In 1793 the Macartney Mission went to China to open up the country for the British. The overall evaluation is that it failed. The Chinese under the Qing dynasty were in the last throes of the Indian summer of a great demographic expansion dating back three hundred years, capped off by an era of peace which had lasted more than 100 years. The Qianlong Emperor was in the 57th year of his reign. And he firmly rejected all British entreaties. China was the Middle Kingdom. It did not have European wares. It did not need European wares. It could easily dismiss European concerns and sensitivities.
Or so Qianlong and his court believed. Within 50 years the British would defeat the Chinese on their home turf, and impose a humiliating peace upon them. Over the next few decades European powers would begin to dissect the rotting carcass of late Qing China, which was also being eaten alive from the inside by convulsions such as the Taiping rebellion.
Though it was difficult for people at the time to perceive, and in particular the Chinese, the signs were already present in 1793 that the British star would ascend, while that of the Chinese would dim in comparison. The Chinese economic system was at its Malthusian carrying capacity, and had squeezed all it could out of the margins of Adam Smith’s classical factors of production, land, labor, and capital. In contrast, the British were in the midst of a revolution in economic production driven by innovation would would explode the underlying parameter of growth, all the while restructuring their social conditions so as to undergo demographic transition.
The British were inventing the modern economy. The Chinese were nursing along the classical agricultural stationary state as best as they could.
Aspects of this were already evident to the British implicitly. McCartney refused to kowtow to the Chinese Emperor, maintaining dignity, whereas previous factors would likely have abased themselves. The period around 1800 in India also saw the shift away from the traditional accommodationism of the East India Company with native cultural forms and practices, toward exporting elite British folkways in toto to overseas administrative posts.
In general people living in an age of transition don’t perceive the transition themselves, and continue to fixate on earlier assumptions and truths. The period between the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the outbreak of World War I saw the high tide of European colonialism and hegemony, but the seeds of its relative decline were already there. The United States of America became the largest economy early in the 20th century. British, French, and German intellectuals may have had their disputes and contributions in those first decades, but the future was already going to be across the Atlantic.
Today I feel that many Americans are living in the past, and not admitting and acknowledging that the present is pointing to the future. The world is becoming genuinely multipolar. There is more than one sun in the sky. Though there are nearly 1 billion people speaking English on the internet (often second language speakers), there are 750 million Chinese speakers. As the year 2020 approaches we’re living in a genuinely multipolar and multicultural world, but a lot of the discussion I see on my part of the internet is about white colonialist males. As if those are the only bright white suns in the sky. Men like McCartney. But the fixation of cultural elites is often a reflection of the last war, and past priorities, just as science fiction futures reflect the present. Change is in the air, even if we don’t realize it….
This is a pretty great post. But, most of the antipathy toward white males is new and represents a reaction to the domestic situation, not foreign policy. In short, HBD could keep whites in their “colonial” position inside the US and other multiethnic Western countries, long after they’ve lost it abroad.
Much of the trend toward extremism in current US politics can be analyzed as a failure of both sides to deal with the implications of HBD. The left decided a few decades ago to view all unequal outcomes as prima facie evidence of discrimination, and so has gotten angrier and angrier that its preferred policies for education, housing, racial reconciliation, etc. have failed. This has led them to embrace ever more extreme rhetoric, including demonization of Evilwhitemales. What’s new is that these ideas have escaped the rubber room of academia and are infecting elites more broadly. Meanwhile, conservatives get mad about what the left is saying and doing but dare not explain why, so they just end up electing people like Trump.
Obviously this is a superficial explanation of what is going on, but it’s valid enough that I don’t think outrage against white males is surprising in the American context. I expect it to continue for awhile, encouraged by those pesky unequal outcomes.
We’re in an unprecedented time for this time of shift. In the past, major wars and revolutions tended to be what exposed weakness in the existing order and forced a shift to a new one. The wars in southeastern Europe exposed the weakness of the once-powerful Ottomans, the Opium Wars the Chinese Empire, and World War 2 the British-dominated international order.
But when it that likely to happen with the US? Any truly major wars between great powers would escalate to nuclear exchanges with tremendous costs, so instead we have constant brushfire conflicts. We get this slow weakening and diminishing, spawning counter-reactions that get co-opted. International institutions creak onward, Brexit notwithstanding. No one gets an opportunity to decisively change things to a different path.
“type”, not “time”.
A shift to a multi polar world seems inevitable after the fall of the Soviet Union. The boogey man is gone and now half of the world doesn’t have to live with the US dictating terms to them. It’s not “us or them” anymore. That’s left a vacuum for regional powers to have a larger role.
One of the changes in the air I believe Americans in general are missing is the revolution in genomics. Most people I talk to have no idea what CRISPR is. Hell, half of the people I know don’t believe in evolution and the others don’t have a basic understanding of how it works. Our religious backwardness in areas like gene modification and stem cell research is basically handing the future to the Chinese who have no such qualms.
as the qing dynasty collapsed, there were still classical conflicts and intrigues internally. the chinese took a while to realize they weren’t the center of the world. i see the arguments over white colonialism in the same vein.
I actually get the sense that the past-informed domestic obsession with white males is being grafted onto this new, multipolar world rather handily. Note the attitude toward Russia, the flirtation with Russophobia by the left. Putin is considered basically an extension of Dylan Roof. I think this is why Michael Tracey-esque arguments that it’s illiberal are falling on deaf ears. Russia is being rolled into domestic culture war disputes and so successfully dodging arguments lodged against it that it represents a kind xenophobia.
My point is that, long after their global dominance is gone, whites will appear to be more successful than certain non-white minority groups living in Western countries. This will be a source of tension for the indefinite future if things continue in the same vein as in recent years.
Right now, though, anger about white privilege is predicated upon ignoring the successes of Asian groups. Maybe, as their power increases globally, domestic arguments about white advantage will morph into resentment against “lightskinned” or “Eurasian” privilege vis a vis Latin Americans and Africans.
Right, so let’s say you were The Chinese Elite of that era–given the Real Political Constraints of the time, what’s the could-a, should-a, would-a, that you’d-a done different back then, to maintain your beloved Middle Kingdom’s continental supremacy/prevent its abject defeat. Perhaps considering such an alternate history might yield useful insight toward what “the world’s oldest functioning democracy” might do at present, in order to secure for all its inhabitants a more perfect future ease/continued (relative) self-determination…Not that you are necessarily advocating, right? Just engaging in a little insight-inducing mooting, such as reasonable persons must do as they might hope to assist in envisioning a society moving healthily forward into necessarily ever-changing futures.
white hegemony is probably a necessary condition for virtue signalling. once white hegemony does not hold internationally i suspect that there will be some atavism….
‘there will be some atavism…’ …which is the greater part of why the BAS’s Doomsday Clock is at just 2.5 minutes to midnight.
Well, remember how the Japanese played it. Not deluding themselves that they were the Middle Kingdom, they still thought themselves unique and “superior”, not needing outside influence. After Peary’s Opening, their solution was to adopt western tech whole-heartedly, put a Japanese spin on it, and become one of the Big Boys. They actually wound up participating in the dissection of China.
So a “what if” is to have the Chinese adopting rather than rejecting western tech like the Japanese did, with their own spin.
The atavism that develops will make colonialism look tenderhearted and benevolent.
Curious as to who you think might join in the atavism. Trump types? Disillusioned SWPLs? Both?