Unfabling the East by Jürgen Osterhammel

Author:Jürgen Osterhammel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press

EX OCCIDENTE LUX

The theory of despotism as a degenerate form of government has a pedigree that can be traced back to ancient Greece. The idea that a violently autocratic form of government was better suited to Asia than to Europe had already arisen among Hellenic authors. In the early modern period—in Jean Bodin, for example—the concept of despotism fitted into a universal taxonomy of constitutions that was no longer (or not yet) aligned with the binary opposition between East and West. Such a dichotomy first became prevalent through Montesquieu’s ideal-typical contrast between monarchy and despotism. This could also be interpreted, in a more strongly normative reading than that proposed by Montesquieu himself, as an opposition between legitimate and illegitimate rule. Such an interpretation met with protest from figures such as Voltaire, Burke, and Gibbon, who warned in the name of historical experience and practical reason against a one-sided ideological appropriation of the concept.188 Their arguments found support among experts who, at a time when it was almost impossible to find any actual rulers in the Orient who lived up to their generic reputation for monstrous tyranny, offered detailed refutations of the theory of despotism: Sir James Porter, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Claude Charles de Peyssonnel, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, C. W. Boughton Rouse, the abbé Grosier, and others. While this counterattack could not be faulted on its own terms, from around the 1780s it flew in the face of the most pressing political issues and the intellectual climate of the day. The topics of chief concern were now the organization of colonial India, the expected breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and the gradual erosion of the social and political system in China. Legal and constitutional questions faded into the background. More important was the alleged civilizational split between East and West.

The polemically slimmed-down concept of despotism that Volney introduced into the debate proved ideally suited to this new situation. Arbitrary rule, ignorance, and administrative-economic mismanagement were compressed into a modernized cliché of barbarianism that made up for in propaganda value what it lacked in theoretical sophistication. It became the basis for the rhetoric of liberation that, following the final war against Tipu Sultan and the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, would accompany every subsequent intervention by a European great power in Asia and Africa. This presupposed that the old Montesquieuean environmental and climatic determinism had been abandoned and a new anthropological-racist reductionism had not yet been embraced. The Orient was by no means condemned to eternal bondage through heat and the weakness of the “oriental character.” Despotism, Sir William Jones declared in 1792, was the decisive difference between Asia and Europe, and its elimination would usher in a new dawn for the Asiatic nations.189 The peoples of the Orient were capable of being free, just not of freeing themselves. Freedom had to come from outside. Europeans even took the provisional measure of installing themselves as modernizing despots and législateurs: at first in India, then elsewhere. By the Napoleonic era, the Enlightenment discourse

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