Name: 帝国主義に対するアジアの対応。クラッシュ・コース世界史#213 (Asian Responses to Imperialism: Crash Course World History #213)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:23:44.000Z
Duration: 12 min 55 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to return to

Ugh, Mr Green, we know. The west rose, we've talked about this a million times.

Yeah, me from the past, I'm sympathetic to your position, but the thing is, this is a

big deal in world history circles and today, we are going to talk about the rise of the

west from the perspective of people who don't live there.

So today, we're going to look at how some people who experienced the rise of the West

firsthand responded to it. We're going to focus on East Asia and also the Middle East,

which is also Asia. Anyway, both of these communities dealt with European imperialism

So, just a quick note here, European imperialism affected millions of people, including agricultural

and industrial workers, very few of whom left records of their experience. So we end up

relying on the words of people who wrote things down, intellectuals. Now, many of those people

were European, but in this case, most of what we'll be examining today is covered by a fascinating

book by Pankaj Mishra, called "The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the

Remaking of Asia." Mishra's book draws heavily from the perspectives of three Asian thinkers,

and I will remind you, mispronouncing things is my thing. He looks at Middle Easterner

Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani, Liang Qichao from China, and Rabindranath Tagore from India.

Through their eyes we can see that Asians did recognize the coming dominance of Europe,

but they also developed ideas about imperialism that provided a counterweight to Western dominance

and gave them a way of imagining their role in this new world.

Alright, let's go straight to the Thought Bubble.

Although we tend to equate European imperialism with the late 19th century, especially the

carving up of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884, for many Asians, the disaster began

earlier. In China, the Opium Wars began a train of humiliations, most memorable of which

occurred with the destructed of the Summer Palace in 1860. And imperialism wasn't great for the Muslim

world either. By 1896, Al-Afghani described Muslims under European imperialism this way:

"The foreigners chain up Muslims, put around their necks a yoke of servitude, debase them,

humiliate their lineage, and they do not mention their name but with insult. Sometimes, they

call them savages and sometimes regard them as hard-hearted and cruel and finally consider

Just like today's historians, Asian intellectuals were quick to recognize that the reason Europeans

were able to dominate and humiliate them was Europe's superior industrial technology and

organization, one early response was to say, "well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, or

at least, try to follow their models of military organization and education." We see this in

attempts at reform, like the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire, Al-Afghani initially echoed

these calls to study more science and philosophy, but his comparison of philosophers with prophets

was too radical for the Ottomans and he ended up being expelled from Istanbul.

Chinese intellectuals responded similarly to the humiliation of the Opium Wars, with

calls for self-strengthening, a phrase coined by its biggest supporter, Feng Guifen. Given

China's almost 2,000 year history of an education system based on Confucian values and classical

texts, which, to be fair, had worked pretty well for them for most of that time, adopting

Western models of education and organization was gonna be a tough sell, as Yan Fu, a Chinese

"China governs the realm through filial piety, while Westerners govern the realm with impartiality.

China values the sovereign, while Westerners esteem the people. China prizes the one way,

while Westerners prefer diversity. In learning, Chinese praise breadth of wisdom, while Westerners

One Chinese reformer, Kang Youwei, took up the challenge of blending Western and Chinese

ideas of governance by attempting to update Confucianism for the modern world and arguing

that political reform and mass mobilization were central concerns for Confucius himself.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So all of that gets to a big question, imperialism was a disaster

for a lot of people, but there were things about what the West was doing to control much

of the world that were obviously working. So the question for people outside the West

became: What, if anything, do we take from this and try to borrow and integrate into our own communities?

Well, in addition to education and military reforms, many Asian intellectuals felt that

Europe's strength was rooted in its political organization, into nation-states. That sounds

a lot like today's historians and also economists. Everyone's crazy about nation-states. Except

And, you know what, I stand with the Mongols on that. I think empire is underrated. I would

make an excellent emperor, for instance. You know what they'd call me, Stan? Genghis John.

But anyway, some of these intellectuals became proponents of nationalism, like, by 1879,

Al-Afghani was advocating that Muslims begin to think of themselves as a nation, in the

sense of a culturally unified people. Here he is in words that recall the German nationalists

of the time: "There is no happiness except through nationality and no nationality except

through language...a people without unity and a people without literature are a people

without language. A people without history are a people without glory, and a people will

lack history if authorities do not rise among them to protect and revivify the memory of

their historical heroes so that they may follow and emulate...all this depends on a national

education, which begins with the fatherland, the environment of which is the fatherland,

Are you sure that wasn't a German nationalist, Stan, because that was a lot of fatherlands?

And then there's India. As the most thoroughly colonized Asian territory, India's feelings

about nationalism were very complicated. Some Indians wanted to create a European style

state organized around Hinduism. But of course, India had a large Muslim minority and also,

Hinduism, with its caste divisions, wasn't great for creating political unity. Others,

like Aurobindo Ghose were critical of adopting too many European ideas, worrying that India,

quote, "was in danger of losing its soul by an insensate surrender to the aberrations

Aberrations of European materialism? I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, that is delicious. Hold on, I gotta play Floppy Bird for a second.

But many Asians considering adopting European models of nationalism look to one of its biggest

For Europeans, Japan became kind of a confirmation of a modernization program, industrialization,

centralization, and to a lesser degree, liberal constitutionalism, could work. And this was

also true to some extent for Asian intellectuals, including Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore,

both of whom visited Japan. But ultimately, Japan didn't provide a great model for other

Asians attempting to reform their own states, especially because Japan embarked on its own

It's almost as if, in addition to industrialization and centralization and et cetera, imperialism

was just part of building a strong nation-state.

So by the early 20th century, many Asian intellectuals were looking beyond Western models. Some,

like Liang Qichao and Al-Afghani, considered supranational movements, like pan-Asianism

and pan-Arabism. They envisioned these huge political conglomerates that could transcend

Europe's dominance, but eventually, both they and Tagore turned to their own traditions

as a source of strength. And what they all had in common was a loss of faith in liberal

democracy as a source of strength, especially after the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Like