The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land
So long as the scholar-gentry aspired to bureaucratic advancement through the examination system, with its classical syllabus and Confucian ideology, and while China was governed from walled cities with an ultra-loyal Manchu army in reserve, rebellion was unlikely to spread far or last long. The early emperors also insisted upon frugal expenditure
... See moreJohn Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly descri... See more
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly descri... See more
We should react sceptically to grand generalizations about stasis and stagnation. Nor should we be too quick to assume that China’s very limited participation in international trade after c.1690 signalled its incorporation into the subordinate ‘periphery’ of a European ‘world system’.76 Indeed, closer inspection may suggest that the reconstruction
... See moreJohn Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
This atomization of the nation—the hunkering of the population into a thousand premodern fiefs—proved to be ideal conditions for incubating a singularly virulent strain of terrorism that would shortly capture the attention of the world, and most especially the United States.