History

Anonymous Chinese artist, 18th century: Ming Dynasty Company Officials at a well on the sea.

As outlined in the Societies section, The St Paul’s History Review is a new venture from the History department. What follows is a selection of two articles from the issue showcasing Pauline scholarship at its finest.

THE MING TREASURE VOYAGES OF CHINA 1405-1433 AND ITS TRIBUTARY SYSTEM

Edward Zhang (L8)

One of the signature projects of the Ming Dynasty (13681644) was the launching of the Treasure Voyages, a unique effort in the history of China. They were seven large militarised maritime expeditions led by the fleet admiral Zheng He, appointed by the Yongle Emperor and the Xuande Emperor. The fleet visited locations in South-East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula and areas of eastern Africa. They were the main tool of diplomatic interaction, including receiving tributes and delivering gifts, between China and its maritime vassal nations.

The most important feature of the treasure voyages was the tributary system it established, which was the Ming court’s primary diplomatic method of engaging with the world. This system formed the main channel of the Ming court’s communication with South-East Asia nations. Under the system, foreign nations became formal vassals of China, while keeping their independent economies, governments and militaries. The actual tributes demanded were minor and primarily symbolic in nature. The most important characteristic of the tributary system carried out by the treasure voyages was the legitimacy it could provide to the Yongle Emperor through the traditional belief of ‘the mandate of heaven’. The tributary system itself was more political than practical, because what the Ming court wanted was the legitimacy the tribute conferred rather than its intrinsic value.

From the Ming court’s perspective, the tributary system carried out by the treasure voyages was a form of establishing cultural influence to assert the Emperor’s legitimacy. The treasure fleets carried a large number of envoys from vassal nations with their tributes such as special local products, horses, luxuries and letters from their kings to China. Through this process, the Chinese nation and the Emperor were glorified to the citizenry.

The special Kylin (Qilin) tribute was a particularly good example of the system. Giraffes were provided, along with other rare animals, as tributes to China through the treasure voyages by African vassal kingdoms and occasionally South-East Asian ones such as Bengal. The animals were misinterpreted by the Chinese as the mythical Qiling, a being whose appearance heralds a time of great strength and prosperity (similar to the way a Rhinoceros would have been misinterpreted by Europeans as a unicorn). This imbued the treasure voyages with an even more profound aura of success and heavenly prestige. For an emperor who got the throne through a civil war, having the ‘mandate of heaven’ on his side created legitimacy and national cohesion.

Moreover, the tributary system acted as a form of cultural expansion considering the fundamental ideas that supported this system: Daoism and Confucianism. As Professor J. K. Fairbank argues in his work, ‘Tributary trade and China’s relations with the west’, ‘the tributary system was a natural expression of Chinese cultural egocentricity.’ The dominance of Chinese technology, art, poems and other soft power created a sense of national self-pride which Fairbank refers to as ‘culturalism’. The harmony between human and nature was a crucial ideological responsibility of the emperor. Therefore, the emperor and Chinese people believed in their dominance and responsibility to spread their culture to help the less developed areas. The Yongle Emperor exercised this belief and propaganda through the tributary system and the treasure voyages. Hence, when the Chinese citizens felt the expansion of the tributary system, the ‘mandate of heaven’ was fulfilled in their view.

The tributary system of the treasure voyages reflected a major part of Chinese culture at that time. The Ming viewed the world differently to European states at that time. Their dominant power within their region and lack of serious competition from rival states resulted in the Chinese believing they were the centre of the world, and their emperor the legitimate ruler of the whole world. They wanted to assert this idea abroad, but did not consider this an urgent priority because China was economically and militarily the strongest power they knew of at the time. Therefore, the Ming court’s voyages were driven primarily by intangible benefits such as a desire to establish the new dynasty’s legitimacy, and assert the primacy of Han culture and virtue after a century of Mongol rule, rather than the hunt for material power or goods that drove Europeans to venture abroad. ❚

WHAT MAKES A NATION?

Thomas O’ Donoghue (L8)

Over the last two centuries, the idea of nationhood has grown ever more significant – both on a geopolitical scale and in terms of the way people go about their lives. But what is a nation? Where do our modern ideas of nationhood come from? And what could nations look like in the future?

The first, and perhaps most important, question that must be answered can be phrased like this: what do we really mean by the term nation? The first that might spring to mind is that we really mean government, or state: a collection of people (assuming we reject Louis XIV’s quip) who maintain a monopoly of the use of violence over a given area. However, this argument immediately raises issues. The Ottoman Empire, which at its height ruled over regions from (modern-day) Algeria to Somalia to Albania, was without a doubt a state – and yet was it truly a nation? Most historical scholars have described the Ottoman Empire as a collection of nations ruled over primarily by what we would now call Turks. This means that a nation must be something more. Many philosophers, sociologists, and historians have argued that a nation must be something metaphysical – a kind of idea that must exist throughout history, despite changing borders and changing forms of governance. This helps us to explain movements like Irish nationalism – Irish nationalism in its modern incarnation began while Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, continued while most of Ireland was a self-governing dominion of the Empire, and has continued now Ireland is an entirely independent state. Yet this raises further questions – how do these metaphysical ideas form and gain such importance in a people’s consciousness? In order to understand this better, we must examine the history of modern nationalism.

A century ago, there was little historical consensus on when nationalism in its modern form began. There were perhaps two leading schools that had radically different views. The leading theory for a time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was what some have called primordialism. This theory stated that nations are effectively immutable – people have a national identity that they maintain even as the world around them changes. Johann Gottfried Herder, a leading primordialist who lived during the latter half of the eighteenth century, believed that the ‘national character’ of peoples was based primarily on their origins. He thought that statist borders were entirely unnatural and national borders entirely natural and transhistorical, and that the two should be identical (he supported a unification of the Germanic states for precisely this reason). Primordialism dominated thought about nations for nearly a century and a half, until modernization theory began after the Second World War. This argues that conceptions of nationhood did not truly begin until the eighteenth century, when industrialisation and mass education allowed for the creation of a shared identity between people who lived far from each other and had little in common – a farmer in Dorset and a factory worker in Manchester, for example. This theory argues that this process of change allowed for the creation of a widespread national mythology. Examples of this in England might be the surprise victory at Agincourt, or the victory at Trafalgar. Perhaps the most powerful part of the English national mythology today is the withstanding of the Blitz – what period is referenced more by politicians when they wish to appeal to the English character.

Now we have seen how dramatically different ideas of the way people see their nation can change so quickly, we can begin to wonder about the future. There are perhaps two possible futures one can imagine (if we examine only the extremes). In the first, national identity is lost or weakened in favour of an appreciation of the unity of the human race and a new global identity; in the second, national identity intensifies and divides into smaller and smaller groups as people’s reliance and connection to and on those around them grows. It is easy to think of ways in which the former could occur while maintaining our present structures – organisations like the United Nations and most notably the European Union attempt to lessen traditional divides between nations and states in favour of a more unified approach. Yet these are not the only options – some have suggested a new world based on solidarity between people and a rejection of artificial lines and divisions (exemplified by borders and immigration policies). On the other hand, it is easy to see a new nationalism arising as Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh independence become truly powerful movements, and groups like the Kurdish PKK and Palestinian Fatah use weapons to bring about their independence. There is also, of course, an obvious dark side to this new nationalism – English nationalists have often been accused of racism, and many of the evils of Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey can be attributed to nationalism. Many advocates of microstates, like the online blogger Menicius Moldbug who inspired a new breed of tech-billionaire ‘neoreactionaries’ (Moldbug’s own selfidentifier), are explicitly racist and have expressed a desire to destroy internationalism and globalism in all its forms.

Nationhood is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Millions of people have died in the service of their nation, and fought to establish their nation as a physical entity corresponding with a metaphysical one. As nationalists and globalists wage a quiet war, it is important to critically examine the history and principles of nationhood, and to think about why these things matter to us and what is valuable and destructive about our ideas of our nation. ❚