I’d never heard of a period defined between 1750 – 1914, nor
had I ever heard of the period referred as “The Long Nineteenth Century.”
Perhaps it’s called that because there were Proto-Industrial Revolution
technologies , ideas, and institutions that didn’t really take off until the 19th
Century? Geography was re-written to be Euro-centric, with Europe at the heart
of the world. For example, when refer to Asia as “The Far East,” you have to
think of the term as “as far east from Europe as one can get,” for example.
Europeans in a sense thought that they had to bring “God and civilization to
the savages,” in order to set them straight upon a trajectory that modeled
European development, or else they might perish. These ideas of Non-European
civilizations persisted into the Mid-Twentieth Century. Eugenic ideas of racial
superiority such as terms like “Aryan” were conveyed in geographical and
historical terminologies from the mid 19th Century to middle 20th
Century. It was only in the Post-WWII world that scholars began to counteract
the Eurocentric views that had been imposed upon the rest of the world. The Greeks,
the Indians, and the Chinese had their golden ages where their views and
civilization were paramount certainly. Of course, it seems that the
Euro-centric worldviews of this period really couldn’t have persisted as long
as they had without the consequences of Colonialism, and how that colored
Eurocentric notions of racial and cultural superiority.
Secondly, Strayer interestingly points out that the
Eurocentric dominance of foreign spheres of influence such as India and China
couldn’t have occurred as they did, had the supremacy of Chinese mercantile and
naval powers hadn’t been reduced in those ocean trading routes pertinent to
their respective regions of the world. The Scientific Revolution in Europe as
well as resources from the New World allowed Europeans the power and influence
to dominant Asia in ways that they could not have done so before. Whereas, it’s
implied that Asian powers weren’t imported a lot of resources from elsewhere in
the world, and their “scientific revolutions,” which allowed the examination
system in China, had already come and passed for example.
Strayer notes that it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for
Europeans to imposed their collective colonial imperialism upon the Asian and
African world; there was a significant amount of native resistance to their
neo-mercantilist measures, such as the famous Mutiny of 1857 in India, for
example. Although, Muslim powers still had enough sway for example to persuade
Europeans to hold back their missionary efforts from some of their territories.
Strayer gives a fourth reason for Eurocentric power becoming
dominant in Europe. The reason being that there were oppressed minorities in
places such as Vietnam, where they saw colonial powers such as “liberators,”
who helped them get out from under the thumb of groups in their native lands
that were holding back their own progress. And some Asians even took advantage
of European technologies. The Hindus in India would make pilgrimages to holy sites
that would have been in the past, harder to get to. And Japan embraced the
Industrial Revolution, borrowing European ideas that would allow the Japanese
to flex their military muscle between the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 to the end
of World War II, for example.
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