Читать книгу Asia Past and Present - Peter P. Wan - Страница 13

Human development on the Asian continent passed through four distinct stages of historical and cultural development by the mid‐nineteenth century of the Common Era (CE): Paleolithic, Neolithic, Pastoral Nomadic, and Civilized. Paleolithic humans departed their African origins for other parts of the world, arriving in Asia as early as 60,000 years ago. They brought with them ways of doing things, and those ways we collectively refer to as culture—people speaking, earning a living, making war, explaining the world, organizing the group, and so forth. As Paleolithic peoples spread across Asia, different kinds of culture appeared, reflecting diverse territories, distinctive climates, and language variations, circumstances that undoubtedly influenced group customs and values. Thus, as the Neolithic culture began to appear roughly 10,000 years ago, Asia boasted a wide range of cultural practices, though these peoples remained chiefly hunters and gatherers. The transition from Paleolithic existence to Neolithic farming occurred gradually and unevenly in Asia. Neolithic farmers experienced a much more abundant existence than their Paleolithic hunting and gathering predecessors. But as farm populations grew as a result of better diets and as the farmland lost its fertility due to soil exhaustion, villages had to move to virgin territory, and over the course of millennia eventually growers wore out the supply of arable land in Asia. These movements of farmers eventually led to the emergence of both Pastoral Nomadic and Civilized ways of life.

Pastoral Nomadic life likely evolved as the territory Paleolithic hunters and gatherers once depended on for livelihood steadily became cropland and villages for farmers. Not only did much of the plant and animal life get displaced as farmers cleared woodland for fields, but these cultivators also staked exclusive claim to surrounding terrain. Thus denied a means of livelihood, Paleolithic people were pushed to increasingly marginal territory. They became pastoral nomads by taking their hunting and gathering skills, as well as their awareness of land cultivation and animal domestication, to begin a new livelihood in what became known as the Eurasian steppe. This chiefly involved the herding of animals, though some agriculture frequently supplemented the skin, meat, and milk products of the herds. These pastoral nomads lived in tribes, which frequently came into conflict with one another, and once civilized life emerged, these tribes traded and warred with civilizations south of the steppe. Known by many names in different languages, the city dwellers typically called these pastoral nomads “barbarians.”

Civilized life likely began in Asia along the Indus River in what is today Pakistan sometime between 3000 and 2500 BCE. Several centuries later, approximately 2000 BCE, city life in China commenced near the Yellow River in today’s Henan Province. In both cases, dry climates probably pushed Neolithic farmers to the edge of subsistence, requiring them either to go the way of pastoral nomads or to find a means of adapting farming to hostile geography. The introduction of irrigation allowed farmers to settle along rivers. In normal times rivers provided water for fields, and when flooding occurred it resulted in the depositing of new topsoil on croplands. This in turn minimized the need for villagers to relocate in search of fertile land, as flooding constantly re‐fertilized the farmers’ fields. Reliable supplies of water and productive soil generated such large food surpluses that non‐farming occupations could be supported. Instead of just one basic occupation found in Paleolithic times—hunting and gathering; just one occupation in Neolithic times—farming; and just one occupation in Pastoral Nomadic settings—herding, Civilized societies could boast a wide variety of specialized livelihoods.

In a Civilized culture, the city directs the activities in urban and surrounding rural areas, both of whose efforts by and large merge to serve a common purpose. Initially, at least, farmers realized the need for city services. These ranged from irrigation construction and maintenance to community security to market arrangements to artisan manufacturing as well as less tangible things such as religious advice. For these and other goods and services, farmers paid taxes to a governing administration. So too did most city inhabitants for the same fundamental reasons. Government promised to maintain essential services and to oversee the interaction of people performing different, often complementary, but frequently conflicting occupations. Farmers provided the necessary food for the city, which supplied the water. Over time, however, some occupations brought greater economic, psychic, and political rewards than others. City residents such as rulers (eventually usually monarchs), bureaucrats, priests, and merchants along with a rural elite (successful farmers, eventually usually a nobility) came to dominate the vast majority of the Civilized community, namely, the average farmer. Some of these cultivators continued to own their land or perhaps own some acreage and rent some; others only rented land; while still others lost their land and became day laborers or, worse, serfs or slaves.

Civilization in India and China produced three key accomplishments for Asia by approximately 1200 CE. First, both produced enduring, adaptable patterns of government practice and social custom, different as those patterns might have been. Politically, India ordinarily experienced regional governments while native central rule remained elusive, whereas China typically created effective central dynastic government, though periods of barbarian invasions and/or regionalism regularly occurred. What India lacked in political unity it made up for with religious cohesion, as Hinduism emerged in conjunction with the caste system to provide meaning and order for the ordinary person. In China, secular Confucianism and Legalism together with indigenous popular religions and Buddhism from India combined to make available understandable guides to daily behavior. Second, by the beginning of the Common Era, both Hinduism and Confucianism succeeded in the longer run by synthesizing competing systems of thought. Thus in Hinduism can be found strands of Buddhism and Jainism, while in Confucianism can be seen elements of Legalism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Third, Indian and Chinese civilizations provided political and cultural models for most of the rest of Asia.

India supplied Southeast Asia, except Vietnam and the Philippines, with a prototype of monarchy, written scripts, religions, economic practices, and other cultural traditions from which the region could pick and choose. Then these chosen Indian ideas and institutions underwent changes as they were adapted to local cultures and customs. The same process of cultural transmission transpired in Central Asia, although by the eighth century CE Islamic expansion, first Arab and eventually Turkish and Persian, began to eclipse Indian influence there. China had the same kind of cultural influence in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Chinese ideas and institutions—monarchy, writing, philosophy, religion, and assorted social practices—made their way to Confucian East Asia to be adopted and adapted.

Between roughly 1200 and 1850, Asia witnessed the dawning of three major jolts: the arrival of Islamic, Mongol, and Western military and cultural challenges. India began to be ruled by various peoples of Islamic background after 1206; the Mongols launched their assault on Eurasia in the thirteenth century; and by the early sixteenth century, the Europeans began to arrive. While the Mongol impact tended to be transitory, the Muslims and Europeans produced more lasting consequences in Asia. Today’s Central Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia are Muslim majority nations, while substantial numbers of Muslims inhabit most remaining Asian nations. The Philippines is today Catholic majority, Vietnam has a large Catholic population, and South Korea claims a considerable Protestant population. Most other Asian nations have large and often growing Christian—Catholic and Protestant—communities. European spoken languages and Islamic‐ and European‐derived writing systems can be seen everywhere in Asia. English dominates the intellectual and mercantile communities, while the languages of non‐Asian colonial overlords retain regional significance. Non‐Asian political, technological, educational, artistic, gastronomic, and assorted popular cultural influences continue to impact the Asian world.

Most of the seeds of these contemporary foreign influences on Asia got planted centuries ago, and for different reasons and at different times in India and China, the major generators of Asian cultural norms. In the early thirteenth century Afghans under the banner of Islam invaded, defeated, and ruled a politically weak India. With their Persian and Arab allies, these Delhi sultans and later the Mughal emperors created a climate that produced the emergence of a large native Indian Muslim population. And much of Southeast Asia, an ongoing consumer of Indian cultural thought and behavior, soon began to appropriate India’s newest cultural item: Islam. While most would agree that India absorbed Islam and preserved the essence of its traditional ways, the same cannot be said of Indonesia and Malaysia. In both nations the vestiges of Indian culture continue, but the dominant influence in both is today clearly Islamic.

When the Chinese threw out the Mongol invaders in 1368, a crisis of cultural confidence remained as the Ming Dynasty turned inward, the early considerable voyages of Admiral Zheng He to Southeast Asia, India, East Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula in the early fifteenth century notwithstanding. The government initially handled the arrival of the West in the early sixteenth century chiefly through the tribute system, a highly ritualized process of tightly controlled Chinese–foreign interaction known to Westerners as the Guangzhou or Canton System. Until the early nineteenth century, the Chinese found little in the West worthy of embracing, the chief exceptions being Galilean astronomy and new crops from the Americas. The West, by contrast, desired many Chinese products—silk and tea, for example—paid for principally by the gold and silver from the Spanish empire in the Americas. However, major changes in European scientific thought and economic and political practice propelled the West past China and the rest of Asia in terms of wealth and power. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Western nations had well‐established colonial regimes across the Asian continent. However, what had been largely commercial enterprises—East Indian companies chartered by European rulers—had often grown to become de facto government administrations with bureaucrats, armies, and educators in place to orchestrate an array of political, economic, social, and religious interactions with local leaders and subjects. Informal economic empire would soon become formal political empire directed by the industrial nations of the world.

The means by which Europeans came to dominate not only most of Asia but also most of the globe forced Asia’s elite to question their cultural traditions. Eventually these elites and ultimately the common people opted to modify much of their cultural past and adopt much of the current Western cultural present. Defending the nation began to trump protecting the culture.

People in Asia, as well as people in the West and elsewhere, are still grappling with the problems associated with becoming and then being modern.