Nineteenth Century China

I want to start today since we're dealing with China probably more than anything although not exclusively China by recommending a novel and it's just just been published by amitav Ghosh who is anthropologist who has taught here in the Columbia from time to time and it's entitled river of smoke it is the sequel to a novel called the sea of poppies sea of poppies is primarily seafaring in the the seafaring culture of the Indian Ocean river of smoke is primarily about and trade and Tom in the era of the leading up to the first wheel it is like notable in his use of the contemporary slang and you know obsolete words of various languages for that particular period you run into and many many senses with three words that you have never seen before you will never see again sort of you know out of Gudda Gudda young and and I'll bash yeah stop but you figure it out in content from time to time you'll run across a word one of these totally strange work and they'll recognize I mean I'll run various languages but old gin such and such or Oh to say nasty thing it was you don't really feel like looking yep then we'll see you ah sorry in the river so the real America is because it deals with what for people who are participating in in notion trade in the early nineteen seven in southern China culture of that particular it can be compared with the novel type an by James Clavell very very successful novel was made and we I believe yeah and that also was the culture of Canton but when you look at claw Bell's novel you discover that almost all the principal characters are Americans or Europeans whereas you look at Ghosh's novel and you'll find almost none of the characters or principal characters are Americans or Europeans they are parsy's and Indian Chinese Armenians and so forth and the comparison is interesting because one of the one of the truths of history these days is that an awful lot of people get their history from historical novels then there's question of what is it that allows you to get a historical novel published and this is always a kind of a back and forth between a publisher and an author what I discovered what I published my first novel is that you call one alley and call another one o yousufzai the reader say one of them is always a struggle right that is always described as having a tiny pointed beard well foreign for foreign names just for together for American ears and so the fact the matter is that that historical fiction set outside of the European context written by Americans at least and published in America usually will have a Western character who is the protagonist and who's the hook for the for the narrative so that you follow oh here's a story about oh the era of seljuq invasion of the Middle East and just happens that there is a an English crusade has abandoned the fight and the Holy Land and has gone off to around so let's follow him because nobody can remember who you know you know Muhammad good Fulani is or whatever it is so one of the one of the things about gosh I he has such a reputation and such a strong research base for his novels that the publishers you know publish these books that I devoted to the overseas career so strange p.m. Wanderers and it gives a completely different texture of things it doesn't mean he doesn't describe the Europeans but he describes them mostly from as seen by an Armenian from Cairo or a Parsi from from Gujarat rather than in and of themselves and as such he's able to describe them always would be harder to do for example Canton which was the one place that Europeans could trade in early 19th century China you know in Kowloon where the European colony was it was for prohibited for any Western woman to set foot the place so all the European and particularly British businessman who have factories or warehouses of what they called exam in Kowloon and are doing business and stay for years they're all gay and it's you know not every single one of them but as portrayed by gauche they're all no they're happy they get to live there and they always have a friend who is their companion of many years and they hold dances and know you have principal characters of Parsi businessman who's saying to someone oh it's a walls let us go and dance and but if you reek level you get principal characters are two American sailors who are in business competition of a very strength just one another it's it's very very the fact that it's set in in China so so I recommend this it has been a characteristic of social history of the last few decades that the lives of ordinary people if they are narrated well are considered to innate for history in an unusually vivid fashion so a book like the return of Martin guerre by dad Elysium and Davis from Princeton is a classic because it's telling the story of a medieval period when a man comes from the wars to pick up where he left off when he went to war but it's not clear whether he's the same man and the debate is was Martin guerre the real Martin guerre or was he an imposter who would come back he made into a movie set in the American Civil War context in this country Richard Gere I think started it or the cheese in the worms by Carlo Ginsburg a number of books like this one of the best of ones of them is a book called Empire made to be a story of a man an Englishman a true story in this case who volunteered very young for World War one in Britain at the end of the war he did not want to go back to becoming her clerk or an apprentice so he signed up to become a policeman in Shanghai and spent the rest of his life in Shanghai and the story of an order of an English policeman in Shanghai over 40 years is really absolutely gripping and he becomes you know completely fluent in Chinese and hates the Chinese and eventually is thrown out of the police force for brutality toward the Chinese and then he becomes a enforcer for various European companies who are trying to keep Chinese labor in line and eventually the Japanese take over the factory and shoot him and so his family said Oh we'd like him to be considered the first British casualty of world war two and then ends up being a debate over that but these stories of ordinary people make a very whether they are fictionalized us in the case of ghosts or whether they are memoirs or whether carefully crafted you know bits of historical research presented as as factual they make a very useful antidote to the tendency in in general history courses such as this one to deal with things at a general level because of the general level you tend to move up the social and political scale and talk about people who are thought to have made had an impact rather than people upon whom an impact was had by the by the events and there's a fairly large library of books of this kind as I say some fictional some non fictional and I can they're more common for European history where you don't have the the issue of the alienists of the characters but this one by gauche is is unusually good particularly because it deals with what the trade and the Indian Ocean was like this is one of the hardest things I think to to get some sort of sense of because we we talk a great deal about the Indian Ocean trade and about the flows of Commerce from China to India to Europe and Africa and back and it tends to who leave the human dimension behind so listen I strongly recommend of this book now because the Europeans were cut off from the interior of China by this very strict ruling that businessmen could not trade outside of captain and then this ultimately leads to the first and the second opium wars when the the British are willing to go to war to protect their their drug business basically sort of you know the wire set in 19th century China with the big drug dealers you know being the big de British because of that and because of some declarations made by high-ranking Chinese that we do not need your European imports you know you don't need your budgets we were entirely independent and live with Ireland manufacturers because of that there there's an image that china doesn't change very much and that it isn't it buys products through Canton European products and cells through Kent um but you don't have much change interior to China views of that are are in the process of changing new books that have come out in recent years have attempted to show that there's a lot of penetration of European goods into Indochina and of processes for making them and so forth but they tend not to be perceived very well because they're at a very very popular level in other words this is not steel mills and you know Steamship Lines so much as o household goods and you know cloth of a fairly simple variety you know manchester woollen cloth did get into China but it wasn't at a high end and the so the idea that China was kind of a isolated land or that didn't have much much effect on it from the outside his seems less and less tenable you also have clothing changes that begin to come in you know some of them of Western Western inspiration but the one I want to talk about comes in toward the end of the period of this chapter that is say in the seemingly in the late 1860's and ends up having a huge impact not just in China but in many of the many Asian and Indian Ocean Rim countries and this is the rickshaw though we spend so much time talking about railroads changing the transportation economy or automobiles for bicycles all these things of the Europeans come up with that changed the way in which people communicate the way in which people move and so forth and in some respects the rickshaw is as important as any of them because it's coming into a into societies that previously had not for passenger use used wheeled vehicles very much the rickshaw is of uncertain origin it is usually ascribed to an American missionary in Japan named Jonathan Goble who supposedly had a a wife who was an invalid could not get around so he invented the rickshaw and within a couple of years or thousands of rickshaws you think well there's one busy missionary or else there is a legend and it seems particularly since different sources give the missionaries name with different spellings like one of them is not doable but Scobie and so it's not just uh-oh there's something really wrong with this story but it probably is is right in the sense that if carries on the notion that Westerners invent things Japanese historians sort of concur on the identification of a Japanese inventor for the rickshaw and and they can demonstrate that he actually received he and two others received licenses to produce and sell rickshaws where there's no evidence that Reverend goby Goble Scobie whoever he was went into the manufacturing of rickshaws okay what is a rickshaw a rickshaw is a is a two-wheeled vehicle very lightweight made primarily out of bamboo for its super structure it has shafts they go you know thin bamboo poles that go up on either side and you stand between the poles and you pull it in the French it was called a pousse pousse so if you look it up in the French Wikipedia you'll get look it up under pousse pousse not on your rickshaw the the passenger you might have two passengers would sit in in a certain amount of comfort and be pulled along this tended to have fairly large diameter wheels with with a large number of spokes but nowhere it'll probably gave a pretty smooth ride as long as you were on a fairly smooth pavement 1868 is given and yet there are illustrations that go back a hundred twenty years earlier from here and they're showing vehicles that are obviously in the same category so what appears to be the case is that the idea of having essentially a very very light cart of the sort you might have pulled by a pony or a horse but having it pulled by the human the idea seems to occur it again and again but it doesn't become an industry until this time the alternatives that you have that's for example goats will talk about people riding around in in Canton in either a sedan chair or a pousse pousse I'm not sure whether his pousse pousse is exact the same as the fresh pousse pousse he spells it differently but the the sedan chair was two poles that had a little house built on it and the passenger sat inside and then these are carried on the shoulders of men and your rank was often indicated by how heavy your sedan chair was so someone could have one carried by 8 men you know four in front for me back I have illustrations that go up to what the level of 30 men carrying a sedan chair that's basically quite like a small house now 15 in front and 15 and I was 32 16 in front 60 in the back I think was a picture we saw so the sedan chair was the standard way of traveling the meiji emperor of japan who is the seen as the emperor who presides over first period of modernization in japan in the second half of the 19th century the meiji emperor of japan who ruled for a long time never went anywhere except in a sedan chair so if he wanted to observe military sizes that were 200 miles away from his from his palace he would get in a sedan chair and he would be carried 200 miles through the forest and up and down the mountains and so forth and that he never travelled in the carriage the carriage was something introduced by Europeans carriages and pet dog play in Japan were always show up in illustrations of the first year coming along but catch on very well to have a carriage menu had to have horses horses required a certain amount of up a certain amount of knowledge how do you hire a stableboy who has never seen a horse before and expect your horse to be taken care of plus I mean think of this as a really big advantage of being pulled around by people inside of my horses there's no manure on the street you know New York City London but their streets for just by 1900 they were just ankle-deep and manure all the time because of all me as Chinese or Japanese or Indian streets wow we're we're cleaner we never talked about things like that about the fundamental filthiness of the modern world that that the Industrial Revolution fostered in Europe but the rickshaw was clean it was comfortable it was fast by comparison to a sedan chair partly because of such a light structure that a rickshaw wallah can run getting your 8 sedan chair holders with on the shoulder to run at the same time were you bouncing on them that's not so good so you tend to walk with a stand chair in England sedan chairs were used for prostitutes because I could be you could be delivered to your to your mansion without anyone seeing who they were but they were the standard upper class transportation in the East because the the rickshaw was simply you know one man one vehicle it hit a much more popular stratum of society than the sedan chair sedan chair at the very minimum you had to have two bearers you know one in front and one and you probably needed more than two so the cost of going from place to place on in any way other than walking suddenly goes down and so you see that the rickshaws that come into China in the at the end of the 1860s all imported from Japan I mean we think that it's what's important is what do the Europeans export to China but here you have a transformative technology in which initially the manufacturing is being done in Japan and we quickly become you look in 2020 500 that 20,000 and you know 80,000 I mean they become extremely common they show up in China they show up in Japan and then they're imported into India then they're imported in yellow only in the colonies in India ported into French Matic then they show up in South Africa so the entire literal of the Indian Ocean and going up into the Sea of Japan South China Sea is undergoing a transition pollution was related to a new industry in a new industry in an area of invention and industrial growth that the Europeans pride themselves on and yet the Europeans had nothing to do with it except of course that the people who were importing these things into place like India Madagascar probably were as much French merchants and English merchants as they were local merchants so is there anything further to this well yeah in a sense we get to the point where it's outside the time frame here something to the early 20th century but it's estimated that in a big city like Calcutta 20% of the population is made up of rickshaw pullers the number you have you know one person per rich all the number of people who get engaged in this at the low end of employment is simply enormous and then and then you think oh well what would be the equivalent in Europe is this the equivalent say you have a factory worker someone who comes in from the countryside has no particular skills that's hired in a factory to you know to work 16 hours a day at a relatively low skill level in order to make enough money to survive then the equivalent in India would appear to be the villager who comes into the city has no particular skills but this is the job that's available for someone with no skills and at the low end of the of the income scale and this is how you make enough money money to survive if you go to Calcutta today it's about the only place left where you still will you'll still have man drawn rickshaws when you talk to Americans who go to Calcutta particularly those who go and intending to stay for a while as opposed to tourists you often get this sense of guilt people say well I'll go in a motor rickshaw which is where you put a little putt-putt motor in front of the rickshaw when I don't like to ride in a rickshaw because that's exploiting human labor you think you know what do you think you're doing when you buy a Big Mac or some other low-end they'll no hope no future employment thing in the United States is that not but it's the idea the person is actually actually running and pulling you and Americans just often feel really really bad about that and yet this was a major part of the the social transformation how do cities grow if as they do throughout the 19th 20th centuries if they do not have low-end employment so even though this you can't find at least I've been able to find a history of the rickshaw its ubiquity and the the role it plays in the employment structure of different countries and the way in which it transforms human human transport for poor people to have cheap wheels as opposed to walking it makes a big difference so then you want to applied in the rickshaw go farther first we have a handful of peda cabs in New York now which is a variation on the rickshaw using a bicycle Drive instead of running but and I know people who wouldn't get in a pedicab so now I don't want to exploit that person's labor as if there's something wrong with humans actually working I don't know it's uh seems to be a guilt thing I don't think anyone in the 19th century ever had three seconds of guilt about exploiting human labor nevertheless I along with the one I was talking about last week of the the lithographed book where where you have a technology that has a transformative capacity and great economic and social impact but has minimal intersection with what's happening in Europe except that it's happening at the same time and that of course goes back to this question of if new things are coming in doesn't a a climate of receptivity for new things you know if there's something new how do you get people to to adopt it I mean if everyone saw a rickshaw and said no I just wouldn't feel comfortable in that then it's not going to succeed take the Segway you know how many have seen a Segway on the streets of New York I think I've seen to change and transportation that it was Valley who does when it first came out because there does seem to be something to do with the the mood of the times in terms of a of the receptivity to to change and I'm just arguing that even though we we celebrate the receptivity to change of Europe in the 19th century that receptivity to change seems to have or not spread but to have existed in many other parts of the world as well at the same time leading to the question of what was the 19th century all about why was it a period of so much change and trying to get away from the notion that that change was uniquely associated with with European you know brilliance and innovation and it was some appears to have been much much broader in its impact all right end of that topic but I think it will work around back to it the way I do sometimes because I want to talk about a different topic this is something for better for one of a better turn I'll call charisma disparity this is a way of income disparities that some people are having more experience of charismatic excitement than others this is something that we have today people who take Jesus Christ as their personal Savior take Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and they actually do say you know what would Jesus do and it's exciting for them and it's satisfying for them and it really works and those in our population I don't want to say those of us I don't want to tip off where I might be on this but who don't do that think you know WTF I mean it's you know does this really does really does this really is this really happening in America today that yeah I mean this is bizarre so now we have a polity that is severely divided on the issue of whether this is you know something really really stupid and primitive or whether this really is the way the way to live and I don't want to take a vote but my guess is that over the last 10 or 12 years the number of people at Columbia who are on Jesus aside has steadily crept up and the number of people who are really really scared probably has crept up as well because you're getting this this cleavage this disparity people who search for and the chief require charisma and those who who just don't see the point all right now what I want says that to some degree century is marked by a profound disparity in desire for of charisma we have a chapter on the Industrial Revolution but we don't talk much about religion and yet if you if you look at the 19th century globally instead of specifically at those things that either begin in Europe or radiate out from Europe or our functions of European Imperial or military or economic domination then then you see you know there's an awful lot of religious so in the 19th century for differently there's an awful lot of charismatic dynamism the 19th century now the reason I put it in the latter way is because nationalism is conceivable as a form of charisma that people who were excited by a national project to create Italy or Germany or France or Bulgaria or something the excitement that people got from from intense national feelings or intense patriotic feelings I would argue is in the same ballpark as the excitement people got from very powerful religious feelings and that the simultaneity of the rise of nationalism first in Europe and then more broadly and the incidence of these very powerful charismatic movements is probably not simply a matter of coincidence I think if you if you go century by century nineteenth century does stand out for intensity of feeling compared with say the coal pick a century 15th century China turns out to be one of the places where this is this is particularly strongly in evidence from the beginning of the century to the end of the century beginning of the century from 1818 14 you had a something known as the eight trigrams rebellion the eight trigrams rebellion is given its name from a particular set of characters that come out of being booked on divination in China and they're these trigrams are have our cusine to have a certain no a certain power but it was primarily a inspiration for the ideological level and the type of Buddhism that the that had become common in China in the post tonk era that was a whole half tons dozen centuries preceding 1800 you had Pure Land Buddhism the idea that when you die you will go to a Pure Land in the West and that will be the paradise that you will inhabit and that sort of Buddhism which is in the Mahayana category of Buddhism also had the notion that there would be a Savior and he would be the Maitreya Buddha it's the Buddhism form of messianism in which you you anticipate the coming of a savior and the Savior is going to to make your your journey to paradise possible so your Savior is someone whom you who you are eagerly awaiting if you are of a messianic character messianic movements are particularly susceptible to to charismatic preaching where you you tell people that the Savior is coming that's the same and of the Savior indeed he may be he may be in this room I don't know but but you you you preach this and you tell people how they must behave for to be part of the elect who will benefit from the coming of the Savior in the eight trigrams rebellion which took place in northern China him was a 18 1314 the Maitreya expected and you had preachers for rabbit recruiters who went from village to village telling about the imminent coming of the Messiah and how it would be triggered by the killing of the Emperor and the overthrow of the Qing the Chang regime the people who did the the recruiting or the preaching from village to village were martial arts masters so there was a very strong association between Chinese boxing or martial arts and the this.what of the Empire saw as a conspiracy to overthrow overthrow the Empire as it turned out the rebellion took place it was suppressed in a year about a million people killed in the process of suppression because it was a very very widespread rebellion of those people who were captured who were part of the leadership before they were executed they were all interrogated and the police records are preserved so the result is that there is an excellent book by a historian named Susan a Qin that is the the story of the eight trigrams rebellion based on the on the police police archives and it it's really amazing because on the one hand it describes how this conspiracy develops over hundreds of villages with the operatives going from village to village telling of the eminent Camilla Maitreya and then how you have another group that are your core conspirators who are who are actually going to kill the Emperor and you get down to the description of you know it it's kind of like you know Mission Impossible you know here is you know you will be stationed in a tea house next to the gate to the palace and you know these two over here they're going to distract the guard and then when then you'll go in and they actually penetrate the Imperial Palace in Beijing and they penetrate all the way to the private chambers of the Emperor and the Emperor actually avails himself of a bow and arrow to help fight off the assassins who have come to destroy the Ching dynasty and and they succeed in fighting them off the attack fails but the rebellion goes on anyway you get these million people killed it's a it's not the only rebellion in China there earlier rebellions they usually have you know interesting names like the yellow turbans or something like that but this one is early 19th century and then you go on to 1850 and you have the Taiping rebellion of Taiping rebellion is in southern china we write about it in this chapter of the book and there you have a a charismatic individual named Hong Xiao Quan who seen older brother of Jesus you know who knew you know Dorie private wrote about Jesus having a sister but I don't not quite the same thing so he's the older brother of Jesus and he is leading a heading up a cult that is Christian in in some semblance we know of other religions that are you know Christian and semblance but not necessarily in every particular it rejects the Buddhism and Confucianism and the the local religiosity of China at the time and the rebellion goes on for 14 years 1850 1860 420 million people are thought to have been to have died in that that's not those aren't battlefields deaths those are mostly civilian deaths after some huge sieges of cities that where the population was slaughtered so as in the case of VA trigrams rebellion the Empire prevails the Empire Strikes Back and all of these elet's are are killed then you go up to the end of the century and you'll get the Boxer Rebellion it's a little outside our time frame but at the end of the century the Boxer Rebellion is strongly anti foreign and very much focused on the on the sort of charisma of the martial arts masters so China seems to be strongly affected by these charismatic charismatic movements but it's not just not just China in Iran at the same time you have the birth of the behind but we are formally talking about Iran in this chapter but for for our purposes here we can include it you have in 1840 a man declares himself to be the báb which means the doorway or the gateway a few years later the person who he predicts to come as the next prophet the successor to Oh Hamid appears in other words he's the John the Baptist and then the person who follows him is b'hala who founds a religious sect he clearly is a charismatic individual as is the Bab the religious sect becomes the Baha'is and it is prohibited within Iran to such a degree that you have a number of really large-scale persecutions in Iran of the Shiite government and the Shia clergy trying to exterminate the the Baha'is and those people who did not end up following the halal ah who were called the bobbies so the Bobby rebellions are the efforts to put down the Baja the bobbies and the the highs this is a central drama for the history of Iran the 19th century but then you look at the highs and you say well no interestingly they're strongly associated with foreign trade and with business and ultimately religious connections outside of Iran also they are very strongly Jewish so that many of the converts to Baha'i ISM Jews who convert to 2 to bhai is 'm they continue to be important in Iran down to the present day here you have a state that in its constitution offers freedom of religion to Shiites and Sunnis and Jews and Zoroastrians and Christians but not to the highs because of the time of the Iranian Revolution the on the clerical side much of the inspiration for the revolution was a recruit essence of anti Baha'i gsella tree you know to stamp out to the highs partly because the highs many of the rich Baha'i families were very closely associated associated with the Shah okay it's it's a charismatic movement in Iran you have a charismatic movement in Saudi Arabia I mentioned before the Wahhabi ax it actually begins in the middle of the 18th century but after it is stamped out they thought by Muhammad Ali and the Egyptian Albanian army early in the 19th century it came back there have been three different mojave states the first one that was destroyed while Hamid Ali a second one in the middle of the 19th century and the third one that comes along after World War one and is the Saudi state of today a very very strongly charismatic movement in other places this sort of charisma will take the form of of warfare against imperialism so when the French invaded 1840 of their principal adversary is a Sufi leader and Abdelkader known to solitary and he's an extremely powerful and effective leader takes a number of years for the French to to defeat him and send him off into highly respected retirement and Damascus where he is so highly respected that when you have the anti-christian and anti-do ish riots in 1860 he becomes the protector of the non-muslims not just in Damascus in America to talk about other outlying areas this is the period when you have the rise in the Mormons appearance of the Mormons clearly a charismatic movement this is when William Miller I've mentioned this before I believe he predicts that the world will come to an end in 1843 leading to the great disappointment and from this comes the seventh-day Adventist sect of Christianity these are two well-known movements in America but you also have have movements that are much more localized in the forms of utopian communities and other forms of intense religious you know community feeling but probably the one that has the longest effect is starts around 1830 and is considered to be part of what's called the Second Great Awakening and this is the creation of the the seed of the American who are the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions American missionary work outside the United State gets its first its first strong impetus primarily in New England among college graduates who are intensely religious where do they you know there are earlier missionary movements that came back to earlier times that focus on American Native Americans but the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions focuses on overseas missionary activity bad activity starts by going to the Holy Land and to the Ottoman Empire and then those too you know and the Philippines as they become American missionary activity importance of the American missionary enterprise is increasingly being recognized by scholars as the the most significant content that American culture American Way of life had on people outside the United States in other words if you were looking at history of French or English or Italian or German imperialism you would identify the perhaps the central impact of the imperial power as being officials that get sent from the Metropole to administer overseas territories and the missionaries would would play a role but it would tend to be a secondary role to the government very often in fact you had adversarial relations between colonial governments and the missionaries who were trying to work in their area because the officials often thought that the missionaries were were disruptive in the American case because we did not have areal holdings until after 1898 in the Philippines in the American case the missionaries were saw themselves found quite and quite literally and realistically as the the living embodiment of the American Way they were determined to live like Americans dressed like Americans try and get local converts to to become many Americans worried initially that if they converted people to Christianity and taught them English so they would all immigrate to the United States because you know you get to be an American everybody in the world wants to be in America they thought so they prohibited teaching in English and said well we'll teach in the local languages so we don't get people you know converting in race the United States that was probably an illusion since they converted at least a Muslim to converted virtually no one but at least no one who Christian they did have this strong feeling that converting someone from Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity was almost as converting them from from heathenism because Protestantism was just so much better we don't have any very good comparative histories of Protestant and Catholic missions it's rather interesting that the Catholics we have many many more Souls than the Protestants do but the Protestants talkable endlessly these vast eyes that we have at Union Theological Seminary in other places America become and these are ardent those who after 1830 where we have the names of individual missionaries we know a great deal about their lives they did not expect to come back they thought they would die in in the mission in the mission field and many of them did commitment as time moves on we also find that it is a as with the British opium merchants in Canton it's a good place for gay people because you know nobody nobody cares particularly for you know if you were a really really well it woman say in the early the end of the 19th early 20th century you could not be a lawyer you could not be a doctor you could not be a businessman but you could be a missionary and as a missionary you actually could run a really big operation and be highly respected but you would not if you were with your husband because then he would be the Reverend dr. so-and-so the the wife of the Reverend doctor so but see female missionaries you know their area for a compliment was unlimited as long as they left the United States and it's notable how many really fine missionaries there were who look superficially at least to have been lesbian we usually don't have detailed documentation the one case that comes to mind as a woman went to India she'd been there for 20 years came back gave speeches in Connecticut about how wonderful it is to be bringing Christianity to the to the Indians and a young woman in the audience was so this is the story was so inspired by her preaching that she decided she already trained as a physician would go to India and become a missionary also and living as the woman who was giving the sermons and together they would adopt children the Barnard student who wrote the senior thesis that uncovered all this or aged when I suggested that there might be a lesbian relationship here so though I don't never say anything about that they're adopting children together no what is it all about only male children know they adopt sons anyway these these examples could be multiplied the 19th century was a period of intense religiosity in many parts of the world it's also a period of the Muslim say I I'm not sure that if we were looking at all these things under the category of charisma and a yearning for charisma whether we could easily distinguish between religious and secular charisma Lunken going to history the Zionist movement for example and find questions along these lines as to whether one is religiously inspired to go back to Eretz Israel or whether one is doing it as part of a socialist project or a nationalist enterprise the boundary between nationalism and religion becomes a somewhat fuzzy boundary in numerous cases but not in the general historiography that we have so the master narratives that we cultivate are eager to talk about the invocation of Italy unification of Germany and the rise of nationalism in Russia or higher or other places where you can see seeds of nationalism popping up in the second half of 19th century and you can often with these early nationalist movements sort of count the number of participants on you know when the fingers of both hands and but that's the way movements tend to start but we tend not to tell the story of religious movements at all and I think that there was a good reason for that when the master narratives of modern history were being constructed wherever that was because it was assumed that in the sort of let's say the academic million it's this sort of construction done it was assumed that the world was it seems to me that since we have know that the modern world of the 21st century is not univocal II a secular world that we really need to go back and revisit the master narratives and say where does this religiosity come is it something that we look at case a case and say okay here we'll talk about the the mad bowl of Somalia as the British called they're not there the sufi who resisted them in somalia do we look at his movement and then we look at some other movement and in Indonesia maybe separately or do we do we do Li aggregate them and do we aggregate them qua religious movements or do we aggregate them qua appeals to to intense feeling on the part of followers in which we we throw the nationalism and the socialism and so forth into the same hopper if we do that of course it screws up the history terribly because of you know we we're no longer able to distinguish easily between what is positive and what is not positive but but if we do it then we get to the question of why was there such intensity of feeling in the world in the 19th century now maybe it isn't any different from the 18th century I think it was and my suspicion is that it's related to two changes that are coming about in an era of economic change and industrialization changes like increasing urbanism that it may be that these movements work find more resume in urban millou's or alternatively did me that as people leave for the city of people out in the boondocks become more conservative and return to their roots and of atomistic and rebellious fashion as with the eight trigrams rebellion did they have to do with literacy and that the means of communicating become better I don't know but I think that let's say the spirit of the 19th century is not simply the modern project outlined by item and the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution culminating in the in the great surge of Imperial colonial political occupation around the world I think that there is a different dynamic to the 19th century that needs to be needs to be recovered that's that's a nice polite historical terms let's say needs to be invented out of whole cloth by some clever historian about probably not me I'm too old for that now but nevertheless when you read the history of the chapters that we've had for the last couple of weeks and ones we'll have and we a couple weeks to come just keep in mind is the 19th century best understood as a series of sort of autonomous movements in different places you know you patient of Italy the rise of full storm sentiment in Russia you know Taiping rebellion in China the Meiji Restoration this is this all simply a series of separate stories that are being mushed into the same century or is there something that is potentially conceivable as a unifying maybe meta historical version of the 19th century I don't know but it's been fun to talk about it for the last hour and 20 minutes so I'll stop here but when you when you check out

Channel: Columbia University

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Length: 69min 43sec (4183 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011