Thread: Since 1258, when Baghdad — the preeminent city of the Abrahamic Greater West — was destroyed by the Mongol armies of Hülegü, Christian and Muslim alike have recognized the possibility of domination by the immense and accomplished civilization of the Greater East.

(1/17)

The first murmurations of this in Europe were largely from those with much knowledge of the Sinosphere, and predated the later racial narrative of "Yellow Peril." At that time, it was the recognition that at the other end of the world, no longer so far away...

(2/17)

...the unfamiliar civilization of those who read from the Confucian and Buddhist classics at least rivalled, if not exceeded, the might and historical achievement of those who read from the Greco-Roman canon and Abrahamic scriptures.

(3/17)

I point to Hülegü (who in fact was a Nestorian Christian) sacking Baghdad as the beginning along with the Mongol conquests into Eastern Europe, which happened immediately prior but were not as world-shocking — Constantinople and Catholic Europe got off comparatively easy.

(4/17)

Even then, however, the steppe conquerors were not associated particularly strongly with the Confucian world. They tended to rapidly assimilate to the high cultures of the lands they conquered.

But the world shrank, and the spectre of an Eastern conquest returned.

(5/17)

Until the travels of Marco Polo, Europe was largely unaware of the Far East outside of certain (mainly secondary) sources.

The Mongols, in fact, were seen in Western Europe as a potential ally against the Islamic world: nobody likes their neighbors.

(6/17)

During the period of Pax Mongolica there was a period of European-Chinese contact over the steppe, with exchange of embassies, goods and technology (gunpowder). This flirtation was cut short when the intensely xenophobic Ming replaced the cosmopolitan Yuan.

(7/17)

Iberian navigation enabled Europeans to bypass Muslim middlemen, and Renaissance Europe began to exceed Asia in science and technology. After a period of intense exchange mediated by Jesuits, the Ming shut the gates of China and later on the Qing followed suit.

(8/17)

This had disastrous consequences for China, with the Opium Wars eventually beginning a new era of demonstrated European superiority. China had to play catch-up, and the Europeans, on top of the world, began to theorize as to why.

(9/17)

This began the time of modernist racialist theories, which metamorphosed into the Yellow Peril and so-on and so-forth. But why "Peril"? Why not an attitude of simple contempt to those they considered inferior?

(10/17)

Because history couldn't be changed, and the population of China was vast. The sharper Western minds realized what they had done before they could do again.

Napoleon identified the world-conquering potential of China prior to the Opium Wars.

(11/17)

Chinese emigration added a perceived threat of demographic conquest to that of military conquest. This led to the height of the racialist rhetoric towards East Asia, during the latter half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.

(12/17)

Jack London wrote the short story "The Unparalleled Invasion" in 1910, in which an "awakened" China embarks on a campaign of conquest until the West destroys it entirely with biological warfare. It's left ambiguous whether this is justified or monstrous.

(13/17)

Much hay has been made over the story's meaning, but London certainly subscribed to the popular historiography of the time as a series of racial struggles, and saw the Far East as the main potential threat to the position Europe and the US then enjoyed.

(14/17)

"Out of their native optimism and race-egotism they had therefore concluded that the task was impossible, that China would never awaken."

From the above story. The superiority rhetoric was puffery, the intelligent knew that.

(15/17)

Then, the events of World War II took this to an extreme, particularly in the Anglophone world, only to drop off rapidly after '45. Racialism was falling from fashion, to be replaced by ideology. Communism was the new enemy.

(16/17)

I'll stop there, as this thread was originally meant to be something else. I'll use it as supporting material for another on that topic.

Suffice it to conclude that the "postmodern" Yellow Peril narrative is much the same as that of those old benighted days.

(17/17).