Contents
China Expanded West Under the Ming and Qing Dynasties
The Mongol Yuan dynasty collapsed in 1368. Between 1450 and 1740, two final imperial dynasties led China. The Ming would rule from 1368-1644, while the Qing would rule from 1644-1912.
The Ming Dynasty
The Ming dynasty came to power after defeating the Mongol Yuan dynasty.
Reconstructing China and reasserting Chinese culture
When the Ming came to power, they immediately reconstructed China from the damage and disruption caused by Mongol rule and the plague.
- The Ming sponsored the replanting of forests that the Mongols had cut down and converted to pasture land for their animals.
- The Ming also sought to eliminate Mongol culture from China and to reassert traditional Confucian cultural practices. Mongol names were discouraged, and conventional Chinese gender roles were encouraged.
- The Ming emperor Yongle (1402-1422) sponsored the writing of a massive 11,000 volume encyclopedia of Chinese history and knowledge. While much of the world was looking to the future, China looked to its past.
The Ming moved their capital to Beijing and restored traditional Chinese governing practices. While the examination system once again became the primary route to government employment, those closest to the emperor in the imperial household were not Confucian scholar-officials but eunuchs (castrated males) who advised Ming emperors and controlled access to the emperors by government ministers and bureaucrats. The government refocused its attention on agriculture. Early Ming emperors financed the restoration and replanting of farmland and rebuilt agricultural infrastructures like canals, reservoirs, and irrigation channels. The government also established a national school system to improve education.
In the 15th century, China increasingly isolated itself from the outside world as the Confucian beliefs that agricultural work was superior to commerce reasserted itself. To limit foreign influence in China, only the government was legally allowed to conduct foreign trade. Foreign traders were limited to the east coast ports of Canton, Macao, and Ningbo.
Despite restrictions, trade and commerce continued to expand
Despite trade restrictions, the non-agricultural commercial sectors of the Chinese economy continued to thrive under the Ming. Global demand for Chinese goods remained high, and Chinese goods continued to flow throughout international commercial networks. Traditional Chinese industries, such as silk, further prospered under the stability of the Ming dynasty.
A renewed focus on agricultural peasants
The new first Ming emperor Hongwu was the only Chinese emperor from a poor peasant background. As a result, his government undertook economic reforms to protect the peasant classes by redistributing land to the landless.
- Emperor Hongwu accomplished this through various methods, such as the forced migration of peasants to less populated areas with more available land.
- In Hunan and Anhui, the emperor decreed (gave a legal order) that the government would provide land to young farmers.
- Farmers who brought fallow (unused) land under cultivation were also allowed to keep the property and were exempt from property taxation.
- As a result of these reforms, for a time, China’s vast peasant classes, many of which were impoverished, gained a level of financial protection that they had lacked under hundreds of years of previous Chinese emperors.
The Qing Dynasty
The Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644 following a wide-scale famine. As conditions worsened, a peasant revolt led by a minor government official, Li Zicheng, broke out. The revolters managed to capture the Chinese capital of Beijing. The Manchus from Manchuria to the North of China used the opportunity to invade and conquer China from the rebellion’s inexperienced leaders. They spent the next 40 years subduing China under their leadership. China was once again under the control of non-ethnic Chinese. However, this time, foreign rule over China endured. The Qing ruled China for over 250 years until the Chinese imperial system collapsed in the early 20th century.
Ensuring Manchu dominance over native Chinese
China’s new Manchu rulers worked to make their culture and political position dominant in China.
- Qing emperors placed Manchus in the highest government positions.
- The Manchu forced Chinese men to adopt Manchu clothing styles and wear their hair in the traditional Manchu style of braided ponytails. The Manchus executed those who refused.
- Initially, Qing emperors forbid marriages between Manchus and native Chinese. Qing emperors later relaxed these restrictions.
- The Manchu adopted the Eight Banner System to distinguish themselves from commoners and non-Manchu. Under this system, all Manchu families received a designation under one of the eight banners, each with different colors. Manchu families, especially those in the three upper banners, enjoyed political and economic privileges unavailable to non-Manchus outside the banner system. The Manchu later created separate banner classes for elite native Han Chinese.
Historical trend: Rulers across history have claimed power from god. Pope’s claimed they were chosen by god to lead the Church. Christian monarchs in Europe claimed their authority from god. They called it the divine right of kings. In comparison, in China it was referred to as the Mandate of Heaven.
The Manchu adopted certain traditional Chinese cultural practices
Historical comparison: The Manchu conquest of China put China back under the rule of foreign, non Chinese leaders. China was previously under the rule of the Mongol Yuan dynasty.
The Manchu Qing did retain some traditional Chinese practices.
- Confucianism remained the dominant social and governing philosophy of China.
- Conservative Chinese filial beliefs of the family’s importance over the individual and patriarchal views on women’s inferiority remained important in China.
- The Qing also adopted the native Chinese language.
The Qing also maintained China’s imperial system and extensive governing bureaucracy. Despite Manchus gaining the highest governing positions nearest the emperor, the Confucian scholar-official class continued to run much of the Chinese bureaucracy. The Qing also retained the Chinese imperial examination system as the route to government employment for most government officials.
China’s economy under the Qing continued to flourish from foreign demand for Chinese goods despite the Qing’s continuation of foreign trade restrictions. These restrictions included limits on foreign trade activity to the designated ports of Canton, Macao, and Ningbhe paying tribute and gifts to the Chinese emperor and performing the kowtow ritual of placing one’s head on the ground at the feet of the Chinese emperor. While silks and porcelains continued to be major Chinese exports during this period, increasingly, tea became the dominant export to Europe.
The growth and expansion of the Qing empire
Under the Qing, China entered a period of westward expansion.
- Under emperor Kangxi (1661-1722), China conquered Taiwan, Mongolia, and areas of Central Asia. The vast region of Tibet to the southwest of China was occupied and became a Chinese protectorate.
- Many of these conquered areas remain in the modern Chinese state.
Source: Chinese Qing emperor Kangxi, “Reflections”, compiled from the personal writings of the emperor
Emperor Kangxi reigned from 1661-1722. Below is one of his reflections on managing the Chinese state, specifically maintaining China’s tradition of examinations as a path into government employment.
In 1691, I noticed that we were losing talent because the way the exams were being conducted: even in the military… exams, most of the successful candidates were from Cheikiang and Chiangnan, while there was only one from Honan and one from Shansi. The successful ones had often done no more than memorize old examination books, whereas the best should be selected on the basis of riding and archery….
Even among the examinersm there are those who are corrupt, those who do not understand basic works,… those who insist entirely on the memorization of the classics… those who put candidates from their own geographic region area at the top of the list….
The Qing viewed expansion as a defensive necessity to secure China from the various nomadic groups that successfully attacked China throughout its history. Qing rulers generally showed respect for the cultures of conquered people, and Chinese settlers did not flood into conquered areas. Conquered peoples were also not forced to adopt Chinese culture.
Turkish Islamic Dynasties Dominated from North Africa to Northern India
Historical comparison: The rise of these Turkish Islamic dynasties continued Turkish dominance over the Islamic world,
Turkish Muslim dynasties continued their dominance across the heart of the Islamic world.
The Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire (1525-1857) was the second significant Islamic power in India. Babur, a Muslim Turk who invaded India from the Northwest, established the dynasty after defeating the last Sultan of the Delhi Sultanate at the Battle of Panipat in 1526. At its height in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the Mughal Empire encompassed nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.
Unlike the Ottoman and Safavids, the Central Asian Muslim Turkish Mughals were a minority in their lands; whereas, the vast majority of those in India were South Asian Hindus.
- Rulers were absolute monarchs who passed power down to their sons.
- Mughal governance was Islamic.
- The Mughals ran a centralized bureaucratic government. However, the Mughal bureaucracy was much smaller than the bureaucracies in China and the Ottoman empire.
- Ministers chosen by merit were responsible for the administration of the government.
Mughal emperors increased trade in South Asia.
- Through their international trade connections, the Mughals brought Chinese porcelain, paper, and gunpowder to India.
- The largest manufacturing industry in the Mughal Empire was textile manufacturing, mainly cotton textile manufacturing.
- Mughal India had a large shipbuilding industry centered in the Bengal province in the Eastern Mughal empire. Indian shipbuilding, particularly in Bengal, was advanced compared to European shipbuilding at the time, with Indians selling ships to European firms. An important Mughal innovation in shipbuilding was the flushed deck design in Bengal rice ships, resulting in stronger ships that leaked less than the structurally weak hulls of traditional European ships built with a stepped deck design. The British East India Company later duplicated the flushed deck and hull designs of Bengal rice ships in the 1760s, leading to significant improvements in seaworthiness and navigation for European ships during the Industrial Revolution.
Like the Delhi Sultanate before it, the Mughals ruled over a majority Hindu population.
- Mughal relations with their non-Islamic people varied from ruler to ruler. Initially, under the first Mughal ruler Babur, the early Mughal period was marked by religious violence against Hindu communities, and Babur’s armies killed both Hindus and non-Sunni Muslims. Babur recorded these massacres in his memoirs Baburnama (Letters of Babur).
- Under the third Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605), religious tolerance and harmony between Muslim and Hindu communities were encouraged. He repealed the non-Islamic Jizya tax against Hindu communities that his father and grandfather had enforced. Akbar also sponsored religious debates between various religious communities, including Hindus, Christians, Jews, Jains, and Sikhs.
Repression of non-Islamic communities returned under later Mughal rulers. Aurangzeb (1658-1707) was particularly repressive. He reinstituted the non-Muslim jizya tax that Mughal rulers had not collected for the previous 100 years. He also ordered numerous important Hindu temples destroyed.
Early Mughal emperors supported the expansion of the arts.
- The Mughals built beautiful architectural masterpieces that often incorporated traditional Islamic architectural elements from the Middle East, including domes and arches.
- The Taj Mahal, built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to honor his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth, is one of the most famous and photographed buildings and incorporates many traditional Middle eastern Islamic architectural components.
- The tradition of miniature painting from Persian Islam became a popular style among Mughal artists.
The Ottoman Empire
By the 14th century, the Christian Byzantine Empire had weakened, and the Ottoman Turks on Byzantium’s eastern borders slowly began to conquer portions of Byzantine territory. By 1453 all that remained of the once great Byzantine Empire was its capital city of Constantinople. In 1453, 80,000 troops led by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed laid siege to the city. Less than two months later, on May 29, 1453, the siege ended with an Ottoman victory. The Ottomans rebuilt Constantinople as the capital of the Ottoman Empire and named it Istanbul.
- The Ottoman Empire became the core of the Islamic world.
- With their powerful navy and an army of professional elite soldiers, the Ottomans dominated Middle-Eastern politics until their defeat in World War I in 1918.
- In the late 15th century, Sultan Mehmed II’s (ruled 1451-1481) armies moved across the Bosporus Strait and seized lands on the Black Sea’s western coast and Eastern Europe. Under Suleiman I (ruled 1520-1566), at the height of their power in the 16th century, the Ottomans conquered the holy lands, the Levant, Egypt, and coastal areas in Northern Africa and the Red Sea.
The House of Osman ruled the Ottoman Empire for 600 years as Islamic Sultans as an absolute Islamic monarchy.
- The Ottoman government was a centralized and bureaucratic state run by the military at the highest levels and by civil authorities at the provincial and local levels.
- The Ottoman emperors’ ministers were known as viziers and helped the sultans in government administration.
- Governing elites closest to the Ottoman emperor were often Islamic converts from conquered populations within the empire.
- This arrangement ensured that the highest-ranking officials’ allegiance remained with the Ottoman emperor and not local Ottoman peoples.
- Ottoman emperors had the sole legal right to make and enforce the law.
- Ottoman Sultans governed according to Islamic Sharia law.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the world’s great centers of wealth and trade. Ottoman dominance in trade resulted from its large size and position between Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Ottomans also controlled key Silk Road trading routes across the Middle East. Ottoman merchants sold large quantities of foreign goods like silks and cotton, porcelains from China, dye like indigo, and spices. The Ottomans also produced cotton, sugar, coffee, silk, and rugs. Major commercial cities within the empire included Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus.
The Ottoman Empire was a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society that mostly maintained harmonious relationships between different religious groups.
- The largest and most significant group were Muslims, who made up the elite governing class.
- Jews and Christians were the largest religious minorities.
- Under the Ottoman millet systems, religious communities each had independent courts of law that governed their communities.
The Safavid Empire
Established in 15th-century Persia, the Safavid Empire sat between the Ottoman Empire to the west and the Mughal Empire to the east.
Culture in the Safavid empire
Like the Mughals and the Ottomans, the Safavid descended from Turkish ancestry.
- However, the Safavid were unique from the Ottomans because the Safavid practiced. Shia Islam while the Ottomans were Sunni.
- The Safavid state forcibly imposed Shia Islam on non-Shia in Safavid territory.
Cultural and religious conflict with the Ottoman empire
Conflicts between the Ottoman and the Safavid were common and caused by a variety of factors.
- The religious divide between the Shia Safavid and the Sunni Ottoman empires was one main contributor.
- The Ottoman Empire was the heartland of Sunni Islam and considered the Shia Islamic practices of the Safavid heretical (against proper Islam).
- Territorial rivalries for control over land and trade routes in the region also stoked conflict.
This divide between Sunni and Shia powers continues to divide the modern Islamic world.
The Russians Build an Empire
The modern Russian state resulted from interactions with the Golden Horde Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries. Through those interactions, the kingdom of Muscovy was appointed the chief tax collector for the Mongols. Through this position, the Muscovy kingdom became the dominant power in the region. In 1480 Russian Czar Ivan III refused to pay the Mongols any further tax. The Russian army and Mongol forces met 150 miles east of the Russian capital along the banks of the Volga river. However, no conflict broke out. This bloodless victory marked the official end of Mongol power in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Free from Mongol control, Muscovy embarked on 300 years of expansion. This expansion enlarged Muscovy from a few hundred miles to nearly 7000 miles from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Much of the conquered territory included the extensive grasslands and Siberian wilderness to the east of Moscow. Russian expansion resulted from the following factors.
Absolute monarchs named Czar’s ruled over Russia. The capital of the emerging Russian empire was Moscow. As the Russian Empire expanded, the government grew into a centralized and bureaucratic state. An aristocracy supported the Russian emperor.
- The Russian economy was less developed than the Ottoman, Chinese, or Western European economies.
- The Russian economy was primarily agricultural.
- Semi-enslaved serfs continued to work land owned by the Russian aristocracy until the late 19th century. Russia was one of the last places in Europe to allow legal serfdom.
Russian culture had traditionally been a mix of western and central Asian cultures.
- Eastern Orthodox Christianity was the religion of most people in Western Russia. As Russia expanded west, the Russian state forced many natives to abandon their traditional beliefs and convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
- Peter I and Catherine the Great “Westernized” Russia in the 17th and 19th centuries. Through this ‘westernization’ process, they sought to make Russia more like the emerging powers of England, France, and the Dutch in Western Europe. This process involved investing in modern military practices and the study of western European art, science, fashion, and philosophy.
Russian Expansion
Free from Mongol control, Muscovy embarked on 300 years of expansion. This expansion enlarged Muscovy from a few hundred miles to nearly 7000 miles from eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Much of the conquered territory included the extensive grasslands and Siberian wilderness to the east of Moscow. Russian expansion resulted from the following factors.
Motivations for Russian expansion
The desire for increased security
After a long period of domination from the Mongols, Russia wanted security from nomadic pastoral peoples in Central Asia to prevent them from raiding into Russian territory.
Economic development
The Russians looked east for economic development. In the grasslands directly to Moscow’s east, vast grasslands provided millions of acres of potentially productive agricultural lands. Further to the east in Siberia, Russia looked to harvest valuable pelts of fur-bearing animals (soft gold) and various minerals.
Russia’s eastern expansion vastly reshaped the lives and cultures of the natives that lived in the areas Russia conquered.
The effects of Russian expansion
Large settlements of Russians in native lands
As Russians moved east, Russians began to outnumber natives. By the early 18th century, ethnic Russians amounted to 70% of the population in Siberia.
Russification of native populations
Russian leadership in the region discouraged traditional ways of life, such as pastoralism. Large pieces of what had been open graving lands were closed off and privatized (made private property), preventing pastoralists from grazing their herds. In other areas, the Russian state charged taxes to cross land. Many pastoral communities had no choice but to settle down and adopt an agricultural lifestyle. As a result, natives became dependent upon Russians and the Russian economy for their survival. There were also additional pressures to convert to Russian Eastern Orthodox Christianity. While Russian authorities did not generally force conversion, tax breaks, free land, and cash payments provided incentives for non-Christian populations to convert. Muslim communities often experienced additional conversion pressures, including forced relocation and the destruction of mosques.
Forced labor from native populations
The Russian state required the payment of tribute called yasak by natives in cash or goods like furs.
Deadly epidemics killed native populations
Epidemics of smallpox and measles accompanied Russian into new Russian territories. With little immunity to these diseases, native populations died in massive numbers as these diseases swept through their communities.