,
Washbrook argues for indigenous systems of capitalist development in
India and other Asian countries, which were mediated and o en
disrupted by nineteenth-century European imperialism. 1 Such
discussions have made south Asian history a domain for exploring new
perspec ves on issues of industrializa on and for reexamining the
connec on between colonialism and development. The jute
manufacturing industry in colonial India provides a unique case study to
illuminate further the connec on between colonialism and
industrializa on.

The rise of the jute manufacturing industry in India presents a case in

which, with respect to the industrial produc on of jute and its share in
the world market, a colony outstripped an imperial metropolis, Dundee
—once known as "Juteopolis." 2 This raises a host of interes ng
ques ons: What forces were crucial to the rise of the Indian jute
industry? What roles did colonial and metropolitan capitalism play in
the rise of the Indian jute industry? What was its connec on with the
Dundee industry? In other words, what role did Indian jute play in the
industrializa on of Dundee and the global expansion of its capital,
especially in the American West? How did the Dundee industrialists,
who perceived Calcu a as the supplier of raw jute to their mills, re-
spond to its becoming a rival manufacturing center? Why did the Bri sh
not resist the development of a manufacturing sector in India in order to
protect the Dundee industry? Did the failure of the Bri sh government
to espouse the cause of Bri sh industrial supremacy mean the
breakdown of collabora ve mechanisms between the imperial and
industrial interests in Britain, or did it reflect Britain's search for new
pa erns of collabora on to survive the changing interna onal economy
at the turn of the twen eth century?
This paper examines the rise of the jute manufacturing industry in
Calcu a and its rela on with Dundee between 1855, when the first jute
spinning mill was installed in Calcu a, and the era 1914-18, when
Calcu a completely superseded the Dundee industry as the lead-ing
jute manufacturing center of the world. This analysis highlights the
interplay of forces that operated in the context of changing pa erns of
global trade and economy. Finally, the paper also a empts to explore
two related issues: the role played by Indian raw jute in the growth of
industrializa on in Dundee and the beneficial role of the Indian jute
manufacturing industry in the context of the Bri sh em-pire, including
the cri cal role of Indian jute manufactures in balancing Bri sh overseas
trade. These points help us to understand why the rapid rise of the
Indian jute industry was not curtailed by the Bri sh to protect their own
industry in Dundee.

Jute: An Old Co age Industry in India

Produced primarily in Bengal, jute—"the golden fiber"—had been

known to India since ancient mes. 3 The use of hand-spun jute
products, such as ropes, bedding cloth, mats, screens, sacks, bags, and
clothing for the poor, had been common among Indians since the early
six-teenth century, long before the advent of the Bri sh. Some of these
items, par cularly jute bags and sacks, became popular items of export
to the neighboring coastal and southeast Asian regions, which used
them for expor ng sugar, coffee, and other products. By the end of the
sixteenth century, jute had become an important component of the
Indian economy. 4 With the enormous growth of interna onal trade in
the mid-nineteenth century, following the revolu ons in transporta on
and communica on technologies, the need for jute bags and gunny
sacks increased in an unprecedented manner. In the year 1850-51, even
a er the mechanized manufacturing of jute had begun in the Dundee
mills, Calcu a exported a total of 9,035,713 hand-loom-made gunny
sacks to several countries, including Britain. Of these, 2,290,427 —the
single largest quan ty—went to North America. 5 India also remained
the world's largest producer and exporter of raw jute. Why, then, did
the first modern jute manufacturing industry emerge in Dundee, where
jute was not even known before the nineteenth century?

The Rise of the "Juteopolis" Dundee: From Flax to Jute

Indian jute played a cri cal role in transforming the Dundee tex le
industry and provided that city with a new name, "Juteopolis." The jute
industry was also central to the accumula on and global expansion of
Dundee capital, par cularly in the United States during the 1870s and
the 1880s. Tradi onally, Dundee had specialized in the manufacturing of
coarse linen products, such as tents, tarpaulins, cloth for sailing ships,
canvas, bags, and sacks, out of flax fiber imported from Russia and the
Bal c. The demand for these products rose sharply in the nineteenth
century with the rapid growth of interna onal trade. Increasing
numbers of sailing ships required large quan es of canvas, tents, and
tarpaulins. The transport of gold from the mines of Australia and
California created an enormous demand for bagging, as did the export
of grain, wool, fer lizers, and other bulk commodi es.

The representa ves of the East India Company trading in Bengal had
been exploring the possible uses of jute, the "Indian grass," in Britain
since the late eighteenth century. 6 The man who ini ated these
experiments was Dr. Roxburgh, a Bri sh officer in the Company's service
in India. A consignment of 100 tons of jute was shipped to England in
1793. This fiber was first tried out in the making of carpet yarn at
Abingdon in Oxfordshire. 7 In the 1820s Thomas Neish, a merchant,
introduced jute fiber as a subs tute for flax and hemp manufacturing to
the tex le mills in Dundee. 8 In 1830 a ton of spun jute could be
purchased for £12, while the same amount of flax cost £54. 9 Due to the
failure of the flax crop in 1833, these experiments received significant
a en on from the Dundee tex le manufacturers and led to the birth of
a new industry in that year. At first, combining jute with flax to prepare
"union yarns" gave Dundee a bad name for tain ng its tradi onal tex le
industry. However, the use of whale oil—readily available because
Dundee had been a whaling sta on since 1800—in so -ening the jute
fiber led to the successful spinning of "pure" jute. 10 Five years a er the
emergence of the Dundee jute industry, the Dutch government ordered
a large number of "all jute" bags from the Dundee tex le manufacturers
to transport coffee beans from its East Indian possessions. 11

The jute industry superseded Dundee's exis ng flax tex le industry from
this point on. Jute from India was much cheaper than flax from Russia.
Moreover, jute possessed certain posi ve quali es, such as the ease
with which it could be dyed in several colors. Therefore, Dundee's
imports of raw jute from India con nued to grow. 12 This innova ve
measure—using jute instead of flax—allowed the Dundee tex le
industry to survive the interna onal compe on in tex le
manufacturing. The Crystal Palace Exhibi on of 1851 proved that it was
only in hessian (fine jute fabrics) and jute carpe ng that Dundee
enjoyed superiority in quality manufacturing. 13 The event that
switched Dun-dee tex le manufacturing from flax to jute was the
outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, which raised the specter of a
stands ll in the industry due to a shortage of flax from Russia. Thus,
Britain's colonial connec on with India proved crucial to the industrial
growth of Dundee.

Direct jute imports from Calcu a became an established pa ern of

trade by the 1860s. Two business firms, Cox Brothers and Gilroys,
pioneered in this venture. Cox Brothers, which had been a linen
merchant and manufacturer since 1700, established the largest jute
manu-facturing plant in Dundee. By 1863 it had even established its
own baling and pressing plants in Calcu a, which helped pack the raw
jute before it was shipped to Dundee. As early as 1878 its manufacturing
plant in Dundee processed one-eighth of the total jute exported to
Dundee. Ver cal integra on as a mechanism of complete control over
the supply of raw jute to the Cox industry in Dundee seems to have
been in place by then: "the raw material is purchased by the agents [in
Calcu a] from the growers in India, it is assorted and packed in their
own presses and warehouses at Calcu a; it is shipped direct to Dundee
in their own vessels;...it is conveyed from the ship's side in the Dundee
harbor by railway and in their own wagons." 14

Just as tweed mills, ironworks, and the shipbuilding yards had doubled
the na onal income of Scotland within a genera on, so Scotsmen
discovered new sources of wealth in the jute mills during the late 1850s.
The jute mills provided a privileged posi on to the Dundee industrialists
during the American Civil War. In contrast to their fellow manufacturers
in Lancashire and Manchester, who were suffering from the shortage of
co on, the Dundee manufacturers made their first fortunes by
supplying jute bags, bedding, and other jute products to the U.S. Army.
In response to the growing demand for jute goods, the old tex le firms
in Dundee expanded their jute manufacturing, and new mills arose all
over the town on the Tay River. 15 The heavy investment in jute
factories resulted in the unprecedented prosperity of the 1860s, which
earned fortunes for the "juteocracy" of Scotland. For Dundee and the
neighboring tex le manufacturing centers, the 1860s were the "most
extravagant" years. The number of jute spindles and power looms
increased by 19% in Dundee. In neighboring areas the change was even
more radical. For example, in Angus the number of spindles increased
by 19% and the number of power looms by 90%. It was during this
decade that some of the giant jute manufacturing plants, such as the
Camperdown Works, the Constable Dens, and the Tay Works, were
completed. 16 Throughout this period the Dundee manufacturers
regarded Calcu a as a supplier of raw jute to their industry, not as a
possible site for manufacturing jute products. How, then, did the
industry begin in India and soon surpass the Dundee industry?

Jute Manufacturing in India: The Early Entrepreneurs

The Calcu a jute industry began more than twenty years a er the
Dundee industry. Far from being part of a unilinear process of capitalist
expansion, the Indian jute industry was a result of choices made by
certain individuals not directly connected with Dundee. Launched
during the late 1850s by enterprising and opportunis c men, the jute
industry in Calcu a experienced its growth between 1875 and 1895, a
period of ups and downs in the Dundee industry. People who were
involved in the se ng up of the ini al jute mills in Calcu a came from
varied backgrounds. They had no experience in the jute business and
had no sense of planning or vision about the future of their
undertakings. These pioneering promoters of jute mills in Calcu a were
more interested in short-term profits than in the long-term growth of
their mills. They took to the jute manufacturing business to make up for
losses they had incurred in other businesses or to invest capital that
could not be profitably invested elsewhere. Once their purpose was
Page 76] accomplished, they had no inclina on to stay in business. Thus,
these mills went through frequent changes in ownership and
management, crea ng a great deal of instability in the industry during
the 1860s and 1870s.

The first jute spinning machinery was installed in 1855 at Rishra, near
Serampore in Bengal, by George Acland, a former Bri sh marine and
owner of coffee planta ons in Ceylon, in collabora on with a Bengali
financier, Babu Bysumber Sen. 17 Acland's ini al idea was to grow rhea
grass in Bengal as a subs tute for flax and hemp to make up for the
losses he had incurred in the coffee business. However, during the
course of interviewing the tex le manufacturers and machine makers in
Dundee, he had no luck in selling the idea of rhea as a subs tute for flax
and hemp. Instead, a machine manufacturer, John Kerr of Douglas
Foundry, sold him a jute spinning machine and advised him to
manufacture jute products in Bengal where jute was produced. 18

Three years a er the installa on of the spinning machine at Rishra,

Acland elicited the support of addi onal people and in 1858 floated a
limited liability concern called the Ischera Yarn Mill, which survived un l
1862. Later the mill was rejuvenated by the addi on of power looms
and an infusion of fresh capital and was incorporated in Calcu a under a
different name, the Rishra Jute Mill, of which Acland became the
managing director. 19 By encroaching on the coastal trade hitherto
dominated by hand-loom weavers, the mill made large profits and
doubled its capital in a short me. Its prosperity came primarily from
the supply of jute bags to Bombay, whose exports of raw co on to
Britain had increased enormously during the American Civil War. When
the war came to an end, the company collapsed. Having made his
fortune, Acland resigned, and the mill was put up for auc on. It was
acquired by Borrodaile, Schiller and Company, which in turn converted
the concern into another limited liability company, the Calcu a Jute
Company, in 1872. 20

The second jute mill was set up on the advice of George Henderson, the
Calcu a agent of the Borneo Company, which was originally established
to exploit the island of Borneo under the aegis of "Rajah" James Brook.
21 Henderson's idea of floa ng a jute mill in Calcu a to invest some of

the capital si ng idle was welcomed by the Borneo Company. 22

Accordingly, in 1858 a mill carrying the name of the parent company
was erected at Baranagore along the Hooghly River to spin and weave
jute by means of power looms. 23 Within five years it doubled its
capacity, and in thirteen years it had "cleared its capital twice over." 24
A er that, in 1872, the company was reincorporated as a limited liability
company under a new name, the Baranagore Jute Factory Limited, "to
enable the firm to adjust their accounts with an outgoing partner." 25

Two other mills were started in Calcu a in 1862. Both were promoted
by re red physicians. Throughout the late 1860s and the early 1870s,
the jute mills in Calcu a "simply coined money." The shares of a jute
mill could be sold in a single morning. 26 For example, in 1873 the
shares of Baranagore Jute Mill were selling at a premium of 68%. The
company paid a half-yearly dividend of 25% the same year. As a result of
this prosperity, thirteen new mills were established between 1872 and
1875. The investors were quickly swayed from inves ng in tea and coal
—the other major industries in Bengal that had already experienced
periods of boom 27— toward inves ng in jute mills, which by then were
seen as a "sort of El dorado." 28 When Richard Macallister, a former bus
conductor in Philadelphia, came to Calcu a to work for the Tudor Ice
Company in 1869, he was taken up by the jute mill mania and "decided
to have a hand in the golden pie." 29 In collabora on with a bank
manager, he bought an old co on mill at Fort Gloster "for a song" with a
plan to "resell it to a company to be formed at a large profit." The
fortune made from the Bowreah Co on Mill encouraged Macallister to
float and sell several jute mill companies. In the process he made an
enormous profit in less than a decade and disappeared from Calcu a in
1878. 30

Despite frequent changes in the ownership and management of the jute

mills and the money-mindedness of the early pioneers, the jute industry
in India con nued to progress. In 1873-74, the Indian jute mills were
producing bagging and sacking for the exports of India and southeast
Asia. Then the demand for Indian jute goods spread as India began to
export large quan es of jute tex le and goods to Burma, China, the
Straits Se lement, Australia, and the United States. 31 Jute exports from
Calcu a for the decade ending in 1873 showed an an-nual increase of
16%. 32 During the period 1874-78, India exported 3.5 million yards of
jute fabric and nearly 25 million bags every year. During the period
1879-83, these figures rose to 4.25 million yards of fabric and more than
53 million bags per year. 33

Beginning in the late 1870s, Indian jute mills started to expand their
produc on of hessian goods, which had been an exclusive domain of
the Dundee manufacturers. The number of hessian looms steadily
increased a er 1877. From 1903 on, the number of hessian looms in
India gradually exceeded the number of sacking looms. For example, in
1903-1904, there were 9,300 sacking and 10,600 hessian looms. 34 In
1904-1905, there were 9,736 sacking and 11,409 hessian looms. 35 The
rise in the exports of gunnies and hessians from Calcu a was re-
markable, despite some less profitable years, such as 1892 and 1894.
The export of jute bales from Calcu a more than doubled, increasing
from 173,255 in 1880-81 to 363,770 in 1894-95. The largest increase in
these exports was to markets in Europe and the United States, though
exports also increased to the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as
to neighboring ports in the Indian subcon nent. The average monthly
export of gunny bags from Calcu a during the early 1890s also
increased from 13,412,369 to 17,813,561. This meant more exports of
gunny bags to Burma, the various Indian ports, the Straits Se lement,
the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. 36
Calcu a's encroachment upon Dundee's share of jute manufactures in
the world market rapidly rose a er the end of the nineteenth century,
when Dundee's period of industrial expansion "had come to an end and
the peak level of produc on had been passed." 37 Why did the industry
in Dundee gradually decline? Was there a causal connec on between
Dundee's industrial decline and the rise of the jute industry in India?
Dundee: Expansion of Capital and Industrial Decline

The impetus provided by the American Civil War to the Dundee jute
mills led to the further expansion of Dundee capital in a direc on that
eventually proved detrimental to its own industrial growth. Dundee had
exported enormous amounts of jute goods, including sand bags, to the
United States. However, the payment for these could not be made in
cash owing to the Civil War in the United States. The Dundee jute
manufacturers frequently se led for mortgage on land as security.
These mortgages produced an a rac ve return by way of interest of 7-
8%. The Sco sh capitalists discovered that investment in land
development in the United States would bring much greater returns
than investment at home. In the post-Civil War period, when the United
States expanded westward, the enterprising Scotsmen seized the op-
portunity to "buy America at a discount." 38

The Oregon and Washington Trust Investment Company Limited,

founded in 1873 by the prosperous jute manufacturers of Dundee,
opened up another outlet for Dundee's fresh capital accumulated from
the jute mills. This was followed by the forma on of the Dundee
Mortgage and Trust Investment Company in 1876, which not only
favored investment in mortgages but also encouraged investment in
railways and related securi es, thereby expanding the field of
investment for Dundee capital. Two years later, in 1878, the Dundee
Land Investment Company was incorporated as a venture in "organized
specula on in land" in the United States. Dundee acquired interna onal
fame as a center for Sco sh investment. By the 1880s its financiers had
established two major types of investments in the United States: the
land mortgage business, supervised by a syndicate led by William
Mackenzie, and the dealings in bonds and stocks, which were monitored
by Robert Fleming. In both these enterprises the jute manufacturers
played an important role. 39
These were impressive ventures. The average annual income of Dundee
from the early 1860s to about the early 1880s is es mated to have been
less than £1.5 million pounds sterling and annual savings not more than
£250,000. Yet by the early 1880s Dundee had invested £5 million in the
United States. This amount was nine to ten mes the value of the
town's real estate and equaled the savings of nearly twenty years. 40
Dundee capital also found its way to Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and Hawai'i. The Hawaiian Investment and Agency Co. was floated in
1880 with the help of the prominent jute manufacturers Alexander
Gilroy and George Halley, and the la er became the chairman of its
board. 41 The secret behind such expansive Dundee capital investment
was the growing jute in-dustry.

Ironically, this increasing flow of capital gradually caused a downward

turn in Dundee's industry in the post-1875 period. The mills at Bal c and
Taybank never expanded to their poten al. The world's biggest linen
plant, the Camperdown Works, had no significant ex-pansion
throughout the 1870s, when there was an increasing flow of capital
from Dundee to the United States. Many tex le manufacturing firms
closed down. In many others, such as the Logie Works, produc on was
suspended. Jute warehouses were transformed into places of other
uses. In 1884 the jute industry underwent a severe recession. Although
the Dundee industry had increased its capacity by 20% in the previous
two years, the import of raw jute in Dundee dras cally declined by
130,000 tons from 1883. Moreover, by 1888 more than 75% of the
Sco sh capital invested in the ca le companies in the United States had
been lost, and four out of eight public companies had gone bankrupt. 42
Later the Baring crisis of 1890 and the subsequent depression of 1893-
94 threatened the survival of Sco sh enterprise in America. To these
difficul es was added the Bri sh-American diploma c crisis of 1895-96
over the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Bri sh Guiana. Some
members of Congress an cipated war. Such a poli cal climate
undermined loan transac ons, at least temporarily. 43 This added to the
decline of industrial Dundee.

Changing Global Trends and the Indian Jute Industry

Dundee's decline during the period 1875-95 coincided with Calcu a's
growth. However, this was a coincidence. The growth of Calcu a jute
mills was not connected to Dundee's decline. In fact, the rapid rise of
the Calcu a industry was related to changing global trends during the
late nineteenth century: the unprecedented growth of interna onal
trade, the growing global significance of jute products, and the cri cal
role of Indian raw jute.

With respect to global trade, the last quarter of the nineteenth century
witnessed an enormous expansion of new export trades from India. For
example, the export of Indian wheat to different parts of the world,
especially to the neighboring regions of the Indian subcon nent,
increased substan ally. Similarly, India exported Burmese rice to
con nental Europe and east Asian countries. In response to the growing
global demand for oil seeds, the Indian export of oil seeds shot up from
£6 million in 1900 to £18 million in 1914. 44 These exports were
surpassed only by co on and jute exports from India. This meant more
bags and sacks for the con nua on of this export trade.

The rapid rise of interna onal trade had transformed the image of jute
into the "world's carrier." The recogni on that "there are few products
of nature or industry subject to transport that are not at some stage
between producer and consumer covered by a jute wrapper of one kind
or another" revolu onized the perceived importance of jute. 45 The
significance of jute as a packaging material for trade and industry was
unparalleled un l a synthe c subs tute was discovered in the mid-
twen eth century. Hence, jute became known as "gold on silt." 46 New
mills were established in various parts of the Western world. Jute was
manufactured in Ludlow, Massachuse s, as early as 1848. In Europe, the
first mill was established at Dunkirk in 1857, followed by others in
northern France. By 1879 the German jute industry was well
established, and mills were rapidly being built in Belgium, Austria,
Russia, Italy, and other parts of the world around the same me. 47 The
phenomenal growth of the Indian industry was representa ve of this
global trend.

The Indian industry commanded the leading posi on in the world

market because, among other things, it was the largest producer of raw
jute. The global demand for raw jute con nued to increase following the
expansion of the Dundee jute industry and the emergence of
manufacturing plants in other places. Although jute-growing
experiments were conducted in other regions, India throughout
remained the largest supplier of raw jute to the expanding number of
jute mills all over the world. Such a growing demand led to the
extended cul va on of jute in Bengal at the expense of other,
par cularly subsistence, crops. Jute became the premier cash crop and
as such the largest export earner for the Indian economy. 48 In 1911-12,
of the total global demand of 9 million bales of jute, 8 million bales were
supplied by India alone. By 1914 Indian jute mills alone were consuming
more than 50% of the country's raw jute, which was ten mes more
than in 1874. 49 More than fi y jute mills had cropped up along the
banks of the Hooghly, extending thirty-five miles north and twenty-five
miles south of Calcu a. Both raw jute and jute manufacturers
cons tuted a significant por on of the Indian export economy. 50 By the
early twen eth century, India had replaced Dundee as the largest jute
manufacturing center of the world. Yet the growth of this large-scale
industry in India did not foster economic and industrial development in
India. Why?

Growth of the Indian Jute Industry: The Role of Managing Agents

The growth of the Indian industry took a par cular direc on due to the
control exercised by the Bri sh managing houses in Calcu a in the
management of jute mills. These managing agents did more than merely
"manage." They played a decisive role in the development of industry in
India by monopolizing the network for the exploita on of resources,
capital, labor, and markets in an era of expanding global trade. 51 By
1880 managing agencies such as Andrew Yule and Company, Bird and
Company, and Jardine Skinner and Company, which were to dominate
the jute industry in the late nineteenth and early twen eth centuries,
had already made their appearance in jute mill management. 52 This
was in sharp contrast to the tradi onal mentality of the Bri sh
managing houses, which regarded India primarily as a supplier of raw
materials to the expanding industries in Britain, Europe, and the United
States. Accordingly, the managing agents refrained from being crea ve
or innova ve because venturing into modern industrial sectors might
bring them into conflict with "the industrial establishments of Great
Britain and thereby jeopardize their rela onships with business friends
back home." 53

What changed the thinking of the Bri sh managing agents about India's
role in the rapidly changing world economy? The rising demand for jute
shares made it easy to finance the jute mills. The capital normally
needed to start a jute mill was easily raised from the local investors.
Managing agents had no trouble ge ng addi onal financing from the
banks, par cularly a er 1880 when jute mill produc on had become
more stabilized. 54 Moreover, the jute mills provided an opportunity to
maximize control and profit with minimum costs—which had been a
major concern of the managing agents. Such a business mentality can
especially be seen in the way the managing agents related to the
ques on of labor in the jute mills.
Labor in Calcu a was considerably cheaper than in Dundee. Lack of
factory regula ons made labor more vulnerable to exploita on. The
cheapness of labor meant less investment in capital goods and
amounted to lower wages for longer work hours. The opera on of mills
for longer hours led to more output than was possible in Dundee due to
factory regula ons. Up to 1872 the jute industry in India worked ten
hours per day. Soon the schedule changed to twelve hours per working
day. Later on, some mills, such as the Has ngs Mill, were kept open as
long as twenty-two hours per day. Because of the inexpensive labor,
even work that could be done more efficiently by machinery was carried
out by humans to minimize costs and maximize profits. Hence, as an
observer noted, "the na ves carry the bales and drums on their
heads....Commonly two men carry a bale, and the cheapness of their
labour makes it quite unnecessary to use traveling cranes or other
mechanical appliances." 55

Although this excessive reliance on labor kept costs low in the jute mills,
it was not the most efficient mode of produc on. For instance, the
person-hours needed to produce one ton of yarn in Calcu a were found
to be four mes as many as would be necessary in a modernized mill in
Dundee. 56 However, jute manufacturers preferred to employ more
labor because it was cheaper to do so than to modernize their mills,
which would have entailed more expenses and reduced their profits.
But the supply of labor was not always plen ful, a problem that
persisted throughout the 1890s and the early years of the twen eth
century, and constantly occupied the minds of the management of
many jute mills. The plague epidemic of the 1890s exacerbated the
problem of labor shortage, and excessive heat especially in the summer
months prevented efficient work performance. Moreover, the severe
disciplinary ac ons and a tudes of the overseers in the jute mills
caused labor agita on. Among the things most resented by the workers
were the insistence of the mill managers that workers stay on site and
managers' refusal to pay workers' transporta on costs. The mill
managers tried to control and monopolize labor by preven ng workers
from traveling. These factors resulted in erra c a endance of workers in
the mills and seriously affected produc on in the jute mills. 57

To solve the labor problem in the jute mills, the managing agents
recruited workers from outside Calcu a, par cularly from Bihar and the
United Provinces. These workers cons tuted approximately 75% of the
total work force. Their incen ve to migrate to the city from their rural
homes was to earn wages to pay off their debts to landlords in the
villages. However, these workers became vic ms of a different kind of
exploita on in the mills, where the sirdars and their European bosses
extracted bribes in the form of salami and bakshish from them and
subjected them to kabulis. 58 This oversupply of migrant labor (former
peasants) from Bihar and the United Provinces led to compe on that
was disadvantageous to the workers and made labor even cheaper. Why
did labor not organize and resist? In Bengal the system of recruitment
and control of labor prevented the workers from recognizing the
capitalist exploita on. Rather than seeing their problems as arising out
of class conflict, they saw them as ma ers of community conflict:
Bengali Muslim labor versus Hindu migrant labor. These workers
regarded the mill manager as a powerful figure whose authority was
reinforced by the colonial structure rather than dictated by the labor
market. 59

Concern for control and profit dominated the minds of managing

agents. However, cau on was considered necessary for control. To
reduce their risk, managing agents invested in several related industries,
which they later managed. As an expert on the industrial organiza on in
colonial India noted, "managing agents of jute mills started colliery
concerns, and found that the jute mills were good customers for their
coal. Then again, when some of them floated boa ng and inland
steamer companies, these la er were able to get their own jute mills
and colliery companies and tea estates to send their goods by their line
of steamers. It was thus a great thing for them to know that they had a
market which was controlled by themselves." 60 Thus Andrew Yule and
Company, the largest managing agency in India, managed a total of fi y-
four firms. Of these, ten were jute mills, eighteen were tea companies,
fourteen were coal companies, three were transporta on concerns, and
nine were other businesses. 61 This allowed the managing agents not
only to diversify their investment but also to establish a complete
network of control over the businesses they managed. Their strategy
was to own enough shares in a way that allowed them a "controlling
vote" in the firm's decision-making process. By holding a certain number
of shares in a mill, the managing agents could be in a majority on the
board. In turn, the board appointed them as managing agents. For their
service these agents received a commission on the total sales and
dividends on their share of investment in the mill. Such a strategy
enabled the managing agents to control the businesses they managed.
62

In their effort to promote new jute mills and capture the management
of more jute mills, these managing agents were supported ini ally by
the metropolitan capitalists, par cularly the jute mill machine
manufacturers, who envisioned India as a growing market for their
machinery. Before World War I the making of jute spinning machinery
was completely monopolized by three firms in Arborath, Belfast, and
Leeds. Only a small percentage of their produc on went to Dundee; the
rest was manufactured for export all over the world. 63 Seeing the
Dundee jute industry "take off" in the first half of the nineteenth
century, the tex le machine manufacturers in Dundee wished to sell
their machinery to India, the largest producer of raw jute. 64 The
Glasgow News observed that "a er Dundee and other parts were
stocked with jute spinning and weaving plants...it was lawful and proper,
and in fact necessary, that the makers of such plants bethink themselves
of India, where jute is grown, as a suitable place for produc on of jute
yarns and fabrics. Accordingly, in me, like Dundee itself, India became
stocked to reple on with jute mills." 65 Such efforts on the part of
machine makers in Dundee and Leeds were not limited to India, but also
helped establish jute mills in Europe, the United States, and Australia.
66

The Indian mills also provided employment to many Dundee technicians

and assistants. This was par cularly encouraged by the managing
agencies, who regarded these employees as tools to maintain con-stant
control over the industry. In this, they followed in the footsteps of the
early pioneers of the mills. For example, the first jute mill established by
Acland and Sen was managed by a Dundonian, Charles Smith, who had
experience in managing a mill in Dundee. 67 For the most part, these
were men who had suffered during the periods of depression and
unemployment that followed the booms in Dundee jute manufacturing
during the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Moreover, India—
the Jewel in the Crown—was always a rac ve to ambi ous Bri sh
youth, who found greater purchasing power for their salaries in India
than in Britain and also enjoyed a sense of pres ge and power that they
did not have back home. A newspaper ar cle gained the a en on of its
readers with a headline that asked: "How would you like to have a
servant s r your tea and light your pipe?" Many young men from
Dundee who went to Calcu a as assistants in the jute mills enjoyed
benefits that they could not have dreamed of at home. To begin with,
"they lived in style. Plain Sandy Tamson in Dundee became Alexander
Thomson, Esquire, weaving master in Calcu a." His meals were cooked
by a khansamah, his tea would be s rred and pipe lighted by a bearer,
his clothes washed by a dhobi, and his room cleaned by a sweeper. The
crisis in the Dundee industry, beginning in the late 1870s, had created
severe problems of unemployment and infla on. Experienced but
unemployed men readily found jobs in the Calcu a jute mills due to
their connec ons with the Sco sh man-aging agents, for whom Dundee
men in Calcu a mills would be great assets as well as instruments of
control. By offering handsome salaries and benefits, the managing
agents tempted these men, connected with the mills and factories in
Dundee, to make their fortunes in Calcu a. 68

Metropolitan versus Colonial Capital

Notwithstanding the presence of metropolitan men and machinery,

there was rela vely li le par cipa on of metropolitan capital, and much
less of Dundee capital, in the growth of the Calcu a jute mills. The
percep on that the industry was owned by the Scotsmen 69 might have
been influenced by the overwhelming presence of Dundee men as
managers, technicians, and assistants in the Calcu a jute mills. The
exact nature of ownership is hard to assess, due to the destruc on of
shareholders' records. 70 Recent research, however, indicates growing
par cipa on in the post-World War I period of Indian capitalists,
par cularly the Marwaris, who took over the jute industry from the
Sco sh capitalists a er World War II. 71 Even before World War I, at
least 60% of the shares of the jute mills were owned by Indians, most of
them Marwaris. 72

There was a significant investment of colonial capital compared to

metropolitan capital in Calcu a's jute mills. In 1880 twenty jute mills
were opera ng in India. Of these only one, the Samnuggar Jute
Company, Limited, was a Dundee-based company with prac cally all
Dun-dee shareholders. Two mills, the India Jute Mill and the Champdany
Jute Company, were Glasgow-based firms floated by the Calcu a-based
managing agents Mackinnon, Mackenzie and Company in 1868, and
Finlay Muir and Company in 1874. The Ganges Jute and the Serajgunge
Jute mills were floated in England in the early 1870s. In addi on to
these, there were two private companies, the Has ngs Mill owned by
Birkmyre Brothers and the Clive Jute Mill owned by Gladstone, Wyllie
and Company. Together these mills accounted for about 1,700 looms.
The remaining thirteen jute mills, accoun ng for 3,090 looms, were
floated in India with shareholders resident in India. 73 Be-tween 1882
and 1885, five new mills were established in India. Two of these, the
Victoria Jute Mill and Titaghur Jute Mill, were managed by Thomas Duff,
a man who cashed in on his experiences as a former man-ager of
Borneo and Company and the Baranagore Jute Mill to form a managing
company under his own name, which made him popular in Dundee.
Earlier, he had floated the Samnuggar Jute Company. 74 Al-though
incorporated in 1883, the Victoria Jute Mill could not effec vely func on
for some me due to a land dispute with the Samnuggar Jute Company,
which saw the new mill as a poten al threat to its labor supply. 75
Wri ng in 1895-96, Sir John Leng divided the jute mills in Bengal into
three categories: private companies, public companies owned in
England, and Calcu a-owned companies. The largest number of mills,
according to Leng's contemporary account, were Calcu a-owned. 76

The reason for the low par cipa on of Dundee capital in Calcu a jute
mills was that Dundee had invested more than it could afford in the
United States. The Dundee capitalists did not own more than 10% of the
Calcu a jute mills, which was less than the Glasgow firms owned. The
Indian capital in the Calcu a jute mills was regarded as predominant as
early as 1885. 77 The jute mills established a er 1900 were all rupee
companies promoted primarily by the Bri sh managing agencies in
India. 78 Partners of these agency houses o en had a wide network of
affluent friends whom they tried to involve in the promo on of a mill
simply by a promise of quick return. Bird and Company is a case in point.
Its senior partner, Lord Cable, who was planning the promo on of
addi onal jute mills, wrote in 1903 to one of his wealthy friends, "Our
idea is to float this [the Dalhousie Jute Mill] privately amongst our
wealthy friends rather than go to the market, as it is hoped that shares
may very speedily run to a premium, and we could unload some...thus
holding the balance at a figure below par." 79

Many shareholders, par cularly the Bri sh and Sco sh residents in

India, were interested in quick rather than long-term profits. Once they
"unloaded" their shares for a one- me premium, these shares would be
held by the Indians who were increasingly holding shares a er fataka
(specula on) in the jute mills became a customary way to make
addi onal money. For example, in 1874 the shares of the Fort Gloster
Jute Mill were predominantly held by the "foreigners," and the number
of "Indian" shareholders was insignificant. Of the 119 shareholders of
this mill in 1874, 105 were foreigners, and only 14 were Indians. In 1890,
however, this ra o of foreign-to-Indian shareholders changed
drama cally. Out of a total of 152 shareholders, there were 73
foreigners and 79 Indians. 80

In view of the con nuous profits from jute mill management, the
managing agencies remained enthusias c in floa ng and managing the
jute mills in India, which gave rise to a great deal of compe on among
them. None of the managing agencies in 1880 had under its control the
management of more than one jute manufacturing company. Of the
twenty jute mill companies in 1880, two were privately owned. The rest
were limited liability companies all run by different managing firms—a
phenomenon that changed shortly a erward. Thomas Duff and
Company, the only Dundee-based managing firm in India, is a case in
point. The original purpose of the company was to carry out business in
many branches as agents for the management of jute, co on, tea, and
other industries in India. 81 However, once the company was floated, it
concentrated solely on jute. In the process, it faced serious compe on
from the Bri sh managing houses in Calcu a for the control and
management of the jute mills. Thus, when Thomas Duff and Company's
contract for the management of Samnuggar Jute Mill came up for
renewal, it was offered a reduced commission of 2.5% rather than 3%. In
the face of growing compe on, Thomas Duff gladly accepted the offer
with a condi on that the contract run for twenty years. 82 By the turn of
the century, the increasing compe on for the management of jute
mills resulted in the forma on of "jute departments" among the large
managing houses, such as Andrew Yule and Company and Bird and
Company. For example, Bird and Company, which had been increasing
its involvement in the jute business, formed a separate jute department
in 1902. 83

A er the turn of the century, there was increasing involvement of

Indians in the jute manufacturing industry. The Birlas, who had first
migrated to Bombay from Rajasthan, shi ed gradually to Calcu a
between 1898 and 1901. They soon learned about the opium and jute
markets of Calcu a and set up their own firm in the opium trade, in
which they made their first fortunes. 84 By 1915 they had established
themselves in the jute trade as well. World War I created a boom in the
jute trade, and the "demand for gunny sacks spiraled." The Birlas
accumulated a lot of capital in this process, which allowed them to
extend their interests from trade to industry. Moderniza on theorists
regard the movement from trade to industry as an obvious and logical
progression. Accordingly, the lack of ac ve involvement of Indians in the
jute industry has been taken to symbolize the "passivity" of the Indian
capitalists. 85 For the Birlas, however, the extension from trade to
industry was not swi ; the Sco sh managing agents were cau ous to
forestall any likely compe on. To prevent the construc on of a rival
mill in the neighborhood, the directors of the Samnuggar Company
authorized their agents to buy land that they did not need but that
might have become a mill site. 86 It required a great deal of courage and
an enterprising spirit to break through such a closely guarded in-dustry.
Aditya Birla, the grandson of G.D.Birla, recalled: "It was very difficult for
grandfather to establish this jute mill. Whenever he would buy some
land to establish this mill, the English and the Scots would buy land all
around to prevent him from building the jute mill." The Sco sh
managing agents who monopolized the jute industry held a strong racial
animosity, and as a result, the Birla enterprise in manufacturing proved
to be outrageously expensive. But G.D.Birla persevered and thereby
became instrumental in breaking the foreign monopoly of the jute
industry in India. His "project soon took on hues of a war between an
Indian entrepreneur and the colonial establishment." 87 His success
heralded a new era, the coming of the Marwaris to the jute industry in
the post-World War I period. 88

Dundee's Reac on to the Rising Calcu a Industry

How did the Dundee jute mill owners react to the rising new industry in
Calcu a? An examina on of this ques on illustrates two dis nct phases
of Dundee's reac on to the Calcu a mills. Ini ally, Dundee
manufacturers were not concerned about the establishment of a
manufacturing center in Calcu a and had rather li le investment in the
Calcu a industry. In fact, during this phase the Dundee financial
interests seem to have been skep cal about the growth of the Calcu a
industry. This sense of skep cism con nued throughout the 1880s.
Dundee refused to believe that Calcu a's growing success in the world
markets would create compe on with Dundee goods. Among other
things, Dundee prided itself on its proximity to the great markets of the
world, especially the European and American markets, which
significantly reduced the cost of shipping jute goods compared to the
freight charges from Calcu a, which remained very high. 89 The press in
Dundee consistently expressed this viewpoint. The Dundee edi on of
the People's Journal, which catered to the working classes, 90 as well as
the Dundee Adver ser, the most popular newspaper in Dundee, were
always at war with the Calcu a newspaper, the Statesman, for poin ng
out the rapid growth of the jute industry in Calcu a following the rising
demand for Calcu a jute products. According to the Dundee news-
papers, the Dundee spinners never regarded Calcu a as a be er
loca on for jute manufacturing: "there does not seem much reason to
fear the speedy transfer of capital of the jute trade from the banks of
the Tay to the banks of the Hooghly....In our view, Dundee will for many
years remain the headquarters of jute spinning and...retain its hold of
European and American markets." 91 In 1880 the Calcu a correspon-
dent of the Dundee Adver ser wrote a special report, Jute Mills of
Bengal. In this report, published by the Adver ser, he discussed at
length the financial situa on of the jute mills incorporated in Calcu a
with resident shareholders. He summarized the financial status of the
mills, which were primarily owned by the Indian shareholders and were
not connected with Dundee in any way, as follows:

If, therefore, any Dundee capitalist should desire to embark in the jute
manufacturing business in India, we would recommend to their no ce
the old English adage that "Fools build houses and wise men live in
them." It seems to us that it would be far cheaper to buy sufficient
shares to obtain the command, and thus the management of a
company...than to erect a brand new mill....But, our advice just now to
people desirous of inves ng capital in the jute manufacturing trade at
Calcu a is similar to that of Punch, to those about to marry— don't. 92

On the one hand, it is clear that even in 1880 Dundee interests did not
regard Calcu a jute mills as a sound investment because they suspected
the Calcu a industry would collapse due to overproduc on and lack of
markets as its demand was "principally local." 93 On the other hand, the
inves ga on resul ng in the above-men oned report also suggests that
the Dundee manufacturers were beginning to be concerned about their
own industry. This concern was prompted by the end of the golden
decade of Sco sh investment in the American West. The Dundee
capitalists, who had made fortunes in the jute business during the 1860s
and 1870s, had overinvested their capital in the United States. In the
early 1880s the Dundee jute industry suffered from the recession in the
United States, and by the end of that decade it also suffered from the
Calcu a industry, which had become its major compe tor in the global
market for jute manufactures. Jute manufacturing in Dundee was
further curtailed by the increasing labor problems at this me. 94

These disappointed interests marked a new phase in Dundee's reac on

to the rising Calcu a jute industry. Soon they found a pretext for a
formal protest. In 1894 the Has ngs Mill in Calcu a introduced a night
shi . The purpose was to increase produc on following the rising global
demand for jute manufactures. This meant even more compe on for
the Dundee industry. Such fears and concerns provoked a protest by the
Dundee capitalists to the secretary of state for India alleging viola on of
the Factory Act and the general lack of trained inspectors in the Indian
mills to enforce that act. Many Dundee manufacturers took this
occasion to express their frustra on over their own government's
"unwisdom" to let the jute manufacturing industry in India grow and
supersede the Dundee one. 95 To their dismay, the Indian jute industry
was never taxed.

The Indian Jute Industry and the Bri sh Empire

In the context of the development of the tex le industry in colonial

India, the rise of the jute manufacturing industry was quite a contrast to
the growth of the Indian co on tex le industry. While the growth of the
Indian co on industry was curtailed by the Bri sh to protect the
interests of Lancashire and Manchester, the Indian jute industry rose to
prominence without any obstruc on from the Bri sh authori es,
dwarfing the Dundee industry—the oldest and the leading jute
manufacturing center of the world. Why did these disaffected Dundee
manufacturing interests not have as much influence with the Bri sh
government in undermining the rising produc on of the Calcu a jute
mills as did the Lancashire co on manufacturers in controlling
compe on from the Bombay co on mills? The explana on of
Dundee's lack of influence in Whitehall, according to Daniel Buchanan,
was "that had Dundee been as strong as Manchester [in the Bri sh
Parliament], and had Indian jute manufacturing been an Indian rather
than Sco sh owned industry, it would also have been taxed." 96

While Buchanan's assessment of the degree of influence Dundee

wielded with the Bri sh Parliament as compared to Lancashire was
correct, his statement about the industry being owned by the Scots was
not. This mispercep on, as is clear from the preceding analysis, arises
from confusing the control of the industry with the ownership of the
industry. Unlike the Indian co on tex le industry, which was
predominantly owned, managed, and controlled by Indians, the Indian
jute manufacturing industry was managed by the Bri sh managing
houses, which exercised a great deal of control without predominant
investment in these enterprises. For example, Andrew Yule and Co.
controlled ten jute mills but owned less than 30% of the shares in these
mills. Similarly, Bird and Heilgers controlled seven jute mills but owned
less than 25% shares in them. 97 By monopolizing the management of
the shipping, transport, and banking industries, the managing agents
virtually controlled the export-import trade in eastern India. The jute
industry grew along with the development of transport, shipping, and
coal industries. This meant, for example, that the railways connec ng
the jute districts were managed by the Bri sh, which gave them
enormous power. Similarly, the board of directors of the Bank of Bengal
was dominated by the big managing agencies in Calcu a. These
agencies managed several industries at the same me. More specifically,
the managing agents controlled the jute trade at every stage, including
buying, shipping, expor ng, and marke ng. 98

Such control was possible due to the ghtly knit nature of the Indian
jute industry, which was one of the best organized industries of the pre-
World War I period. Conversely, the managing agents organized the jute
industry in such a way as to keep it under their control. The Indian Jute
Mills Associa on (IJMA) was formed in response to the growing number
of new mills in the early 1880s. Its purpose was to limit new mills, to
prevent recession and price cuts, and to control compe on by
regula ng output and prices. Through its representa on in the Bengal
legislature, its powerful lobby, and its connec ons in the colonial
administra on, the IJMA grew into an oligopolist power. As one of the
most effec ve manufacturers' associa ons, the IJMA wielded significant
influence over all aspects of the jute industry, including trading,
manufacturing, pricing, and marke ng. It established branch offices in
New York and London to help secure those markets for the Indian jute
manufactures. 99

The Bri sh decision not to tax the jute industry was based on simple
reasoning: by collabora ng with the managing agencies and the colonial
state, the Indian jute industry served the Bri sh cause be er than the
Dundee jute industry. Following the protest of the Dundee
manufacturers in the mid-1890s, Sir John Leng, a liberal poli cian and
member of Parliament from Dundee and the owner and publisher of the
Dundee Adver ser, the People's Journal, and the Telegraph, visited India
in 1895-96 to inspect the jute mills. The Has ngs Mill in India, Leng
pointed out, worked prac cally all day and night, a total of twenty-two
hours out of twenty-four. While the mills in Dundee operated 56 hours
per week, the mills in India, following the Has ngs mill, operated for
nearly 152 hours per week. This enabled the Indian mills to produce
235% more than the mills of Dundee. The labor force was employed in
three shi s. In this respect, Calcu a had certain advantages that
Dundee did not. First, there was plenty of labor available, which made it
possible to run factories for longer hours. Second, this labor was
extremely cheap. An average jute mill worker in India earned a monthly
wage equal to the weekly wage of his counterpart in Dundee. In
contrast to this, the Europeans, predominantly Dundee men, employed
as managers and assistants in the Calcu a mills earned twice as much as
their counterparts in Dundee. In addi on, their round-trip travel was
paid for, and they lived in more luxurious dwellings at a lesser cost to
themselves. 100

Above all, the Indian industry served Bri sh interests in a way that the
Dundee industry could not. At the turn of the century, the changing
pa ern of the global trade network had replaced the earlier regional
trade networks. This new trade pa ern was accompanied by new
players, the newly industrialized United States and the rising European
na ons, par cularly Germany, which threatened to undermine the
privileged posi on Britain had enjoyed throughout the nineteenth
century as the creditor na on. Britain's posi on had become
increasingly vulnerable with the emergence of the United States as a
creditor na on and the fear of a German takeover of hitherto Bri sh-
dominated markets. While Britain's trade deficit with the United States
had been constantly increasing, Germany was already compe ng with
Bri sh co on goods in the Indian market. In a sarcas c tone, Leng
commented, "Manchester complains of Indian compe on, when it is
really Germany that it is suffering from." 101 How could Britain survive
with such a change of roles and in the face of serious challenges?

Britain found the solu on in its Indian empire, which alone would
finance two-fi hs of Britain's total trade deficit. The Bengal Chamber's
annual report recorded the Bri sh determina on to compete against
the Germans, who had made up an influen al community in Calcu a
before 1914, and secure the Indian trade for the benefit of the empire.
102 Britain's already excessive exports to the Indian subcon nent rose
rapidly, and so did the income from its trade with India during the early
twen eth century. For example, from 1910 to 1913 these exports
increased by £22 million. Britain's total income from trade during this
period also increased from £3 million to £4 million. 103 India served as a
safety valve for Britain. While keeping its own markets open for Bri sh
manufactured goods, it exported raw materials and goods to other
na ons, primarily the United States, thereby bringing about a favorable
balance of trade for Britain. India's value to Britain in this respect can be
well illustrated by the increasing importance of the Indian jute products
in the interna onal market.

Tradi onally, the United States had been the biggest market for Bri sh
jute products. However, a er 1900 Bri sh jute exports sharply declined.
This was largely due to the compe on the Bri sh jute goods faced
from European goods protected by stringent tariffs, and especially from
the cheap Indian jute products, which competed with Dundee goods in
global markets as early as the late 1870s. Indian jute products had found
new markets in Egypt and Britain; they were especially popular in the
United States and Australia; and they did well even in the high-tariff
markets of South America where Bri sh jute goods could not be sold
without difficulty. 104 From the point of view of Britain's payment for its
interna onal trade deficit, the Indian jute trade, both in raw materials
and in manufactured goods, was the only way to ensure Bri sh
preeminence in the global market where other countries were pu ng
up a severe compe on. Jute and jute manufactures together
cons tuted the largest share of the Indian export economy between
1900 and 1914. In 1900 India exported raw jute worth Rs.108.6 million
and jute goods worth Rs.78.6 million. In 1914 these figures rose to
Rs.126 million and Rs.401.9 million, respec vely. 105 The largest single
consumer of Indian jute manufactures was the United States. India's
contribu on to Britain's trade se lement with the United States through
the export of jute and jute products alone amounted to more than £10
million, which Dundee, by its own admission, could not have achieved
because of the American tariff. By 1913 Indian jute goods were
successfully encroaching on Dundee's share in world trade. As a result,
Bri sh exports of jute goods to the United States declined from
£1,641,000 in 1897 to £1,525,000 in 1913. In con-trast, the export of
Indian jute goods to the United States shot up from £786,000 in 1897 to
£7,591,000 in 1913. These goods were transforming the pa ern of
global trade se lements. "In no other branch of ac vity were the Bri sh
goods being so widely displaced by empire compe on in neutral
markets." 106 It was Britain's connec on with India that allowed it to be
in a win-win situa on, despite its losing ba le for markets in
interna onal trade. For the colonial government in India, the jute
industry generated substan al revenues in the form of income tax,
which was the primary mechanism of the colonial state to appropriate a
significant por on of the profits from this industry. 107

Thus, India's role in the changing pa ern of global trade was of

enormous significance for Britain. On the one hand, India served as the
single largest market for Bri sh co on tex les and consumed many
other Bri sh commodi es. On the other hand, India was a source of
diverse raw materials, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods, such as jute,
which had found major markets in the world. The global demand for
Indian raw materials and goods rose steadily between 1900 and 1913.
Although some sectors of the Indian economy may have benefited from
this growing trade, 108 Britain benefited the most. In 1880-83 India
allowed Britain to have a trade surplus of £11 million to help se le its
global trade deficit in Europe. This trade surplus expanded to £50
million in 1914. 109 Jute and jute goods played an important part in this
increasing trade surplus. The Bri sh government had been aware of the
cri cal significance of the Indian jute industry since the late nineteenth
century. On 9 April 1896 the Bri sh government issued a Blue Book
providing impressive sta s cs of Indian exports on behalf of the Bri sh
empire. The Bri sh decision not to tax the Indian jute industry, unlike
Indian co on, was based on this understanding that Indian jute goods
served Britain in adjus ng its trade se lements in the interna onal
marketplace. Far from being sympathe c to the protest of the Dundee
manufacturers, the Bri sh government made it plain that the Indian
industry was extremely important to Britain. 110

Conclusion

The preceding analysis underscores the complexi es underlying the

connec on between colonialism and development and demonstrates
the difficul es with generaliza ons about such connec ons. Even during
the period of "high" imperialism, the jute industry in colonial India
outstripped the leading Dundee jute industry in manufacturing as well
as interna onal marke ng. India as a leading producer of raw jute and
leading manufacturer of jute products played a unique role in the
growth of the Bri sh economy. In the role of a supplier of raw jute, India
became instrumental in the growth of industrial Dundee and the global
expansion of Dundee capitalism, especially to the United States. As a
leading jute manufacturer and supplier of jute products, India served
the cause of the Bri sh empire and economy, including that of the Raj.
This paper also suggests the cri cal role played by the Indian jute
products in facilita ng the rising world trade and subsequent growth of
capitalism.

Ironically, the growth of industrializa on and the process of capital

accumula on was limited in India, given the constant media on by the
imperial and colonial interests. The Bri sh government's concern to
control world trade and the colonial government's concern to control
Indian resources and revenues converged with the financial interests of
the managing agencies, which provided the ins tu onal mechanism for
promo ng the ascendancy of Bri sh imperial and colonial interests by
controlling the jute industry from marke ng to manufacturing.
Collabora on with such powerful agencies promised greater benefits for
the economy of the empire, including the Raj, than was possible by
suppor ng the metropolitan industry in Dundee. Although this
collabora on led to the Bri sh control of the Indian jute industry, it did
not demonstrate "passivity" on the part of Indian capitalists so much as
it did their lack of power. This lack of voice, to a large extent, was due to
the managing agencies, which made sure that they retained enough
shares in the jute mills to have a controlling voice in the management of
those mills. Moreover, specula on in the jute shares market also lured
investors to hope for profits through repeated share transac ons. The
Sco sh managing agents were able to exploit colonial capital just as
they were able to exploit colonial raw materials, labor, land, and other
resources, thus curtailing the growth of Indian capital.

NOTES

* I am grateful to many colleagues who provided valuable comments

and sugges ons at various stages of this work. In par cular, I wish to
thank Professors Sugata Bose, Daniel Headrick, Blair Kling, Deepak
Kumar, Karen Leonard, Peter Lindert, W.Roger Louis, and Lynda Shaffer.

1.
For an intellectually s mula ng discussion of, and debate over, south
Asian capitalist development and its contribu on to the growth of world
capitalism, see Sugata Bose, ed., South Asia and World Capitalism (Delhi,
1990). The exchange between Immanuel Wallerstein and David
Washbrook is par cularly illumina ng. The quota on from Washbrook
given in the epigraph appears on p. 80.

2.
The reliance of Dundee's economy on a single industry had given rise to
the city's image as Juteopolis, a "one-industry city." See Chris Whatley,
"From Second City to Juteopolis: The Rise of Industrial Dundee," in
Dundee Book, ed. Billy Kay (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 33-34.

3.
Jute was one of India's ancient co age industries. The word pat (jute)
appears in ancient books, such as the Manusanhita and Mahabharata.
See S.K.Cha erjea, The Jute Industry: A Resume (Calcu a, 1988), p. 1.

4.
See the Imperial Gaze eer of India, vol. 3 (Calcu a, 1901), p. 207;
Rakibbuddin Ahmed, The Progress of Jute Industry and Trade (Dacca,
1966), p. 26; and P.B.Dey, The Jute Industry of India (Calcu a, 1984), p.
12.

5.
D.R.Wallace, The Romance of Jute (London, 1928), table on p. 4.

6.
Associa on of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers (herea er cited as
AJSM), The Story of Jute (School Edi on for Teachers), No. 1, p. 1.
Central Library, Dundee (herea er cited as CLD), Lamb Collec on,
D30689.

7.
Thomas Woodhouse and Alexander Brand, A Century's Progress in Jute
Manufacturing, 1833-1933 (Dundee, 1934), p. 16.

8.
Dundee University Archives (herea er cited as DUA), Cox Papers, MS
66/II/10/42 (2), p. 1.

9.
Whatley, "From Second City to Juteopolis," p. 39.

10.
Survey of United Kingdom Jute Industries, p. 3. CLD, Lamb Collec on,
D9501.

11.
Woodhouse and Brand, Century of Progress, pp. 17-18.

12.
Dundee Chamber of Commerce, Dundee for Jute and Flax (Dundee,
1933), pp. 22- 23. CLD, Lamb Collec on. For the constant increase of
raw jute imports from Calcu a to Dundee from 1850 to 1895, see
(London) Board of Trade, Jute: Working Party Report (London, 1948), p.
8, table 1.

13.
Bruce Lenman, Charlo e Lythe, and Enid Gauldie, Dundee and Its Tex le
Industry, 1850-1914 (Dundee, 1969), p. 12.

14.
DUA, Cox Papers, Miscellaneous Notes, MS 66/II/10/42 (2), p. 6
(emphasis added).

15.
Lenman, Lythe, and Gauldie, Dundee and Its Tex le Industry, p. 30.

16.
Mark Watson, Jute and Flax Mills in Dundee (Fife, 1990), pp. 16-17, table
on p. 18.

17.
Wallace, The Romance of Jute, pp. 7-11.
18.
Daniel H. Buchanan, The Development of the Capitalist Enterprise in
India (New York, 1934), pp. 242-43; Lenman, Lythe, and Gauldie, Dundee
and Its Tex le Industry, p. 27.

19.
Wallace, The Romance of Jute, p. 13.

20.
See a comprehensive report by a special correspondent of the Dundee
Adver ser in Calcu a, in The Jute Mills of Bengal (Dundee, 1880), pp.
13-14. CLD, Lamb Collec on, D12676.

21.
C.Chaudhury, Jute in Bengal (Calcu a, 1908), p. 9.

22.
The Borneo Company seems to have had strong links with a well-known
Glasgow firm, MacEwan and Company. See Lenman, Lythe, and Gauldie,
Dundee and Its Tex le Industry, p. 28.

23.
Wallace, The Romance of Jute, p. 15.

24.
Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist Enterprise, p. 243.

25.
The Jute Mills of Bengal, p. 22.

26.
Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist Enterprise, p. 243; Wallace,
The Romance of Jute, p. 30.

27.
Shyam Rungta, "Bowreah Co on and Fort Gloster Mills, 1872-1900,"
Indian Economic and Social History Review 22 (1985): 111, 113.

28.
The Jute Mills of Bengal, p. 23.

29.
Wallace, The Romance of Jute, p. 31.

30.
For the specific amounts of money he made on each of these mills and
the later charges of misappropria on of funds against him, see The Jute
Mills of Bengal, pp. 28-30.

31.
Sir John Leng, Le ers from India and Ceylon (Dundee, 1895; reprint,
1901), pp. 70- 71. Dundee Art Gallery and Museum (herea er cited as
DAGM), Sir John Leng Collec on.

32.
Elijah Helm, "The Growth of Factory System in India," Journal of the
Society of Arts 23 (1875): 551.

33.
Woodhouse and Brand, A Century of Progress, p. 21.

34.
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900-1939
(Cambridge, 1972), p. 277, table 8.3.

35.
Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist Enterprise, p. 244.

36.
DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, pp. 89-90, 105.
37.
(London) Board of Trade, Jute: Working Party Report, p. 9.

38.
Rates of interest in Britain had fallen to about 4%. In sharp contrast to
this, the United States, in dire need of capital during the period of
Reconstruc on, offered "mouthwatering" 12% interest on investments
to the Scotsmen. See G.A.Stout, "The Golden Decade," in Kay, ed., The
Dundee Book, pp. 121-37.

39.
W.T.Jackson, The Enterprising Scot: Investors in the American West a er
1873 (Edinburgh, 1968), pp. 24, 28-34, 66, 71-72.

40.
Edinburgh Courant, 27 June 1884.

41.
Stout, "The Golden Decade," p. 132.

42.
Stout, "The Golden Decade," p. 133.

43.
The only excep on was the Dundee-based Alliance Trust Company,
which con nued to conduct business as usual. It was driven by the logic
that half of America's commercial rela ons were with the Bri sh
empire, which guaranteed a rapid return to mutually beneficial
rela ons. See Jackson, The Enterprising Scot, pp. 256-57.

44.
S.B.Saul, Studies in Bri sh Overseas Trade (Liverpool, 1960), pp. 194,
196.
45.
Woodhouse and Brand, A Century of Progress, p. 15.

46.
George Tyson, Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Calcu a,
1952), p. 65.

47.
(London) Board of Trade, Jute: Working Party Report, p. 8.

48.
For far-reaching social and economic consequences of the extended jute
cul va on in Bengal, see Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal (Cambridge,
1986).

49.
Tom Cook, Dundee and Calcu a (Dundee, 1945), p. 5. CLD, Lamb
Collec on, D6162H.

50.
P.G.Shah, "History of Silk, Wool, and Jute Industries in India," Modern
Review 12 (1912): 379.

51.
Tyson, Bengal Chamber, pp. 98-99.

52.
Jute Mills of Bengal, p. 91.

53.
Blair Kling, Partner in Empire (Berkeley, 1976), p. 155.

54.
P.S.Loknathan, Industrial Organiza on in India (London, 1935), pp. 222-
23.
55.
DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, p. 52 (emphasis added).

56.
Cook, Dundee and Calcu a, p. 11.

57.
The Directors' Minutes of the Samnuggar Jute Factory show a
con nuous concern about the labor problems. See especially the
following Minute Books: DUA, November- December 1891, MS 86/I/1/3,
pp. 93, 382, 384, 393; 19 June 1895, MS 86/I/1/5; May-June 1899, MS
86/I/1/6, pp. 91, 100, 275, 283, 286, 289; 1 July 1902, MS 86/I/1/8, p.
238; 19 May 1903, MS 86/I/1/19, p. 26; 9 June 1903, MS 86/I/1/11, p.
190. With the coming of the new Factory Act, which became effec ve in
July 1912, the labor problem came under control. See MS 86/I/1/14, p.
142.

58.
For details of the various forms of exploita on of labor in the Calcu a
jute mills, see Thomas Johnston and John F. Sime, Exploita on in India
(Dundee, 1926), pp. 1-19. Dundee District Archives (herea er cited as
DDA), GD/JF/16/18.

59.
For an insigh ul and detailed discussion of the problems surrounding
the workers in the jute mills of Calcu a, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "On
Deifying and Defying Authority: Managers and Workers in the Jute Mills
of Bengal," Past and Present 100 (1983): 124-46; and Chakrabarty,
"Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal's Jute Mill Hands in the 1890s,"
Past and Present 91 (1981): 140-69. Since the appearance of these
ar cles, Chakrabarty has published a book (integra ng these ar cles
with new research), Rethinking Working Class History (Princeton, 1990).
60.
Loknathan, Industrial Organiza on, pp. 15-16 (emphasis added).

61.
Loknathan, Industrial Organiza on, p. 48.

62.
See Omkar Goswami, "Then Came the Marwaris: Some Aspects of
Change in the Pa ern of Industrial Control in Eastern India," Indian
Economic and Social History Review 22 (1985): 236.

63.
(London) Board of Trade, Jute: Working Party Report, p. 39.

64.
Handbook and Guide to Dundee District (Dundee, 1912), p. 278; see also
Dundee Journal, 10 October 1874.

65.
Newspaper clipping from The Glasgow News, c. 1877. CLD, Lamb
Collec on, 196(12).

66.
Newspaper clipping from Glasgow News, c. 1877. Also see Lenman,
Lythe, and Gauldie, Dundee and Its Tex le Industry, p. 51.

67.
Lenman, Lythe, and Gauldie, Dundee and Its Tex le Industry, p. 27.

68.
Newspaper ar cle, undated. DAGM, Sir John Leng Collec on. See also
The Dundee Year Book, 1894, pp. 100, 44.

69.
Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist Enterprise, p. 467.
70.
Many of the companies' records for the early period have been
destroyed. For lack of space, the shareholders' lists are no longer
preserved by the Office of the Registrar of the Companies in Calcu a,
where all lists were deposited. See Bagchi, Private Investment in India,
p. 192, n. 109. The annual publica on Investors' India Year Book began
to appear only in 1911.

71.
See Omkar Goswami, "Collabora on and Conflict: European and Indian
Capitalists and the Jute Economy of Bengal, 1919-1939," Indian
Economic and Social History Review 19 (1982): 141-79; Goswami, "Then
Came the Marwaris."

72.
"Report of the Indian Fiscal Commission,"in Evidence, vol. 2 (Calcu a,
1923), pp. 419-20.

73.
The details and figures in this paragraph are taken from The Jute Mills of
Bengal, pp. 5-6, 42-44, 50-53, 71.

74.
DUA, Papers of Thomas Duff and Company, MS 86/V/6/1.

75.
DUA, Victoria Jute Mill, Miscellaneous Records, MS 86/II/10/1.

76.
For details on these companies, see DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, pp.
106-10.

77.
Dundee Year Book, 1985, appendix, p. 84. See also Patricia Kendall,
Come with Me to India: A Quest for Truth among People's Problems
(New York and London, 1931), p. 275.

78.
Bagchi, Private Investment in India, p. 263.

79.
A History of Bird and Company, xx vols. (Calcu a, 1929), 2:191. CLD,
Lamb Collec on, D31293a.

80.
Rungta, "Bowreah Co on and Fort Gloster," pp. 109-38, 127, and table 3
on p. 113.

81.
DUA, Thomas Duff and Company Papers, MS 86/V/6/1.

82.
DUA, Records of Samnuggar Jute Factory, MS 86/I/7, pp. 128, 136-37.

83.
A History of Bird and Company, 2:285, 384. CLD, Lamb Collec on,
D31293a.

84.
Margaret Herdeck and Gita Piramal, India's Industrialists, 2 vols.
(Washington, D.C., 1985), 1:62.

85.
Morris D. Morris, "Large Scale Industry," in Cambridge Economic History
of India, ed. Dharma Kumar, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1983), 2:568-75.

86.
Samnuggar Factory Ltd., Directors' Minutes, 2 August 1893. DUA, MS
86/V/I/1, pp. 112-13, 131.
87.
Both the quota ons in this paragraph are from Herdeck and Piramal,
India's Industrialists, pp. 63 and 66, respec vely.

88.
For the role of Marwaris and their growing conflict with the Sco sh
managing agents in the jute industry, see Goswami, "Then Came the
Marwaris." For the enterprising spirit of the Marwari community, see
Thomas Timberg, The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists (New
Delhi, 1978).

89.
Newspaper clipping from People's Journal, 25 March 1876. CLS, Lamb
Collec on, 196(6), p. 2.

90.
William M. Walker, Juteopolis: Dundee and Its Tex le Workers
(Edinburgh, 1979), p. 544.

91.
Quoted from the Adver ser. See the newspaper clipping from the
weekly People's Journal, 27 May 1876. CLD, Lamb Collec on, 196(6).

92.
Jute Mills of Bengal, pp. 83, 87.

93.
DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, p. 91.

94.
Walker, Juteopolis.

95.
Bagchi, Private Investment in India, p. 262.
96.
Buchanan, The Development of Capitalist Enterprise, p. 467.

97.
Goswami, "Then Came the Marwaris," p. 236. See also Omkar Goswami,
Industry, Trade, and Peasant Society (Delhi, 1991).

98.
The various ac vi es were all well organized by means of several
associa ons, such as the Calcu a Jute Dealers Associa on, the Calcu a
Jute Brokers Associa on, and the Calcu a Jute Balers Associa on. See
Bagchi, Private Investment in India, pp. 264-65.

99.
Tyson, The Bengal Chamber, p. 68.

100.
DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, pp. 59-67.

101.
DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, pp. 99, 111.

102.
Tyson, The Bengal Chamber, p. 114.

103.
For a detailed discussion of this aspect, see the well-documented study
on the subject by Saul, Studies in Bri sh Overseas Trade, pp. 61-62.

104.
Saul, Studies in Bri sh Overseas Trade, p. 63. See also Y.S.Pandit, India's
Balance of Indebtedness (London, 1937).

105.
Vera Anstey, Economic Development of India (London, 1952), table 17 on
Bri sh overseas trade, p. 626.
106.
Saul, Studies in Bri sh Overseas Trade, pp. 63, 193-94.

107.
Brock, "Bengal and Its Jute Industry," Asia c Review 30 (1934): 533.

108.
B.R.Tomlinson, The Poli cal Economy of the Bri sh Raj, 1914-1947
(Cambridge, 1979), p. 6.

109.
Saul, Studies in Bri sh Overseas Trade, pp. 103, 204.

110.
The Blue Book on Bri sh overseas trade echoed the analysis and
conclusions of Sir John Leng about the usefulness of the Calcu a jute
industry. For detailed sta s cal calcula ons of Indian jute exports to
different parts of the world, see DAGM, Leng Collec on, Le ers, pp.
118-20.
What Is This “Chinese” in Overseas Chinese?
Sojourn Work and the Place of China's
Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial
Chinese-ness
Chris Vasantkumar

Abstract
This essay argues that to adequately answer the ques on its tle poses,
anthropological approaches to na onal and transna onal China(s) must
be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it
compares and explores the connec ons between three examples of the
“sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, mul ethnic
popula ons abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with
recent official a empts to project the People's Republic of China's
mul ethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its na onal borders. The
second highlights the importance of the early Chinese na on-state in
the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first
decades of the twen eth century. The final case foregrounds the late
imperial routes of nascent Chinese na onalism to argue that, in contrast
to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” na onal and
transna onal modes of Chinese community emerged together from the
ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need
to ques on the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas)
Chinese-ness.
The Journal of Asian Studies
The Journal of Asian Studies (2012), 71 : pp 423-446
Copyright © The Associa on for Asian Studies, Inc. 2012
DOI: h p://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021911812000113 (About DOI)
Published online: Wed May 09 00:00:00 BST 2012

Chris Vasantkumar (cvasantk@hamilton.edu) is Luce Junior Professor of

Asian Studies and Anthropology at Hamilton College.
One a ernoon in early November 2003, I was si ng in a booth at the
gaily- decorated cafe a ached to the Huaqiao Fandian, one of most
popular foreign tourists' hotels in Xiahe, 1 Gansu province, China.
Opposite me, his face reflected in the long mirrors running along the
interior walls of the restaurant, was the establishment's owner, one of
the richest men in the area. T., as I will call him for now, is a polymath
and a tycoon, fluent in at least five languages, from the slightly accented
but elegant English in which we conversed to his sterling Mandarin. The
former was honed in elite private schools and at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, the la er polished in a two-year s nt at the
Beijing Language and Culture University. At the me of our
conversa on, T. had recently taken over the reins of his family's
enterprises from his elderly father, who had been the first local émigré
to return to the region a er the beginning of the reform era in 1979. T.
is a tall man with a dignified mien and an easy smile. He is, however, all
business when it comes to doing business in China.
“This century will be China's century,” he assures me. “The government
is in some ways s ll old-fashioned in their outlook, but over the last ten
years they have been ac vely promo ng the priva za on of publicly
owned companies as well as seeking to foster interna onaliza on of
investment.” Priva za on is only just beginning to reach Xiahe, but
amazing opportuni es are out there for those, who, as he puts it, “have
the balls or the money” to take advantage of them. T. and his father
have certainly not lacked for audacity. Having first made their fortune in
expor ng locally produced tex les, they expanded to holdings in jewelry
and semiprecious stones, herbal medicine, and the wool trade, but five
years previous they switched to tourism and have not looked back.
When T.'s father returned to Xiahe, he was able to extract a parcel of
real estate from the local government as an incen ve to invest in the
area. At the me, it was farmland with just one house. Nowadays it is
smack in the middle of Xiahe's busiest market area, a lodestone for
peasants and pilgrims from miles around, and equally magne c for
tourists both interna onal and domes c. To tap into this growing traffic,
T. and his father built a hotel and cafe facing the main street of town.
Oriented towards European group tours, the hotel has been remarkably
successful. 2 Throughout the process of investment and construc on,
the local government was very suppor ve, in no small part because T.
and his father were well-connected overseas investors. In recent years,
overseas investment has come to be seen as a key means of improving
people's living condi ons in China's “backward” western provinces.
Especially since the implementa on of the Xibu Dakaifa or Great
Western Development Scheme in 2000, the Chinese government has
sought to a ract overseas investors with tax breaks and other economic
incen ves.
T. is genuinely op mis c about what the future holds. “Let people
know,” he tells me, “that I'm not a Communist, but I feel China is
different now. Don't rely on nega ve media reports—come and see for
yourself. China is going the right way; in ten to fi een years it will be the
number-one country in Asia.” Compared to the small Asian principality
where he grew up, China is less free but considerably more stable and
the pace of its development is much faster. T. is more than willing to
trade the odd liberty for profit: “They know I am here for the money,”
he confesses. “If I had go en involved in poli cs, I would have been
kicked out ten years ago.”
In some respects this conversa on seems unremarkable: a wealthy
overseas investor returns “home” and cashes in. T. is neither the first
nor the wealthiest example of such an individual. His account constructs
post-WTO China as a land of opportunity where self-reliance has
replaced sta st complacency, where some might starve but others can
drive Buicks if they have the cash, the connec ons, or the cojones. The
name of his hotel, Huaqiao Fandian (usually “Overseas Chinese Hotel” in
English), would seem to be similarly banal. An ar cle from Chinese
Na on Magazine on returnees to the region features an interview with
T.'s father that includes a brief account of the logic of its selec on. In it,
he proclaims, “The reason why I gave the hotel the name of Huaqiao is
because I am a Chinese person (wo shi zhongguoren) and my sons are
huaqiao who ardently love China” (wode erzi shi reaizhe zhongguo de
huaqiao), Diemujiangteng (n.d.).
At first blush, T.'s narra ve might be just a localized variant of the
emergent discourses of racialized, Confucian capitalism current in
diasporic circles. Ong (1999) has famously described the efforts of key
figures in the Chinese communi es of Southeast Asia to spread images
of transna onal Chinese-ness in which “capital and race are
interbraided” in what Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore has called “the glow of
Chinese fraternity.” The end result at which such “racial” and
“masculinist” statements are aimed is the construc on of an
extraterritorial community of “Chinese” capitalists who belong
“ul mately to one big family” based on “common racial origin, ethnic
tradi ons, and alliances that penetrate bureaucra c rules and transcend
ideological differences” (Ong 1999, 65–6).
In these visions of essen al Chinese-ness, the Overseas Chinese can be
divorced from any roo ng in the soil of the People's Republic. The
transna onal structures of feeling to which they appeal are cast as
external and poten ally opposed to the Chinese na on-state (Tu 2005).
Such stories about the nature of Overseas Chinese-ness have been
widely circulated and have come to form much of the common sense
about the category of people in ques on. But with regard to T., there
are a couple of wrinkles that I have kept from you on purpose: first, T.,
or rather Tsering, is a Tibetan. His father fled the country soon a er the
communist triumph in 1949 but went to Nepal, not Taiwan. Tsering's
father was originally a monk from nomad country near Xiahe. In 1957 he
walked all the way to Lhasa, a journey of eleven months, heard whispers
of trouble brewing, and kept on going to Kathmandu. There he le the
monkhood, married a local woman, started a successful carpet
company, and sent his two sons to a Jesuit school in Darjeeling, India,
and eventually to college in the United States and postgraduate study in
China. Second, the English version of the name of his hotel, the Huaqiao
Fandian, a common enough Mandarin appella on, usually rendered as
“Overseas Chinese Hotel,” is here, by contrast, “The Overseas Tibetan
Hotel.” 3
Interlude: Sojourn Work
Is Chinese-ness given shape by na onal borders or is it unaffected by
them? Is the “Chinese” in “Overseas Chinese” and “Han Chinese” one
and the same? Comparing construc ons of Chinese-ness in the scholarly
literature on the “Overseas Chinese” (Ahearn and Gates 1981; Callahan
2003; Duara 1997; Freedman 1979; McKeown 2001; Ong 1999; Ong and
Nonini 1997; Siu 1952; Skinner 1957; Tu 2005; Wang 1981b, 1991a,
1991b) with those in work on ethnic minori es in the People's Republic
of China (PRC) (Brown 1996, 2004; Bulag 2002; Davis 2005; Gladney
1991, 1994, 2004; Harrell 1990, 1995, 2001; Litzinger 1998, 2000;
Mueggler 2001; Rack 2005; Schein 2000) prompts such uncomfortable
ques ons. Yet none of these ques ons quite captures the strangeness of
the contemporary situa on, for Chinese-ness as it is studied today is
simultaneously many and one—many within the PRC and one without.
Within the People's Republic, a “unified mul -ethnic state,” Chinese-
ness is formally plural. The Chinese na on or Zhonghua minzu is
officially composed of the majority Han and fi y-five minority peoples
(shaoshu minzu). 4 Outside of the PRC, however, in place of the
na onally contained, mul plex Chinese-ness of the “mainland” one
finds an Overseas Chinese-ness that is geographically unbounded and
resolutely uniform in ethno-racial terms—one ethnicity instead of fi y-
six. Territorial and extraterritorial 5 versions of Chinese-ness are not
congruent. The crucial ques on, then, is how has Chinese-ness today
come to be comprised of both fi y-six ethnici es and one?
To this point, sinological inquiry has not really known what to make of
this Janus-faced Chinese-ness. Alluding to the division between ethnic
and na onal bases of Chinese-ness has itself become fairly
commonplace. Lamentably, however, this divide has been both
dehistoricized and under-theorized. Li le a en on has been paid to its
con nuing effects on scholarly prac ce. Moreover, the complex
historical interrela onships between territorial and extraterritorial
Chinese-nesses, which had received some a en on in past decades,
have been virtually ignored in China anthropology, if not more generally,
in recent years. As a result, contemporary studies of Chinese-ness are
confronted with an apparently paradoxical situa on.
Historian Tu Wei-ming explains the situa on eloquently: the central
conundrum of Chinese-ness today is how to map the dis nc on
between the “variety of na onali es that are ethnically and culturally
Chinese,” encapsulated in the term Huaren on the one hand and
Zhongguoren on the other (Tu 2005, 162). Tu glosses these terms
tautologically, rendering Huaren as “people of Chinese origin” and
Zhongguoren as “people of China, the state.” 6 The former is “not
geopoli cally centered” but instead invokes “a common ancestry and a
shared cultural background” (Tu 2005, 162). 7 The la er by contrast
“necessarily evokes obliga ons and loyal es of poli cal affilia on and
the myth of the Middle Kingdom” (Tu 2005, 162). Here cultural and
na onal bases of Chinese-ness are posed as poten ally antagonis c
alterna ves. Further, this dis nc on possesses something approaching
moral force.
For Tu, ethno-cultural Chinese-ness (being “of Chinese origin”) has deep
historical roots in millennia of “Chinese” civiliza on, while civic Chinese-
ness (becoming of Chinese des ny, 8 if you will, by virtue of holding
ci zenship in “China, the state”) is an unwelcome precipitate of the
traumas of China's long nineteenth century (Tu 2005, 147–48). This
later, civic Chinese-ness squats in the ruins of its earlier, ethnic
counterpart. We can see the degree to which Tu conceives ethnic and
civic Chinese-nesses as dis nct and opposed in his answer to the
ques on “Does ci zenship of a Chinese na onal state guarantee one's
Chineseness?” (2005, 167): “an obvious no.”
That one can hold a Chinese passport and, in theory, not be “Chinese”
highlights the importance of determining how Chinese-ness can be
recognized as Chinese-ness without reifying “the very category
—‘Chinese’—that must be explained” (Karl 2002, 54). This essay is an
extended medita on on this problem. In it, I a end to Chinese-ness(es)
as processual rather than fixed. In place of sta c modes of “being of
Chinese origin” I suggest the importance of examining how individuals
and collec vi es might become, stay, and cease to be Chinese.
Specifically, I treat the Overseas Chinese not as an always already
naturally exis ng outgrowth of something prior called China 9 but as a
con ngent ar fact of historical processes of the produc on of what
David Po er has called the “condi ons of commonality” basic to the
cul va on of na onalist sen ment (Po er 1973 quoted in Sheehan
1981, 9 n.17).
This approach foregrounds the hard work of construc ng condi ons of
commonality of which Overseas Chinese consciousness and
communi es have historically been the results. Drawing upon the
common transla on of the ubiquitous Mandarin term huaqiao, as
“Chinese sojourners,” I term such efforts “sojourn work.” Sojourn work
comprises two interrelated efforts: first, rendering it possible for
popula ons to be construed and construe themselves as “Chinese,” and
second, recontextualizing the journeys these popula ons undertake,
whether retrospec vely or prospec vely, as sojourns (temporary travels
away) linked crucially to the Chinese na on-state. Sojourn work is
historically con ngent, complexly territorialized, and linked to
na onalist concerns that both are cons tuted by and crosscut na on-
state boundaries.
From this perspec ve, modes of imagining extraterritorial Chinese
community, far from working against the na on-state, may be bound up
in crucial ways with state projects of trans/na onal unity. In place of Tu's
binary logic of Chinese-ness, scholars must heed Callahan's sugges on
that in a “Chinese” context, “the na on and the diaspora are not
separate autonomous ‘substances’ with core iden es; rather, Chinese
na onalism and diaspora take on meaning in rela on to each other”
(2003, 489). Posi ng the na on-state and transna onalism as opposed,
contradictory, or separable forms of imagining community does more
harm than good—not least because it masks and dehistoricizes the
complex mutual implica on of na onal and transna onal Chinese-
nesses, obscuring both the late imperial circumstances of their co-
crea on as well the la er's consequences for sinology today.
Below, I analyze three instances of sojourn work to highlight the
in macies between territorial and extraterritorial modes of Chinese-
ness. I begin with the story of recent returns of huaqiao Tibetans and
then work back in me, grounding my analysis of their sojourns in
discussions, first, of the importance of the territorial na on-state to the
galvanizing of Overseas Chinese sen ment in the early years of the
Chinese Republic and, second, of the extraterritorial i neraries of
Chinese (proto-)na onalism in the intellectual ferment of the late Qing. I
conclude by sugges ng ways in which acknowledging the in macy of
territorial and extraterritorial Chinese-nesses could reshape sinological
inquiry. First, however, let us return to the “Overseas Tibetan.”
(Mis)transla ng Huaqiao

For many scholars, transla ng huaqiao as “Overseas Tibetan” raises

conceptual hackles because it upends two sets of received opposi ons,
one affec ve and one categorical. First, it works against the stories of
Han-Tibetan antagonism that dominate Western representa ons of the
Tibet ques on. In these stories—many of which were truer for the
Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) than for Tibetan areas in Gansu and
Qinghai prior to the March 2008 riots—Chinese and Tibetan are posited
as opposites rather than poten al cognates. 10 Second, transla ng
huaqiao as “Overseas Tibetan” calls into ques on a problema c set of
assump ons about the rela onship between territorial and
extraterritorial forms of community that posit the la er as separate
from and opposed to the former. 11
While one might expect such objec ons to come primarily from
sinophiles such as Tu, cri cs of China have also been swayed by such
rhetoric. Thus, ironically, Bulag (2002), a notably acid and eloquent cri c
of the supposedly meless veri es of Chinese culture and civiliza on
that Tu assiduously promotes, arrives at the same endpoint as the la er
—namely that real Chinese-ness is the natural property of the Han and
that any a empt to link non-Han to Chinese-ness is doomed to failure
or, at best, some sort of sad ethno-na onal transves sm. Without
seeking to diminish in any way the suffering of Mongols at the hands of
the Han over the last century, I suggest that while “con nu[ing] to use
the English word Chinese to designate the ‘Han’ in contrast to Mongol,”
may be sa sfying affec vely, it is overly limi ng analy cally (Bulag 2002,
18). Assuming an a priori difference in kind between Han and non-Han
in which Chinese-ness is always already the sole legi mate property of
the former renders it nearly impossible to analyze emergent modes of
mul -minzu extraterritorial Chinese-ness. Moreover, it obscures the
sojourn work that has gone into bringing Han extraterritorial Chinese-
ness into being.
Where the coinciding blind spots of Bulag and Tu would render visions
of the Overseas Tibetan as huaqiao either unanalyzeable or as unworthy
of analysis, I suggest that despite the cogni ve dissonance it might
provoke, this (mis)transla on of huaqiao as “Overseas Tibetan” just
might “crack open new ques ons, ques ons not previously visible in the
subject ma er itself” (Gallison 2003). Specifically, it forces us to ask,
with a nod to Stuart Hall (1996), just what is this Chinese in “Overseas
Chinese?” How can we take seriously a empts to render Tibetan travels
beyond the na on as Chinese sojourns without uncri cally endorsing
na onalist aims? How should this transla on affect scholars'
understandings of the ambivalent posi on of “Overseas Tibetan
Compatriots” (haiwai zangzu tongbao 12 ) as well as of their returned
counterparts (guiguo zangzu tongbao) in contemporary na onal and
transna onal mappings of Chinese-ness? 13 Ul mately, how are we to
reconcile na onal minori es and transna onal projects?
Sojourn Work I: “With the Sincerity of a Mother's Call”
Since the fall of Tibet to communist rule in the 1950s, Tibetans have
engaged in a complex set of journeying prac ces that range from taking
permanent refuge in the exile communi es of north India to temporary
trans-Himalayan travels on Chinese passports to visit rela ves living
abroad. During my fieldwork in Tibetan areas of northwest China, I met
many individuals who had made the arduous journey to India but had,
for various reasons, opted to return to China. Some had returned
fur vely with a cri cal consciousness of the limits of Chinese
na onalism. Others, like Tsering's father, had returned with official
blessing to cash in on the promise of economic development. Whether
temporary or permanent, licit or illicit, selfless or self-interested, these
sojourning prac ces were 14 undertaken at some remove from more
usual circuits of subaltern movement in contemporary China, which
generally run between poor rural hinterlands and the booming urban
East.
From the point of view of the PRC government, Tibetan peregrina ons
to South Asia and the community of Tibetans living outside the borders
of China that has been the product of such movements represent a
source of poten al “spli st” behavior—a threat to the very fabric of the
na on. Rather than conforming with prescribed circuits of movement
that work to further the developmentalist projects of the contemporary
Chinese state, Tibetans' trans-Himalayan circuits have been an
uncomfortable reminder of the persistence of mul ple centers (Lhasa,
Dharamsala, the West) that unse les what one might call the
“concentricity” of the “One China Policy.”
The Chinese state's response to these eccentrically routed communi es
took a surprising turn in the years leading up to the strife of 2008. PRC
authori es, largely under the auspices of the United Front, had been
ac vely wooing Tibetans overseas to reorient their sen ments towards
the Chinese na on and recenter their ac ons towards the building of a
rela vely well-off na onal future. 15 On the PRC website “100 Ques ons
and Answers about Tibet,” for example, answer 94 concerns China's
policies towards “Tibetan compatriots residing abroad”:
The Chinese government has adopted the policy that, “all patriots
belong to one big family, whether they rally to the common cause early
or late.” Anyone, as long as he or she does not par cipate in separa st
ac vi es or harm the unifica on of the motherland and the unity of the
Chinese na on, is welcome by the Chinese government, whether he or
she comes back to visit friends and rela ves, or to se le. Those who had
par cipated in separa st ac vi es in the past may also be permi ed to
return, provided that they cease their separa st ac vi es and change
their stance on “Tibet independence.” (China Tibet Informa on Center
n.d.a)
To par cipate in Chinese society, Tibetans need not even return “home,”
although that is also encouraged. Rather they are exhorted to realign
their movements around a mul ethnic prospect of na onal “Chinese-
ness” no longer neatly circumscribed by territorial borders.
This “Tibetan Compatriots Abroad Work” (guowai zangbao gongzuo)
kicked off at the dawn of the era of Reform and Opening with the
forma on in January 1979 of a region-level commi ee for the recep on
of Tibetan compatriots returning to visit rela ves or se le down in the
TAR along with city-level recep on offices in Zhangmu on the Nepal
border and seven other loca ons shortly therea er. 16 Such efforts
increased drama cally in intensity over the years between the events of
June 4, 1989, and the troubles of March 2008, as living standards in
Lhasa improved drama cally (for some) and the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) came to increasingly “rel[y] on Pan-Chinese na onalism as a
supplementary ideology and as a basis for a new united front in post-
Tiananmen China” (Guo 2003, 42). 17
Texts in support of these United Front efforts paint the a rac ons of a
return “home” for Tibetans in both familial and economic terms.
Diemujiangteng describes such incitements in the context of the difficult
lives of Tibetans “deceived” by spli sts into going abroad:
In these foreign places, they experienced for themselves the bi erness
of living under a stranger's roof; in these foreign places, they heard the
sound of their homeland becoming rich and powerful, of minzu
becoming prosperous, they listened to their homeland call with the
sincerity of a mother calling to wandering children (ling ng daole zuguo
muqin dui youzi zhencheng de huhuan). These experiences caused these
Tibetan compatriots leading difficult lives wandering in strange lands to
resolve firmly to return to their ancestral homeland and, breaking
through all sorts of obstruc ons, duty bound not to turn back, they
returned to the embrace (huaibao) of their ancestral homeland.
(Diemujiangteng n.d.)
It is clear that these returns exist on both affec ve and poli cal terrains.
Dankao, an aged returnee to Gannan, frames his longing in emo onal,
even sensuous terms: “In India, almost every day I would think of my
na ve place: each of its trees, its grasses. I would think of the Mani
stones of Labrang and the smell of juniper smoke. Some mes, at night I
would think so much that I could not sleep” (Diemujiangteng n.d.). Yet
the realiza on of individual Tibetans' desires to return home, if only to
be reunited with family members or to die in their na ve places, are
transformed in United Front accounts into poli cal acts that both lend
legi macy to the improvements in living condi ons in Tibet and provide
blueprints for new forms of mul ethnic “Chinese” transna onalism.
United Front appeals exhort Tibetans overseas to abandon spli st
proclivi es and (re)commit either at home or abroad to a collec ve,
prosperous, Chinese future. They seek to transform homesick exiles into
na onalist sojourners—to effect a recontextualiza on of a popula on
and their journeys in na onalist terms. A 2002 text on “The Situa on of
the Work of Managing the Recep on of Returned and Visi ng Tibetan
Compatriots in the TAR” a empts to construct a connec on between
emo on and poli cs. As befi ng a “mother calling to her wandering
children,” it emphasizes the importance of working diligently to make
returnees both temporary and permanent “feel the loving care
(guanhuai) of the government and the party, the warmth (wennuan) of
socialism, to promote (cujinle) their love of country and party and to
raise their socialist consciousness (juewu).” The ul mate goal in all of
this is “to cause them gradually to become Chinese ci zens not just in
name but also in actuality ” (yinqi tamen zhubu zhuancheng mingfuqishi
de zhongguo gongmin, China Tibet Informa on Center n.d.b).
Prior to the turmoil of 2008, the PRC sought to turn returned Tibetan
compatriots into real Chinese ci zens and mold their overseas
counterparts into long-distance Chinese na onalists. On both counts,
the conversion such United Front work endeavored to enact was
poli cal rather than ethnic. The goal was not to turn Tibetans into
“ethnic” Chinese or Han but, in classic United Front fashion, to convert
“wavering” Tibetans to the party's (and, by extension, the na on's)
poli cal cause (Van Slyke 1970, 128) —to make Tibetans Chinese
poli cally rather than ethnically (thus short-circui ng Bulag's cri que).
In such a empts, Chinese-ness has been, despite the melessness of
official na onalist mappings of the na on, apparently emergent and
open-ended. With such policies, clearly, the PRC was a emp ng to
solidify new possible bases for being Chinese, to convince new
cons tuencies to align their futures with the des ny of the Chinese
na on-state. Part and parcel of this work was an a empt to project the
PRC's mul ethnic na onal project 18 beyond the confines of the
territorial na on-state that hailed not just returned Tibetans but their
kinfolk abroad as poten al members of a deterritorialized, mul ethnic
Chinese na on.
Sojourn Work II: “Teochiu, Cantonese, or Whatever”
The United Front work devoted to conver ng Tibetans abroad from
spli st threat into avatars of poli cal Chinese-ness has sought to
construct new, if apparently unlikely, trajectories for becoming not
necessarily of Chinese origin 19 but Chinese in des ny. Such sojourn
work has been devoted to the produc on of Overseas Chinese-ness not
as primordial ethnic fact but as emergent poli cal poten ality. Such
a empts hark back to prior moments of making new possible
trajectories for becoming Chinese outside of China in which the unlikely
targets of sojourn work were not Tibetan but “Han.”
It was not always the case that the “Chinese overseas” were more
fundamentally the “Overseas Chinese” (Freedman 1979 [1964], 6).
Indeed, both Freedman and Skinner (1957) highlight the degree to
which, rather than being a latent property of all those we would now
classify as Han residing outside of the territory we now know as China,
transna onal consciousness of an overarching Chinese ethnic or
na onal iden ty was not so much the condi on for but the product of
early Chinese na onalist projects. Indeed, the contrast between
zhonghua minzu as poli cal (civic, unnatural) Chinese-ness and Hanzu as
ethnic and laterally natural Chinese-ness only stands if we treat the Han
as an ahistorical essence rather than, itself, a poli cal, constructed
category. (On the constructedness of the Han and the emergence of the
Hanzu in the broader circula on of racial and evolu onary thinking in
late Qing, see, among others, Brown 2004; Chow 1997, 2001; Dikö er
1992, 2005; Gladney 1991, 1994; and Mullaney et al. 2012). Skinner's
(1957) history of Chinese society in Thailand is especially illumina ng in
this regard.
Skinner (1957) describes the galvanizing effect the na onalist revolu on
on the mainland had on the Chinese-ness of the “Chinese” community
in Thailand. Yet he presents this outcome not as instantaneous and
universal but as gradual, historically con ngent, and unevenly achieved.
Skinner suggests that from the ini al efflorescence of “Chinese”
migra on to Siam in the mid-eighteenth century un l the early years of
the Republic, “speech groups” (1957, 35) were far more salient to local
community organiza on than was any sort of pan-Sinic or ethno-
na onalist Chinese-ness. During this roughly 150-year period, there was
not a single “Chinese” community in Thailand, but rather five main
linguis c groups: speakers of Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, Hokkien,
and Teochiu. Rela ons between the speech groups were o en less than
amicable. “The nineteenth-century literature on Siam is full of tes mony
to the division and animosity” between them. “In 1837,” Skinner notes,
“[George Windsor] Earl wrote that, ‘the na ves of different Chinese
provinces are strongly opposed to each other, as much so, indeed, as if
they belonged to rival na ons’” (quoted in Skinner 1957, 139).
Even a er the fall of the Qing and the ascendancy of the Guomindang
(GMD), however, poli cal and linguis c divisions remained. While there
was now a consciousness of belonging to something called China,
especially a er the 1927 GMD purge of the communists, debate
intensified as to the nature of this unifying category. “Almost all Chinese
considered poli cs in the Chinese schools to be a natural concomitant of
patrio sm. The ques on concerned the brand of poli cs to be
propagated” (Skinner 1957, 231). It took an intensifica on of na onalist
contacts between the “Chinese” communi es in Siam and the Chinese
Republic between 1928 and 1933 to spur a movement towards
instruc on in Mandarin as opposed to the southern languages
tradi onally used by the five speech groups (Skinner 1957, 232). Yet this
standardiza on of Chinese-ness on the na onal model in both Thailand
and the nanyang more broadly was uneven in both progress and scope.
As late as the 1930s, prominent Fujianese/Singaporean huaqiao Tan Kah
Kee remarked on the nanyang Chinese, “As for the word ‘unity’, all the
organiza ons of the overseas Chinese are mainly united in form only.
Where substance is concerned, there is really very li le worth talking
about.… To talk emp ly of unity when s ll like sca ered sand, that is
really to be regre ed” (quoted in Wang 1981b, 146).
Tellingly, reflec ng on the vicissitudes of the “ethnic Chinese in postwar
Thailand,” Skinner does not a ribute some sort of inevitability to the
processes by which pan-linguis c “ethnic” or “na onal” consciousness
was achieved. While no ng the rela ve decline in the significance of
speech group divisions since the turn of the nineteenth century, Skinner
treats the outcome of this process as fundamentally con ngent:
Historical events of the twen eth century have had the effect of
minimizing differences among speech groups: the growth of Chinese
na onalism, and not of Teochiu, Cantonese, and Hainanese
na onalisms; the unifica on of China under the Kuomintang; the
development of a popular Chinese na onal literature and the promo on
of Kuo-yu as a Chinese na onal language; and in Thailand the increase
of an -Chinese sen ment and measures which … forced a certain
degree of unity in Chinese society. Ethnic Chinese are today indisputably
Chinese first and Teochiu, Cantonese, or whatever second. (1957, 315)
This all sounds remarkably like a civic, forged (trans-)na onalism, spread
in ramifying circuits from a na on-state center. But the word “ethnic”
muddies things here. Skinner's own fine-grained analysis makes his last
sentence unintelligible. What were ethnic Chinese before they were
Chinese? We are back to Karl's conundrum. If the spread of pan-dialect
“Chinese” consciousness was the result of a historically con ngent
poli cal project, it then follows that the category of ethnic Chinese is
itself a poli cally shaped, thoroughly historical ar fact and not some
sort of eternal moral essence.
The story we see in Skinner is not just the Chinese overseas being
turned into the Overseas Chinese as per Freedman, it is the “Teochiu,
Cantonese, or whatever” overseas being turned into the Overseas
Chinese. Wang Gungwu puts it slightly differently, no ng that the
process would make “all Chinese abroad [sic] think less of themselves as
Cantonese, Hokkienese, Hakkas, Teochius, and Hailams and more as
Chinese compatriots” (1981b, 154; emphasis added). The
transforma on of the “whatevers” overseas into the Overseas Chinese
took hard work—sojourn work. In Wang's words, “it depended on China
to con nue to take an interest in [the communi es of the nanyang], and
on expatriate Chinese to con nue to prepare later genera ons to be
na onalis c. Otherwise,” and here is the crux of things, “the Nanyang
Chinese would not have overcome their distance from China and
believe, as some did, that they were as Chinese as those at home and
only different because they were temporarily abroad” (1981b, 156–57).
The interven ons of the territorial na on-state were perceived as
central to the successful elabora on of this transna onal structure of
feeling.
Wang notes Tan Kah Kee's addendum to his pessimis c assessment of
overseas Chinese unity:
What I hope for is that our government [i.e., the Chinese Republic] can
rule effec vely and lead the people to unity. By providing an example for
the overseas Chinese, surely the Chinese will respond. If our
government is unable to lead the people to unity and the overseas
Chinese are expected to achieve this [by themselves] first, then it is no
different from climbing a tree to catch a fish. (quoted in 1981b, 158)
In place of rhetoric that would sever “cultural China” from the Chinese
na on-state, we see in Skinner, Wang, and Tan's accounts the
fundamental role played by the territorial na on-state in the cul va on
of poten al transna onal communi es. Further we see that, like the
Tibetans wooed by the PRC, the Han, too, had to be coaxed into
responding to a mother's call. 20 If both Han as Overseas Chinese and
Tibetans as Overseas Chinese are con ngent historical construc ons,
then scholars seeking to understand contemporary Chinese-ness should
follow Bruno Latour's sugges on to shi our “a en on away from the
irrelevant difference between what is constructed and not constructed,
toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed,
well or badly composed” (2010, 3).
Sojourn Work III: Trans/na onalists before the Na on-State
Whereas Skinner, Wang, and Tan describe the importance of the
territorial na on-state to the promulga on of transna onal sen ment in
the early Republican era, Karl and Duara describe the crucial role played
by trans-imperial popula ons and circuits in the birthing of territorial
and extraterritorial Chinese na onalisms in the late Qing. Karl succinctly
describes the intellectual ferment and bodily displacements of the era:
On the one hand internal breakdown fueled efforts at theorizing the
gathering crisis in terms of a new people-state rela onship; this
theoriza on, combined with the breakdowns, increasingly destabilized
the claims of the dynas c system to represent the correct rela onal
unity among poli cs, learning and Chinese-ness…. On the other hand,
a er the 1898 coup, a considerable por on of Chinese na onalist
theorizing and mobilizing took place outside the territorial bounds of
the Qing Empire and the first direct targets of mobiliza on were o en
Chinese who resided outside of these boundaries. (2002, 53)
Such mobiliza on was not an easy, predictable, or guaranteed process,
given the frac ousness of “Chinese communi es” abroad. Prospec ve
reformers did not simply find “Chinese” people abroad, draw on their
natural patrio sm, and yoke them effortlessly to the glorious cause of
the Chinese na on-state. Instead, such efforts relied on a “recoding of
Chinese abroad into a new na onal imaginary of ‘the people’ and of
their obliga ons toward the weakened [Qing] state” (Karl 2002, 56). This
was a process of rendering Chinese overseas “plausibly part of
contemporary Chinese na onalist praxis” (Karl 2002, 71), the ac ve
making in other words of Po er's “condi ons of commonality”
prerequisite to the making of na onal consciousness in both
territorialized and deterritorialized variants.
This process transformed constructed, poli cal categories into the
ahistorical divisions of nature (Karl 2002, 57). The Chinese-ness that had
emerged historically as a poli cal category or orienta on—a tool to get
the “Teochiu, Cantonese, or whatever” living outside the territories of
the Qing onto the same na onalist page—was, in the process,
transmuted into an eternal ethnic verity, the Overseas (Han) Chinese.
The na onalist affini es of would-be transna onal popula ons were
thus the products of na onalist agita on and circula on, not their
causes. Crucial in all of this was the category of huaqiao itself. A close
look at the term's development makes it clear that so-called
“transna onal” narra ves of racial and cultural Chinese-ness and
construc ons of the Chinese na on-state itself were both birthed in the
late imperial period between 1898 and 1911 and were nurtured by
related sets of proto-na onalist reform movements (Wang 1981a, 123–
24). The quest to forge a mature Overseas Chinese community was also
the quest to forge a homeland—a Chinese na on-state to which this
overseas community could construct its rela onship of distanced
interest.
Duara (1997) illustrates the degree to which early forms of huaqiao
were caught up in the various trans-imperially circula ng, proto-
na onalist reform movements in the late Qing, each with their own
visions of the proper nature of the imperial polity and its future form.
He follows Wang (1991b) in employing huaqiao to refer to a par cular
mode of Chinese immigra on rather than the “diaspora” as a whole.
Wang describes at least three historical modes of Chinese mobility. Two
of these modes, the huashang or Chinese trader mode and the huagong
or Chinese laborer mode, date from the mid-nineteenth century and are
rooted in livelihood prac ces rather than any sort of loyalty to some
larger perceived totality of China. Huaqiao for Wang is associated with
an “influx of na onalist ac vists and ideology at the end of the
nineteenth century” (Duara 1997, 42).
For Duara huaqiao represents a par cular project of fixing Chinese
“iden ty in the face of a pre-exis ng mul plicity” of iden es as well as
in rela on to the conflic ng interpreta ons of Chinese-ness advocated
by other contemporary projects of fixing (1997, 40). “Huaqiao … was
introduced to unify the various terms that the diaspora used to refer to
themselves, such as Min Guangren, Min Yueren and Tangren—ways of
iden fying the people of Guangdong and Fujian” (Duara 1997, 42).
Huaqiao proffered a new larger basis of shared iden ty in place of the
several “simultaneously different communi es” into which so-called
diaspora popula ons had previously organized themselves: linguis c
groups, surname groupings, and na ve place and other territorially
based groupings (Duara 1997, 40). For Wang and laterally for Duara,
then, huaqiao was, in rela on to other modes of “Chinese immigra on,”
a “new na onal signifier” (Duara 1997, 42). Yet, at huaqiao's birth, the
Chinese na on itself was an aspira on rather than accomplishment (on
these two la er terms see Sheehan 1981, 10).
What does it mean to suggest that before the Chinese na on took its
ul mate shape huaqiao was a na onal signifier? Might huaqiao itself
have been more of an aspira on than an accomplishment? Duara
a empts to clarify the stakes here by no ng that “the new na onal
signifier, huaqiao, implied first that the huaqiao owed their allegiance to
China and the Qing state (and a er 1911, to the Republic) and entailed
certain legal rights and responsibili es towards the Chinese state”
(Duara 1997, 42). Yet I think that there is too easy a slippage here
between na on and state, Qing Empire and Chinese Republic. What was
the basis of Chinese-ness before the na on-state? The Qing Empire?
Certainly no one writes of the Qing na on or the overseas Qing. Are
China and the Qing iden cal? Contemporary Chinese na onalists and
many Western observers answer this ques on in the affirma ve. Yet if
we are to take the narra ves of revolu onary huaqiao ac vists seriously,
they were not. 21
Duara notes that revolu onaries considered huaqiao communi es the
heirs to the secret socie es of Ming loyalists who had opposed Manchu
rule from the beginning. As such, huaqiao could serve as “the source of
China's salva on from the Manchus” (Duara 1997, 52). In these
narra ves, huaqiao were cast as glorious pioneers who con nued the
legacy of the seafaring early Ming. In such construc ons, China and the
Qing were empha cally not coterminous; the Manchu Qing rulers were
not seen as one of the brother minzu of today but as alien usurpers. Yet
we seem to have no qualms about projec ng our serial logics of
Chinese-ness back into the pre-na onal past.
During the last few years of Qing rule, the par sans of imperial,
reformist, and revolu onary projects of Chinese prospects (projects that
sought to mold a possible future) all a empted to ac vate networks of
extraterritorial loyalty, jostling for poten al supporters for their versions
of the future of the Qing state as well as for the poten al Chinese-
nesses these versions entailed. All three shared an emphasis on
reorien ng sca ered popula ons towards the “fons et origo” of the
central, “Chinese” state and its future prospects—an emphasis, that is,
on recas ng the disparate hopes of sca ered popula ons in terms of a
collec ve, Chinese des ny. Duara terms this reorienta on a process of
“re-sinicizing” (1997, 40). I suggest it simultaneously represents projects
of sojourn work and na on work that were qualita vely new rather than
latent poten ali es reac vated. Moreover, rather than simply assuming
the na onal content of these projects of (re-)centraliza on, we should
bring the legacies of Qing colonial expansion more clearly into focus.
The Empire, Overseas?
Late Qing a empts to mobilize “Chinese” communi es abroad need to
be contextualized in light of “domes c” projects of shoring up the
imperial government a er the fi een-year struggle to defeat the Taiping
rebellion. Crossley (2005) suggests that in the “military struggle of the
1850s and the subsequent struggle for economic recovery in the 1870s,
a progressively programma c ‘Confucian’ orthodoxy was set against
puta ve heterodoxies….” Only at this point in me through this example
of “tradi on by inven on, a broad based conscious use of
communica ons and educa onal ins tu ons” was a “novel ideological
confla on of the Qing empire with ‘China’ and of puta ve Chinese
tradi ons (foremost ‘Confucianism’) with the Qing court” forged. Much
of “tradi onal Chinese culture” is thus, for Crossley, the product of the
civil wars of the nineteenth century (Crossley 2005, 143). The point here
is not simply that the narra ve of an eternal, deterritorialized, Confucian
China is problema c, but, more tellingly, that the ideological confla on
of “China” and the Qing was the con ngent result of par cular historical
trajectories. In turn these historical trajectories and the ideologies of
community (na onal, imperial, or whatever) that they inspired played
important roles in the shaping of projects of huaqiao iden ty across
state boundaries at the end of the Qing as na ons and trans-na ons
together emerged from the ruins of the empire.
In this context, we should not forget that the presence of the diverse
array of peoples within the People's Republic is directly a ributable to
the colonial expansion undertaken by the Manchu in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries that added large swaths of territory to the
map of the empire. The legacy of Qing colonial expansion has shaped
Chinese na onalism in crucial ways. Specifically, the difficulty of
transforming a vast, diverse, and polylingual empire ruled by non-Han
“outsiders” into a viable Han-dominated na on-state has led to an
obsession with preserving the geobody of the Qing—an obsession with
trying to render the Chinese na on and the territory of the Qing
imperium isomorphic. Only by making the Qing and the PRC one and
the same can China legi mate its claims to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.
Contemporary China is thus in many ways an empire in the guise of a
na on-state (Bockman 1998; Bulag 2006; Harrell 2001; Mongia 2003,).
Consequent to these projects of preserving the Qing in na onal form
has been, in Crossley's terms, a retroac ve “na viza on” of the
Manchus (2005, 148) at odds with early na onalists' racist ra onales for
overthrowing the Qing. This conjuring trick is the illusion that lies at the
heart of rhetorics of eternal China. While the PRC has adopted the
Republican project of preserving the geobody of the empire, it has also
sought to extend this project beyond the na on's borders—to project its
mul ethnic na onal project into transna onal space. Crossley's
argument is, thus, as crucial to our understandings of contemporary
transna onal forms of Chinese-ness as it is to their na onal
counterparts.
Both ethnically singular and ethnically plural versions of Chinese
na onalism (territorial and extraterritorial alike) date back to the proto-
na onalist ferment of the late imperial moment. This period was
marked by ongoing debate about which of two alterna ve forms a
poten al na onal successor to the Qing polity should take: an ethnically
plural state that would preserve the borders of the empire or a
monoethnic country for the Han that would occupy a much reduced
territorial footprint. Suisheng Zhao notes the key role played by the
famous late Qing intellectual and poli cal reformer Liang Qichao in the
promulga on of both:
A er traveling to the United States and Japan in 1903, Liang came to
define a na on as the natural outcome of the tendency of human beings
to gather into progressively larger groups akin to one another for
purposes of self-defense. Dis nc vely, a state could encompass more
than one na on and a na on could also be sca ered over many states.
In this regard, Liang invented two Chinese terms, da minzu zhuyi (large
na onalism) and xiao minzu zhuyi (small na onalism), and explained
that “small na onalism is the Han na on as opposed to the other
na ons (tazu) in the country. Large na onalism is the various na ons
within the country as opposed to the various na ons abroad (guowai zhi
zhuzu).” Apparently, Liang's large na onalism was comparable to state
na onalism and small na onalism comparable to ethnic na onalism.
(Zhao 2004, 65–66)
While Liang advocated a post-Qing polity on the large na onalism
model, other late Qing reformers and revolu onaries pushed for a
na on-state of and for the Han. Inside “China” a er the tumult of the
warlord and early na onalist periods, the ques on of the nature of
Chinese na onalism was resolved in favor of da minzu zhuyi with Sun
Yat-sen's hybrid (and assimila onist) but func onally large na onalist
“Five na ons, one family” (wuzu yijia) policy (Leibold 2004). The PRC has
since oscillated from endorsing mul ethnic “unity in diversity” to
dismissing ethnicity as bourgeois but throughout has sought to preserve
the territory of the Qing. Beyond the “mainland,” however, Liang's small
na onalism has held sway—not a surprising outcome given the early
an -Manchu stance of many migrants to the nanyang.
Surprising, perhaps, is the degree to which the co-parentage of Liang's
large and small na onalisms has dropped from view. While large
na onalism has remained clearly the constructed product of human
ac on, small na onalism has been naturalized—the hard work that
went into the making of a pan-linguis c and pan-regional Han iden ty
effaced and Han na onalism projected back into the meless mists of
Confucian China. Small na onalism has been naturalized outside the
boundaries of the empire even as large na onalism became ascendant
atop the ruins of the Qing. Thus we are confronted with the bizarre
spectacle, one hundred years a er the fall of the empire, of Chinese-
ness on the imperial model inside the na on-state and Chinese-ness on
the an -Manchu model outside its bounds. On this paradoxical terrain,
PRC efforts to turn Tibetans abroad into avatars of the na on-state can
be seen as both novel a empts to bring the empire overseas and
familiar projects of crea ng na onalist aspira ons in unlikely loca ons.
Conclusion: Denaturalizing Overseas Chinese-ness
Scholars must take seriously such contemporary state endeavors to
project the PRC's mul ethnic na onal project onto transna onal terrain.
Doing so requires that we treat a empts to hail Tibetans living outside
the PRC as either “Huaqiao” or “Overseas Tibetan compatriots” and to
turn returned Tibetans into “real Chinese ci zens” as instances of
sojourn work comparable to the efforts that transformed the “Chinese
overseas” into the “Overseas Chinese.” To say that these are similar
sorts of processes is not to say that the sojourns and sojourners they
produce are fully commensurate, nor is it, necessarily, to endorse the
na onalist concerns behind such a empts. Yet, I argue, a hard
dis nc on between the making of majority and minority sojourners
only works if one dehistoricizes the concurrent emergence of large and
small na onalisms. Only by turning them from in mately connected
contemporaries into historical ancestor (small) and successor (large),
can ethnic (small) na onalism be naturalized in contrast to an
“obviously” constructed civic (large) na onalism.
Where some scholars see these two versions of Chinese-ness as
separate and opposed, I have argued that territorial and extraterritorial
modes of Chinese community are, as the literal transla on of the
Chinese word for compatriots (tongbao) would have it, “co-uterines”
(Dikö er 2005, 191). They were birthed by a common set of forces and
journeying prac ces in the proto-na onalist ferment of the late Qing.
Further, if the Chinese na on-state and its possible trans-na ons had
their birth in the extraterritorial i neraries of ideas and agitators in the
late nineteenth and early twen eth centuries, the connec ons between
na onal (territorial) and transna onal (extraterritorial) Chinese-ness did
not end there. Drawing on works by Skinner and Wang, I have
highlighted the role of the territorial state in the sojourn work that went
into crea ng the “condi ons of commonality” necessary to the
cul va on of na onalist sen ment outside the territorial bounds of the
nascent Chinese na on-state.
By revealing the constructedness and con ngency of Han-centric visions
of Overseas Chinese-ness, by historicizing and denaturalizing, that is,
primordialist understandings of Overseas Chinese-ness that posit the
Han abroad as always already Overseas Chinese, I demonstrate in this
essay that an opposi on between Han as natural Overseas Chinese and
Tibetan as unnatural Overseas Chinese is untenable because the
Chinese-ness of both groups is precisely unnatural, a fic on in the
Geertzian sense of being humanly made. That is, Chinese ethnic
na onalism is itself also civic. Thus any dis nc on between the Han as
an unproblema c or natural category in contrast to the messy fic ons of
civic Chinese-ness can no longer hold.
If we see Chinese-ness in all instances as processual rather than
inherent, the con ngency of both civic and ethnic na onalisms becomes
clear. The import of this claim is that neither dismissing the possibility of
mul ethnic huaqiao as a sterile, slightly freakish hybrid as Tu or Bulag
would have us do, nor uncri cally celebra ng the harmony of the
mul ethnic Chinese trans/na on as the PRC exhorts is adequate to
understand the in macies of contemporary Chinese state-
transna onalisms—official na onalist projects that exceed na onal
boundaries.
Projects that seek to cast Tibetans abroad as Overseas Chinese bridge
the gap between two modes of Chinese-ness, one territorial,
mul ethnic, and, in na onalist terms, civic, the other extraterritorial,
monoethnic, and primordialist, that to this point have been both cause
and product of an academic division of labor in sinological inquiry. Today
the anthropology of China is divided into at least two dis nct streams
that rarely commingle: an anthropology of China as mul -“ethnic”
na on state and an anthropology of transna onal Chinese communi es
o en discussed in terms of “Confucian Capitalism” or other similar
rubrics. These two apparently divergent anthropologies can no longer
operate in isola on. In order to properly understand the in mate
rela onship between na on and transna onal forms of community in
the contemporary PRC, we must begin to reconcile ethnic and na onal
understandings of Chinese-ness. This has been a guiding mo va on in
my own work; I originally was inspired to do research on northwest
China by recent works on the PRC as a mul ethnic na on-state by
authors such as Harrell, Gladney, Litzinger, Mueggler, and Schein. Over
the last two decades or so, a vibrant English-language anthropological
literature has begun to trace the contours of human difference in the
People's Republic.
In theory, these works on the ethnic diversity of contemporary China
should provide leverage for opening up no ons of essen al Chinese-
ness to cri cal rethinking. Yet for the most part this has not happened. I
think the ineffec veness of this cri que is in no small part the result of
the failure of anthropological studies of Chinese minority peoples to
engage with the literature on the “Overseas Chinese.” By assuming that
cri quing Chinese-ness in a na onal context is sufficient, they have
failed to grapple sufficiently with either the ethno-cultural essen alisms
of diasporic intellectuals and scholars or the co-parentage and
con nuing in macies of territorial and extraterritorial modes of Chinese
na onalism. Thus even as detail is added to our picture of the human
diversity of the People's Republic, essen alized and dehistoricized
versions of Chinese-ness remain in circula on. This essay has been
mo vated by the failure of the Chinese minority studies' cri que. In
order to really “dislocat[e] China,” (Gladney 2004)—to historicize and
“provincialize” (Chakrabarty 2000) tenacious common-sense equa ons
of China with a par cular racio-cultural eth(n)os—we must bring
na onal and transna onal anthropologies of China together, grounding
each in histories of empire.
Acknowledgments
Research in China from 2003 to 2004 and again in 2006, 2007, and 2009
was made possible by a Fulbright IIE Fellowship, a UC Berkeley Center
for Chinese Studies Graduate Research Fellowship, a CAORC Mul -
country Research Fellowship, and Hamilton College Junior Faculty
Research Funds. My thinking on this topic has benefited from ques ons
and comments offered in response to the presenta on of earlier
versions of this essay at Berkeley and Hamilton, as well at conferences in
Binghamton, Hilton Head, and Paris. My thanks also to the many friends
and colleagues whose generous readings have strengthened the
argument. I owe a special debt of gra tude to Kathleen Poling and Dar
Rudnyckyj for their detailed comments. I also thank Lawrence Cohen,
Cris ana Giordano, Laura Hubbard, Kevin Karpiak, Ben Peacock, Lucinda
Ramberg, and Fouzieyha Towghi for offering their thoughts and
encouragement. Liu Xin and Jenny T. Chio have also played significant
roles in the course of my intellectual engagement with China
anthropology. Aihwa Ong provided important guidance at a crucial stage
of the project. The sugges ons of Jeffrey Wasserstrom and JAS's three
anonymous reviewers improved the essay immensely. The responsibility
for any remaining errors is en rely my own.
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Notes
1
See Makley ( 2007 ) for a wrenching account of Xiahe under high
Maoism and its a ermath.
2
Like many other businesses in the region, it was hit hard by the strife of
March 2008. As of the summer of 2009, business was beginning to
recover from a lengthy drought and T. was op mis c once again about
the future.
3
The Tibetan version of the name, Phyir sdod bod mi'i mgron khang,
translates roughly as “hotel of outside dwelling Tibetans.”
4
For the vicissitudes of the term minzu see, among others, Gladney (
1991 , 78–93).
5
Describing communi es that extend across state boundaries is
something of a terminological challenge. Given McKeown's (2001, 10–
12) cri que of vocabularies of “diaspora,” “globaliza on,” and
“transna onalism,” I have opted to avoid these terms (except where
discussing others and the occasional, non-anachronis c use of
transna onal) and employ a vocabulary of territorial (bounded) and
extraterritorial (boundary crossing) (Duara 1997 , 39).
6
The most common Mandarin terms for the popula ons that have come
to be called the Overseas Chinese, huaqiao (literally hua sojourners) and
haiwai huaren (literally overseas hua people) would seem to be linked
most fundamentally to Tu's “people of Chinese origin.” Yet Zhongguo,
the Mandarin term for China, is itself a shortened version of Zhonghua
Renmin Gonghe Guo (People's Republican Country of the Central
Fluorescence; see Mair [ 2005 , 52–54] for a detailed dissec on). Hua is
actually on both sides of the equa on.
7
While Tu ethnicizes Hua, Chow ( 1997 , 50) notes that at the dawn of
Chinese na onalism, Zhang Binglin “argued that the three terms Hua,
Xia and Han denoted different aspects of the ‘Chinese.’ Hua referred to
the land, while Xia and Han referred to the ‘race.’”
8
Cf. Malkki ( 1997 , 67): “The homeland here is not so much a territorial
or topographic en ty as a moral des na on.”
9
See Axel ( 2001 ) for a cri que of the assump on that the place of origin
cons tutes the diaspora.
10
“In English, we can write Han Chinese, but it is impossible to hyphenate
other na onali es with Chinese. Mongol Chinese and Tibetan Chinese
are impossibili es” (Bulag 2002 , 17, 18). See Leibold ( 2010b ) for an
account of the rise of absolu st popular Han na onalism in the
a ermath of the riots.
11
A final set of objec ons to the characteriza on of Tibetans living outside
the PRC as huaqiao (i.e., as “Chinese sojourners”) stems from a mixture
of terminological and poli cal concerns. First, as one anonymous
reviewer of this essay astutely noted, Tibetans are officially grouped
separately from huaqiao popula ons: government offices tasked with
dealing with overseas and returned Tibetans deal with tongbao
(“compatriots”; literally co-uterines), not huaqiao. The same reviewer
also observed that most “overseas Tibetans” would not think of
themselves as huaqiao. Further, Tibetans like Tsering would seem to
become huaqiao only if they return—if, that is, they “cease being
sojourners and cease being overseas.” In contrast to other huaqiao
residing abroad who are constructed as always already poten al
returnees, for Tibetans, returning itself retrospec vely reconstructs me
abroad as a “Chinese” sojourn.
12
Tongbao, defined by Wang as “natural-born Chinese” who “remain
outside the PRC's jurisdic on” (1991a, 225), is a peculiar term. Literally
“co-uterine” (Dikö er 2005 ), it combines this in mate physical
reference with an emphasis on shared poli cs (Hsiao and Sullivan 1979
). Wang suggests that the logic of grouping various popula ons under
the tongbao umbrella has less to do with race or territory than with “the
kinds of common problems they pose for, and the par cular nature of
the contribu on they can offer to, the PRC” (1991a, 226).
13
Discussions of Tibetan returnees simultaneously employ idioms of
huaqiao (overseas Chinese/Chinese sojourner) and zangzu
tongbao/zangbao (Tibetan compatriots). At present, the rela onship
between these two terms is marked by differen a on in formal contexts
and convergence in informal usage. Formally zangzu tongbao and
huaqiao are parallel rather than synonymous. Most official documents
treat them as such, and the bureaucracies set up to handle the two
(qiaowu ban for huaqiao and zangbao ban for Tibetan compatriots) are
separate and discrete. (I thank one of JAS's reviewers for pressing this
point.) It is certainly clear enough, however, that there is some unofficial
overlapping between the terms.
14
Since the events of the spring of 2008, such trans-border movements
have been dras cally curtailed (Wong 2009 ).
15
Thanks to Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy for emphasizing the role of the
United Front.
16
By 1998, this commi ee had welcomed the visits of 22,935 Tibetans
visi ng rela ves and more than 2,200 returning from abroad to se le
down (China Tibet Informa on Center n.d.b). This number includes 86
Tibetans who returned to se le in the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture where Xiahe is located (Diemujiangteng n.d.).
17
According to Guo ( 2003 ), “two things determine the composi on of a
United Front: the nature of the Party's enemy and the Party's
fundamental task at a certain me…. The 'Chinese people' is actually
defined with reference to the CCP's enemy and the CCP's fundamental
task” (42–3). See Leibold ( 2010a , 2010b ) for a discussion of a possible
end to the minzu tuanjie framework. “Unity in unity” may yet replace
“unity in diversity” as the official line.
18
Thanks to one of JAS's anonymous reviewers for this wording.
19
This was also a empted. See Sautman ( 1997 ) and Tu le ( 2005 , ch. 5)
for discussions of a empts to make Tibetans racially Chinese.
20
That “Chinese” abroad would respond to the siren song of Chinese
na onalism was never guaranteed (Skinner 1957 , 187).
21
In this respect, if not in broader ethos, they are paralleled by recent
advances in “the new Qing imperial history ” which, rejec ng na onalist
teleologies, take that regime as an example of a colonial power. For an
overview, see Waley-Cohen ( 2004 ). Tu le ( 2005 ) deals with the
Republican period rather than the Qing but evinces a similar approach.