Hi. Welcome back.

Make yourself comfortable.

This presentation is going to be more about

the cultural encounter that's occurring between Europeans and Asians.

I call it ï¿½Introverts and Extrovertsï¿½: people who are

looking more inward, people who are looking more outward.

I'll show you what I mean.

Let's start with all these interesting interactions between

these people from different parts of the world.

Ask yourself: when the Europeans land in China, or Chinese encounter Europeans,

what is it they think they're discovering? What do they think they have found?

One way of thinking about that is: what is that they valued about what they found?

And the answers to that are very interesting.

So for instance, here's a painting

by Sir Joshua Reynolds, once of the great English court painters of the 1700s.

The boy in his painting is named Omai. He's Tahitian.

He's been brought back from one of captain Cook's

voyages of exploration and discovery in the South Seas.

Omai, handsome youth, and Reynold is struck by the

natural, unaffected simplicity of this young man.

That's what he's capturing in this painting.

So, the sense that, these new places

we're discovering, don't have some of the

refinements or corruptions of our way of life.

They're natural and unspoiled.

That sense of the undiscovered country is a kind of Eden.

There's also a fascination with the sheer

exocticism and difference in places they're encountering.

Voltaire, for example, was a great admirer of what he heard about the Chinese rulers.

Their

Confucian culture seemed to be one in

which scholars were in charge, sort of scholar-philosophers.

He liked that idea, being a philosophe himself.

Okay, now let's turn the perspective.

Instead of Europeans thinking about the things they're valuing in Asia,

let's look at the Asian reactions to some of the Europeans.

This Japanese print is an especially interesting example.

This Japanese painting

was made by a man named Shiba Kokan in the late 1700s.

In the scene, you see the Japanese gentleman, samurai, a dignified fellow,

has sitting across from him at the

table, a Chinese gentleman, and a Dutch gentleman.

The Chinese gentleman looks like a learned, scholarly fellow.

You see the scroll right here.

But the Dutch gentleman. He has open in front of him a book.

The book shows a diagram of human anatomy.

And you can just see in the symbolism of the picture, the Japanese

gentleman is subtly aligning himself a little bit more closely

to the promise of what was then called ï¿½Dutch knowledge.ï¿½ Okay.

We talked just a moment about some things they valued

in these encounters.

But think too about the things that are fearful in these encounters.

Of course, there's the danger that the

foreigners might not like you, might attack you.

That could be fearful.

But another thing that could be fearful are the

encounters with alien cultures that you dislike, that you

fear might contaminate your own society. So this is

one of the reasons why both the Chinese and

the Japanese keep the foreigners very carefully compartmented in their little

trading outposts, to keep the infection of their ideas from spreading.

So, of course then there's a whole spectrum of reactions to these encounters.

But the reaction might be determined by your basic temperament.

The basic attitude of your society.

How do you feel about encounters with strangers?

Introverts and extroverts. Consider two opposite ends of Eurasia.

At the eastern end of Eurasia, there's the wealth of the Qing dynasty in China.

At the western end of Eurasia,

there's the wealth of England.

You would be wrong to regard the

Chinese as backward, or not as commercially active.

They also have banks. They also have financial

ability, people working hard.

Chinese manufacturing capability in the late 1700s is about

as advanced as manufacturing capability anywhere in Northwestern Europe.

So what both of these areas, with a

lot of population density, a lot of commercial activity,

have in common, they're both experiencing what a

Dutch historian, Jan de Vries, has called ï¿½industrious revolutions.ï¿½

That is,

revolutions in the habits and practice of

people engaged in an active commercial life.

What they also have in common are pretty strong

monarchs in different kinds of relatively strong fiscal-military states.

What's different though about them is that in the East, the ruling dynasty, its

prevailing culture is more conservative than the

one in England or the one in Holland,

for instance. Why would it be more conservative?

Because they're the richest and most powerful empire on earth.

Why wouldn't they want to conserve what they had?

Even feel maybe a tiny bit complacent about it.

What's also different is that China's cultural integration

is actually so strong, so powerful, that there

is actually not a lot of rivals to it anywhere nearby, not a lot of spurs

for them to change or hear different ideas.

Just to give you some sense of just

how powerful the cultural integration was: the Qing Dynasty

actually dictated that every single adult Chinese male

had to demonstrate his physical subordination to the emperor

by shaving the top of their head and then pulling the rest of their hair back in a

queue.

You see the distinctive hairstyle here.

These men aren't all doing this as a fashion choice.

They're doing this because, for a long time, the penalty for not

doing it this way could be death, could be a sign of treason.

And cultured Chinese women for centuries had been taught that

their feet needed to be systematically broken and deformed from childhood,

so that they could fit into tiny shoes.

This habit called foot binding, then, effectively disabled

Chinese women from being able to walk normally.

I show you all this to see the power of a reigning culture.

But precisely because the reigning culture was so dominant,

it also tended to look inward.

Another difference, too, is the sheer restlessness of the Europeans.

Think about

what the last couple hundred years had been like for them.

Their ships are sailing all over the oceans.

They're planting new colonies, discovering new things,

finding new sources of wealth. The world is opening up to them.

They want to knock on the next door.

And another difference: the European explorations into science,

what historians often call the European Enlightenment,

is part of a sense, culturally, in which

Europeans think they're discovering the way God's laws work.

That gives them an extra level of cultural confidence, a sense

of mastery, that emboldens them in their relations with the outside world.

We'll see some more of the effects of those interactions,

when we see this play out in North America and South Asia next time.

See you then.

Introverts and Extroverts

现代世界，第一部分：1760 年到 1910 年的全球史

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